Towing Test & Rolling Thunder Part 6

Today, we're doing some real world testing to see if we can improve the towing performance of a gas burning pickup. And we're gonna be setting a new ride hike for project rolling thunder. It's all today here on trucks.

Hey, guys, welcome to trucks.

Now, we've all got our trucks for different reasons, some for work, some for play and some just because of the plain old versatility of owning a pickup.

Now, if you're in the market for a brand new truck that you're gonna tow with day in and day out, well, you'll probably pony up for a one ton diesel truck, but if you're only gonna tow on occasion and you prefer the ride and comfort of a half ton truck, you probably go with something like this 2010 f 150 with the 5.4 L gas engine and let's face it. Most of the trucks out there are half ton gas powered vehicles. Now, you got your brand new truck and you got it home, you got it hooked to a trailer and you take it for a test spin,

but you might quickly realize you could use a little bit more power underneath your right foot and a little bit more insight into what's going on underneath the hood. Now, a great solution to those problems is to install an aftermarket programmer or tuner. That way you get to pump up your vehicle's performance as well as you get much better monitoring of communication with what's going on internally in your vehicle. Now, bully dog has been an innovator and a pioneer in this field since they began and have been constantly upgrading and updating their product line for the better part of the last decade, which brings us to what we're going to show you today and what bully dog is calling the ultimate performance

agent tuner. The triple dog gauge tuner is obviously a performance tuner, but it's a monitor gauge and diagnostic device. All in one unit,

there are three different power levels with gains of up to 34 horsepower. It's got a full color display with four different themes and multiple color choices. It's got a day, night driving mode, instant and average fuel economy monitoring and all the features of the driving coach that we showed you a while back

if you're going to be using your gas truck to tow and let's face it. Most of us do at some point or another. Well, the gauge sooner gives you the ability to monitor internal fluid temperatures like your oil temperature or transmission fluid temperature as well as if you got an F 150 like ours egts. Now, an EGT probe is nothing new in the diesel market, but this is the first time ever that an EGT

monitoring device is available for a gas burning truck in the F 150. Now, this one device is good for up to eight different vehicle manufacturers including some imports and I'll bet you can find one for a price point of just less than 400 bucks. So all of those things consider this is a pretty versatile device and pretty accessible too. So

let's get it on the truck, see what it does.

The Gau shooter monitors engine data through the PC M via the onboard diagnostic port or known as the OBD two port, which is found on all 96 and newer vehicles.

Now,

all the cables you need are included and the instructions walk you through the installation.

Now, the installation was easy enough, but now it's time to put it to the test.

And if you're wondering why we've got a 2010 Camaro ss loaded on our trailer, we'll tell you more about that later,

but like we talked about earlier, we want to do a real world test with our half ton pickup and a loaded trailer and see how it performs out on the highway in a passing situation with and without the Gt Tuer. Now I'm gonna be the control factor,

this experiment driving this 50 ft rig at a geriatric 45 miles an hour on the highway and we all know how annoying that is to get behind. He doesn't get any more real world than that.

And I'll be the guy stuck in the lane behind him and needing to make a pass really quickly with traffic building up in both lanes behind me.

So we'll see if the power we've added with the GT Turner helps us make that pass a little bit quicker.

We wanted this test to be as real as possible. So rather than do another

dyno Pole or a closed course test, we threw it out on the highway

settling in. Cruise on 45.

Go

on Kevin's go command. We started the clock and I flat footed the F 150 in stock condition.

We stopped the clock when the rear of the trailer cleared the front bumper of our control vehicle and to come up with our baseline, we're using a three run average

and go

by averaging the runs together. We can even out any inconsistencies due to a slight grade or head or tail wind.

The stock three run average gave us a time of 9.84 seconds with that out of the way we can download the performance tune.

Now, the tuner makes power, no question about that. But this is a pretty sophisticated device with lots of cool features.

But one of the most important ones and the most practical features are the vehicle safety alerts, which are especially important while towing. Because if you're pulling a long hill with a loaded down rig, like ours, an audible and visual alert could very well keep you from burning up an electronically controlled automatic transmission. And the cost of that, well, it can hurt.

Downloading the tune only took 10 or 15 minutes and we were ready for the start of the next test,

started it

back out on the highway. We repeated the test just like we did in the first round.

The only difference being the two, there's 45

and

go

on our first run with the tune.

We picked up almost a full second over our initial stock run with that done. We ran twice more

and go.

