"Project Body Bag" Part 1: Building a Wild Mini Street Truck!

Today, it's a brand new project and it's one we've never done before.

It's a full on frame. Dragon mini truck.

First, we'll take a trip to check out one of the coolest mini truck fab shops around.

Then we'll tear into our Nissan so we can lay the frame on the ground.

It's all here today on trucks.

Welcome to trucks

and today is a good day

because today we're starting a whole new project, something you guys have been asking for for a long time

and has never been done on trucks before. That's right. You've seen us build compact trucks like S

10-K here. But that's a different goal. This was a budget muscle truck hit it.

This is gonna be a full on custom mini truck. Now, we know you mini truck guys are not posers. So we're gonna go the whole nine yards on this hard body. And by the time we're through with this build, we're gonna be dragging frame all over the streets and tucking twenties. Now, the mini truck scene is huge with great projects and incredible workmanship coming out of that genre and that's what trucks is all about.

We've been hearing rumors about a high end fab shop that specializes in minis

and the same creepy name keeps coming up all the time. The little shop of horrors.

Yeah,

in a

little shop of Heart

Eric

Saliba runs one of the premier mini truck shops on the east coast cranking out totally custom frame. Dragon spark flying and sometimes just freaky trucks, all of them with an edge,

uh, mini trucks. You know, for me say

it's, it's a rebellious thing.

You know, go to a mini truck show. You're gonna find guys that have been up for six weeks worth of nights

getting something together. That's just crazy, you know, get trying to create something that's, that's truly different.

Uh, and get to the show, you know, you're gonna see them dragging around, you know, destroying what they spend all that hard time making and it's fun. It's fun to see it. It's fun to see the guys get into it,

but sometimes they can get into it a little too much. Now, this is over the top. Tell me about this thing.

Well, this is what happens when things get out of hand at your friendly neighborhood chop shop.

Uh This used to be 22 cabs, uh, two doors, some fenders. Uh, we got combine wheels, we've got a flathead motor, uh, tractor grill, the reel, all sorts of crazy parts, throw them in a big pot, mix it up and this is what you end up with

now, most work for customers isn't quite as radical, but in this shop it's still all about Dragon frame.

This is the frame for that expedition. Right.

Well, it's only stock from here up. You guys have fabricated everything from their back. How low will this lay out? Tell you what this one will go all the way down to the ground?

That's, that's it.

That is awesome.

But even with all the extreme metal coming out of the little shop, there's still a few standard approaches to building a mini truck. Most of these trucks, what everybody wants to do

and get it as low as possible, get the big rollers on it, you know, get, get it all tucked up in the fenders. That's, that's usually the key. So, uh,

if that's your goals, then you're gonna need a sea notch in the rear, at least, uh, probably a triangulated four

length to keep the rear end located and, uh,

and go from there,

it's the sea notch that gives you a stance like this.

So, what is it? A

sea notch is simply a box tubing or flat stock that's welded together to give a little more clearance in the frame right above the axle. So, in a nutshell, it's just a relief so the axle can travel exactly.

Now, those are the basics, but Eric also knows what's hit.

I tell you what's hot right now is the suicide doors swinging them backwards. So some people are doing the Lambeau but

us, here at the little shop, we prefer the suicide doors. You know, uh, suicide doors have been a part of hot rodding since the fifties. Man. It's a very cool thing.

He also knows. It's good to keep in mind all the work that it takes to build a mini truck.

Stick with what you can accomplish. Uh, it's, it's really

with the mini trucks. A lot of times I see people that are,

I want this and this and this and this and it's gonna be done next week

and it's, you know, if you really step back and look like what's being done,

it's, it's a 21st century street ride. You know, I mean, there's, there's a lot of work that goes into it that you don't necessarily see

the

nuts and bolts stuff that, that people don't know and that a lot of projects get built halfway

and never make it for that reason. But there's one thing you can count on no matter how ambitious the project. If it's from the little shop, of course, notably, will it get done? Right? But it's gonna be cool.

Well, this is serious.

We've got a couple of spots,

some skulls, a little something dangerous. Watch your finger on it,

Eric. That looks awesome. You guys do great work. Thanks for showing us your shop.

Yeah, man. Thanks for coming.

We got a parting gift for you. This is a little shop switch box, the logo machined in the back there.

That's how to get you started on your Nisan.

That's great, dude. Thank you. Good deal. All right. Hey, got a question. Do you charge by the spike on this one? Yeah, we were running a special that day.

