Building a Bobbed Deuce from a Military 6x6

We told you our plans for building General Granite or was it Corporal Stone or Sergeant? I forget the silly names. It's one big military truck with a new tour of duty. Extreme style. We'll crush some cars, douse some flames and turn this six by six into one massive four by four

for a while. In extreme, we've been thinking that we need to build a really big four wheel drive truck,

like not a monster truck or something that's impractical or unattainable. Something that anyone can build. It's got to be something that's affordable so anyone can buy it

something you can drive on the street every single day.

And we thought the best way to do that would be to go out and get a really big truck and make it just

a little bit smaller

for more than 50 years. There's been one military vehicle that's carried more troops and supplies around than any other. And that is the 2.5 ton six by 66 by six means that you've got power to all the wheels under the truck at one time. One steering Rockwell up front and two top motors in the rear mean that you have true six wheel drives keeping this monster moving

like we need to rotate the tires.

A

flat spot,

a

five speed standard shift transmission and a full time six wheel drive transfer case capable of high or low range. This deuce and a half can deliver the goods anywhere they're needed.

Does the horn work?

No, it

doesn't.

It does work.

Governments commissioned these vehicles to serve many different purposes in the military. From troop transport, fuel delivery cranes, even guided missile launchers or fire trucks like ours.

So this run about on just about anything.

It's got three fuels. You can run this truck on, you can run this truck on straight diesel, like a military grade diesel.

You can run it on military gasoline or military kerosene. Well, military gasoline is about the same as just like regular unleaded gasoline,

but you cannot put the aviation fuel in it. That's the only thing you can't put in. Uh,

but everything else you can

makes it easier.

They did that to make it simpler to fill up

like on the basis in combat. Right. Right.

There we go.

The first Deuce and a half was manufactured back in 1940 with more than 800,000 units built. It's easy to see why the six by six is easily recognized as a military truck.

Now, you're probably wondering what something like this is going to cost. You can pick up a used six by six from anywhere between 2500 to $5000. We've got our, from Boyce equipment in Ogden Utah.

Now, Boyce is a military salvage yard specializing in repurposing

like our six by six for civilian use.

They have complete used rigs. They also have turn key rigs that have been built into things like snow plows or fuel transport and they've even got parts if you're restoring one that you've already bought.

Yeah, it's big, but more importantly, it's cool.

Now, there's one thing I gotta do before we roll this truck into the shop. You

see every morning, our fat cat overpaid, underworked producer. No pictures. Ok. Parks his dodge neon in the middle of the parking lot

that ends today.

Now, the plan for this truck is simple. We're gonna create what's called a Bobbed

Deuce. Now, to do that, all we have to do is remove the rear Rockwell axle and we end up not having a six by six anymore. Just a really big four by four. Now, guys do this all the time.

It's a little bit of investment of money to end up with a really cool one of a kind truck. Now, the hardest part of the job on this truck is gonna be cutting off that firebox

time to go down, down on the ground.

Come on there.

What's next, man? All right, we're gonna unbolt these, these front mud flops,

no torches because we don't want to wreck them. I'm gonna climb up inside. I'm gonna unbolt the main feed from the tank that goes in the pump and then we should be ready to lift it all up. All right, I'll get the other side.

It doesn't look complicated in there at all.

Who

are you

going down? Slowly?

Slow ears down and see what happens. See if it'll take the

up next. No, it's not a village people audition. Ian's got that gig wrapped up. He's all dressed up to see if our pumpers still pumps. Stay tuned.

We're back with our stripped down 5 30 C deuce, which received an honorable discharge after only 12,000 miles and 550 hours of service.

These military fire trucks are rare, especially ones in good shape like ours.

We surgically removed the pump fire box and water tank which are all spoken for for someone else's reso.

But before we tore this steel soldier down, we had to see if the heart of this rescue ranger could still pump some h2o.

I'm a fireman

now when it comes to fire trucks, not a lot has changed over the years.

Let's flow some water, man.

That's why we knew our buddies down at fire station. Number five would know exactly how to get our old girl pumping some water.

Wait, wait before we start. Important question.

Is there a pole in there that we can like slide down?

You don't have a pole. They say no fire station they got no pole. Y'all could build us one

pressures on. Here we go.

I think there's a small leak.

Oh,

all right. We know what that one does.

Our truck can do more than deliver water straight from the hydrant. Once the water tank is full, we can divert it into the pump. We'll need a reducer

to take it down to an inch and three quarter

to engage the PTO.

I love the motor and have massive pressure flowing out of our fire hose.

It pumped pretty good for old trucks.

Look at that, I'm a fireman

and ever since I was a little boy, I always thought being a fireman was the coolest job in the world. And I teach my son to not play with matches and

believe it or not here at extreme, we're even 100% smoke free. I said no smoking.

Mhm.

Kids don't smoke

taking it for the team.

Now, with all the fire truck parts out of the way, you can really get an idea of how these tandem axles work on the back of these old military trucks. Now, you've got the drive shaft coming into the front part of the top loader and the front axle and there's a flange on the backside with a second drive shaft that then delivers power back to the

rear axle and that's how you end up with the six wheel drive. Now, we don't need that because we're just building a big four by four. So we're gonna go ahead and temporarily support this front Rockwell. We'll remove this rear drive shaft as well as all the suspension and then we'll cut this frame right at this cross member.

