YOUNG said:
If you beat on your rig hard all of the bolts holding that thing on WILL NOT stay tight nor will the ones holding the third member down stay tight. I highly recommend building a truss that goes up and over the third member and one that doesn't attach it self to the third at any point. Something like the below. This was the one that I built for my rig. There was plenty of room for the pinion brake on the rear side of the third member also.
When I spoke to Scott on the phone about my wheel centers I mentioned that his Peggy link brackets (
http://www.mudprometalworks.com/peggy.html) looked very similar to the ones I built for my rig long before he released them:
(This wasn't the final version I ended up with. The final looks even more like his, just can't find the pics at the moment.)
He said that one of his customers brought him pics of my brackets saying that they wanted some like them so he just built what his customer wanted. It was fine with me as several people asked me to cut some for them and I was not interested.
But the other side of that bracket includes a tab that goes down and bolts to a mating tab on the axle tube to keep the dif from trying to rotate and cause the bolts to loosen. You can just barely see it in this pic:
I've been on about 8 rides with the buggy so far and beating the ever loving **** out of it. I've jumped it with 5' of air under the rear at least 10 times, thrashed relentlessly on it, wedged the rear tires under **** and nailed the throttle so hard that the rear end jumped 5 feet into the air from a stand still, driven 50-70mph on multiple occasions offroad, and torn 2 44" TSL's from abuse so far. But all the bolts you describe are still just as tight as the day I put them in. I just checked them about 2 weeks ago. I attribute that to that tab.
I don't beat as hard on my **** as TC, any of the Tanners, or some of the other big name bouncers, but I beat on it hard enough to where most around me cringe as they watch.
I didn't want mine on top fo the dif not only because I didn't have room there, but also because making them that high screws with link geometry too much. You end up needing like 12" of vertical separation at the frame to match it, which I DEFINITELY didn't have.
