Ranger Resurrection

It doesn't get more extreme than this. We'll go behind the scenes of one of off roads, top race teams and in the shop, our team puts their ultimate truck on all fours today. Axel and suspension for project Ranger Resurrection.

Welcome to Xtreme 4x4. As you can see, we're back working on one of our most popular projects to date where we've been taking this wreck Ford truck. We pull out of a junkyard

and putting it together into something kind of like a Swiss army knife of trucks. What he means is, is that we can take this truck just about anywhere we want to go.

We can go to the desert, we can go to a tough truck track, we can go rock crawling. This is the ultimate thing

when we started this project. The truck was a ride off and after stripping it to a bare frame, we tossed it into our frame bench to begin the process. We built a roll cage inside the cab to protect us a little better than the previous owner assembled a killer drive train that consists of a four performance solutions 347 and Envy 4500 transmission and an MP 271 transfer case.

We then looked in a set of Mastercraft suspension seats

and belts followed by

I's favorite window

that

now the last time you were with us, we just had these fiberglass panels mocked the place. But as you can see, we've completely finished all the tube structure in the back half of this truck. And now these pieces we got from Perry's fab and fiber

mounted in place, put in the front, we had to change everything.

Thankfully that didn't change any of the measurements we took for our links in our axles because just the other day, dyno

Check sent us a really big box. Now, all the tube structures are on the front of this truck is new, it wasn't on there last time we looked at it and we also moved the engine further back in the chassis, but it's still temporarily held in place until we weigh this thing which we're going to do today.

Now, this tube structure is not only going to protect our front fiberglass front end, it's also going to give us a mounting point for off road lights. Plus we're going to be able to skid plate this thing all the way back underneath that oil pan for protection.

The only thing that's going to change is when we pull that motor, originally, we plan to drop it through the bottom. Now it's got to come to the top.

Dyno

track has been building Dana 60 axles for off road vehicles since 1988.

And they build more than almost anybody.

I put a hole in the wall.

It's a good thing. We're moving.

This type of axle building experience allows them to build an axle for virtually any type of vehicle engine output, gearing suspension or driving style.

These are 100% brand new axles and dyno

Track manufactures the majority of the components themselves.

These two Pro Rock sixties come with a one year written unlimited mileage guarantee. Perfect for our truck.

The really cool thing about this Pro Rock 60 is inside this custom high opinion center section. You'll find a nine and three quarter inch ring gear, which is typical of all Dana sixties, but normally you're going to sacrifice ground clearance underneath the housing, but this housing has as much ground clearance as a standard Dana 44 axle and the Dana 44 only has an 8.5 inch ring.

So again, the benefits of that super big, super strong large ring gear without having to give up any ground clearance for this truck. The no

cast alloy housing is built with internal and external webbing

to provide more rigidity than a regular day 60. This is critical to keep your gears and mesh under extreme loads. It's also got a dual some high volume oil system that's going to keep oil flowing through this whole part even under high opinion.

Now we also had dyno track install these upper axle trusses that not only add even more strength to the center section, but it's going to give us a spot to mount our upper link points, front and rear. Now, all we have to do now is sling some tires on these and throw them under the truck

good

with the truck up on the hoist. We're able to set our ride height by moving it up and down, but we moved it out here. So we have a lot more room to work and make it a lot easier to build our suspension.

But that left us with a problem that you guys would face at home all the time. And that is our tallest jack stand will not hold this frame rail at the right height that we wanted. So we've come up with a solution

earlier, we built two vehicle stands to hold up the truck. This way of supporting a vehicle is very common when back half

a truck that is removing your rear frame rails and replacing them with a tube structure.

It should be mentioned though that this is not the safest method to work on your truck. You should avoid getting underneath of it at all costs when it's only being held up by these stands.

That's good.

Ok, let's go up like real slow like,

ok, war there.

All right. Let's take a look at this thing.

It's now welded to the stand. So it's not gonna fall down and hurt anybody.

But more importantly, you just gotta look at that stance. It's up in the front, down the back.

It just looks mean, man.

All we need now is

suspension

which leaves us for our next order of business. The last time we worked on the ranger, we took our measurements for the rear suspension.

The next measurement is the location of the front transfer case output and whether it is offset to the driver or passenger side, followed by measuring wheel mounting surface to wheel mounting surface,

the distance from the ground to the center of the wheel hub, the distance from the transfer case output shaft to the rear of the axle center line and lastly measure the distance. The transfer case output is from the ground. And by using some simple formulas, we were able to determine the size of all of our leaks

before we could build our trailing arms. We had to construct

to ensure that not only do we have matching trailing arms on both sides of the truck, but because we're using half inch thick steel requires a lot of heat to be welded. So this J is also going to help eliminate deflection.

