Gorilla: Part 4

No time for snoozing. There's a ton of fabrication ahead on the ultimate tow monster suburban gorilla. Plus one lucky co-host gets suited up for the chance of a lifetime.

That's all today on Xtreme 4x4.

Welcome to Xtreme 4x4. Another day working on a suburban Gua

project. Our ultimate to R

for

this truck is going to be just as happy on the trail as it will be told in our trail. Right?

And we started with an 87 Chevy suburban.

Then we got a hold of four by four bodies for one of their urban gorilla body kit. Granted, we spent 10 grand on that thing, but we're going to be turning a lot we had with that and we will be spending 10 grand fixing up the old rusty suburban.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Hey, that trucks cool. It looks,

it's got lots of power and I wish I had one to drive, but I'm not building one. But wait, wait, just wait a second. Remember the donor vehicle for this truck is an 87 suburban. It's a solid axle GM truck. There's thousands of these things out there on the road and the modifications we make to this frame apply to all those trucks like these two inch rough country leaf springs installed in the back last time.

And now this week on the front axle,

we're going to do a coil spring conversion. But the first thing we're going to do today is an upgrade to any frame.

And that is boxing it in

the whole point of boxing in a frame is to strengthen it by putting a plate on the inner side of the sea channel

that's going to stop the frame from flexing up and down and twisting on itself. I've already stripped out all the brake lines and all the fuel lines. But if you're not careful enough, you might strip something out that's going to make the frame a lot weaker.

The part that Jesse's talking about is a cross number like this one right here. Now, we already pulled one out of the front of this frame to put the

max in place. And this one right here is in the way of our fuel tank. This 21 gallon polyethylene tank came with our urban grill body kit and we want to lower it between the frame rails right here. We could put it down in here, but it's gonna get in the way of our winch that we're gonna put behind this back bumper. So this cross member has to go, but this adds a lot of strength to the frame just like rungs on a ladder, this holds the frame together. If you take too many of them out, the frame's gonna fall down. So if we cut this out, we got to replace it with something else

with a temporary brace lobbed into the frame,

the factory cross member is removed.

Holy cannoli that was hard. Boxing plates are welded to the frame

an inch and five eights hole is drilled through both the boxing plate and the original frames

and a new cross member is welded in place.

Another trick you're going to want to remember when you're boxing in your frame is when you cut your boxing pieces, you want to cut them a fraction of an inch shorter than the frame itself. That way the world will fall in the corner and weld on both pieces of metal. Whereas if you had a flush, you're only going to have your we

on one piece of metal and it will be weak and it will break easily.

We need to replace the front engine cross member that we ripped out of here. When we were mocking our

Duramax engine into place. We're gonna build a new one very similar to the one we built on the back. The only difference is, is this one will have a bend in it to go around the oil pan

with the engine cross member made, we can go ahead and start making our transmission and transfer case cross members. But first we gotta get our engine in there and start making its mounts.

And since this whole set up here is huge, it's actually bigger than any drive train I've ever seen before. We're gonna pull this transfer case off. So we don't exceed the limit of our crane. And just to give you an idea of exactly how big this thing is. Let's throw a tape on it here and we'll give you an idea

right off. But the

Boer,

this thing is about 7.5 ft long.

Uh

It's a big drive trade

and with the whole deal in position, we can assemble our frames, side motor mounts,

pack everything together

and measure and build our tranny support

with the engine mounts built and tacked into place. And the Hill Killer 1000 supported by that transmission cross member, we can slip our transfer case back in place.

Thanks said

no, obviously, this thing is super duper heavy. That's why offer design suggests we use a secondary cross member to support the weight of this double case

because otherwise it's just going to be hanging off the land of the transmission and that's going to have a tendency to break.

And I know there's a big space in here, but we had to put it all together to figure out what size that space was. So we had the right size of space

now in your building ct cross members like we are here. It's a good idea to match up your mouth.

If you had a rubber engine mount like this rubber mount here and then poly mounts in the back of the transmission, like we've done, they can actually work against each other. So when you rev that engine rocks up and the back of the transmission is held tight, you can actually crack the case right in half. That's why we're going to be using pros

new mount kits. These poly mounts are different than your typical spring. I bushing. The compound is a lot softer so it's going to absorb that engine vibration. Plus they come in a range of sizes.

