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After you are ready to take the
plunge, then you can jack up your truck and begin the removal of parts for
the installation of the lift kit. Since my truck had almost 90,000 miles
on it, I planned to replace most of the moving parts while it was apart. I
ordered ball joints, tie rods, and an Energy suspension polyurethane
bushing kit. Everything needs to be removed from the front suspension of
the truck. The shocks, swaybar, steering arm, half-shafts, calipers,
rotors, torsion bars, torsion bar cross-member, upper/lower a-arms,
driveshaft, differential, etc.....
To begin remove the shocks, swaybar, tie rods and steering arm. Then
remove the half-shafts.
Then you can put a jack under the lower a-arm and unbolt the upper
a-arm. By unbolting the upper a-arm, you should have enough movement to
remove the pressure on the torsion bars by lowering the jack. You should
mark the bars for placement in the lower a-arm and placement in the
adjuster at the rear of the bars. The adjuster for the torsion bar should
be marked/rusted already, but you might want to spray some paint on them,
so that you have a starting point when you put the bars back, in the event
you need to loosen them to get the bars/adjusters out along with the
adjuster bolt/stop. You can knock the torsion bars forward with an air
chisel, or if yours are as rusted/stuck as mine were, you could save a lot
of time by releasing the pressure on both torsion bars and unbolting the
torsion bar cross-member and sliding it backwards off of the bars.
side notes: On my truck the pitman arm was stuck in the steering arm,
so I removed it from the steering box and bought a new one($23.00). It
would have saved a lot of time to do this from the beginning. It was just
one more part that's now new. The only part that I didnt replace was the
idler arm, since the dealer replaced it in 1999.
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