Beefing up suspension.

[enduro4231]

I'm not a desert racer, nor do I live near a desert. But the places we drive are real sandy, whooped out trails.

I drive a 1990 Toyota 4Runner

Anywho, I would like to beef up my suspension to handle all this better. I would like to bend some shock hoops to weld to the frame so I can run normal shocks, instead of the weird toyota shocks with the threaded rod on top. I would like to do this in the front and rear.

As far as shocks, I have no clue what to use. It has torsion bars in the front, i believe, and coil springs in the back. If i wanted to go to coilovers, would i just remove the stock springs and bolt in the coilovers?

For the front, are there any major areas of these toyotas that are prone to breakage that I should focus on first? What would need beefing up in the rear?

I'm a n00b, and I just want to beef anything up before it breaks on me.

[Brutpwr]

Check out these guys http://www.chaosfab.com/
There are probably other Toyota prerunner specialists but these guys come to mind right now...

Jason

[AK-Josh]

Well there is a local guy that has built a few trucks using stock ifs before the LT stuff was widely available. I bought one of these trucks and DD'ed it for a couple months before I sold it. All mine had was a new upper shock mount that allowed the use of a longer, larger bodied shock with trimmed stops. Was able to do about 25-30 on whoops.

He also built a few trucks using balljoint spacers and shocks mounted to the upper a arm that would go though the hood. Was said to pull about 12 inchs of travel but I havnt seen one in a while since they were all wrecked.

Heres some pictures of the bracing he did to have the lower ifs mounting stuff to hold up.