I have a lot of this to do myself soon with my Baja. While figuring out my Woodsbuggy frame I found out going overboard tends to add in a lot of stress you can't necessarily see until you start dis/assembling and things don't line up.
I went from this fairly ordinary Berrien frame
To this
That engine is not light unfortunately. After all was said and done, despite painstakingly trying to take my time making that back cage and making it removable, it had so much stress in it that it doesn't match up the cage mounts and had to have holes elongated to make it bolt up. It works, but as a fabricator in the back of my mind I failed miserably. But you know what? Most things I fail on, if I'm being honest. There always seems to be that one element I may have overlooked or didn't realize until it was done or I couldn't have seen. But you know what? I believe that's what makes mechanics like me different than engineers I work with. (Notice I didn't say better, just different.) While I put a lot of thought into how I'm going to do something beforehand, there comes a time when you just have to jump off that ledge and see what happens. I definitely know next time because I have experienced what happens if I do it. Most of the engineers I've encountered in my 25 years in the work force would have gotten a lot farther trying things and failing than all the plans they made on paper and never ended up doing. Now I can see your not that type of person and I'm probably preaching to the choir, just saying sometimes it's ok to try and then see how it goes. We can always fix it later if it doesn't suit us. It's just awful tempting to get caught in the minutia and not make progress.
).
) so I could keep my paddle tires and the body apart which meant the low pressure in the tires (15#s) was the suspension and the shocks took over the torsion bars job completely. that setup is the main reasons for my almost "endo". It is also why I learned how to adjust/reset my preload on the blue buggy's rear suspension.