SubUrban Gorilla

Today, Ian and Jessi have built their buggies now it's time to craft the ultimate tow rig to get them on and off the trail. It's part one of project suburban Gorilla.

Welcome to Xtreme 4x4. You know, it's hard to believe that we've been making this show for almost a year now.

And wow, what a ride it's been even though we've had a crazy hectic schedule, we have had so much fun building all these trucks like the hard core, no budget aluminum Jeep, the $5000 budget cheap, Jeep,

the race steam Baja

style ranger that we dragged out of a wrecking yard

and then the latest one, the full tube chassis, poison Spider Rock Rod.

We even had the opportunity to get out of the shop and go to a couple of events. These are the competition trails at Jellicoe Tennessee during a We Rock event. This is Ian and I's first time to be able to compete on an official course with official scoring. When our buddy Howard from Rhino off road invited us for a celebrity rock crop.

So after some tips, Jessey climbed in the seat and took her first trip through the cones

and driving these competition trails aren't as easy as it looks, but the Rhinos handle them with ease

even when you hit some goals.

And although Jessi knocked over a cone, it was my turn then to climb in a Rhino and hit the same trail under the same conditions and it worked great. The Rhino crawled over everything.

But when the rain came down and the mud started to get a little slick and you don't pay attention to your spider.

You're going to knock over a cone as well.

No, we weren't the only ones out on the trail.

Marie Torbett, granddaughter of Super Crawl champ, Randy Torbett was there tearing up the same trail as we were showing her grandfather that she deserved his seat in next year's races. It's always nice to see another girl out in the trail and especially for as young as she was, she was doing awesome.

So, amongst you two, I'm sorry. But, uh,

I'm sorry, the rookie wins. Ok. Ok. Ok. So I ran over another cone that was in the way

and even though Jessi looks really sad here,

I'm sure on the next event she'll be able to maybe at least tie me

and Tim took the big win. But considering that he won a 5050 draw to get a seat in this race and he was actually competing in the wee rock event. We'll just call him a ringer.

Now, driving those Rhino Buggies was a blast and we've had a great time wheeling everything else we've built so far. But all of our projects have one thing in common before you can hit the trail. You have to get there on a trailer which brings us to our newest project that we get requests for on our website all the time. The ultimate tow rig, we did all our research and this is what we came up with a 2006 Hummer H one Alpha.

You don't get more extreme than this. This thing turns heads all day long toes like a beast. And the best thing is if something happens to your trail rig, when it's out on the trail, this thing is capable enough off road to get in there and get it out for you.

The heart of the H one is the power train 6.6 L V8 turbo

charge

Duramax diesel with 300 horsepower at 3000 RPM and 520 ft pounds of torque at 1600 RPM.

Before all that power hits the ground. It first has to travel through the H one portal box and that's going to allow the drive axle to enter the wheel above the wheels, center line. And that's going to give this truck increased ground clearance as well as a gear reduction right at the hub.

And when you're talking gear reductions in one of these, you got

talk about the transmission.

This thing's packing an Allison 1000. That's a five speed automatic transmission with a tow feature that a flip of a switch. This thing can hall over 9000 pounds and with a first gear ratio of 3.1 to 1. This thing ends up with a final crawl ratio of 45.1 to 1.

And inside this truck, you're gonna find all the creature comforts that you would find in a brand new SUV

rear ac power windows, power locks, leather seats.

There's only four of them. What if we wanna go wheeling with more than just three other people?

And when we head out, we usually do. But behind the wheel of this thing, you feel like king of the road with a full complement of gauges, switches for the lockers, front and rear, the CTIS tire inflation. This thing's a blast to drive. But what if you wanna build your own truck and you don't want a truck that looks just like your neighbor's truck? Well, you can do exactly what we're gonna do. We're gonna build our own like this one

right here,

but a little different.

And it all starts with an 87 Chevy suburban and we picked this up online for 600 bucks

and then called the guys at four by four bodies.

They sent us this urban gorilla body kit. Now this is an all steel body. It's 14 gauge, then laser cut and then hand laid over a tubular substructure for strength and they have these in a bunch of different style. They got two door pick up soft top models and we chose this four door hard top so we could still have a little bit of a bed in the back. And the best thing about this thing, you don't need a great big fan

shop like we have here. This kit is honestly designed to be done by the average guy in his garage. All you need is a donor vehicle. One of these,

this complete body kit comes with everything from the fiberglass front end with the doors, the quarter panels, light kit wiper kit, hinges, latches basically everything that you're gonna need

to make your donor vehicle into an H one inspired truck.

