So this past summer I purchased a 1993 Carry and a set of Mattracks light foot to install on it. After spending months researching this site on the different ways to do it I made my choice.I know tracks can be installed with the simple 2" strut spacer, heavier springs and a bit of trimming. I wanted to go a bit further as some others have done before! I opted to do a 3" spacer lift with 300# springs and equal 3" front crossmember/ diff drop, a questionable amount of drivetrain drop and a springover conversion for the rear axle. As expected there were issues with my plan and had to adapt my plan as I got into the project. So let's get started with front! I fabricated spacers for the struts that essentially lowered the mounts vertically without any compensation for castor or camber. I did this because I intended to also lower the crossmember the same amount to keep things aligned as factory. I tried to go 3" but because of the front drive shaft hitting the engine crossmember I could only do 2.5" on the strut spacers and subframe spacers. I found that to do 3" the engine and transmission would need to be lowered 2.5" but the shift cables were the only things that would not allow it to happen. So I settled with 2" drop on engine and transmission and 2.5" for the front end. The flex brake lines were to short to take that much drop so I drilled out the spot welds that hold the connection between solid and flex line and lowered it until I had enough. With the struts spaced down and the subframe and diff lowered I now needed to deal with the tension rods that locate the control arm. I have seen others bend them to a "Z" shape and extend them but I opted to fabricate lower mounts that bolt up to the existing mount and provided me with a good place to mount bumper brackets that I still need to make! The next thing is steering. I didn't see anything about dealing the the sever angle the is put on the steering rods so I went out on my own and fabricated my own parts to fix the issue!! That's all I have time for now. I will continue soon and get all my pictures up sometime! Lol
How did you drop the tie rods? I have an idea on mine but would love to here others? I know a guy here who remade the entire piviot!
Ya that's basically what I did. Just made a bracket that bolted up to either side and had a hole in it the same size as factory just 3" lower. Looking to get pictures up soon
They work ok. Probably not as good and the tatou 4S would because the Mattracks run flat so it doesn't like to climb real well. But it really comes down to what your expectations are. Certainly better than tires! It doesn't compare to my canam outlander with apache tracks but the carry is also twice the weight and half the power. Still turns heads though! I had it out in -30 deg C (-22 deg F). It didn't really like that. Having issues with carb icing. I think my problem actually comes from the warm air intake. When the tracks throw snow on the exhaust it obviously creates steam which gets sucked into the intake and frosts the inlet of the carb up to the point that it will idle but becomes very difficult to rev up. Now that is pretty extreme weather. I think I would be better off just drawing in pure cold air. There isn't much moisture in the air to frost at -30. Definitely some mods need to be made to run at that temp reliably.
Update. Running great at -20 deg C. Turned out my revving issue was my accelerator pump linkage came apart. The nut vibrated off the rod from the throttle plate. Apparently without an accelerator pump it doesn't like to rev up off idle! Lol who knew! Happy I found the issue. Now I have it tightened up for maximum squirt from the pump and that really seems to help in the cold weather.
