[Cautrell05]

Out back is a 77 Lincoln nine inch that I picked up a while back. Currently it's 65" flange to flange. With 8 inch wheels they stick out past the fenders by just a little bit. The wheels that are on there now are 7 inches wide with 3 1/2" back spacing if I remember right. With these wheels and the 65 inch width have 275/50/15s on the back with just enough clearance to work. Not sure what I'm going to do long term but if I do decide to narrow it I can. It also had the 5 on 5 pattern to match the fronts.
It came with 3.00 gears and a 28 spline trac-loc. On the bench right now I have a 3.50 gear set and a rebuild kit for the posi. I also have a new pair of axles from summit waiting to go in. I'm not sure what the history of this rear end was but both shafts are bent pretty bad. I'm in the process of making an alignment bar and the pucks for it and when that's done I'll pull the rear end out and go through it. I'm pretty confident that the housing is going to need tweaked as bad as the shafts are.
The sway bar mounts are just standard rear S10 mounts welded to the housing. The lower spring pads were cut out of a piece of 2 1/2x 5" tubing. I'll gusset and cap them when it comes out. I don't remember how far forward I offset the pads but it seemed like a lot. After it was together I added a 1.25" lowering block to fine tune the height. I actually took one block, cut it in half and added it to the other two to make up for the long spring pads.
The torque arm was made from a kit I got from one of the 4wd places. It came with everything except the round tubing. I used 1.25x.125 wall tubing for that. I deviated from the design slightly by putting the heim on the bottom in back. The idea there was it would not pivot under normal suspension movement. I hate heim joints on Street vehicles because they always get dry and noisy. Also with it on the bottom in back I can use that to fine tune pinion angle. The bottom mount is on both sides. The top one will be when I pull it out and go through it. The front end has the shackle mounted to the middle cross member that will eventually also hold the driveshaft loop.