Supercharged JK Part 2

You see them everywhere. Chrysler's four door Jeep Wrangler soccer moms love them. But today ours is going from mall rated to crawl

rated with an easy bolt on suspension lift and a not so easy hardcore roll cage. Plus 30 years ago, a teenager took a welder and a dream and turned it into this. We'll visit the man behind Rusty's Opera

today on Xtreme 4x4, we have our brand new 2010. Jeep JK back in the shop for the best part of the build. Today, we're gonna get to cut and grind on this truck that has less than 500 miles on the odometer. Now, last time we took care of the entire drive,

put a super charger on the engine to give us more horsepower slipped in Aruba Crawler and gear reduction case to give us better gearing and upgraded our axles with these one of a kind atomic hybrid axle assemblies. Now, the first thing we're gonna do today is make some clearance for a new suspension

before any new suspension pieces can go on.

The old ones have gotta come off.

I love that line.

We had to remove the stock suspension mounts because our new suspension system from Rusty's off road, not only uses keyed in welded on mount, but it completely changes the design of the suspension in the truck. See from the factory, the JK uses a four link with a pan hard bar. Well, this new system from Rusty's off road, it is a completely different type of suspension.

It uses what are basically termed as

arms. It has a long lower link that mounts off the frame and then a short upper link that connects to the link as well as the top of the axle to prevent that rotational twist and also locate it under the truck. Now, the nice thing about this system is you can get a lot of articulation when you're out on the trail. If there's one drawback to this suspension type is that your opinion angle tends to change a little bit through the cycling of the suspension. But the nice thing is if you can get these lower lens long enough, the change is usually around three or four degrees. Now, this kit from Rusty's Off Road comes with everything that we need and they will custom powder coated into any color that you want. And we chose orange just for fun, comes with all new springs and we had them throw in a couple of spacers just to fine tune it because of the axles. We're putting underneath the truck, new sway bar and length and of course all new braided brake lines,

the rear link bracket indexes off of the body mount and is tacked in place.

We'll lower the truck

so we can remove the hoist arms and install the links from the frame down to the axle

on the rear. The stock springs are used

and the track bar is installed.

The front is the same design as the back

with brackets indexed on the frame rail, an inch and a quarter ahead of the vertical slot on the outer frame

and an adjustable track bar just like the back

to locate the axle

one area that must be addressed when installing an aftermarket suspension system. Are your bump stops? You see you're changing the distance from the factory bump stop to where it contacts the axle by increasing the ride height of the vehicle. Now, one option is to simply relocate your factory bump stops, but the downfall is is the material that these are made out of. It is somewhat reactive. And what that means is when the axle compresses and hits it, it actually bounces back down on the ground,

making the ride very rough. A better option is to upgrade your bump stops. Now, we're gonna be swapping ours out for these daystar products competition style bump stops. The urethane that these are made out of is what's called progressive. And what that means is when the axle contacts it, it'll actually slow it down slowly before stopping its travel, that'll allow the spring to react and slowly push the axle back down onto the ground, improving your ride and keeping the fillings in your teeth.

Even though we're not gonna be installing an overly large tire on this truck. A great upgrade to any trail vehicle is gonna be a hydraulic ram assist steering kit. It'll really help you out when you're out on the trail and the vehicles articulated over all one way and a lot of the vehicle's weight is on the front steering wheels. It will especially help out the JK because this is one of the biggest Jeeps ever built. Now, we went ahead and got a complete steering kit all from PSC

comes with everything we're gonna need, including a brand new pump with an external reservoir designed to hold more fluid that the system is gonna need

a brand new steering gear assembly with a billet nose assembly that accepts both the factory hydraulic lines as well as the two hydraulic hoses that'll travel down to the ram that's matted on the front axle. Now, when you're installing a ra M assist kit, a great upgrade is gonna be a cooler. Now, this extruded aluminum cooler, maybe a little different than when you start thinking about an oil cooler. Mine tends to go towards something that looks a lot like a radiator. But believe it or not the design of this cooler, the fact that the inside diameter is a lot larger than the inlet hose and the fact that it has fins all the way around dissipates almost as much heat as a typical plate and fin cooler. We were a little skeptical of these when they first came out, we've installed them on a couple projects and they work really well.