That little shop was awesome, wasn't it?

Yeah.

And we got some serious inspiration now to start digging into this thing. Get it ready for the four L

bags. The whole works, but we're not just gonna throw a kid at this truck, are we? Oh, no,

we're gonna show you guys how to scratch, build your own drop system right after the break.

Yeah.

Coming up next, we're tearing apart our hard body

and

making room for our new excellent four lane.

Hey, welcome back to trucks.

Well, we're just getting ready to dig into our new project. Something that's never been done on trucks before this 97 hard body mini truck. And when we get through with it, the only way it could sit any lower

is if it's that under the road,

now, we gotta strip this thing down to pretty much the frame in the rear axle. But before you start hacking stuff up and tossing stuff on the pile, remember that the ECM of the truck needs all of these sensors to run properly. So if you have to relocate some things for clearance, make sure you plug them back in

eight.

We want this truck to sit so low that the frame literally drags on the ground and you just can't do it with leaf springs. So what most guys do is completely get rid of the factory system and put in a four length system that sits on air springs and gives us the ultimate in control over both the drop and the ride height.

We're keeping a straight axle at the rear.

This means

we got to see not the frame so that our axle has enough room to move for when the frame is on the ground at full drop. The last thing we wanna do is start hacking on the frame before we establish our axle center point. We want to keep the factory axle positioned so the wheels sit squarely in the wells just like the factory truck.

Now, here's where we had to make a decision. Our Nissan truck has a six lug bolt pattern and let's face it. There's just not as much wheel and tire selection for a six lug pattern.

So what we decided to do is swap in this rear axle which comes from a Toyota two wheel drive pickup that has the five bolt pattern that we want

and the wheel and tire selection that we want.

Now, that is what you call a suspension drive.

Now it's time to set a right height.

So we'll take our Toyota axle and set a level with the frame.

I'm right at four inches

No, I'm 4.5

right on. Right on.

First, we center the Toyota rear end in the frame.

Then by using old U bolts tack welded to the frame rail, we can lock the rear end in place at a ride height. This allows us to rotate the axle assembly and adjust the pinion angle.

Once the pinion angle is set to zero degrees, we'll weld the axle to the U bolt until our four link is completed

all in it. That's it.

All right. With our Nissan strip down our Toyota axle locked into place. Now, we can start building that four lane.

That's right, Kev.

So while you guys take a break, we're gonna go fire up that cold saw.

Mhm.

When we get back, we're building our four link from scratch and then later we're c knots in the frame so we can go really low.

Hey, welcome back to trucks and our frame dragon mini truck project. So why? A 97 Nissan King cab? Well, some of the coolest mini trucks we've seen are these old hard bodies and Nissan made this body style for 11 years. So everybody's going to know what it is,

but they stopped making them in 1998. So it's kind of a cool challenge sort of off the beaten path and we're up for it

besides, we got tons of room in the back for a kick and sound system.

Now,

you guys have seen us at a universal four link before. Remember project Old School.

But this time we're gonna build our own four

link

and we'll show you how

but like old school, this project requires good welding skills.

So

if you guys don't know how to weld, find a buddy that can because there's a lot of fabrication in this project.

A

four length system is usually found on a high performance vehicle. The main reason being is that you have better axle control under extreme driving conditions. Our Nissan like a lot of other trucks is designed with a Hodgkiss drive suspension system. Basically two leaf springs and a live axle technology literally borrowed from a horse and buggy. Don't get me wrong. It works just fine, but there's a lot better systems out there, especially for our truck.

With the four link, you can adjust your axle location, set your pinion angle and tune the degree of anti squat, which is exactly what it sounds like. The vehicle accelerates the weight transfers back and the back end of the vehicle squats down. But by choosing the point to which we call the instant center, which is where the two link bars meet. You can literally tune the vehicle suspension to the type of driving experience you want to have.

Now, all that's fine for a performance vehicle. But with this mini truck, we've got one single golden mine to lay the frame on the ground.

When you're designing your four link to eliminate the need for a track bar or pan art bar build in at least 40 degrees of triangulation into the upper links that keeps the

center of the frame.

Now, if you're wondering why we're using square tubing on the lower links, it's a simple answer. Square cube makes it really easy to mount the rear bags on the bars themselves instead of on the axle. This will allow us to at least double the travel of our air bags by taking advantage of leverage depending on where we place the bags on the link bar. You can make your own link bar ends by using round tubing and aftermarket leaf spring bushings. Ours are rubber, easy to find and cheap.