Yeah.

And this time we got a three run average of 9.08 seconds, which means we picked up over three quarters of a second, which may not sound like a whole lot, but at the average interstate speed of 65 miles an hour that works out to over 72 ft

plenty more than the truck and trailer we were trying to pass.

And that distance can mean the difference between a safe merge onto the interstate

or a white knuckle experience while you try to get your truck and trailer up to speed,

especially if you've got somebody getting bigger in your rearview mirror and closing at a high rate of speed

up next, we'll show you why we're hauling around that brand new Camaro

and later

we're lowering the center of gravity on project rolling thunder. Stay tuned.

Hey guys, welcome back to trucks where we've made our way up to Music City Raceway just north of Nashville. So we can do some more testing

but not for the truck.

Now, here's the reason we chose a brand new Camaro to load onto our trailer for our tow test because believe it or not the same exact bully dog GT tuner. We used to program our F 150 for better power and economy while towing can be used to put a performance race tune into this yellow SS. All we had to do was return the truck to the stock. We can install the GT tuner in this car.

Now, if you've been wondering what's in the back of the enclosed trailer all day long. Well, it's just brand new S RT eight Challenger and just like we can take the tune out of the truck and we're gonna put it in a Camaro. Well, when we're done playing with the Camaro, we can pull the tune and the tuner out, upload a tune into the challenger, play around with the new power that it's gonna make. And then at the end of the day, put it back to stock, put it back in the truck and head to the hills with the same device.

Now, this great looking and brand new car is on loan to us from its owner Frank France.

But while it is largely stock, he has done an exhaust upgrade to free up some sound

and free up a few horsepower

Music City's track was prepped and sticky and launching. The car was a balancing act between bog and the engine down and Sirius Wheel hop.

But once the engine was wound up, look out. Oh,

that felt pretty strong.

85 miles an hour,

8.4 seconds. 0 to 64.9.

That's not too shabby for a stock car.

With the initial run down the eight mile track out of the way, we ran the car two more times for repeatability and to get a three run average

and the car was pretty consistent coming up with an average of 8.4 seconds, which is pretty standard for these cars. So we knew we had a solid baseline to compare our upgrades against.

And yes, this is the same exact tuner that we used for the F 150. All we had to do was return the Ford to stock so we could upload the tune into the Camaro

morning.

And with the modified computer tune, the engine seemed to recover quicker from the off the line fog providing us with quicker times.

Our 0 to 60 time was down to 4.5 seconds and our eighth mile improved to 8.2 seconds,

but we didn't want to rely on just one run

at this time, our three run average netted us a time of 8.1 seconds,

which is really respectable. Especially considering that this tuner works in so many different vehicles.

And with the official testing out of the way, we loaded up our football player size videographer into the passenger seat

ready

B

two.

That way, Rob could get some cool in car shots of grabbing gears.

But to say, we were surprised with the results.

A

little bit of an understatement.

1.7

60 ft time.

You're big in

your help. The time

eight mile of 7.9.

That's hilarious.

We ran a 13 1 in the quarter.

What?

That's hilarious. There's already heavy car actually improved by

2/10 in the 60 ft time with more weight in here. 4.40 to 67.9 in the eight

a mile and hour. The only thing that suffered due to the weight penalty.

Thanks, ballast.

There you go.

Hey guys, welcome back to the shop. Well, we're back on project rolling thunder, making preparations to move on to stage two of this build. Now, it's going to be a pretty drastic transformation from both the stock Mazda B 2500 version and stage one of this project

with this swapped in engine clattering and making not so healthy noises. It was time to go

and Kevin and I have both been anxious to ditch the slush box automatic

in favor of a manual transmission.

Now, the engine we're going to be installing in place of the wounded mercury Marauder 4.6 is going to be a little bit heavier due to the blower and inner cooler and supporting hardware. So to counter that, we're going to be installing a fuel tank at the very back of the frame instead of the mid frame mounted stock

plastic tank. So we just sent some dimensions to the guys at Rick's Hot Rod shop and they crafted up this super slick stainless steel tank. Now, we're going to drop it right in between the frame rails and behind the rear axle and that will help us with the weight bias. But before we do that, we've got to figure out the rear suspension.

