So I bought a 98 xj and thought it had a long arm kit, however with my knowledge increasing in this sport I had been fooled. It has long arm lowers, but stock uppers so my question is has anybody has experience in converting something like that into a long arm kit? I notice that iron rock only has one arm that connects to the top from the bottom arm and the other arm is strictly a lower. Has anybody fabbed something like this up? Any pointers?

 

Could you post a picture of your current suspension. What you are talking about is called a radius arm suspension system.

 

I will post some tomorrow after work! Enlighten me on this "radius suspension "

 

It uses a single arm that connects to the bod and the axle, the lower arm. It also uses an upper arm the connects to the middle of the loser arm and controls pinion angle.

 

if your lower arms are of full length long arm type, then it should be pretty easy to just weld on a tab so you can attach an upper control arm creating a radius arm setup quite easily.

but if you have mid length arms, not as easy. you want your lowers to go all the way to the trans cross member, so about 3 foot long arms.

 

 

Don't mind the blown out bushings

 

Wow those look weakly attached. I would swap it with something like the tnt long arm kit or the serious off-road long arm kit.

 

What the.....

 

Weakly Attached how? Like to the frame? To the axle? Where the arm meets the frame? I didn't build this so I'm not going to take offense

 

Where the bracket is mounted to the frame. I'm suprised that thing hasn't torn out yet. Seriously take a long look at how the kits are attached and you will see what we are talking about.

 

Maybe the picture is a bad picture but it's tied into the trans mount, c-channeled around the frame bolted and welded...maybe I'm missing something?

 

It's a rather small bracket for the amount of load. From your description it is better than the pictures, but its still seems weak.

 

You have really bad suspension geometry right now. It's amazing the drive shaft and steering haven't been damaged. Right now when the suspension cycles up and down the axle goes through a huge amount of rotation.
You can make drastic improvement in the way it works by removing the two upper links from body to axle and create links that go from the upper axle brackets down to the lower arms using some type of bearing or flex joint.

In doing that, all the load on the axle will go directly to the only two bolts holding the front on which is the bracket attached to the cross member shown in the image. That is too much for the small bolt and bushing you have in place now and it's been mention that the bracket is sort of small.

You have a good starting point if you can fabricate/weld. You may have difficulty finding a bolt-on solution with out replacing most or all of it.

 

Thank you! This is the kind of response I was looking for! Any who my original thought in my head was buying some adjustable upper control arms from RE or teraflex and running them to the lowers from the axle. Adjustable so I can still adjust pinion angle. Something you would suggest? At that point it would be full "radius suspension" correct?