A few more weeks and some decent work done, I got the front suspension and axle mounted back onto the truck , one good step close to being a rolling chassis.
I ended up blasting both springs, all spring and related hardware and then the spindles and painted them all gloss black before putting them back on. I'm not so sure that was a great idea for the springs as while I was putting the leaf springs back together they took a bit of a beating and chipped the paint in places.
To start putting it together the springs went on first, the front spring mount is riveted to almost the very front of the frame rail, and through it goes a hollow bolt with a grease fitting that fits through a bronze bushing, capped by a castle nut. The rear mounts are shackles, with the shackle plates mating to conical surfaces on each side of the spring, and to a similar part on the frame giving the spring some movement. The surfaces were rough so we polished them up a bit after cleaning and painted. The leaf springs were different from each other, same length but 1 more leaf on one side then the other, not sure how that will change the suspension but for now we didn't worry about it.
Next was the axle, the axle sits below the springs with a bow-tie shaped block between the springs and the axle, and 2 u bolts for each side. Next the spindles which , when we had the right parts on the right side were easy to put together, but we at some point got the pins or spindles swapped, and apparently the pins were different enough in size to not fit in both spindles. After we found this out we installed them and then tested the end play as the maintenance book has a specification for spindle end play , .003 to .006 , and lucky for us they met specs. We installed the shims we took out originally and it seem to work out, so we did not need to take it back apart to adjust the fitting. The spindles need some metal caps on either side of the king pin for dust protection according to the manual but we did not have those, so another part to buy should be fine, something like a freeze plug.
The photos are of post install As you can see some of the many places I ate the paint off the surfaces. And one of the springs I left the old bolts alone as I will likely replace them and it did not seem to matter if the spring was on or off the truck so back together it went. The scrapes will get a touch up and we will move on to the back plates , brakes and hubs so we can get this thing on the ground.
