Plenty of fender gap. I can fit my entire fist into the space between the tire and the fender. It will go down a bit more once the springs settle, but I am finally making some progress. The cut-off fenders had a bit of a "hacked" feel to them I didn't like. I wanted a touch more of a refined look. I also wanted to do it on the cheap so I had to come up with a solution from the home improvement store. I ended up buying some really cheap soaker hose.
I cut a line on one edge of the hose, filled the hose with super duper waterproof silicone and then jammed the hose onto the bare edges. I then blue taped it all on until the silicone set. It stuck nicely, but I did end up dribbling some medium CA glue on the top edge between the sheet metal and the hose the next day to really seal the deal.
It came out looking fantastic. It really added a finished look to it all, and you'd never know it was soaker hose. The front of the car was scariest for me. The front had many things that could go wrong or sink the entire project. The wheels would not mount initially.
They aggressively hit the strut tower. The solution was to use wheel spacers. Wheel spacers tend to get a bad rap, but if you install them properly and follow the instructions, you won't have any issues. BUUUUT, If you torque them wrong or things don't line up right, you are going to loose a rim while you are driving and that tends to be a bad thing.
WIth the wheels now clearing the strut tower they technically fit, but I didn't have enough height. The wheels did not turn to full stop and any compression of the suspension made things rub. I needed to lift the front end as well. I tried the rubber coil spring spacers again but I was not getting the room I needed. I had to do something more aggressive. I researched online the ways people lift cars.
I especially looked at the people who build "Donks" knowing that many of those cars are not getting a huge suspension lift, they are getting some sort of workaround or janky hack. This method is popular with "donk" builds as well as Subaru Forester guys who lift their cars for offroad use. A bottom strut lift consists of unbolting the steering knuckle from the strut tower, moving it down one bolt so the top bolt sits in the strut towers bottom bolt hole, and then fabricating a bracket to tie it all back together.
In the pictures, you can see the after pic with the new bracket painted yellow and the before pic below. It wasn't terribly hard to make the brackets but it was time-consuming. I wanted to be sure they were stronger than the existing brackets in the car because I knew this would add loads of additional stress to the strut tower.
Also, these brackets needed to have some built in adjustability in them as they would be the thing I need to tweak to get my alignment back into shape. The top hole is slightly ovalized so I can loosen that one to adjust camber. The middle bolt is a pivot point.
It all ended up working out quite good. I have some camber adjustment bolts in the mail as of this writing to really fine tune the camber and I'll put those in soon.
I go into more details in the video, so please check that out. If you like what I am doing please comment and let me know. Your feedback pushes me to continue doing stuff like this. I over-built it as much as I could. It is using thicker steel than the existing brackets and it fits in nice and snug and I am using stronger bolts than the factory. I don't drive on the highway and I don't tend to go faster than 45 so the danger factor is low.
TONS of people have done this mod before me, so I have confidence that what I have done is reasonably safe. Indeed it is. I need to put a warning sticker on it so a mechanic doesn't undo the bottom control arm and it launches the spring out.
The fenders are already rusty. If the car last 5 years I'll be shocked and pleased. It's just a toy. I put brand new brake pads and rotors on this a month or so back. The hose lines have plenty of slack in them still and the ABS didn't work when I bought it so meh.
Metal brake lines sound like a good idea I freely admit and might do that someday. Probably one of the Coolest things I've seen done with a Mini-Van.
I especially liked the budget-minded creativity here. This is a fun way to "Up-cycle" an otherwise bland ride. That insures you'll still have 50 percent of your braking power if half the system fails. On older rear-wheel-drive cars and trucks, only one working front brake will tear the steering wheel out of your hands, don't ask me how I know this!
With only one working front brake on a front-wheel-drive car, this doesn't happen, thanks to the redesigned scrub radius. On Chrysler products, you will only see the red "Brake" warning light.
On all other cars, at most you might see a little wiggle in the steering wheel when you apply the brakes. That shows how much effect scrub radius has, and you're going to change that a real lot on your van, and think nothing will be affected? As long as we're talking about all-wheel-drive vehicles, it is important to point out these are not the same as four-wheel-drive vehicles.
