I don't plan on jumping in and just tearing it apart, I am wheeling it as is, but I have a couple of trucks just sitting around and am wanting to start building something a little more advaced.
Before going any further, do you have any personal experience in fabrication and modifications on any type of vehicle?
Do you have any experience behind the wheel doing actual off roading? Driving on ice or snow in 4x4 don't count. I mean
real off roading.
Sometimes its best to start at the bottom and work your way up. Stephen Watson and Steve Fox both started (as did most of us) with bone stock rigs and modified them as they went along, one small piece at a time. Part of the reason behind this is only fixing or upgrading what breaks, etc. You sound like you want to do the opposite. You don't fix something thats not broken, right? Thats where the dollar figures come in along with the time factor of which both leads to many projects being given up because of the lack of the two.
As long as your rig is operational, I'd just do something small to start out with such as lift and tires. Then if you start breaking axles, etc., upgrade to something stronger like 3/4 tons or 1 tons. Then when you gain more valuable experience behind the wheel and you know what your rig is capable of doing, you will find its flaws and want to improve those areas. Linking the front and/or rear is somewhere down the road of that modification but not this soon.
Sorry if my post isn't quite what you want to hear but you're asking a lot of guys who have already been in your shoes and know what they would do the second time around. Those advising you against your plan right now are likely the ones who know what they're talking about and those are the same dudes you should be listening to.
What you're trying to do, with the lack of experience, is like putting a kid with go-cart experience right into a NASCAR race car and letting him go at it. It just won't work. Get some experience and insight, ask plenty of questions, hang out in the COG forum, read, read, read.
Meanwhile, go out and have fun with what you have. Too many of us wished we had our old rigs where we could just take them out as they were and just have fun with them. Only when most of us modified them, then we started to get bit by a bug of where we thought we had to do more to make it better, faster or stronger when a plain-Jane truck would have done just fine.