Coming up, Ian and Jessi get behind the wheel of a core race track while pro driver Johnny Greaves continues his chase for another championship when Xtreme 4x4 continues.

Welcome back to extreme with the rear trailing arms mounted, we can go ahead and figure our shock locations and mountains.

Now, the rear suspension and shock set up on this truck is specifically designed to give us lots of wheel travel and also lots of control and there's no other truck out there that exemplifies that. Like a trophy truck. Talk about a thrill of a lifetime.

We had the chance to enter the cockpit and take a few laps in a real trophy truck. All thanks to co driver and owner Greg Adler.

Yeah, he let Jessi and I take a few supervised laps in his pro comp race truck, which just so happens to be Robbie Gordon's old trophy truck. And afterwards, let me tell you,

I think both of us have a greater respect for how much skill it takes to drive one of these 600 horsepower beast.

Yeah,

it was worth it now.

Great.

I was

like a little school girl and that the corn

on shoot out in San Diego. The only thing hotter than the trucks racing

are the Habanero

peppers at the

stand

less than a mile from the Mexican border. The core series came to California for the first annual Nissan shootout. I want to kick some butt and that's it. That's the bottom line.

Do

what it takes over two races and the winners bottom line got a $30,000 bump

for that one. First. We've come a long ways and we all want to leave with that pot of goal en route to his second title. Johnny Greens finished out the core Pro four series with seven straight wins. Definitely got a target on our back now. You know, there's no tension. You just walk out, jump in and strap in and roll

to roll in. The premier class is bigger than one man alone can handle without the right team. You're screwed. You know, you gotta have a crew that works together. Everyone's got to know their job and do their job right. And not step on anybody's toes. His brother, Kurt is the crew chief and handles the rear gearing. Brad Marty is Mr transmission

and

Jim Norton takes care of the front end together. They've got Johnny's back. I have the smallest crew out here because one of my guys know their job and they do it and I jump in and I help out whenever I have. Dude definitely is 100% team. I mean, we work real real well together. I mean, we're by far the smallest team out here, but we, we really put everything we have into the truck

for the fans. It's all about race day for the team. It's about getting the truck ready to take down the world's best. It is a full time job. Normally in between like we have like a two weeks, it takes all two weeks to get the truck taken apart ready, checked and put back together for the next race. It's always nerve wracking it really is.

The hours are long. The stress is formidable but to stay gold, they do it for. Johnny. John gives 100% and we try to give 110 just whatever it takes to really get him out there and give him the best possible.

It's truly an honor to work on his team

in race. One of the shootout. Johnny's drive for the 30 grand looked doubtful when he was knocked off line, forced to work through the pack. You won't hear Johnny G crying like they say in Motocross, it's bar to bar. You know, we're, we're, we're at each other all the time. It's a contact sport. It's intense to get to the front meant pushing his Toyota to the limit.

And that's what it was built to handle.

And what you're looking at here is the championship Toyota Pro four. We design it for what we want to do. There's no rules. This is one bad mobile right here while 18 inches of travel in the front and 20 in the rear is bad.

It's the engine that makes number 22 unique. Ours is only

330 cubic inch.

Next smallest motor out there is 400

rules dictate that a smaller engine means they can run a lighter truck

and with a five speed manual transmission, Johnny uses that control to his advantage with a smaller engine. It's nice to have five gears and pick the one he want

the bigger, bigger engines have more torque. They can pull away in pretty much any gear with the automatic.

John gets a choice now, he can pick a gear to pull up the corner.

Whatever it is work that grieves past Carl R

as

in race one for the

impressive every time I watch him I get

in race two. It was red

versus Grieves. The rematch this time 22 drew short. He landed on all fours but the truck gave out a half a lap later. Runners

won 30 G as Greaves could only watch, we were close. You know,

we were inches away. Another race may be over but for the crew, their job is never done

to see how well the engine looks after the race,

even if the truck doesn't look good

next before the Ranger gets shocks, you gotta do the math, calculating wheel rate, spring rate motion ratio and more. Keep it tuned to extreme.

Welcome back to extreme right in the middle of building our suspension for a project Ranger resurrection

and that we shocks are almost ready to go in,

but we haven't calculated the spring rate for this truck yet

and we're going to show you how to do that later. So for now, we're going to install some mock up shops.

