Ranger Resurrection Part VI

18 months ago, it came in on a flat bed today. It's flat out. Awesome. Ranger Resurrection is back to be plumbed wired and fired. Plus wacky traditions

and wild rides highlight the 57th annual swamp buggy races that and more right now on Xtreme 4x4.

Welcome to Xtreme 4x4. And you guessed it, we're nearing the end of project Ranger Resurrection. Our

Swiss army knife for trucks basically built to handle anything that we can throw out of.

We've been working on this truck for a really long time and today we will finally be able to hear the small block in between those custom frame rails, breathe life. I can't wait.

This truck started with what we thought was gonna be a pretty simple plan. Drag a Ford Ranger out of a junkyard, bring it to the shop, strip it down and turn it into a hardcore off road truck.

So we pulled in a completely thrashed pick up, started to tear it apart.

We ditch the back half of the frame, mounted it to our frame

and this is what replaced the stock frame, a custom to cage that I'm going to paint with Por 15 because when you live in an area with a lot of moisture in the air or even sometimes worse winter, you got to seal up that raw metal before it begins to rust. But it took a lot of work to get that truck to a point where it was ready for two

to accomplish everything we wanted to, with this truck, we needed it to be an extended cap.

This would give us a longer wheel base and a place to mount the radiator in the back.

And we thought, how hard can it be to convert it? Since all it took was a trip to the part store for some body panels and a whole bunch of trimming and fitting and grinding,

fitting and more trimming and grinding.

And finally, some welding, it was no big deal.

And with the cab taken care of it was time to build in some protection for both the driver and of course, the passenger

and with a plan in hand, we started with a pile of in 58 dom tubing and began to build a custom roll cage with the main hoop in place. We added a halo bar and some down tubes in the front, plus a cool extra extreme in the windshield that will also act as our tax mountain.

Then we added some five point safety harnesses to keep us planted in our Mastercraft suspension seats and the best thing of all the window nets.

Now, at that point obviously, the interior was still missing some stuff. It didn't have a dash or wiring or any gauges. So today, we're going to install these Stewart Warner maximum performance gauges and these are all full electric gauges with very precise competition sending units. And the best thing is we're going to be able to convert these smaller gauges over from a standard bulb to a super bright led

and we're going to mount those in this. This is a carbon fiber dash from Perry's fab and fiber made specifically for the ranger. Now, the best thing is this thing is ultra light and ultra strong, so strong. In fact, if you had an automatic transmission, you can actually mount the shifter right to that console,

but this truck was not an automatic. So once we had the cage built, it was time to deal with the drive train.

It all started with a Ford performance solution V8 that was built by the horsepower crew.

It pushed 435 horsepower and 457 ft pounds of torque on the dyno.

And once we had it at extreme, we made it to a new Venture gear 4500 and then an MP 271 transfer case.

Now these gauges are going to monitor that small block with ease. But when it comes to the power distribution for the rest of this truck, we're going to use painless performance sixth circuit off road wiring harness. Now, this harness comes with this aluminum bezel that went ahead and mounted the dash

and it has these little waterproof boots for the switches. And the best thing is instead of fuses, it uses a circuit breaker. So if you have a short circuit on the trail, you have to fix it reset.

And we're on our way

now with this mount and the dash, it's almost done. But this dash isn't the only piece of fiberglass we got from Perry's fabric fiber

with the rear frame rails welded to the original frame. We built a full tube, rear section to carry the fuel cell and our rear mounted radiator and two spare tires just in case. Then with a tube frame in place, we finally were able to mount the fiberglass bedsides and one piece front end

and we could start setting the ride height and begin designing the suspension. But of course, a suspension isn't any good without a set of axles underneath of them.

And when a huge crate from dyno track arrived, we couldn't wait to open it because inside was a pair of Dana 60

fitted with 513 gears in a B air lockers, front and rear. We set the ride height for the truck bolted on the American racing 20 inch

Mojave wheels and the 38 Toyos. Then all we had to do was build the rear trailing arms and the front for,

for the truck.

And then once the axles were underneath the truck, we could measure for the shocks.

But before we can even turn those axles, once we need to get that engine fired and that requires some plumbing.

We're going to be using Earl's Dash 8 ft and return from the fuel cell. And with this dash finished up and thank you and you guys caught up into what it took to get this truck to this stage.

We're one step closer to getting this thing on the trip.

Oh,

yeah. And so is that

coming up part boat part four by four swamp buggy races next?

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4. We're about ready to dive back on a ranger. Resurrection to Plummet Wire and fire it in. Say a matter of 15 minutes, that's the magic of TV. And today inside a little window into the off road world, we're going off road, way off road and into the swamp for some hard core racing with a splash.

