Ranger Resurrection Part VIII

The heavy labor is done. Now it's time to bolt on the fun stuff today, Ranger Resurrection gets buttoned up and trailer out for the ultimate payoff. Plus, see how off road legend Ivan Stewart became the Iron Man of Baha.

That and more today on Xtreme 4x4.

Hey, everybody, welcome to Xtreme 4x4. This is it what you and both of us have been waiting for the final installment of Ranger Resurrection by the end of the day, this is going on the trails and the last time we worked on this truck, we went ahead and painted our complete custom tube frame as well as all the fiberglass

and saw the dash and a complete set of gauges. So we put the fuel cell and we got to hear

thing. We are the first thing we're gonna take care of today are some off road lights.

Now, for the ranger, we chose the Baha

Design Soul Tech light bar for the roof. It comes with two spotlights and two floodlights. And the best thing is everything is premounted and prewired. So adding a light bar like this to the roof of your truck is as easy as adding tabs for the front mounts as well as for these rear stabilizers.

We have already installed the entire wiring harness into the truck

and now we can install our H I DS on the roof as well as the front bumper. Now, a high intensity discharge light uses a low wattage bulb to produce extremely bright lights that are mainly used in off road racing.

You build a truck as c

as the ranger. You have a lot of options. When it comes to steering,

you can install a steering box like this scout box on your frame rails and have mechanical linkage.

But the nor on trail trucks has become a full hydraulic system. And when we mentioned this project to PSC, they had suggested their full hydraulic double ended ram system.

The system begins with a high pressure pump assembly that mounts to the engine in the stock location.

The reservoir is mounted to the truck making sure it is the highest point in the system.

The steering is controlled by an orbital valve that is attached to the steering wheel.

Hydraulic fluid is drawn from the reservoir to the pump where it is pressurized and sent to the orbital valve.

The orbital valve controls the direction of the steering and pressurizes the steering ramp to turn the tires

with the cylinder mounted to the brackets. I can pack it to the center of the axle.

The tie rods are going to be made from inch and a half half inch wall tubing

one in tap for the Q A one rod in the opposite end, they will build a double sheer crevice using the drill press and

a

now that's fabrication.

Everything on this truck from the engine all the way down to the axles was built to handle a lot of abuse and also handle a lot of speed. And the one thing as you guys know about speed is eventually you got to slow down.

And when it comes to the brakes on this truck, dyno track really did their homework. And at the end of each wheel is a modified three quarter ton Ford brake rotor and caliper assembly. Now, the nice thing about this is it's a two piston floating caliper. So it's got lots of clamping forces can really drag down these big tires when you got to spin it as well as handle the power from that motor

and to get the fluid from the master cylinder down to the wheel, all we're gonna use is some flex lines like these ones we got from crown.

We run one from the caliper down to the axle tube itself. Another flex line up onto the lower link tubing and then a hard line up the link that way everything should be out of harm's way,

be no problems at all

while I am at it, I will run the airline for our A RBS front and rear as well.

Once the flex lines are attached. I'll make custom hard lines to connect them.

Our NBG 4500 uses a stock GM hydraulic slave cylinder inside the Bell house.

All right, the hydraulic system is installed and it looks pretty awesome. All I have to do is put in the hydraulic hoses that came with the psck

up to the orbital valve and our steering is done.

That means we're this close to taking it out on the trail. So stick around because I promise it will be worth it.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4. We're right in the middle of our final day on the Ranger Resurrection. Now, as you guys remember when we started to build this truck, the whole plan was to always have like a Swiss army knife of vehicles, something that could handle any terrain that we could throw out of. And the cool thing is a lot of the tips and tricks we've used to bring this thing back from the dead are also being used by guys who are building purpose built vehicles to compete in the Extreme Rock Racing Association. Well, in the world of off road racing, there's one man that you could definitely say was built for Baja.

It didn't matter if it was the desert of Baha or a 60,000 seat stadium

in a career that spanned almost three decades.

I,

the Iron Man Stewart's resume has earned him a spot in off road racing.

Ant theon of greatness. I feel so fortunate just to be able to have done what I've done in my 30 years of racing. Despite growing up in the heart of the Southern California racing.

I

road to glory got an unusually late start.

I didn't start racing until I was 27.

