There are more than a few old trucks still out there waiting for a good home and a new lease on life, but many of these trucks have had their ride and safety sacrificed for looks. While there are a great number of people who love a truck that is sitting in the weeds, the work done to get it there needs to be well thought out or you and your truck might literally wind up "in" the weeds.
It's easy to cut or remove a bunch of leaf springs and mess with the shackles to try and lower a truck, but they were put there for a reason at the factory and designed to work with all these parts intact. Once you start removing suspension parts, you jeopardize the ride and safety of you and others. This is why there are lowered suspension parts available in the aftermarket.
For those not wanting to get into doing framework or installing airbags on their '55-59 Chevy truck, you have a couple of choices: using a dropped axle, dropped leaf springs, or dropped monoleaf springs. Of course the first can be used with either of the latter to get the nose really down.
In the rear there are a few options as well. There are long shackle kits, flip kits to mount the rearend on top of the leaf springs, and dropped leaf spring packs as well as monoleafs. An easy way to drop the rear of a truck 4 inches with the rearend mounted below the leaf springs is to use a flip kit, but sometimes C-notching the frame is necessary.
Well, what if you have a truck and you're not sure what has been done to the suspension? You know it's low, but underneath it looks dangerous, not to mention it rides bad. That's just what we encountered when we talked to Circle City Hot Rods in Orange, California, about a '55 Chevy 3100 they bought to use as a shop truck. It sat nice and low, had some cool old ET five spokes on it, and ran well, but when we went for a ride in it, we knew immediately something had to be done!
A few things were obvious: it already had a dropped axle, many leafs (front and rear) had been removed as well as cut, it was basically riding on the bumpstops, and the rearend had been flipped and swapped to a 10 bolt. We didn't even realize at the time that the rear shackles had been flipped down to compensate for lowering it too much in the back. This raised it back up 6 inches, but also locked the shackles from swinging like they are supposed to.
So a call was made to Performance Online to see what to do about the desperate situation. They recommended their dropped monoleafs for the front and rear and corresponding spring pin and shackle kits. Fore the front they have a 3-inch dropped monoleaf kit and out back there is either a 4- or 6-inch dropped pair of monoleafs. We were hoping to keep the ride height close to where it was to start with, but we weren't sure exactly how much it had been lowered so we went with the 3- and 6-inch monoleafs (remember this truck already has a dropped axle).
The rebuild of the stock spring pins and shackles is pretty straightforward once the old parts are out; just grease everything up and put the new monoleafs in. The 6-inch monos proved to be too much drop with the rear axle already being flipped, so we re-flipped it back below the leafs like it would be stock, using Performance Online's rearend flip kit. This allowed the use of the 6-inch monoleafs with a 1-inch block to give the truck the look, ride, and rearend clearance.
In the end, the truck came down another 1/2-inch in the front and a full inch in the rear from where it started! Plus the ride is much better and of course safer. Performance Online has just about everything you need for the underside of your classic Chevy or Ford truck-check them out today.
