Thanks for all the feedback guys. As always these kind of things come down to tradeoffs. Ideally you want a coilover that's as long as possible. I don't want to do a huge amount of cutting on the frame or rear floor so mounting the coilovers in front of the axle is the only way to make that happen. On the stock estate rear setup the spring is located 5-1/8" (13.02cm) behind the center line of the rear axle and my proposed layout moves the new coilover to be 4" (10.16cm) in front of that center line. The biggest drawback to my current design is that it induces a torque motion due to the small lever that is formed by the lower coilover mount.
To eliminate that problem I've been considering building a variation of the stock lower arm for the coilover to mount to instead. I finally taught myself Google Sketchup this past weekend and I'm drawing up the axle, 4-link, coilovers, upper crossmember and wheel/tire. Once that's done I will post so screenshots to show what I'm thinking.
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"Why is it that there's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it again?"
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