Full tube chassis?

[GMracer]

Well here is my dilemma I have a 2001 Silverado 2wd currently rebuild frame up air ride suspension but setup for a mean street high horsepower setup. I took the factory frame and lowered the body mounts to get the the frame tucked up a little more inside the body, notched the rear half to accommodate the low stance and ran a 4link setup with a pan hard. Up front I setup a torsion style bracket with bags and planned to run ART DA shocks to dial in my ride.

Now my thinking is since the factory frame is designed to be about 5" taller than what my ride height will be, the front suspension geometry will be way off, as in the control arms instead of being parallel to the ground they will point upwards a bit. Now I could run drop spindles (2") but still the geometry wouldn't be ideal.

Lately I've been thinking of just building a full tube chassis and re-setup the front suspension to get the arms back to the being parallel to the ground like they are at factory ride height. The rear half I am redoing no matter what, (triangulated 4link setup inboard with 20x15 wheels out back) but this front half is what determines whether I do just a back half or a full tube chassis. Do you think the factory geometry would be adequate enough? I'm really open to opinions, this forum is a lot more technical to suspension that my other forums.

Thanks in advance for all the help!

[novanutcase]

Can't you just relocate the pick up points of your CA's or is there now room to do that?

John

[GMracer]

I probably could, but would it be worth it?
Here are the uppers
http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j312/GMracer313/Silverado/Complete%20Resto/IMG_2897.jpg
lowers are under frame, so I don't think it'd be all that easy to raise those ones up compared the the fronts, seems like the amount of work to do that would just lead to doing full tube anyway.

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j312/GMracer313/Silverado/Complete%20Resto/IMG_2571.jpg
http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j312/GMracer313/Silverado/Complete%20Resto/IMG_2567.jpg

[Silver69Camaro]

Doing a full tube chassis is a huge project...probably one of the most complicated projects there are. I would think relocating your CA brackets would be cakewalk...

[GMracer]

I know it's a huge project and I don't see why I could do it, to move those control arms up would be a nightmare with the way they tie into the cross member underneath the motor. I guess I have some thinking to do on it.

[ironworks]

Let me tell you from experience, relocating the pickup points is way easier then building a tube frame. You might not even have to do any work to the floor due to motor mounts. If you could combine spindles and relocating the a arms you might be in with very little other mods.

[GMracer]

Thing is with the current frame setup I would need to redo the cross member under the engine, both of them at that. I definitely see what you're saying but I think I'm going to take the latter of the two and build the tube chassis, last thing I want is to do all this work to this frame and have it not be 100% what I want, I already have 150hrs into the frame, and it sucks not to use it, but I've learned a lot from this frame. I still need to build a whole new backhalf to setup the new suspension I planned.

btw ironworks, AWESOME work I was just checking out your site, top notch!

[ironworks]

Thanks we try very hard.

[GMracer]

I will start a thread once I get some picture of the new progress, no sense in posting the 600 reply thread for the first frame I had on another forum. Lots of good info on here so if I run into a snag I don't see why I shouldn't be able to get a good answer.