You know, I got married very early and we had the, we had kids, bought a house and got in debt just like a lot of American families. The opportunity didn't come around until I was, until I was 27. Life changed after seeing the Baha

1000 in person, if I had to find a way to do that, that was back in the

late sixties, early seventies kind of got me hooked on off of racing

in the cockpit. Racing. Always came naturally in the early days. I think that for off road desert racing anyway, I had a feeling for the race car

or having a understanding of what was abusing the race car. And that's really kind of hard to, uh,

you know, to teach people what it feels like when you're, when you're hurting the race car, when it's

giving you information through the steering wheel and the suspension or through the engine or

tells you a lot of time when you're hurting. And I had an understanding of that for some reason, in the mid seventies, when

Val

offered $500 to race Baja

solo,

an off road legend was born.

So you had to sign up solo drive the whole entire race by yourself and win. So I, I did that three times before anybody else out of the world.

And that became attractive to a lot of the sponsors that I was able to attract back in the mid seventies. And that's attractive right now,

that sponsors still use. The fact that Ivan Iron Man Stewart chose his products to test race cars on after retiring seven years ago,

Ivan wasn't ready for a life spent on a golf course. Instead, he started his own race series. My Baha Pro truck series is, is basically the NASCAR formula for off road racing.

It's just like NASCAR.

It's a spec truck and created a class. It's a real drivers class. I probably got more from off road racing than anybody else. This is a way for me to give something back to it.

Located 20 miles east of San Diego. This nondescript building holds more than just staplers and post it notes. Welcome to my Baha

Pro truck shop here in Southern California.

It's about a 6000 square foot building.

I come here to have my fun. Come on, I'll show you around.

Well, this is one of our Baha

Pro trucks that we're just putting together.

We'll start building this one. Actually, I think this is gonna be built as a Ford my off time. I enjoy working on, uh, classic cars or old cars and, and this happens to be 1967 Rambler that I'm quite fond of who collects ramblers other than

Ivan Stewart. Right.

Vintage rides, video games and tons of racing history is pretty cool. But our favorite part of the shop has to be Iron Man's race cars. To, this is one of about five or six different stadium trucks that I drove for Toyota and Cal Wells and the Mickey Thompson Series. And this was a little single seat fun co that I drove, we won the Baja 500

in a

two or three

Baja five hundreds in these cars. And then the one on top is the original

car that I started racing in, uh, with Bill Rinko, a high school buddy

back in the early, early seventies. To be honest, I do miss it. I do miss miss doing the Baha

races

because there's such a, uh rewarding feeling, being able to take a, a race truck or a race car from point A

and get it 500 miles down the road, let alone be in the competition. You know, it's rewarding. I mean, there's nothing like the memories that you get from off road racing.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4. We are this close to hitting the trail with Ranger Resurrection.

We've already gone ahead and installed the full hydraulic steering system hooked up the lines for the brakes as well as the A RB air lockers. And now the coolant tubes are running back to that rear mounted radiator. We can concentrate on ditching the mock up shocks for the real deal and everybody knows shocks are shocks,

hopefully, you know, that isn't true.

But when it comes to offer Coil overs, there's one company that's been doing this the longest built and shocks.

They were the originator of the gas charged mono

shock absorber in 1954. That's over 50 years of building shots.

And when they entered the world of racing, they dominated all forms from pavement to

so we called up Bill Stein sales department. And once we talked through what we were building, they hooked us up with Joel in their off road department, the guy who actually built these shocks

in the front, we're gonna be using 2 9100 series coil overs. They have a 22 millimeter shaft self

deflecting disks with individual rebound and compression valve.

The thread of body will help us out with easy adjustment for the ride height

and the separate reservoir with a floating piston. Another feature pioneered by Bill Stein

will allow for more oil to help keep the shocks cooler.

Now, the rear shocks on this truck are very similar to what you'd see on desert racing trucks all over the west coast. We have a similar Bill Stein 9100 coil over except this one has a shorter body and it has very moderate valving inside for slow speed driving. But when you start to hit those high speed

and you have rapid oscillation of the shock, lots of up and down movement. The bulk of the work is gonna be taken over by this 9100 bypass series shock. Now, if you're looking at this thing and wondering what all these external bypass tubes actually do on a shock like this, we got it drawn up on the chalkboard for you.

In order to first understand how bypass shocks are beneficial to your truck. You need to understand how standard valving works in a typical gas mono tube shock. Now, when the piston travels up through a column of oil in the shock, oil is forced through orifices in the piston. And this controls the valving. The speed at which this shaft moves is controlled by valving discs that are stacked on top of this piston. Now, high end shock absorbers that can be

built, you can change this valving and that's great when you're talking about a car that's going to see a racetrack where there's a difference between a smooth track or a slightly bumpy track.