Somewhere over the Rainbow City in Alabama, the dreams of an off road empire really did come true for a man named Rusty. We'll meet this cheap fanatic and learn his secret to aftermarket success. Stay tuned.

We've just got done throwing our radius arm suspension system on our brand new Jeep J kit.

And if you guys are like me, you don't want to just know how these parts go on. You want to know where they come from. Well, this suspension kit came from a small little town called Rainbow City Alabama.

Good morning, Rusty.

It's 5:30 a.m. and every inch of this 60,000 square foot operation is abuzz with activity.

Well, almost,

this is Rusty's off road products specializing in nothing but hardcore Jeep components,

a

parts warehouse. This is not, this is a turnkey fabrication shop where parts are designed, prototyped, tested, redesigned and then trail tested

before they are eventually manufactured

and shipped to your door

where some companies that don't build their own parts have to order that stuff and wait on other manufacturers. We can go out there and start on that production that part that day, have them on the shelf. Usually within a couple of days,

it started over 30 years ago with a passion for dirt.

Today. Rusty Migos and his wife, Nina have filled a small off road empire

concentrating on the things that matter. Most customer service quality parts all made in the USA.

It's a family operation involving both their sons.

Tony runs the fab shop while Zach heads up C AD CAM design and marketing

all of the snow and have worked on Jeeps, whether it be the guys in the tech department on the telephones, which have installed our parts and used our parts. But since you're gonna be running a 35 inch tire, I would definitely recommend maybe looking at our over the knuckle steering kit

or somebody like myself that designs the part and the whole time when I'm designing and putting together the part, I know exactly what it's gonna go on and what function it has on the Jeep to ensure the performance and quality of it.

One way to ensure quality and consistency

is the use of keyed laser technology

accomplished by this amazing Quattro CNC laser processing machine

that really helped us out on the accuracy of the part. The fit of the part,

definitely increased production quality.

The key is to eliminate as much welding as possible. And that's one thing that's definitely helped us out using the key laser system is that there's less welding involved by doing that. You're distorting the far less

and the best part is we do it all in the house so we can control the quality

attention to detail

ready for powder coating.

That cross member is one of over 6000 Jeep Parts Rusty's offers

in a line that's constantly expanding.

The new JK uh is in its third year and and more parts are coming out for it every day. We just released a new Long Arm uh kit for the WJ Grand Cherokee, which we think will be very successful. Our builder parts is growing every day.

So it's all machine goods or it's laser cut parts that are bent and fabricated. And what it's for is a guy that wants, that's a little bit more technical that can go out there in his garage and he has his own welder, his own cut or maybe even a plasma

and he can mount Dana six

under a CJ or even build something like what we've built in our XJ

with the quality of our products. We know that the abuse they are going to give their vehicles. Our parts are not gonna fail

when they call you back and say this is the best thing I bought for my vehicle.

It really makes you feel happy and know that you've done a good job at what you, you know, set out to do

today on extreme. We've knocked out a bunch of stuff on our 0 10 Jeep JK. We've pulled it off the lift, set it down on some jack stands to make it a little bit more stable for us to tackle the next project. Now, the whole plan with this entire truck is to build it a little bit different kind of out of the box and we're going to do that with the roll cage. You see, Jeep has sort of a roll cage installed in this truck. It's not really a roll cage. It's more of a sport cage. When you roll these things over the

cage is designed to crumple.

That is bad news when you're talking serious off road. And this isn't the first JK we've had in the shop. So we know some of the pitfalls we have to avoid. The first thing is to completely replace this cage. But there's one part on this Jeep that I have a major issue with and it's right here. Right. Come here right up in here. Check us out. This is the B pillar on the four door Jeep. Problem with that is when you're all wheeling, you got this thing with the doors off having fun, lean it over in a trench that always gets hit by every tree limb, every rock, every ledge. And the problem is it's not strong, it's made out of the same small lightweight steel. The rest of the Jeep is made of issue with that

one trail hit here. It folds up, it's wrecked. You can't close the rear door, you can't close the front door. So we're gonna incorporate our cage to fix that problem right there. Now, the first step to put any custom cage in any truck is to completely gut the interior.

Now, I know what a lot of you guys are thinking. Seriously. This truck has less than 500 miles on it and we're completely tearing it apart.