Now, we wanted to do a little bit better than just some lowering blocks of shackles and really enhance the handling capabilities of this project. And there's lots of aftermarket options out there. There's four links, there's watts links, there's all kinds of torque arm systems that are really well engineered, but we wanted to go independent rear suspension. Now, since we're completely redesigning the front suspension and doing a custom one off set up, we wanted to go with more of a sub frame system for the rear and we've had a killer option. This is an IRS from a Cobra Mustang Ford introduced these in the Cobras in 99 but this one is from an 04 with the beefed up 31 spline half shafts, limited slip differential and 373 gears. Now there's good and bad points about this IRS system. The good point is that it's designed to handle the power output of a supercharged engine application, which is precisely what we're going to be throwing at it bad points. Well, there's a wheel hop issue, you co

know this and it's due to the rubber isolators and the various design aspects of the IRS.

Now because of that, a lot of straight line guys ditch this entire system in exchange for a stick axle, which also makes this inexpensive and available. Not to mention there's aftermarket support to compensate for the factory shortcomings. So the bottom line is, this is an adjustable strong independent suspension system that is going to up the ante and really turn our little truck into a corner carver.

Now, another reason this stock fuel tank has got to go away is that it's going to try to occupy the same space is that IRS

Subra assembly, Kevin just showed you

and needless to say, the 7.5 inch rear axle has got to go as well.

And I'm kind of surprised that this thing held together under V8 power during the test drive.

But I guess the fact that the engine was a little bit wounded and these bike tires weren't exactly hooking up, helped the axle live.

Now we're stripping the front suspension down just for the sake of getting it to a bare frame. That way we can set the frame at ride height and work the front and rear suspensions separately.

Now, there aren't any off the shelf. Bolton kits whose primary focus is to get the truck to handle better.

They're mainly designed to sit the truck lower down for looks and aesthetics.

But I guess that's to be expected since nobody really takes a pickup truck to a road course. So we're going to be on our own for a completely custom front suspension that handles.

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Hey guys, welcome back to the shop.

Well, we've got the frame of Project Rolling Thunder just about completely stripped down in preparation for some pretty serious suspension modifications. But before we cut off the first bracket or even make the first weld, we wanted to point something out, check this out

with the front of the frame on jack stands on both sides. We've got a good two or three inches of flex underneath this left rear corner. So we're definitely gonna have to address the torsional rigidity issue

and all that movement is without any weight in the chassis which is only gonna amplify the problem now, to remedy it we've got a couple of things we're gonna do. We're gonna add some bracing and we're gonna weld some of these cross members that are currently just riveted in place like this one that's holding the front and rear frame sections together by way of the leaf spring hanger, which is gonna go away. So it'll all welded together and that will help stiffen things up. But the biggest thing we can do to increase the overall chassis stiffness is to install a well thought out roll cage. Now it's hard to tune a suspension or even calculate spring rates when the frame itself is acting like a spring.

But before we break out any tools, we want to drop the body down on the frame, select our ride height.

Well, check out the new mocked up stance of rolling thunder and it is amazing how much difference lowering a vehicle and throwing a set of wheels and tires on can do for the appearance. But as good as this thing looks, appearance is not our main goal. We want to make this truck handle. Now, the wheels and tires are something that we borrowed from a horsepower project out in the warehouse, but they're similar in style

and sizes to what we're eventually gonna be putting on this truck, check this out as well. See the negative camera we've dialed into the mock up of the wheels and where they sit, it's gonna give us the ability to really make this truck handle having adjust ability on all four corners. Not to mention the fact that some negative camera on the back end of a pickup truck. Well, it's not something you see every day

and take a closer look at the front wheel. Well, we've marked the fender and dropped a plumb line where the original front axle center line was and we've shifted the wheel forward an inch and a half because that's where the new front axle center line is gonna be lengthening the wheel base. And that's gonna have the same effect as moving the heavy engine and transmission rearward in the chassis helping with that weight distribution. We've been stressing so much and only because it's gonna make this truck handle the twisties and with this giant wheel, well, if we hadn't have told you,

well, you probably wouldn't have noticed.

Now, one of the things that's gonna help us move some of the weight to the back of our pickup truck is by relocating the battery.

Rusty's off road battery box is laser cut from eight inch stainless steel, meaning you never have to worry about corrosion issues making it great. Even for marine applications, it's got eight mounting holes on the bottom and only two bolts, hold the lid in place, making it really convenient

and it'll hold any optima battery out there. And for a show car, look, all you gotta do is polish the stainless.

Now, if you got any questions about anything you've seen on today's show. Check out the website guys. Thanks for watching trucks. See you next week.