So, pretty much we're gonna save absolutely nothing because we're gonna be replacing it all with brand new stuff. First thing you gotta do is make sure that everything that attaches the body to the frame is disconnected.

Ah, it's all, it's

12 warts.

We should unplug that.

What?

Ok. Now, go off,

keep going,

keep going.

Ok. W

time

with the body removed. Jessi and Ian could start stripping the frame plus later on a new Mexico trail, appropriately named the bone crusher.

When Xtreme 4x4 continues,

we're back on Xtreme 4x4 where we're in the process of tearing down this junkyard suburban so we can turn it into a humvee inspired tow monster.

Step one's done with the body off and

now we're gonna strip all the factory body mount locations off the frame and anything else that we don't need, which is pretty much everything so we can slide it under and find the new location for new body mounts

with the frame strip, we can simply slide underneath the body.

His body was designed with a really long firewall designed also for it to be cut out. So we have clearance fire transmission. So it's gonna cut it out

the body mount brackets that come with the urban Gorilla kit, reuse the suburban rubber isolator and bolt assembly and we'll probably replace these later with new units once we get this thing final assembled. Now, the body sitting on some wood. So we know it's at the right height above the frame rails and all we're gonna do is mark the hole for this body mount, then we can drill it, bolt it in and the weld this piece of the frame.

When we were stripping down the frame, I had to trim some of the rear frame rails off to get rid of the bumper. But to be able to weld on the new bumper, I'm gonna have to cut more off or it's gonna sit way out here. That's gonna look funny.

Yeah,

that's why it was only $600

with the rest of this drive train out, we can start putting our attention towards this engine. Now, the stock 350 that sat between these frame rails might be ok for a regular off road truck,

but we want more

and when you want ultimate power, you might want to start looking into diesel performance engines. They're big news lately and with gas prices you can't shake your head at horsepower ratings and torque curves that peak at 700

still get 2030

MPG.

00, all right.

So the decision was made out with the gas in

with the diesel, but that led us on a real quest. We had to find someone who was big into towing big in diesel performance and we knew that it was going to take more than just a fuel computer to fulfill our dreams in this truck.

And when you add up all those requirements, the road leads you to Gail Banks engineering. When we called him with our idea, he jumped on board and hooked us up with this GM

Duramax for our mock up.

And then later we'll trade this engine for a brand new

Duramax full of all sorts of internal goodies, like an upgraded crank shaft, new connecting rods and new pistons. Then here at extreme, we'll trade at the top end for some CNC cylinder heads and an upgraded twin turbo system all designed by Gale Banks engineering.

But the question everyone seems to ask is why is a heavy hitter, hard core diesel engine like this one better for towing than a lumpy old gas engine like that.

The answer is horsepower and torque curves. We built this Dodge

kick

up with Gale banks engineering

and Gail even spent some time at the extreme shop talking about the benefits of diesel power,

even though they require a different fuel source and higher compression ratios, they're very similar to a gasoline engine you can modify in the same way. And

if you look at the torque and the horsepower curves of a conventional gas engine,

you can see that the power increases as the RPM increases, the diesel is very similar except it increases at a much more rapid rate.

And that's due to the engine design and its ability to produce more power at a lower RPM.

You'll also be able to see that the curve is more flat and higher at a lower RPM. Every vehicle requires a certain amount of power to take off and that's called road horsepower. Now, you can also see that on this graph in a four speed transmission, the power peaks and then it drops off and that's because the truck's gearing is forcing that

PM drop. But as you speed up, that drop is less dramatic because a higher gear ratios, they're often more closer to each other, allowing the truck to perform in its peak curve. So the more gears you have, the less violent that drop is going to be, stay with us. And we'll show you what transmission we picked to keep our truck running in its peak power curve.

The Xtreme 4x4 event of the week is brought to you by Fram America's number one oil filter.

Welcome back to extreme for those of us who like to play outdoors. We understand the importance of dedicated trails or ohvs off highway vehicle areas because most of us don't have private land that we can access to go. Four wheeling on

and some of the top trails west of the Mississippi are in New Mexico's Choke Cherry Canyon where one trail in particular wreaks havoc. Even on the locals.

There are over 50 trails around Farmington, New Mexico.