Uh, you're gonna hate me for what I'm about to say. Oh, a, uh, spot we

drill.

Now we'll leave this here.

Uh, we'll come in with a cut off wheel.

Everything we do to this Jeep is gonna take it from mall

rated to truly trail

rated

even though it left the factory with that badge.

One of the nice things about the Jeep JK is all the carpet is completely removable, but in small sections, that means if you're gonna be wheeling somewhere where it's dirty or muddy, you can simply take it out to protect it from getting ruined when you get in and out of the truck. The downfall is, is all the sound deadening material is actually bonded to the backside of that carpet. And if you've ever spent a long period of time in a truck with nothing on the floor, driving around the side of rocks, getting kicked up off the bottom of the tires can get a little bit annoying. So to solve that, we're gonna apply some sound deadening. This is lizard skin. It's a 100% water based acrylic sound deader that's applied as one full sheet or membrane on the bottom of all the interior surfaces. That means that it will completely seal the inside of the truck and we can apply as many coats as we see fit.

Now, if we were after some heat blocking, they also make a ceramic insulation and this is also a water based material that you'd spray on before the sound deadening. Now, we do not need to put this on our Jeep because we have all the heat shields underneath the bottom of the truck. So we're just chasing some sound deadening. In this particular project. It simply gets applied with a gun that you get directly from lizard skin at a pressure of 50 P si

our entire cage is going to be built out of and 58 dom tubing with a six inch radius. That way we can get it really close to the body. All the floor plates are gonna be mounted directly over the factory body mount

or tied into the frame a little bit later on.

Now, the cage right now is definitely a lot stronger than the factory, not just because we've made it all out of dom tubing, but the design itself, we have two distinct passenger compartments with main hoops and X's in each to protect everyone in the jeep in case of a rollover, it won't crumple, it's gonna stay strong. And the best part is because we spent the time getting this front bar all the way down through the frame, we're gonna be able to fold the windshield down

when we go wheeling to protect it from getting smashed against obstacles. Now, we talked about protecting this B pillar right here and we've come up with a plan, we're gonna make a removable tube

that'll mount off the front and back of the cage and that way it'll stick out past the B pillar and it is what will contact anything on the trail. Instead of the B pillar itself, you won't be able to run this tube with the doors on or on the street. But when you're out wheeling, it'll definitely

save your body.

You're watching Xtreme 4x4 for a DVD copy of this episode. Just go to Power Block tv.com and order your copy for just 595 plus shipping and handling. Start your own Xtreme 4x4 collection delivered right to your door from the power block.

Since we're all done inside the cab of the truck, we've got it up off the floor sitting on its wheels and tires. Now, if you remember, we didn't want to install a large wheel and tire package on this Jeep because of the design of the axles. So we're sticking with a 37 inch tall 13.5 inch tire that we got from Coker tire. Now, this is an Interco SS M-16

and it's a great dual purpose tire. The tread blocks are very close together. That means we're gonna have great manners on the highway. But because there's a void every second pattern, we'll still have that aggressive tread when we're off road, wheeling this thing in the dirt. We went ahead and mounted these things up to a 17 by nine allied monster 32 bolt bead lock.

Since we chose to bring back some Jeep heritage with a full down windshield,

it only makes sense to add some classic flat style fenders to this modern truck.

The bushwacker flares dura Flex construction means that the flares will actually bend instead of break when we're on the trail.

The fronts include led marker lights to keep the Jeep legal for the street.

Now, the next time we've got this Jeep in the shop, we obviously still have a little bit more work to do. We're gonna ditch these plastic bumpers up front for something that's just a little bit more substantial. We'll finish off the interior with four full reclining suspension bucket seats and maybe take a little bit of height out of this Jeep. It's sitting a little tall right now now that we have these flat fenders on here, just too much space between here and the tire and,

and lastly, we're gonna take care of a problem that a lot of you JK owners see the electronic stability control in this truck needs to see sensors from all four wheels. We'll show you how to adapt those sensors to these aftermarket axles so you can fool the Jeep into thinking it's running stock running gear trying to drive this Jeep right now and you get nowhere. I'm right now, I'm

uh,

I'm going to have a cup of coffee.