Outer Limits 4x4 Board

was wondering on how far you can reverse bend a leaf spring.
at the moment when the front is on the bump stops, the springs look like a compound bow. i want to cut the bumps in half to get a bit more travel, but am worried about breaking the leafs.

s3 army shackles, county shocks, rangie flex lines, bump spacer removed

any thoughts would be good.

My IIA has a reasonably similar setup (mil chassis and shackles, spacer removed, etc), except I have the stock monroe military front shocks (reco'd).

I would have the same up-travel as you have now - and about the same amount of reverse-arch. I have had my front suspension like that for about 6 years - 5 of that pretty hard offroading. The only problems I had were I broke the bottom leaf on each pack, but I think that was down to the guy who reset them for me not putting the proper arch in.

With more of a reverse arch you would be puting more stress on the springs - it would give them a shorter life but how much shorter I would have to calculate from the leaf-spring stress calcs in the SAE leaf spring design manual (if you really want to know I can do this).

Rather than put more stress on the springs, I would be inclined to fit some longer shocks, so that you can get more down travel.

At full up-travel (when bump stop is fully compressed) I can see daylight through the top of the top shock eye and the bottom of the bottom - so the shocks are a bit long but they work OK - just a bit hard on the bushes (I can also bottom them out the other end). So if your county shocks have more up-travel then they must be shorter.

i had s111 ex army ffr with some leaves and the bumpstop spacers removed. same up travel as yours no probs
david