But for the hardcore wheelers, it's about nailing the bone crusher.

This is extreme four wheeling right here. So, I mean, it doesn't get any better than either go or no go.

Well, the first claim on the bone crusher kind of roots out. Everybody that don't want body damage after you get past that it's constant body damage

in any of these extreme trails. Anything is liable to happen, especially when you get a group of guys like this out here tend to get a little wild. Sometimes

the bone crusher isn't for everyone.

Let the kids tear the

up. I'm gonna keep my eyes.

I agree

on the bone crusher. They met their match.

Shout

as soon as it hit, I heard it pop it, it just snapped all the bolts

and an axle shaft all at once. So we're looking at probably about $300 worth of repairs here.

You feel it in your stomach quick. Oh,

if that hurt, not usually supposed to spend that much, uh,

kind of got a little fixing to do here.

Broken parts weren't going to stop Zack from getting to the top.

I mean, you gotta continue on. I mean, if the Jeep is still running and you're only one axle down, you still got three left. I mean, what else can I do? You still gotta get out of the trail no matter what. So you just got to give the little gas and keep on going. That's what next weekend's for to fix it. Broken rigs and tight trails didn't scare off Zach Steele and his 74 blazer.

I have a family. So I take my dogs and my kid and my wife everywhere we go and we do the most extreme trails. They'll see us out there doing, doing our best to keep up with the guys, the rock leg.

He's trying to keep up in a full size no less.

You try to ride it like a, a

dirt bike. You keep the front end in the air and just keep the throttle pin

as the reins moved in, no amount of horsepower was going to help him through the bone crusher.

We run the hardest trails and now everybody says you can't make it in a full size and

I do my best to prove them wrong. I mean, today was obviously a fault. I didn't get to prove them wrong today, but

give me another shot when it ain't raining on us and we can probably get it done,

man. Look at steel go. He's not giving up.

Looks like bone crusher one X

in none. Speaking of which, what are we gonna do with that thing? I don't know, but that full size has inspired us. Maybe we'll just have to wait and see,

check back after the break. We'll be jumping back on our full size build here at Xtreme.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4 where we're getting ready to shove a pretty serious drive train in between the frame rails of our urban Gorilla project

and a new giant chain means new mount. So this factory cross members gotta go.

Now, the

Duramax diesel is a pretty healthy engine just in stock trim. But by the time we get done with it here, we're going to be pushing some pretty serious numbers at that flywheel. So we're going to need

a heavy duty transmission

and you don't get any more heavy duty than the Allison 1000. This a full helio

cut automatic transmission with five forward speeds, a lock up torque converter, two live PTS and computer controlled. This transmission is capable of towing over 26,000 pounds and that's in stock trim.

Now, we created up this transmission and shipped it off to hill killer transmissions. Now, they specialize in heavy duty pulling and diesel performance transmissions. And we told them the numbers that we expected to pull out of this

Duramax and the weight we're going to pull with our urban Gorilla. And they custom built this transmission

using heavy duty Kevlar clutches, cole

steels and a triple disk torque converter. Then they

dyno this thing out

1000 horsepower and 1200 ft pounds of torque. So we're comfortable in knowing that this transmission is gonna be able to stand up to whatever this

Duramax puts through it.

Not only is that drivetrain powerful, but it's huge. And for us to be able to fit in our turbos and our inner cooler, we're gonna wanna push that

Duramax back. So what I'm gonna have to do is make some modifications to the firewall by cutting out this huge chunk.

I set the interior fiberglass in place to get an idea of how much modification would be possible without affecting the passenger compartment.

Then I built this new sub frame out of one by one tubing

and welded it to the urban gorilla floor for added support

with the floor supported. I will do a rough cut with the plasma cutting

and I will clean up the cuts with the grinder

and weld the seam with the mint.

A custom engine will require custom mount. And after cutting some quarter inch plate

drill, the mounting holes,

I will use these new pro theane engine mount bushings inside some two inch quarter wall, do

M tubing

with everything packed together.

I can tig weld the entire engine out.

Now, since the turbo system for this engine is gonna be custom and we're gonna design that next time. We're gonna wait before we slipped out between the frame rails. So that's all we have for you today. So come back and play with us next week when we finish this drive train with our transfer case or should I say transfer case says, and I think I got the name, see suburban and urban gorilla, suburban gorilla. That's right. We'll see you next week. Bye now.