Far Beyond Driven, the story of Vantera

Yup I named it Vantera. All of the vans on here have cool names. My buddy started calling it Vanna but there are thousands of white vans with that name. So Vantera it is.

I started with the simple idea of doing a super cheap 2" lift and a little bigger tire. Found a add a leaf locally. Found some Cooper 235/70r16's and some Silverado wheels locally also. Got 2" pucks and hardware from 1lowcab (thanks again dude!) and read through wimp's 2+1 lift thread. Actually read through just about everyone's lift thread.

Front lift went great! Not a single problem. Every step of the process is mentioned on this site. Every answer you need is here...somewhere.





I'm pretty sure the AC condenser is suppose to be mounted to something. Not a big deal, just throw some bolts in there and move on.



And I'm sitting there fumbling around with a floor jack and some 4x4 chunks of wood thinking to myself "wish I had a jack that goes higher". Wait a sec, I do have a jack that goes higher.







Broke a few bolts. They weren't important anyway.



E brake cable bracket was so easy I forgot to take a pic.

Now here is where things went down hill for a moment. I actually thought I could jam a add a leaf into the original 250K mile fleet vehicle spring pack and get a full 2" of lift. Nope, not at all. After all that work I got it back on the ground to measure my success...1", that's it. If anyone is thinking about doing this kind of lift be realistic, these vans are getting older, they need new springs. And my shackles were pretty crappy looking, so while the credit card was out.





Should be a little rubber bump stop here correct?



Took a sec to fix some broken mounts for the exhaust heat shields.



Now from here on out I didn't really get any pics. Ran into another little issue, shock length. Rear ended up being way higher then I anticipated. My old blown out air shocks would not cut it(front shocks were bad too so figure I'd buy all four at once). Central 4wd is close to my house, I'll just run by there real fast. They did not have Rancho or Procomp that I wanted. So I picked up a set of Skyjacker Hydro 7000. They are a tight fit, almost too tight, but screw it, I want to drive it. I'll order new shocks next week if I have too.

This is totally worth it!





The 2+1 lift(plus shackle), for me, turned out to be 3.25 in the front and 4.75 in the rear.

More parts on order as I type this.