Bottom Drawer Buggy Part II - Ian Johnson Mud Racing / Smoke Run, PA

Today, a salute to heavy metal when our build team turns raw steel into a raucous buggy. Plus Ian saddles up only to get down and dirty at this extreme mud race

that and more including Jesse's fabrication tips right now on Xtreme 4x4.

Hey, what's up everybody, you know, here at extreme, we have a catchphrase. Go big or go home from the size of our shop to the size of our giant tires

and sometimes going big means that you have absolutely no money in your bank account. So today we're doing a bill that's gonna be easy on your wallet.

That's right. This is our bottom drawer buggy. A complete tube chassis trail truck built out of used parts left over from other projects. And we

call the bottom drawer buggy because just like you guys at home. Whenever we have anything left over from a project, we tend to throw it in the bottom drawer, the toolbox. Now, we don't expect everybody to have a turbo 400 sitting in their backyard,

but you might be able to find one for about 100 bucks or something. Now, remember this build is all about creativity. So please feel free to steal as many ideas from us as you can and use them on your own projects.

Now, last time we basically started out getting all the parts and pieces together like this Ford front axle that we'd originally bought for the poison spider. But we pulled the cover off. We found out that it was a Dana 50. So we got another 60 for that. Kept this one for later.

Now, the engine transmission and front axle is out of the suburban Gorilla,

but the whole project can't be used parts. And when we spend money, we're gonna give you a running total. So you get an idea how much it costs and it all starts with these Allied Rock Aon bead locks and it is an all steel bead lock wheel and they're one of the strongest out there for the money.

This rolled outer lip on the rock ring makes it super strong and almost impossible to bend if you hit it. Now, a combination of the Allied Wheels and our Mickey Thompson 46 inch tires run us about 650 bucks a corner.

Yeah,

two minutes into a building and we've already spent $2600. I know what you're thinking, but you have to remember, you need to spend your money in the right place. The right time for the right part

of the first thing we're going to deal with today is the chassis. If you remember, we went through tons of different designs to figure out which way we were going to go with our own. This is what we ended up with, which is eventually going to be the floor bars.

Now to give you an idea of cost on this whole chassis part of it

all we are going to

estimated at $3 a running foot for all the tubing.

Let's hoop this pig up.

Come,

can you blo

we got a hook to

see you

funny at

time.

I think it looks like the pitcher

go. Who?

You haven't seen any of our uh angle finders lately? Have you

while in our jewels never return.

You don't happen to have any of our angle finders. Do you all like five of our angle finders are missing.

Put

it in a safe place. Nobody asked me for it. I can't work without my,

a big piece of tubing

keeping track of every foot of in

58

DM that came off our steel rack. We use 103.5 ft for a grand total of 310 B.

Another area where we save some cash is in these poly seeds and five point harnesses from Summit.

We'll secure everything to the chassis with these tabs from A and A manufacturers

and we're going to be building a four Len

suspension system on our buggy, both front and rear. So that means we're gonna have to install some type of suspension shock like these 14 inch nitrogen air shocks that we got from Fox. Now, these are ideal for our buggy because they really work well in lightweight applications. It's the nitrogen charge inside the cylinder that actually holds up the vehicle weight and it's fully adjustable

right through that Schrader valve. We can also adjust how the shock reacts or its valve curve by adding oil through that same port. Now, the 14 inch shock obviously has 14 inches of travel and has an inch and a quarter hardened steel shaft and hem

joints at either end.

But the best thing about an air shock is there's no springs to mess with. So once this thing is mounted, we've got suspension

later on, Ian finishes up, welding the underside while Jessi begins building our 350 junkyard small block. But up next, no fear, mud racing when Xtreme 4x4 continues

time now for an Xtreme 4x4 tech tip.

All right, let's say you have just spent what seems like hours on a complex notch in a complicated area.

And then do

you have to go to the other side and make a mirror image of that exact same notch?

But here's a little tip for you. You don't have to start from scratch. All you have to do is use your first notch as a template.

Take a piece of paper and wrap it around the tube,

rub an impression and cut out the contour,

unravel the paper, turn it over and roll it around the second piece of tubing.

