Bobbed Deuce: Big Truck on a Little Trail

Sometimes you got to build a truck for the fun of it.

And that's exactly why we took a military fire truck and turned it into a pickup today on Xtreme 4x4. It'll be ready for duty

today. On extreme, we've got our Bob Deuce

back in the shop. Now, we have just around $5000 into this project so far, which means a lot because we have a, one of a kind

custom four wheel drive truck that is huge and it's got a custom bed on the back designed to haul a very specific cargo. And we wanted to stick the

Zook up there to see how it looked before we do any work today.

How's it fit, man? Uh Just right. If it was any bigger, I don't think it fit

officially. Our truck started life as an M 5 30 C Military Deuce and a half.

We found it bone stock and in good working condition before it was decommissioned.

But in our hands, it would soon be the biggest four by four we've ever built

with the torches, our scalpel, we surgically removed both the fire box and the pump.

We bobbed the back and replaced the rear suspension with a four length set up suspended by a set of heavy duty airbags

so we could drop the suspension to help with loading.

The custom bed really fits the style of our truck. It's very boxy and very utilitarian

now. Right now, our truck is rocking a pretty unique paint scheme. I mean, we got a red fender on the front. We got a bare steel box in the back and we've even got a brown camouflage battery box that we installed on the driver's side last time. And the first thing we want to take care of today is to repaint

this entire truck. Now, I'm sure you guys have seen this done before where guys will take a classic ride like this, give it a true custom paint job where they take everything apart, label it, put it in baggies and take good care of it.

We're not doing any of that. We're painting this Xtreme 4x4 style

to paint our truck. We're going to be using the new Dup, the color paint shop Pro system. Now, this is a great option when you want to save a little bit of money, but still get a high quality automotive finish

and you save the money because the paint comes ready to spray in these small court cans. You don't have to buy any hardener or activator, just pour it in the gun and it's ready to apply

and we're going to be applying three different colors. We're going to start by basing the entire truck in

a

black color. Then we're gonna go in afterwards and add in some silver and white highlights to kind of give it that snow camouflage or night camouflage look. Now to apply the paint, we're gonna be using one of these electric spray guns, not a typical spray gun. This one is the same type of gun you'd buy if you were standing your deck at your house. Now, there's no way that you're gonna get as good a finish with a gun like this on our project. But that's ok.

It'll look good enough for us.

The electric spray gun uses a small mechanical piston to push the paint out of the nozzle instead of compressed air like a conventional gun.

Oops. And the nice thing about the mechanical gun is there's not a lot of overspray that'll maximize our paint coverage and minimize the amount of fumes in the air.

There's a secret Chris just never let go of the trigger.

All right, I'll try that.

Now, if you do want a show type, finish on a truck like this, the best way to do it is to strip it all down. Spend a lot of time with prep work mask, everything off, maybe even pull the body off the frame.

In our case,

we just want a cool looking truck

with black white and silver.

Well, there you go guys do it yourself. Paint job. For the low, low price of telling how much it was. Well, we got six cans of black, two cans of silver and a couple of white spray bombs that set us back about 100 and 75 bucks. If you don't already have a mechanical spray gun, you're gonna need to buy one of those at about $80. But for a grand total of 250 bucks to have a 100% custom paint job on a truck. This big,

that's pretty cheap.

Later on our deuce will try to earn its stripes. Plus more on our fuel saving street truck.

There are a few things that a giant four wheel drive truck just has to have in our case because this was an ex military truck had to have some type of camouflage paint scheme, even if it is a little bit different because we want a giant four wheel drive truck. Obviously, it needs big tires like these giant Michelins that we stuffed underneath this project. But most important, if you have a diesel engine underneath your hood and you've got a big truck, you need a set of stacks,

exhaust stacks, draw the spent diesel fuel up above the cap that way it's exiting well above the roof and you're not going to be stinking up the people driving behind it.

Now, ours are going to be made from some custom fuel master four inch exhaust tubes.

