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Message: [QUOTE="Tree Trimmer, post: 627212, member: 716"] if your going to do it yourself, and you want it done right, and you dont have access to the nice computer programs that will do the figuring and simulating for you, you only can do it the old fashioned way. make your axle mounts, and make your frame mounts. mount your axle mounts and mount on the rear of the bar. hold the front truck mounts up by hand, and the front of the bar by hand. the mount on the end of the bar should not be welded solid at this time. so if you need to shorten the bar, you can just pull out the sleeve, shorten the bar and try again. while under the truck, looking at the front mount, have someone push down on the rear of the truck. we used 2 pallets full of seed corn and a skid loader. something that will almost bottom the truck out. we set both pallets in, and just used the loader to lift and lower the truck via the reese hitch, with a hitch upside down and a chain. and we made a mock up bar out of a piece of 3/4" threaded rod and two joining nuts. that was alot cheaper to mess up, than a piece of DOM tubing. screwed our poly ends on, and went to town. the correct length of the bar, is the length of bar that does not move AT ALL, around the front mount. a 1/8" is fine, as your poly bushings will allow for that comfortably, with out additional stress on them. when you look through the holes, they should not move within each other. if they do, you either need to shorten your bar, lengthen it, lower your front mount, raise your front mount, or do something different. its geometry, if you stew on it long enough, you'll figure out what you need to do. this will allow you to compress the rear of the truck, fully, without the trac bars binding your travel. most fab shops have software that does all that manual stuff for them. they can input all the correct dimensions they are working with, and it will tell them where the front mount needs to go, based on more variable's than you think, and the length of the center to center of the eyes on the bar needed to achieve that, accurate down to the nearest .001" if they choose. note i said center to center of the eyes on the bar. that's the important number. your bar length just matters how much thread you want left on your eye's. two guys both get 72" bars. one bottoms his eyes out in his bar, and ends up with 74" c2c, and one leave his out a few inches and ends up with a 77" c2c. both same length bars, but one guy will bind his, and the other won't. or if the magic number is 75.25" c2c on the eyes, they both could be wrong. this is just hypothetical, but you get my point. bar length is not the number your after. center to center of the eyes is the number your after. that should at least get you started. [/QUOTE]