Try this on for size. Ian Johnson monster truck driver,

see how he does with 2000 horsepower under his seat when Xtreme 4x4 continues.

Welcome back to extreme. That's Marlowe, our cleaning lady. Say

hi.

Hi, Marlo. Hi

there. You know, Jessey, I like the trails. I like the rocks, but really in my heart of hearts, I'm a man of speed. I know I've driven with you before. That's funny.

But you know, I got to go to the Indianapolis four wheel Jamboree and fulfill a lifelong dream

for 24 years. The Indianapolis four wheel Jamboree has been the race to win. We're taking it easy.

And

I

if you're a tough truck guy, if you're a monster truck guy showing shine,

you want to grab the brass ring. You want to be included in all the rest of the legends of the past 24 years. I mean, it is one action pack three days of four by four P

for the fans at Indy. They want their fun done big when it comes to motor sports and off road vehicles, nothing's bigger and nothing's better than monster trucks.

So we came to the Indianapolis four wheel Jamboree to check out one of the biggest and baddest. There is the Ramin

and we're going to talk to the Driver Mark Hall with four straight titles. Movie star, good looks and a rig that makes a fan swoon Mark Hall is taking monster truck racing to the next level.

Kind of,

I

think, uh, you know, for a lot of years, maybe we were,

I hate to say this, but maybe we were kind of like the professional wrestling of motor sport, but I think now we're kind of coming around and we're starting to look more like a legitimate motor sport. And, you know, the racing is, is, is just awesome. No, no doubt about it. It's more than awesome racing that's turning donors into good

at it.

You know, we can do a lot with these vehicles and I think that's kind of the appeal to him too. Kids like them because they think they're nothing more than a big toy,

you know, gear heads like you and me. We kind of want to see how they work. His first truck in 1986 had seven inches of travel and 500 horsepower.

The Ramin

has 30 inches of travel and pushes 2000 horses

and when you're making that kind of horsepower in a Dodge, you can only have one kind of,

there isn't any other kind. You got to have a Hammy.

You know, this is a 565 tube against Dodge

hemi. It's a supercharged fuel injection. They run real strong for you. Now, the coolest part of the drive train, the whole drive train to me is the transfer case because it's really different. Remember, you have a truck, it's a quick change, rear end, it's a 16 inch drop. You take this back cover off and it almost looks like it's very similar to like a stock car. A quick change, rear end, there's gears there, we can change that gear ratio depending on how long the course is and what we're doing, one thing people have seen a lot in rock crawling, but really, it's always been on a monster truck is the rear steering, right. Yeah, the rear steering is kind of, you know, that's another thing that kind of makes a monster truck, a monster truck. We have a rocker switch mounted on the left hand side of the seat. And so if we're going to make a left hand turn, we'll hit that switch to the left, we'll steer to the left and the rear wheels will actually go to the right. So it'll make us swing around you know, a few years ago we came up with turn to center, which that helps a lot. It takes a lot of that guess, work out. So, when you let that, uh, switch off in the cab, the switch is under this cover here, we'll turn it back on and run the wheel straight to have a chance to drive this quarter million dollar beast.

I knew I had to put on that Johnson charm. You know, I've driven lots of trucks. I've built lots of trucks. What are the chances of, uh,

getting some seat timing in? You want to do that? We may well do that. Let's, let's give it a try. Thanks. I appreciate

that.

You're in good hands. This truck will take very good care of you. All right. I promise to bring it back in one piece. Well, hey, you know, if you break it, I've seen your show. You guys do pretty good work my whole life. I've had one dream.

You know, we'll just kind of take it easy, take it slow. Kind of gonna get the feel for it start out with now, shifting this thing, as you said, it's a, yeah, we got push buttons, push the first, the first button down, you go first to second and the second button goes second to third. That part's pretty simple. It's just when you're in a race condition, all that stuff happens pretty fast. I don't know if we'll go quite that

fast

today.

Tell you how fast we went.

What I do know it was a blast.

Ok. So we've had some fun in open field. Like, am I ready to hit some cars down and,

you know, I gotta race this thing the rest of the weekend and the way he was doing it, you might take my job. You're done with that. All right.

Well, I appreciate it. And you know what I gotta say it,

the Ramin,

it's the biggest, the baddest and I'll put my name on it and say

it's just

a, it's unbelievable.

