Hor Rod Daddy, Ultimately this choice is going to be yours. Some of the advice you have gotten here is both good-- Bad-- and some even worse as it is obviously just personal opinion with no basis in fact at all.

I personally don't think your idea of a i-Beam Truck axle with spring behind and the use of bat wings is bad. The design itself has been proven time and time again, not a few times or even a hundred times but thousands of times. At some point a design is proven worthy by history, your idea certainly fits into that category.

If the idea was completly without merit, and have been used as many times as it has then we all would be reading every day about some Hot Rod crashing becuase the front suspension of I-Beam Axle, bat wings and spring behind suspension failed. I have been in and around Hot Rods and modified cars for a lot more years than I care to think about, and I have never heard of ONE not a single ONE that, that ever happened to.

Ford engineered the Spring offset canfiguration and used it for a dozen or more years, so the argument for the spring being on top of the axle "Were it belongs" doesnt hold water. And most of the objections -- " In my opinion" have also been proven unfounded simple by the numbers and the time that has past with this spring configuration being used.

RS