The Everglades is a tranquil place where birds frolic and alligators roam in the still of the Florida swamp

three times a year. That piece is shattered when Florida Sports Park hosts the swamp buggy races.

The drive one is just awesome. It is a thrill of a lifetime.

There's no roller coaster, no dragster, no,

any kind of machine out there that can turn you on

like a swamp

buggy can from its humble beginnings in 1949 swamp buggy racing is now part of South Florida's Racing heritage.

We live, breathe, eat swampy

racing. It's the only place that they race these things. People up north and from other parts of the country have never seen anything like this. You get a little bit hard to clean

drag racing, circle track and all, you know, put into one. You know, it's really exciting. It is pretty hard core

hurtling through 18 inches of water side by side. Hard core is an understatement. If you're in the buggy, all you can see is straight ahead. You really don't have a peripheral view. But if he's right there and he's coming up on you, you can see him. And then when you know that, you know,

put a pedal to the metal and go

and the two and four wheel drive classes have pedal. We're running about 840 horsepower and we're flying through the water somewhere between 7080 miles an hour. There's no room for air. You make a little bottle and that guy

blow by you. It is extreme.

30 years ago. Randy John's race career was cut short back when I was 18 years old. I raced a couple of times. Second time I ran, I flipped over and my dad wouldn't let me race anymore after that. That was the end of my racing career. He returned to the swamp four years ago to race the top gun machine.

You get the bow,

you can't get rid of it.

Randy didn't return alone enlisting his wife, Laurie to pilot Lady Liberty, having her in this race with us and doing this. She can't complain about how much it costs.

And his son, Tyler mans, the controls of the patriots. The families don't work together very well all the time, but

we usually do. All right.

With only one day of practice, this event would test the fortitude of the John's family. Today. Saturday is the only day you get to practice right before Sunday. So if you tear something up or it's not right, you gotta do all your adjustments today. If you break something tomorrow, you're pretty much done. It's very intense. It's very nerve wracking

and it's a full time job trying to keep up with all these buggies and keep them working. Things turned sour early when Laurie had problems in the first practice session.

We don't seem to be shifting very well

at

all.

After blowing the gears in his first practice, it didn't get any better for Tyler on his second run. Check that gear, that gear is wrong.

That gear is wrong. Let's go.

Jack it up, check it. It's got, it's gotta be wrong.

It's not 18 to 1. This thing, it's gotta be a

15 to 15 grand.

Yeah, there's something wrong. I put the gear in upside down.

I did that myself just blew $1000. I know

like that.

That was

our money.

Well, when you put the gears in upside down.

I, I got a name for that. It's called dumb ass. No, it don't bother me because he put so much work into it. You know, he's trying to look after all three of our buggies. It's a simple mistake. Anybody would make. It been kind of a frustrating day because we've had problems. A lot of people don't make it around a track today and they're, they're just aggravating discussion. We are so go home, work on them tonight and hopefully we make up for it tomorrow

on race day. Expectations weren't high. We hope we can keep it all together long enough to get around the track to win 10 grand. They would have to keep it together and survive the single elimination.

Laurie was the team's first casualty but Randy wasn't disappointed.

She got the raise bug. She wants to raise, she wants to win. She wants to be a,

in the quarter finals. Randy felt leaving the family's fortune to Tyler.

The 22 year old didn't crumble under pressure as he knocked off some of the world's best.

I'm not feeling cocky

in the final big feature race. A last second surge past seven time champion Eddie Jesser gave Tyler the victory.

We

first after yesterday, the only place we had to go out. We couldn't go down

along with the fame and fortune. Tyler's win earned him the traditional jump with the swamp buggy queen.

Oh, it is a race

that

if you d,

you won it all. You did it,

do you think there's any gators in that swamp there? Jessi? I don't think that they would throw a swamp buggy queen into a swamp with gators in it. That's a good point. I think if I had a swamp buggy, I'd call it the Crocodile Hunter

crikey.

These

fiberglass panels are designed to replace your stock bed side, which means they have provisions for stock tail lights. But

because our donor truck didn't even have a, that

we grabbed a set of headlight and tail light assemblies from a PC.

Now, the wiring harness in this truck is actually one of the easiest ones we've ever had to design with only six circuits to worry about. We only have to pull enough wires in the back to hook up the main power feed of the battery. And then of course, the feeds for the relays for the electric fuel pump as well as the electric fan and a power feed out to the tail lights. Now, if we pop a circuit breaker with this thing out on the trail, it's gonna be pretty simple to chase through this harness, find the problem, fix it and get back behind the driver's seat. But what happens if you got a really complex wiring harness and you keep popping fuses. We got a little trick to show you how to find the problem.