Then all you gotta do is trace,

cut

and grind the metal

and voila. You have the mirror image of that difficult match for the opposite side of your roll cage.

You know, getting to spend your day building wild trail buggies like this is obviously the best job in the world. But when you get an invite to go out and participate in something called the mud bash, you know, you're in for good times.

The road to glory on the hallowed grounds of muddy run raceway is littered with the body parts of those who came before them.

We bump, we bump. That's racing.

Some people do get mad about it but I don't really get mad about it. I just

figure that's just a part of racing. Door dings doesn't make veteran metal masher, Dick Walmer cry in his carburetor doors are cut out on the inside. You just kick them back out. Once they're dented, they're dented

them off, jump up and down on them, put them back on. That's the name of the game. It's harder on your truck. It's hard on your body parts. When you get the water, it's really, really tough. But if you want to win, you have to be all right. And that's the way it is. Now, the whole track is pretty wild, but the goal is to get a straight shot at the car wash

when you come into it. And you see a 4 ft jump there and jumps into probably about 30 yard long water hole, about 3 ft deep. It's amazing. It just hang on

and

once you hit the water, it's just like you hit a tree

and it stops you dead. Drivers can only do so much to prepare for the bruising body blow of impact.

My arms are locked, elbows are locked for that landing because when you land, it just slams the living

right out of you

and

the heck of our trash,

you

can't be scared. If you're scared, you're not gonna,

you might as well just park. It

can't get hurt unless you roll up down in the water hole and you drown. That's extreme.

You can't come out here and watch mud racing all day without wanting to get in the truck yourself. My good friend Darryl hooked me up. Any tips, man.

Yep. I want you to go out and have a good time. Hold it to the floor and go like hell. Darryl salvage is a mud truck builder and the proud father of two racing sons. That's a lot of fun. I'd rather watch them drive

than me. He hooked me up with his youngest son's 89 Bronco. What kind of stuff do you look

here? Build the truck. It has to have the individual suspension because they jump these trucks a lot. It's a 302 fuel injected. I mean, it's straight right off the street and there's not very many guys running ef I out here. Right. We're probably the second guy that's got it and we've had good luck with it. It's one of the top trucks in them. Two classes they named the truck. Are you surprised? And I was surprised to see it leave the first race by way of it. Tractor push. What are we trying to fix? I, I lost fuel pressure. Is this, does this make you wish you didn't have ef I on this truck? Oh, no, I love it. Do you see it take off?

It did. But then I saw it stop. The fix had the team stump.

So in order to make my mud racing debut,

I knew I had to get involved. Did you guys remove that stupid reset switch that Ford puts in these trucks?

No.

What's that?

It's usually up on the firewall behind the glove box.

You never

know

here. Hold on to this microphone.

A

minor adjustment and I was ready for my ride. My strategy out there is pretty simple to try to keep it on at least two wheels.

We're gonna be rocking and rolling.

I can't see a thing in this truck. It's awesome.

I think I'm in two wheel drive boys turned out two wheel drive was actually five wheel drive. Once I had that figured out I was feeling pretty good.

Yeah, we're just flying up the hill.

This is craziness.

A lot of smoke coming out of this truck.

I think my truck might be on fire.

I think I will now get out of the truck. The truck was spent.

But lucky for me, Darryl was just enjoying the show. I told him when he took off as long as you have fun, hold her to the floor. And what happens happens? What happened wasn't pretty

but boy, I had fun. I wanna thank Darryl for loaning me in the truck. I'm sorry, I broke it and, uh, it looks like I'm walking home and they're towing that thing out. So

see you next time.

So you honestly couldn't tell that you were pushing a giant tractor tire around the entire, no, I couldn't. I hit that thing. I felt a bump. I thought I just maybe hit a little rock or something.

But, uh,

you're just cooking, you hit that thing. You can't see, you can't see out the front window or the side windows. You're sort of feeling your way around the track. And II, I didn't know it was there until they told me it was. And then he started the guy's truck on fire. I feel bad about that. But the cool thing was is after I set it on fire, they got on the P A and they said I would

needs another truck and there were six guys lined up to give me a truck. So Michael W hall

hooked me up with the keys that has gone goofy

and, uh, basically lined me up on the line and I went again, which was great because all I wanted to do all day watching

was do that mud hole because it's got a wicked little lip on the end and everyone was getting good air and get through the car wash in the end. Obviously, the car, it looks like you're doing much better in this run. Well, I could see, see, I actually have a little window I could look out of which is kind of nice.

