2006 GMC Sierra - Up,Up,And Away!

Over in the "spray booth" the stock lower control arms were getting back in black. Compare the two side by side, and you can see that this truck has almost no miles on it and the stock paint still looks dismal.

Grade-8 bolts and nuts were all that were necessary to slip the lower control arms into their new home. Cognito added a crossmember between the control arm mounts to keep the control arms from trying to support the drop brackets.

Norcal disassembled the stock spindles and slid the bearing hub assemblies into the new Cognito knuckles.

Cognito chose to use a knuckle lift instead of the dropped upper control-arm brackets for better strength. A benefit is that the stock steering remains with no drop brackets adding unneeded leverage on the parts.

Heim ends replaced the weak tie-rod joints. After unscrewing the tie rods from the center link, the new inner bracket was centered, leveled, and tightened to specs.

A heim adapter was placed into the steering arm on the spindle and the new heim-end tie rods were bolted. The length of each tie rod was set against the removed factory items, so the alignment would be near normal and drivable to the alignment shop.

Next, Norcal mounted up the extended sway bar links and placed the front half-shafts back in place.

Again, we went with the more strength route, the compression strut subframe was also the torsion-bar crossmember mount. Everything stayed tied together for superior performance.

The torsion-bar crossmember was placed into its new home and it was looking like a truck again. We took this opportunity to put the torsions back in, but they were left loose

Side by side, the difference is dramatic between the stock front shaft and the new high angle, CV-style shaft.

It slipped right into place.

Moving on, the dual shock hoops were placed in their new positions and bolted on. One hole per side needed to be drilled to accept the hardware.