We were like right there there. So that's my shadow, I think crashed the truck. That was me. That was a blast. It was a great weekend. I was like,

we did, we had a good time. You should try it sometime, maybe next day we'll hook you up.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4 in our suburban Gorilla build or sug for short

and it's a frame box for strength. We can turn our attention to the front suspension.

Now, as you guys know, the donor truck for this vehicle is an 87 suburban and K series trucks have these solid axle leaf sprung front axles and although they're great for strength, the ride on the road is not that good.

So we decided to convert this truck to a coil spring front axle using a pan hard and a four,

we're going to be using these five inch lift springs that you would find for a Dodge truck, a set of 5100 series shocks per side

and a set of control arms all from rough country suspensions.

When the big three automakers scrambled to build better riding four wheel drive trucks. Most OEM started building independent front suspension systems. Dodge, stuck to their guns and refined the coil spring, solid axle pickup.

Since Dodge has some pretty good time invested in designing their front suspension.

We're going to borrow some measurements as well as some parts from the junkyard.

Yeah,

we're going to be building the system from scratch. We're going to be building one side at a time. That way the passenger side leaf spring will be able to keep the

ale in place while we build our spring buckets and our le mos

on this side

scavenging a bucket like this from a wrecking yard is a great idea because not only does it have the upper and lower link mount in place, it also has an alignment eccentric and a spot for a sway bar that we can add later. Now, I know that everything we build here is going to be pretty much custom applied to this truck, but you can take ideas like this and use them on your own rig

using identical holes in both right and left frame rail, we punched in some larger holes slid our new cross member into place.

This way we know it'll be square

using the engine cross member and the one we just installed will bend a hook to act as the new upper coil mount.

These are not the axles that will be used on the final truck. So for now, we'll just tack the lower mountain plates

to get the final placement for this upper bucket, took a little bit of work. And here's how we came to that final number.

We measured the total height of this spring

and then measured up off the bottom spring bucket to get a baseline.

Now, we expect the spring to compress two inches under the load of the drive train

and we need two inch left on the front axle, match the rear. So we took this bucket and moved it down a total of four inches. Now that the spring buckets are taking shape, we can go ahead and start locating the mounts for a trailing arms by using the measurements that we got off of that dodge stock truck.

The nice thing about rough country is that we can be using these arms for a lift anywhere between 2 to 8 inches of

when custom building any kind of mount for a suspension component. It is a good idea to box it in for strength as well as add gussets from the mount to the frame

over building a mount. Now with a little extra material will lessen the chance of it breaking later

with everything held in place with some good strong T

welds, we can turn our attention to the passenger side of the truck and then we can lower it down on its wheels. And if the ride height looks good, we can finish welding all the brackets and the buckets.

Now that the frame is pretty much taken care of, we can continue on some modification so we can fit this monster drive train in our truck. Plus we want to get the body prep before we send it out to get coated inside and out.

The

one that inspired the gorilla only had four seats and we needed more room than that. So we're going to be using many built new Outland leather seats with adjustable lumbar support,

they fully recline

and the center council has plenty of storage compartments

and cup holders

that comes with these three pieces.

But we're going

with a twist.

We're going to be installing two of those sets. We have two bucket seats in the front

and then we put both of the jump seats in the back along with the other two bucket seats.

So in total, we're going to have six seats when we need.

This is a custom installation for this truck,

but you guys riding around on Ben Shes, don't worry,

Smitty Bill has direct fit seat racks. So almost any truck can be treated to their own set of leather buckets

with our seats in place. We can start to plan out our steering. Now, we could have used the factory column from our donor truck, but the whole thing was pretty long and it could have interfered with our turbos. So we chose this full polish shorty column from I did it. It's a tilt unit with built in key and cruise control. Now we topped it with a grant, silver tone carbon fiber look wheel. And then to connect this to the box, we use some Borgeson full roller U joints and some double D shafting

have those seats. Jess comfy. Mhm.

Well,

as you can see, we got tons of work done today and, well, one of us is a little tired, but that's all right.

But you know what? We got a couple more things to finish before we send this body out. We obviously got to build this transmission tunnel in here and mount the steering column in its final spot. But

in the end, this thing, it just looks awesome. What do you think, Jess?

No,

it

looks great.

Ok. Have a good nap. I'll take care of this.