Mhm.

A nine degree elbow will bring the exhaust from under the truck

and some simple tabs will hold it in place.

A

custom tip is cut from another piece of pipe.

There you go.

Thank you.

The entire stack is welded

now

been given a coat of paint

as with any exhaust job. The last thing we gotta do

test it.

Oh, it sounds awesome.

It sounds like a big rig.

Like most military vehicles. Our truck has a 24 volt power system. Now it gets that power feed by taking 212 volt batteries and wiring them in series, basically hooking the negative and positive battery terminals together to create one large 24 volt battery. Now, the downfall in our case is we've installed some accessories in that truck that need 12 volt power feet. So to get that, we're going to be using C

tech's new battery to battery battery charger. Now, with this system does, is it separates the batteries into a main and auxiliary takes input from the main battery into these two terminals here and then feeds the auxiliary battery off of this terminal here to keep that auxiliary battery fully charged at all times. Now, it's normally used in vehicles where you're just carrying a second battery for backup, make sure it doesn't go dead. But because it splits the two batteries into two distinct units, we're gonna use it on our 24 volt system to get 12 volt power feed for our air ride

next a roof, a redhead and a really rough ride.

Stay tuned

today, an extreme. We're finishing up our monster four by four and started life as a six by six. Now, most of the six by six, as you see out there have a canvas roof on them with bowls like a jeep top. Now, ours is missing all those parts. So we decided to install an aftermarket hard top. Now, voice equipment may

this bolt on factory replacement hard top made it a fiberglass and designed to bolt onto the cap and fit up at the windshield frame. And this is a great option if you want a hard top or if you simply don't have all the parts and pieces of a factory soft top like us. We're gonna go ahead and just spray ours with some nice

duplicate

bed liner

because Chris, there's nothing finer than bed liner. Yeah.

So

I know the nineties would love me. Take extreme on,

Ian. Hold on, man. You can't take general granted out without a pre cleaner. So I whip something up for you. I've been looking for this man. You totally rocked that thing. Look at that.

That is awesome. Sweet. Just don't rub it up against a tree or anything. All right. Ok. But I might keep this for myself because it's too nice to put on the truck

for a redhead. Check that out, man.

Let's

go eight

Whelan.

Now, normally when we bring two trucks to the trail. We just take turns driving them. But today, not today, we're gonna let the crew wheel the

Zook while we wheel the big truck. See, they've always been bugging us for a crew vehicle. So today's their lucky day.

The best part is, is watching them try and get in.

Ah,

my knee.

Do I trade truck. See you later.

We're dark.

Yeah.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Ok.

Back up.

Ok. Go all the way to your left

then come in slow and just let it crawl

the crawl. You got it. Yeah.

Not bad for some rookies. And now that we've got our little truck up the trail, it's time to see how our general can handle the woods.

We have no idea what kind of history this truck has. We don't know if it's actually ever been off the pavement before.

But today we're going to find out

when you build a Bob Deuce like this, you're not trying to build a competitive rock crawler.

Oh, this might be deeper than we think.

Well, this will probably make it deeper as heavy as it is.

You're honestly building it

just for fun.

Yeah,

we'll drive up here. We'll drop in to the left

and then we'll immediately run cattle skull.

All right.

Do you think it'll fit?

It's an army truck, dude. It goes anywhere.

It's a, it's

this trucks like it invades country. It'll go there. I just don't know if it'll get out

let's find out

I'm gonna lose my mirror.

It broke.

I know it's not in the spirit of this truck,

but I'm calling rich.

Oh, no.

There's

one

weird

a

thorn bush.

I told you to watch out, dude.

At least the mirrors. See they fold in. Now.

Now a lot of you have been sending us messages asking why we chose to install 212 volt compressors for our air ride instead of using the engine driven compressor that's already on the truck. Well, really it was a question of safety. See the engine driven compressor on the truck, it controls the brake power assist as well as the steering assist. If we ever chose to add it by separating the two systems into two distinct units. If we ever lost an air bag on the road, we'd only lose the air out of our air ride system, not out of our brake assist or our power steering. So, really for us, it's just a choice of safety.