Now you've seen us wire up every single project here at extreme.

But when it comes to actually diagnosing or building a harness, it's still one of the most popular technical questions that we ever get asked. So to shed some light on the topic, I went ahead and prewired some of the circuits that we're gonna be using in our ranger. But on a lot smaller scale here on the table,

now, the main power feed obviously starts at the positive battery terminal. But to get the power for our switches, we're gonna attach a 10 gauge wire to the big terminal on the starter and then inside the switch box, we're gonna split it off into all the switches first going through the circuit breakers. But for this little mock up, I went ahead and just installed these fuses.

The 12 volt feed is then switched by the switches that are mounted up into the dash for things like our tail lights,

the off road lights to be mounting up on the roof and on the front bumper, the ignition box and then a couple of bare feeds run in the back to run the relays for the cooling fan as well as the electric fuel pump. Now, everything inside your harness is going to need a ground. And in our ranger, we're going to use the chassis as the ground, same way we're doing on this table. All we have to do is hook up the negative ground cable up to a piece of metal and then everything else can just attach to the same piece.

Now, when you blow the fuse in your circuit, it's most commonly caused by a dead short. What a dead short means is that the power coming through the fuse and then through the switch has no load, it's not making it to the light that it has to turn on. So when you go ahead and turn on your switch, it blows a fuse like this.

Now, these dead shorts are often caused by the insulation on the wire, basically wearing off where the wire passes past the metal, usually through a firewall or around the frame.

And this causes a dead short because it goes right to ground just like this little bare piece of wire right here. Now, although this is easy to find with this harness sitting on the table, finding something that small when the harness is strewn through the whole truck can be near impossible. So this is where that little tip comes in.

All you gotta do is take a standard headlight and attach two wires to it, one to the ground,

one to the low beam. This is going to reintroduce that load into the circuit that we don't have, that's causing this fuse to blow.

All we do is replace the fuse with the wires from the headlight and this will help us diagnose the problem. Now, this switch should be turning on these lights, but it's not, it's blowing the fuse. And when I turn the switch now it turns on our headlight. That means we have a dead short. All you got to do now is go around the truck and wiggle the wires. And once that light goes out, we know we found the problem. All we got to do now is repair this. We're back on the trail.

Another problem area and harnesses that could be hard to find or fix is a bad relay.

We're going to have four of them in this truck. Two for the off road lights, one for the electric fan and one for the fuel pump.

You want to use a relay when the item that you are powering draws enough current to possibly burn out the contacts inside of the switch, that's usually anything over 30.

The power from the switch on the dash will go to one terminal, usually marked by number 85 on the relay.

The matching terminal number 86 will be grounded.

Now inside the relay is a small electro magnet that is powered by the switch which causes the internal switch to throw and that's the click you hear inside of the relay

when turned on the relay allows a high level of current to flow from terminal number 30 to terminal number 87 to let's say the fuel pump. But what happens when it goes out, you're obviously not going to be going anywhere.

So if the circuit breaker or the fuse is all right. It's time to check your relay.

You should have power coming from both the switch

and the main power feed. And if you do, then you probably have a bad relay.

A simple temporary fix is to jump the relay with the Carter pin. This will take the place of both a switch and the relay.

The power will run from the battery through the Carter pin and on to the fuel pump. Now, the relay is the problem. When you contact the pin to the terminals, you'll hear the fuel pump run. Now, remember not to leave the jumper in place because not only will it kill the battery, but if it is your fuel pump, you're going to flood the engine.

Stay tuned. Ian and Jessi will be right back to fire up this beast when Xtreme 4x4 continues.

Hi everybody. Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4.

We're almost ready to fire the engine inside the ranger here, getting this truck one step closer to being on the trail after being in the shop. What feels like forever?

The last thing we need to bolt up to the engine is this set of BBK headers, but we're going to mount them in an unusual way upside down and backwards. That way we can run the exhaust pipe in front of the engine, meet up with the passenger side and then the 3.5 inch pipe from Flowmaster

for clearance on our spark plugs. We have to cut the bridges off of our headers.

The exhaust will run down under the floor on the passenger side.

Yeah,

into a pool Master super 40

then finally out the side of our extended cab panel.

All right, with the wiring and the fuel all hooked up. We can do. We've been waiting to do for a long time.

Well, there you go guys. It's running the next time you see your Ranger Resurrection. All we have to do is a couple more things like the steering, the shocks, the springs, drive shafts and some brake stuff. And then I know we said this tons of times, but it's been a lot of work and you're actually gonna see us pay this thing off on the trio. So it was all worth it. You gonna go play next week and I hope you come with us.

Just a little excited.

It's been a year and a