Well I had time to get the coil on, but haven't adjusted it yet for height or welded the shock tower gussets on yet. Here's a couple of photos that show it can be done on a non-lifted Explorer.
This is real preliminary. I usually wait until I'm finished before reporting but know that some of you wanted to know where I'm at with it. Remember I still have a snapped tranny crossmember to rebuild and the shock tower gussets to weld before it's driveable. Plus I just had the battery totally crap out on me so now I have to go buy a battery.
Until then I won't know if 800 lb coils are too much or not with these QA1 shocks that aren't gas-charged to 200lbs like the Foxes are. I can report that the QA1 shock with the 14" extended length worked absolutely perfect and any of you interested in doing this to a non-lifted Explorer should give serious consideration to getting these instead of Foxes. They have 12 dampening settings (I'm sure it will take awhile to finetune the dampening settings and figure out the best one to use) and the extended length is about a 1/2" shy of full CV angle, so the shock itself can be used for the droop limiter. The problem with the Foxes was that there was none that came nearly this close to the compressed/extended length needed for non-lifted application and the QA1 is nearly dead-on. Plus the QA1's are a heckuva lot cheaper.
I do note that the brake line is dangerously close to the coil and might actually end up residing between a couple of the coil levels.... I will probably need to figure out how to reroute the brakeline. The second photo does a pretty good job of showing the brakeline sitting in harm's way waiting to get pinched. There's so little shock travel (3.5" or so) that even at full compression the coils may not close enough to pinch it, but that is yet to be determined.
Otherwise there were no surprises. As expected, I had to cut off the bumpstop mount to clear the coil, but I did NOT have to grind out the upper control arm (which others have said was required on the lift) so maybe the non-lifted aspect keeps the upper arm further out of harm's way than when lifted.
The coil is REAL close to the axleshaft but it does clear it, so I'll call that as a miss is as good as a mile. As the photo shows, it is angled from vertical pretty good, but that was also expected. I don't know at this point if that will have any noticeable effect.
We are going on vacation next weekend so it may be another two weeks before I get it operational and moving again. Once that occurs I'll post a report on actual performance and if any problems cropped up.