A Bob Deuce is honestly a great truck to build lots of fun to drive and a blast to cruise through the woods in

as long as you can find a trail that's big enough big truck

on a little trail.

Ha

s

a gear.

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Now, if there's one universal truth, it's that we all love to save money. You guys have told us that you really like the fact that we're taking this 96 Dodge lifted street truck and trying to do two things. We're trying to make it a more capable off Roader, but we're also trying to keep more money in our pocket by improving its fuel economy by doing little things to it and giving you real world feedback.

So far, we removed the mechanical fan, replaced it with an electric fan and that took us from a baseline of around 8, 8.5

MPG to just over nine. Then we put the truck on a diet. We cleaned out the interior, ditched the full size spare and a bunch of junk in the bed. And that got us up to about 9.5 or 10

MPG. But the big change came when we swapped the axles

by ditching the stock half ton axles and replacing them with two Dana 60 units that we pulled from the same make and model of truck just a little bit newer. We accomplished a couple of things. Number one, we're more confident in this truck's ability to go off road because of the larger axle shaft diameter, as well as ring gear size in that Dana 60 axle, especially in the front end. But more importantly, we now have better fuel economy. You see the half ton axles with the oversized wheels and tires. When you drove this truck on the high way, it was somewhat confused. It was always dropping in and out of overdrive, the converter would lock up and unlock. And when you're cruising at highway speeds, the engine was usually turned at around 2500 RPM with our new axles. We have a 410 to 1 gear ratio. And what that does is it basically fools the truck. It honestly thinks it's still riding on stock size wheels and tires. That means that the overdrive drops in at the correct time and the converter locks up, we can cruise down the highway all day long, turning around 1500 RPM. What does that mean?

It means that we are now running at 12

MPG with this truck simply from changing the axle. Now, we could have obtained the same thing by just upgrading the ring gear in our stock axles. But then we wouldn't have that ability to take this truck off road because those half ton axles would not handle these new tires and wheels when you throw them into the dirt. Now, today's upgrade is actually pretty simple and it applies to every car out there. We're gonna change how you drive your vehicle and we're going to give you a gauge to measure your improvement.

What we're gonna be monitoring is our engine vacuum. Now, when the piston travels down inside the cylinder and the throttle is closed or your engine is idling. It's basically pulling air past the throttle blades through a huge restriction. It's just like putting your hand over the end of a vacuum. Now, that creates a large negative pressure in here, pulls about 20 inches of vacuum. That's fine.

Engines idling. And that's how it's designed to work. You open your throttle blades up just a little bit, maybe 10 15% throttle. Your engine's still going to accelerate. The truck's gonna move down the road. It's just going to do it a little bit slower because there's not a lot of load on the engine. If you go ahead and open that throttle all the way up, you lose all the negative pressure in this area and your vacuum gauge

is going to go to zero. What that means is you have a lot of load on your engine. You're putting a lot of fuel and a lot of air into it. Obviously, you're accelerating faster. If you install a vacuum gauge in your truck and just monitor it, it'll tell you exactly how far you have the throttle valve opened. Anytime you're driving it, if you keep the numbers up on your vacuum gauge, you're going to keep money in your pocket

for our truck, we're going to install an auto meter, Phantom series vacuum gauge

and to simplify the mounting process, we're going to use one of auto meters pods that specifically designed to mount the gauge on top of the steering column, keeping it in plain view

and

then we just tap into a vacuum source on the engine.

Yeah.

Now, all we have to do is run a few tanks of fuel through the truck and come back with some real fuel economy numbers. We don't know what kind of gains we're going to get, but at least now we have a firm gauge as to how much load we're putting the engine under check back in a couple of weeks. I'll tell you the results.