Finished upper housing brace welded on for good:

 

Finished housing brace w/o tabs for the rod end mounts:

 

...and the new lower shock mounts and more pics of the complete housing:

 

Now ya'll take it easy on my tig welding skills, I have less than 1 hour of arc time under my belt.

 

Yea...its was pretty annoying around that rpm at anything other than light throttle or wide open. Sorry no sound clip. I think part of the problem with mine though was the tail pipe. I cut the tail pipe off right after the muffler and started it up in the garage. Sounds totally different. I'm gonna run a short turn down on it for now and see what that sounds like. It is louder in the cab though so I don't know if I'm gonna like that for cruising the streets. Remind me when I get this turd back on the road and I'll let you know how it sounds.

 

the welds look better then i could do lol that torque arm is going to be one nice peace when done

 

Ok man I was just curious, mine is ran all the way to the back, it is bad(the rapp-crack), just was wondering how a bigger case muffler would sound.. I am willing to bet there is no crack if you dump it a lil after the muff.. BTW your tig work looks good, you have the machine set damn good, it took me a long time to get the feel of a tig, so I say *** it and mig alot of my stuff... Good looking build you have...

 

Just picked the rearend up. Got new bearings/seals, eaton posi and because there was a little confusion I ended up with 4.56 gears. I had originally wanted those gears but realized that if I added any more power then I would probably run out of rpm by the end of the 1/4. So I changed my mind and wanted 4.10's. My rearend guy got confused and installed the 56's. Anyway, I'm gonna go ahead and put it in and get the torque arm/shocks dialed in. Then I'll make a few test passes and see exactly how much rpm its gonna turn. If it doesn't look like its gonna work he said he would install the 4.10's for just the cost of the gear. Hopefully I'll have more pics by the end of the weekend.

 

I made a little progress today. Got the torque arm brackets cut. I should be able to get them welded on to the housing tomorrow and get the rearend back in the truck so I can get started on the upper shock mounts. BTW these are 3/4" chromemoly rod ends. Here are some pics...

 

lookin good cant wait to see it finished