Chrysler made that very clear when they came out with their all-wheel-drive Caravan in Astro Vans and some Jeeps use a full-time transfer case that can't be shifted into two-wheel-drive mode. The front and rear driveshafts are continuously locked together. As such, it is critical that all four ties be replaced at the same time. It is even not acceptable to buy two new tires from one tire dealer, then buy two of the same model and size from a different store.
There can be too much circumference variation even between tires that were built during different shifts at the same plant. The slightest mismatch puts an enormous strain on the transfer case, and has been the cause of a lot of lawsuits.
All tire shops are aware of this issue for these vehicles. Other minivans are called "all-wheel-drive" because they are not intended for off-road use. They have a viscous coupling in the middle of the rear drive shaft that allows the rear wheels to rotate at different speeds than the front wheels, even though they're still pulling.
The rear wheels normally go slower when the vehicle goes around a curve. You might have a locking rear differential on your Astro Van, but you won't find that in an all-wheel-drive minivan. That means, as with all front-wheel-drive axles, when one tire spins on loose sand, the other tire on that axle does nothing. Of course, when they all have good traction and aren't slipping, all four tires will pull.
I went to Chrysler's school on their AWD system, and at the end of the day we were allowed to drive through a very muddy gully. The instructor was surprised when one student came back with huge blobs of mud, On the roof, but none of us were able to get it stuck. But as a point of interest, my old '88 Grand Caravan was never stuck in our Wisconsin snow drifts where I couldn't get it out on its own. My mother's '95 Grand Caravan was stuck the minute a single snowflake fell on the other side of the county.
They were simply not the same vehicle. With that much difference between two revisions of the same model, you can understand that being able to go somewhere with one model doesn't mean you're going to have the same experience with a different brand or model, or year. I mentioned the drop spindles for the Astro Van as one method of lifting it. That is not an option on four-wheel-drive models or on other minivans. The outer CV joints will rub on the lower control arms.
There's no room for front coil springs either. You'll have torsion bars which are adjustable. Alignment specialists use them to correct ride height to factory specs before doing an alignment. When you use them to raise the front end, you're changing the parallelogram shape between the upper and lower control arms, the frame rail, and the spindle.
If you look at the lower control arm on a truck at correct ride height, you'll see it is perfectly parallel to the ground, and the upper control arm is angled down just a little. The upper arm is also considerably shorter than the lower arm.
That design has been carefully engineered to cause the wheel to tip in and out on top as the truck bounces up and down. That reduces the how much that tire slides back and forth across the road surface as the body goes up and down. Changing the angles of those arms by changing ride height, changes how those tires tip in and out. The others are as follows:. There are a few different things that you should think about when you are going to be purchasing a jack for your minivan.
Those things are:. The most crucial thing to consider while picking a jack is the size. Miscalculations in this aspect can cost you dearly. So it is always better to consider a jack of a size that has plenty of lifting capacity and that is a little above the required value. For example, if you require a 1. When we are investing in something, it is natural that we search for a choice that has more lifetime compared to others. This warranty is also helpful in replacing or repairing any defective parts that the jack might have.
Another thing to consider before picking a jack is its speed of lifting a vehicle. This is also one among the must-consider feature as time and effort are involved.
A jack capable of lifting a car quickly while requiring less pumps is obviously better than a jack with the opposite features. Ideally, a hydraulic jack requires pumps only to entirely lift the minivan is ideal which means you will want to look at a hydraulic floor jack. There are a variety of different jack types and sizes on the market but for any work done at your home a hydraulic floor jack that can lift 3 or more tons is the best option.
I have been working on cars since I was a kid and I love taking a vehicle that isn't working and bringing it back to life. I have owned quite a few cars over the years and looking for information about different vehicles is still hard online so that is why I started this website. Picture this scenario: you're traveling down a narrow, dusty mountain trail with rocky, uneven terrain in your rugged Jeep.
You pass roads that snake through expansive deserts devoid of human life
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