While the lower link is non adjustable, the uppers will be that way we can fine tune our opinion angle and keep our drive shaft vibration to a minimum

at ride height. The lower L bar needs to be as close to parallel to the road as possible.

Our lower bars are 36 inches long and by using longer bars, we can minimize the amount of arc in the suspension travel and that gives us greater range of motion without binding.

We needed to create a cross member to mount our upper link bars. And the front mounting brackets for the bed are a perfect location.

Using square tubing here will also stiff in the frame and strengthen the whole rear chassis.

Our upper bars are made an inch and a quarter thick wall dom tubing.

We'll drill and tap one end for a hind joint. That'll give us the adjust ability we need to fine tune our opinion angle and also eliminate suspension by it.

All right, I've already tagged in place the upper right hand link bar. Now, this is called a triangulated four link. And the cool thing about this is that we don't need a panhard bar with this system because the aggressive angle of the upper links stops side to side movement in the rear axle

with the U bolts gone. We can actually see our axle travel up and down.

Now, that works great. But to get this rig as low as we want to get it, we gotta do something different. And that means see nut in this frame.

I want to show you guys how to do that right after the break

up. Next. It's the art of the sea notch and some slight

fed modifications.

Hey, welcome back to trucks. Our Nissan hard buddy is getting lower by the minute and it's about to get even lower. We've completely ripped out the factory leaf spring suspension and added our own triangulated four link. Now, this is low, but it's still not low enough to get us to lay frame. So we're gonna see notch the rear frame. So we have even more room for the rear axle to travel.

And

really all we're doing is creating an arch for our axle to travel into. Now, we could bark something up out of flat stock, but I like to use this freeform tubing.

Not only is it faster for this sea notch, but you can also route your wires and plumbing through. It makes a nice neat job.

And we could just make a square notch for our axle relief. But if you add just a little bit of anger,

it does a couple of things,

not only

does it box itself in and we don't have an opening to deal with.

It also adds strength due to the opposing forces of the angle. Besides that just looks better be

the edges to allow better weld penetration.

This is especially important if you plan on smoothing the weld for a show quality finish that way you don't grind away all the weld strength,

the wheels and tires we want to put in this truck have an outside diameter of 26.5 inches. I wanna lay the frame on the road, which is represented by this piece of steel.

So I'll measure from the axle center point, half the diameter of the wheel which is 13 and a quarter inches. And that tells me that with those wheels and tires on my frame is gonna be just about five inches off the ground, not good, no sparks. So our axle has to come up

at least five inches in order to lay the frame and that means that this part of the frame has gotta go away.

But with our new C notch,

this is gonna give us

almost 11 inches, nearly twice as much as what we want.

But let's face it. Let's do this once and do it right. We've already got to cut the bed floor out to clearance this stuff. And this way, we've got lots of room if we want to switch to larger diameter wheels later on or other customized,

make sure you weld the sea notch to the frame before cutting the relief away. This locks the back of the frame in the correct location. Using cardboard as a template will make boxing plates out of three sixteens flat stock and weld them to the frame rail for added strength and a cleaner load.

You don't have to have a plasma cutter to hack up your frame. A Sawzall

or cut off wheel works just fine for a clean cut clamp a straight edge to your work to serve as a guide. Then just drag the plasma cutter tip along the edge

with the sea notch installed and the extra metal out of the way cap the open ends of the factory frame.

Since we've created a giant sea notch out back, we've got to cut out the bed floor for frames, axles and tire cleaning.

We can make a trailer for you.

Yeah.

Good idea.

All right. Give it a shot.

Ah, yeah,

that is low. It doesn't get any lower. Looks like you're going up hill all the time. Next time you see this truck, we're gonna take care of that lame stock front end.

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feeding. This is an oil less pleated gauze

filter that traps dirt particles as small as one micron.

The element is reusable and doesn't have to be oiled to trap dirt.

The heat shield has powder coated 16 gauge steel that protects the air filter from water splash and road debris. Fittings of brackets are tig welded and it complies with most state's emission standards.

We're installing ours on a 91 Jeep. But Fram claims that in a Ford lightning, the system picked up 21 horses and 37 ft pounds of torque and it's consistent with manufacturer's warranties. The Fram boost two performance intake system for truck application starts at about 220 bucks.

Thanks for watching trucks. See you next week.