We have the specs for our shocks from Bill Stein and we know that the installed height is going to be 33 inches. So by using one inch tubing, we could build mock up shocks

and once the tabs are tacked in the truck is ready to sit on its wheels.

Now, the front suspension on this truck is going to be a typical

system.

We'll put a poly bushing back on the frame side and a hem

joint here at the axle and that will limit the articulation,

but we don't have a lot of clearance between the housing and the oil pan. Now, the pan, hard bar will run down from the frame side down to the axle right about here. We'll obviously have to move some of these tubes

on the uppers. We will thread a left hand thread on one end and the right hand thread on the other to allow for pinion angle adjustment.

I'm ch

with their mock up shocks in place for one step closer to determining our spring and our shock selection. Now, all vehicles have springs and what they do is they hold up the weight of the vehicle and they also absorb the bumps on and off road. Now, the weight of the spring is determined by its spring rate.

Is that what I meant? That's not what I mean. Yeah, but I think you're supposed to be over here. Oh, before we can calculate spring weight for this truck, we need to know one very important thing and that's the weight of the truck at each wheel for that. We're going to need a set of scales. Now we got this quick way scale from Intercom

because here at extreme, we tend to do four corner weights quite often.

This system comes the four built aluminum pads that are certified to be within 1% of each other

and the entire thing is portable. So if you have a friend that needs to weigh their truck, you can easily share. Now, the first step in calculating actual spring rate is to find the wheel rate of this particular wheel. Now to do that, we need to know what the sprung weight of the vehicle is or the weight that's held up

little springs,

that's easy to do on a solid axle vehicle. We're going to subtract the weight of the axle, the wheels, the tires and half of the control arm from our back half total on our scale. Then we're gonna take that information and plug it into a formula that looks like this

wheel rate equals sprung weight

divided by

0.4 multiplied by the wheel travel.

The next item we need to solve for is motion ratio, which is the comparison between your front pivot point and your shock mount and your front pivot point

and your rear mount

divide the first measurement by the second measurement and square. This is your motion ratio.

If you mount your coil overs at an angle like we have here, you have to use an angle correction formula because spring rate changes when you take them off vertical. So to do that, you simply cosign that angle. And then once you have numbers for all these little

like WRMR AC F, all you got to do is plug them into a final formula. To figure out your spring rate,

we rate divided by motion ratio times angle correction factor equals our spring rate.

And now that we have this information, we can call our spring and shock supplier and get the right parts for this truck. And then after the break, we're going to talk about a question that we get asked a lot on the power block, emails, bolts

and not,

but mostly bolts.

Welcome back to extreme. You can see we put the ranger aside for now until we get our shocks here, we can go ahead and bolt them place and speaking of bolts. Wow, what a topic you start talking about bolts around any gear head and you're going to get 1000 different opinions and a whole lot of misinformation. So we thought we'd share some stuff with you today about bolts. A bolt is simply a fastener with a head, a shank and a threaded area for a nut.

There are many different bolts for a ton of different applications and these are some of the most popular

A UN C bolt is a coarse thread bolt and a UN F is a fine thread bolt when it comes to metric bolts. The most commonly used sizes are 1.251 0.5 and 1.75. And that leads us to our first argument which is better a fine thread bolt or a coarse thread bolt. Now, although the fine thread bolt technically is capable of greater clamping forces because of more threat engagement. The fine thread bolt is prone to thread damage and stripping during trail repairs. So of course, it is,

the next decision to make is going to be the grade or the strength of the B

which is identified by the markings on the head.

A grade two B

has no markings on the head is super weak and it has no business. And off road

A grade five B

has three markings on the head

and is good for things like accessories and body panels. Now grade eight ball is super strong, has six markings on the head and we recommend that for everything.

Now, the nuts are graded as well. So it's a good idea to match the two. But more importantly, the type of lock nut use, you can use a nylon lock nut, but the problem is under high heat areas, the nylon will actually boil out. So a mechanical lock nut is better. It actually locks itself to the threads.

Now, this is just the beginning of nuts and bolts and fasteners. But if you want to learn more, you should pick up Carol Smith's book. This thing is full of lots of information and if you build

something, you got to own this and if you go to our website after the show, you'll find a link to the Power Block bookstore where you can find that book, purchase it amongst many other books. So that's it for today. That's it for Ranger Resurrection. The next time you see this truck, we'll have it back in here. We're gonna plummet wire it, maybe even fire it put in some shocks, steering all the good stuff. Hopefully we can make it go.

The list is long, but it will be fun.

Goodbye.