I have these spring cups sitting around:


Essentially, this:


I'm thinking about cutting out the middle and rewelding it with the middle like this:


That will let me run the spring cups flush in the pockets, so with the weight jacks fully backed out I would be able to run the stock springs at the stock spring height, or with a set of lowering springs and 1" extended ball joints I'll have an adjustment range from about 1" lower than the lowering springs. This will allow me to run the longest possible springs giving me the most possible spring choices.

What I'm worried about is that the way they are now you have a solid 1/4" plate in compression between the spring and the weight jack screw. No joints. The way I'm thinking about modifying them they'll instead have 2 weld joints in tension, with a 1/8" wall sleeve attaching the 2, 1/4" plates together. My concern is not the welds, I can put down good welds, but the way these things normally fail is that they rust and eventually break where the welds are, which would be a catastrophic failure, likely dumping the car down on the bump stop. OTOH, that's a lot of weld area, I wonder if there would be some warning before it happened?

Does anyone have any thoughts on how much of a concern this really is? Would you do it?

 

And while I'm at it, how big a deal is it to lube the weight jack threads through a zerk? It seems like the nuts for these things that I have are MUCH bigger than most, most are like a plate with a slightly thicker threaded area in the middle, and most don't have zerks. I could think of a few ways of making it accessible (mostly cutting larger, oblong holes in the frame rails and then using a 90* zerk, but that would be a REAL PITA), but it seems like giving the threads a light coat of grease putting them in should take care of that for a LONG time, and you can always back them out, grease the threads and screw them back.

 

I have no comments on cup design or lubing screw

 

I'm glad you said it and not me 😆 I've been trying to shoot video of doing some of this and I can't believe some of what has come out of my mouth accidentally, yesterday I made guide bushings and drilled the frame rails and I have a few minutes of "lubing the hole," "lubing the drill," "using lube while drilling..."

Anyway, If I remember right, you used one of the plate type nut assemblies with no provision for lube, did you do anything to lube your screws otherwise?

As far as the cup design... my feeling about all of it was worse before writing the original post. I was originally thinking "cup breaks, car drops to the ground and all my precious parts get scraped up or destroyed." Writing that I realized, "it will drop to the bump stops. Ok, I can handle that, when I lowered my first third gen back in the early 90's I drove around on the bump stops for over a week till I installed shorter bump stops," not that big a deal. Now with 1" extended ball joints that might drop closer to "this is really bad" than that was, and may mean towing it home, but I don't think it will be catastrophic.