But off road racing, it's all different. It's about huge distances. 255 100 even 1000 miles that require tunable suspension. You'll have everything from slight washboards to huge air like at the lough

and lead

where you need to have soft and more importantly, safe landings.

Now, a bypass shock as the piston is compressed, the oil also travels through orifices in the piston and past valving disks.

But when that piston also goes up, it pushes oil through your bypass port. Now, if you had a suspension that worked really well on a soft setup, when it was running over washboards, you could open up this bypass port to allow the maximum amount of oil through. So this piston would be a real soft flowing piston

from this distance till it crosses that port. But if you needed a firm suspension, when your suspension was going to go fully extended to fully compressed, you could adjust this upper bypass port to allow very little oil through. So in essence, you have a fine tuned shock that reacts differently in different places of the travel. That's the key to how a bypass shock works. And more importantly, it's the key to having a fully tunable suspension on a truck that's going to see massively different amounts of terrain

on our coil overs. We've installed hyper coil springs since Bill Side is a leader in all forms of racing, it only seemed right to wrap a spring around them that has one in everything from the Indianapolis 500 to the ball hall.

Now, the way distribution in this truck is 5050. So the spring rates front, we are going to be the same. We have a 16 inch, 450 pound spring on the bottom and a 12 inch 250 pound tender spring.

These adjusters right here are going to keep this tender spring from fully compressing.

You never want the shock to reach its full extension or compression. So, to keep this from happening, we are installing triple wrapped Mastercraft limiting straps, front and rear, as well as Bill Stein air bump stops. These will cushion the suspension when it's fully compressed.

All right. This is it the last piece of the puzzle. You know, you're getting close when you're putting in the drive shaft. Now, for the ranger, we called up Tom Woods custom shaft and had them build us to set a custom drive shaft with one ton CV flange and then of course, show Polish just for fun.

The rear is made of three inch dom tubing with a 120 inch wall,

a slip yoke at the rear axle and a heavy duty CB joint flange of the transfer case will allow our rear axle to travel through its entire suspension cycle without binding.

The front shaft is two inch tubing with a 120 wall thickness. It's a good idea to cycle the suspension through its entire travel and check for binding before hitting the trail.

It's fast. It's mean and it has a hand throttle.

The ranger is resurrected next.

All right, you're free,

Mike.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4 are gnarly looking beast was built as a Swiss army knife of trucks, high ground clearance for climbing, power and torque for speed and a trick suspension to handle with these anything we throw in its path.

So we set a course designed to test range of resurrection for all facets. But first a shakedown run to get a feel for the hydraulic steering.

The truck was working great,

tearing up the trails and scaring trees.

But then we came up a steep grade and we felt something rubbing in the rear.

Oh,

we got a slight problem on the back end.

Fortunately,

the shock mail has bent

just a little.

I kind of wondered what all that rubbing was.

I think it's just more a matter of the p the piece of steel we mounted them on, it was really tall. So I think it's just folded over. So I think what we gotta do is we gotta pull them down and mount them on shorter ones

and I think we'll be all right.

So we found the cause of the problem. We actually got the truck back in the shop, this upper link mount on the driver's side actually ripped right off the frame. You can see what's left of the weld on it.

So we went ahead and beefed them up by lowering them down, running a tube all the way through the frame rail with a great 83 quarter inch pull all the way through into one tap and there's no way this is gonna break. We hope.

And then just for good measure, went ahead and gusted it up all the new shock mounts

and we back on the trail.

So we gave it another shot

rigged up our cameras for what we hoped would be a good pay

off

after this, roll through the woods

and a steep

hill climb. The unthinkable happened.

You don't see it, but you can certainly hear it.

The front end just fell out of it.

Well, unfortunately, that's the end of this test.

Oh, man,

that's what started right there

right there.

Right.

Yes. See this. Hi, how it's broken

basically the upper hind joint, it failed. And as soon as that failed, the whole axle tried to twist

up and away from the trucks. The only thing holding it on then was the shock. Once those broke, there was nothing holding that axle in place. So it then tweaked the drive shaft and unfortunately, it ripped the drive shaft right in half and the drive shaft

is now in the oil pan.

That's a shame. Really. It's a real shame.

Well, you know what guys, we always told you, if we break something, we're gonna show you there. It is. Unfortunately, right now, the ranger, it's a little too broken to get back on the trail. But don't worry, we're gonna take it back into extreme. We're gonna fix everything and then we'll bring it back so you guys can see an actual good payoff with no carnage. So I promise probably next season.

Hopefully,

hopefully

Drer

help.