Ok, back with good news. In short...she's back together, tracking straight down the road with reasonable camber/caster numbers.
In long....
Fiddled around with swapping the arms driver/pass and found a potential bind at full droop due to the cant in the end ball joint end of the arm. Swapped them back to their respective sides with the cleaned up slots and new cam washers and bolts. Eye ball'ed her for straight-ish and limped down to the alignment shop (had to change up to a different one than the previously mentioned shop but still had confidence in these guys).
After they got it on the rack they spent an hour dialing things in as best as they could and ended up with camber at -0.05/-0.87 (L/R) and caster at 1.43/1.04 (L/R). That was with the rear UCA arms pulled full inboard to slot max and the front about mid slot. All they really had to work with was the front UCA mounting positions, moving out to improve caster but going more (+) on camber or vis versa. Given they had done as well as the hardware would let them I took her home. Immediately noticed an improvement in the road noise now that I am riding flatter on the tread and a bit of an improvement in wheel feel and some return to center, but still very light steering.
After about a week of driving I felt comfortable in it, but after letting my wife drive and seeing her a bit stressed managing the still very light steering I decided to go ahead and move on to the next phase. Swapping bushings.
With the rig back up on stands, I pulled the UCAs and dicked around trying to find a good way to press out the bushings Rough Country shipped them with. Due to the very small available land outside the bushing flange I struggled to get a good backing surface to press against. Ended up cutting two flats off each flange and cobbling together a backer plate with 1-2-3 blocks and plate and used my ball press. It worked well enough for this job
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Now that the old bushings were out I went ahead and pressed in the eccentric bushings I had ordered a while back. Pressing these in went much easier than removal thankfully.
Installed them as suggested by a tech at SPC (
https://www.spcalignment.com) which was rear biased outboard and front bushing biased inboard to maximise my potential to gain caster. As an aside; I got to say these guys are great to talk to. Very knowledgeable about their products, were able to pull mfg drawings and get specific dimensions that aren't typically listed on their product pages over the phone, and one guy even had a K2500 burb he was working on.
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Bolted the UCAs back in and gave her the ol' eyeball-O-linement and headed back to the shop. Lucked out in that the shop didn't charge for the second alignment covering it under their '1yr warranty' even after letting them know that I had swapped some of the hardware (wasn't looking to short change anyone). Said it's all the same to them and that I was covered for as many alignements as I like no-questions asked thru that 1 year. This gave me pause as to the quality of their work but after seeing their clean shop/equipment and talking to the techs, I don't have any worries. They had it back off the rack in about 30 mins and was able to get me back in a more reasonable range for numbers.
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Night and day difference on the drive home. Wheel self-centered great after turns, the additional steering weight made for fewer micro corrections, and everything felt very stable at speed. Very happy with where things ended up at this point.
I think it's safe to say I am done messing around with the suspension for now.
Will keep an eye on the conditions of these new bushings as their inboard/outboard positions *could* cause premature wear.
While the bodged slots where limiting adjustment I have to believe that the Rough Country arms were also partially responsible for making this a pain to get to reasonable numbers. While my side by side comparisons to the stock UCAs didn't show much of a difference, I still believe the RC arms have to be a bit longer.
@Luke Stratton - When choosing new eccentric washers and bolts I did see some differences in advertised adjustment range. The idea of different adjustment ranges confused me as looking at how the washers work, they really all need to be designed to a single outside diameter to snugly fit within the flanges they bear on and the hole *should* be offset the appropriate amount to match with the slot length after the knock outs are removed. Assuming the OD's are the same, a hole offset too far from center would bind with the slots, and a hole not offset out enough would work fine but would not allow the full range of adjustment the slots provide. See my crappy rendering of an ideal washer (blue) and one with less offset (yellow). Then again what do I know. Just keyboard theorizing here.
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Say
@xAFNYx , did you ever figure out your camber issue?
