It doesn’t make any sense to slam the front of your classic truck if the back end is gonna stay sky-high. So it only follows that we continue on where we ended back in July on our buddy Josh’s ’75 C10. The original intent was to slam the truck as much as possible without using air-ride while still retaining proper suspension travel. While this wasn’t so hard to achieve up front, out back it’s a different story.
Here’s the stock rear suspension that will be getting replaced.
The stock C10 chassis has only a minor kickup over the rear axle, which makes lowering the trucks more than a few inches out of the question without installing at the bare minimum a C-notch. Since we wanted a nice healthy dump (enter pun here) out back, we decided to go with KP Components’ eight-piece step notch kit which allows for as much as nine inches of axle travel depth. We don’t need quite that much, but it will be a good start.
To locate the rearend, we kept in line with the front suspension and hit up our friends at Fatman Fabrications. They recommended their quasi-universal four-bar kit, which fits all kinds of applications. Their kit is designed to be used with the four-bars mounted either inboard or outboard of the framerails, providing a variety of options for various make/models. We opted to mount the four-bars outboard of the framerails as it allows for more travel with less impedance from the exhaust system, etc.
While the kit is pretty straight forward to install, there are a couple of things that come into play that should be mentioned, most notably the necessary removal of the stock spring’s hangers and the second-most rear crossmember. It’s also necessary to box the frame on both sides of the new crossmember, but anyone who can handle installing a step notch kit can handle this as well.
One of the neat things about the Fatman kit is not only its universality, but the fact that it’s designed with a number of possible mounting positions for both the four-bars as well as the shocks, making ride height changes or adjustments down the road possible. This enables one to set their truck up with an initial baseline ride height setting and have the ability to change it later if they want to go to a different size wheel/tire combo for instance. The versatility of the Fatman four-bar kit is truly unique and is what lends it to such a wide variety of applications, be them early Ford or late Chevy. CCT
