Thought I'd post a couple of pics of some chassis work my son and I did on my interior guy's (Larry) 59 Corvette AME chassis. We had already built a C4 conversion for Larry for a 55 Chevy which he ended up selling because he decided he has too many projects. This project started with an AME chassis with a C5/6 front end but with bare frame rails in the rear. Larry had a few C4 rearends and decided he wanted one in his '59 without paying the $10K for the AME IRS.
The work involved putting the chassis in our frame jig at the stock 102" wheelbase. We did that by placing the chassis over the IRS we have in the jig, and locating the front spindles at that wheelbase, then building stands to hold the front end at the correct ride height. The rear ride height was kept at AME specs with some mods to the jig. Larry bought a CNC-machined batwing for the early C4 Dana 44 IRS that was narrowed about 9" from stock. It's a beautiful piece...
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We started out by narrowing the rear frame rails 4.5" and building the batwing brackets to position the center section at the correct height. Then we moved and narrowed moving/narrowing the shock crossmember.
Larry mocked up some 4" narrowed (2" per side) halfshafts so we could use them in the build. He's going to have new ones built for the final assembly.
Then we had to locate the dogbones and build the structure for them. We used a splined swaybar and fabbed some threaded plates we welded to the frame. Then we added axle bumpers, built custom shock mounts, and removed the adjustable transmission crossmember brackets and built a custom crossmember. Larry's happy as a pig in sh*t.
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