Hey, Chris, where are you going?

We're about to show you what we're planning on putting in the back of that thing.

Radar.

Now, what a lot of people do when they're bobbing these deuces is they use an existing truck bed. Now that bed comes off an M 101 or an M 105 military trailer. And I'm sure you've seen them because they're usually pulled by these trucks.

They're about 7 ft across 9 ft long, very square, very military looking. Now, we're not going to do that. We're going to build a custom bed. It's going to be similar to one of those military trailers, but it's going to be designed to haul a very special cargo.

We figured since the Suzuki is the smallest truck we'd ever built, we'd size the bed perfectly to fit this truck into the biggest truck we've ever built.

Oh,

yeah.

Now, for the perimeter of our truck bed, we're going to be using this two by 48 inch wall, rectangular tubing.

Now the two by four design will give us that military style that we're after. While the eight inch wall will make it strong enough to handle the weight of our Suzuki.

We will start with the perimeter or floor of our bed. I'm going to measure 7 ft wide and 9 ft long with miters at the front corners to give us a clean look

what we got. 9898.

We're gonna go ahead and move this axle back about six inches and then, uh, we'll make a wheel well, once it's set in position, so the tires have room to move. But, uh, yeah, we'll, we'll cut that after we set that distance.

So set this rear crosser.

This is the bottom.

Ok.

This also because it's the two by four, it's two by four on the side. So when it comes down here

and gets kicked up for the tires, it looks like a fender. Well,

see that's how, that's how those beds are designed. That's where I was throwing off is, you know, just the straight piece without the wheel wells, you could cut that out and make a wheel. Well, but that's just silly.

Why is it? So,

because how would, you know, it's perfectly square if you cut out in the middle of it,

uh,

measures

where the new axle is gonna be?

Yeah, but no, what I'm saying is you can build a giant rectangle like this,

make sure this is a perfectly square box, right, weld it up and then come in here and clip out one side at a time

to build your fender.

That way you don't lose any of the structure on the rest of the bed.

Whereas if you just come down here and you take this piece and end it in no man's land and then throw an angled piece up to come up and then a top and go down and you got a piece hanging up in the air and you got nothing to support it. And is it square? Is it not square? You don't really know. And then you come up here if you just build a big box like this and then clip it out for the wheels,

it's, it's easier. It's more structurally sound while you work on it.

Ok? I see your point

crossed races are added to mount the bed to the truck's frame. We'll use to stock mounting location from the fire.

Then we'll reset the wheelbase of the truck. We're gonna stretch it six inches

and then build the wheel well, to match the angle of the front fender,

the top lip of the bed is slightly narrower just for a clean look and is made from some two by two tubing.

Now, we have the basic skeleton of our bed all in place and we still have to do some finish pieces on here. We've got to put a floor in it. We're probably gonna use some expanded metal. So any mud or gunk will fall off the Suzuki onto the ground. We'll just fill in the sides with some sheet metal and we still need to build a tailgate. Now there's one issue we have to deal with. Our bed is 9 ft long. The wheelbase on our Suzuki is

played around 10 ft. So that means that we're gonna have to build the tailgate so it can drop down and carry the weight of the rear axle of our zoo. It's not a big deal. We just have to make sure that we have beefy mounts up here as part of the bed. But before we finish weld or go any further, we wanna go ahead and try our tires and wheels in here and make sure we got lots of room when the suspension compresses.

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Now, since we're converting this six by six over to a big four by four, obviously, we need some large off road tires to make it look right now. These are Michelin X series tires and believe it or not, even though they look brand new, these are military timed out tires which will work perfectly considering our truck is an ex military truck. Now, what happens is the military determines these tires are out of use because of their age and then they offer them up for salvage. Now, salvage dealers buy them and then sell them again to the public. We got ours from $100

man and he specializes in repurposing tires and wheel packages like this as well as building Bob Deuces. So we know that these are perfect for our truck and not only will they look great on our truck opposed to the stock ones, the 50 inch tall tire that puts on a 20 inch rim

that sells for less than $100 a piece. So even if you're just throwing some rockwells underneath your buggy, they are a great deal. More importantly to us, they came off heavy duty troop transport vehicles. So they're designed to handle the weight of our six by six the wheels, there's something special too.

Now, just like our tires, the wheels are timed out military items as well. Now they start life as what's called a hemmitt wheel. Now, that is a heavy expanded mobility tactical truck. Now, that is a huge five ton military truck that has four axles on it. You've probably seen them out in the military today doing everything that the six by six used to do. Now, they are a 10 log wheel. So what $100 man does is machine out the center of the wheel and then have a new center cut with the Rockwell six bolt pattern to bolt into place. Now, they are a true two piece wheel and they are incredibly strong and incredibly heavy. How heavy? Well, four wheels, four tires for this truck

2000 pounds.

Well, there you go, guys to say that this truck has undergone a huge transformation would be an understatement. We've gone from a six wheel drive fire truck to a huge four wheel drive truck sitting on 50 inch tall tires. And the nice thing is we didn't spend a lot of money to get to this point. The next time we got the truck in the shop, we'll take care of some odds and ends. We gotta fix that battery box as well. Some damage from when we crush that car. We'll sheet that bed when we throw the Zook in the back. Go for a drive.