Question for off-road experts

[tm america]

alot of offroader get ride of the shocks they help with wheel hop and they keep the tires planted on the ground where the traction is but in rock crawling they dont do much for you.dont think wheel hope is much of a problem since it probably doesnt have enough power to spin the tires.id probably just put some limiting straps on there for what you will use the truck for and if you want maybe some quick connects for the shocks

 

[duncan]

I'll be near that area tomorow

It's tomorow! Took a small detour, which ended with a 5-ton weight limit, into another detour, more small roads, more detour, but I made it to Reomie's MV graveyard. Hell, I had to do some hairpin turns on a small mountain road... and we don't even have mountains in the Netherlands

Anyway... I asked some of the people there, and they didnt know anything. Not about a Ford, XM, 757, 8 wheeler, or whatever. All they could tell me is they scrap a lot of vehicles. They get multiple MV's a day, remove the salvageable parts (engines, wheels, drivetrains, etc) and dump the rest as scrap metal. Their best guess is the picture you have is quite old and the machine got scrapped years ago.

Does look like a legit business at first glance, and they sure do stack a lot of MV hardware. So, the trail ends there I guess, sorry CraneTruck

 

[gimpyrobb]

MAN! Look at all those trucks! drewl!

 

[cranetruck]

Thanks for taking the detour Duncan, better hang on to what we have left of the m656/xm757 trucks in this country, since they appear to melt away quickly over there.

Tom, the 5th wheel and dromedary platform on the 757 weigh about as much as the aluminum bed on the 656 cargo version. The weight difference between the two is only a couple of hundred pounds IIRC.
I started a new thread on the torque rods, which are "frozen" and present a huge amount of resistance to the free movement of the suspension. I'm loosening up the swivel joints as we speak and will do another test run when all is back on. There are 12 torque rods on this vehicle and it takes at least 4 hours to do each one.
The bump stops should have been dimensioned to keep anything from binding up, so I'm not concerned about that.