Is this the car was? That's the LA. It's the last thing that's,

it's

like you can tell it's coming.

How bad did that impact hurt? It doesn't hurt that bad. You think it would hurt hard? But when you come up and you land it almost like cushions the whole truck, but it's still pretty wild. Sweet. Did you have fun? Always?

There was mud.

That's all that matters.

Everybody. Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4. We pulled the drive train out of our bottom drawer, buggy to freshen it up before we mounted into the custom built two chassis and we just finished welding.

Now, the whole point of this project is to build a really good full tube trail truck built that have used parts left over from other projects,

but we can't all be used. And so far we spent a little over four grand,

but when it comes to the engine, we got a few tricks up our sleeve.

This engine was originally in the 87 Chevy Suburban that became our ultimate to

rig.

We went ahead and kept it around because it looked like it was in pretty good shape. We took it apart. We found that it's definitely been rebuilt.

Once apart, we found that the cylinders were bored 40 over and the crank was turned 20 under as well as the rods.

So with the rebu

from our local part store at a cost of 220 bucks, we can freshen up our short block with new rings and bearing.

Now, we thought about simply pulling the stock heads off this motor lapping the valves, throwing some new valve seals in them and call it a day. But then I remembered that I saw the guys down on trucks TV, take a crate motor, put some aluminum heads on them. So some smooth talking, I was able to get those stock cast iron heads from them. The original cam shaft, they pulled out of that crate motor,

double roller timing set and of course an unused oil pump.

Now, I know what you're thinking must be nice to find free parts in the shop.

But when you're working on a budget, you can get creative, call your buddies and trade parts you have laying around for stuff that they have or maybe offer to paint your house for cutting their grass. You never know

our

engine was originally an EF I truck and we had thought about trying to reuse it, but we could never get it to run when we had first got it.

We couldn't tell if it was a bad sensor or bad ECM.

So we found a type of induction that has all the benefits of an

F I but it burns a little bit cleaner and even better when you roll the truck over, it doesn't spill anything. Plus it all sits on top of a standard four barrel manifold just like this

rock piece.

Now, the magic fuel that Jesse's talking about is propane. And yes, I mean, the exact same propane you find your barbecue grill used for cooking hamburgers and hot dogs. Except that our kit from got propane uses a forklift storage tank. Now, inside this tank is a liquefied petroleum gas and when under pressure, it's a liquid. When you release it to the atmosphere, it's a gas,

the gas travels down a hose through a blow off valve. It'll keep the system from being over pressurized. Finally through a filter. A switching solenoid and into the regulator vapor.

This, we use the engine's coolant to heat up that propane as it leaves here as a warm gas ready to burn out of here. It comes into our mixing hat. Now, this works just like a carburetor, mixing the fuel in the air, allowing the engine to burn propane just like gasoline except it's not just light gasoline propane contains very little to no carbon. So your oil lasts longer has an octane rating of almost 100 and 10. And the best thing is because the tank is pressurized. There's no fuel pumps. All we have is two wires to hook up. The system's good to go.

All right. Well, go ahead and stick around during the break while we button this up and when we come back,

we're gonna put in the transmission in the transfer case.

Now, there's no doubt that the turbo 400 is one of the strongest three speed automatic GM ever put behind a V8. So we knew we were gonna keep this one around for our buggy build. The only problem is the reason we got our tow vehicle so cheap for our ultimate tow rig is the stock transfer case was actually broken right in half.

But we do have a day 300 left over from the automatic transmission swap we did on the Chief Jeep and we knew that we could adapt the two of them together. Thanks to Nova conversions,

their conversion kit that we're going to be using requires us to change the output shaft on the transmission

to meet up with the spines on the transfer case.

And that it also comes with a compact adapter that's made with a machine aluminum

and has an integrated clocking ring. So we can go ahead and flatten out that t

to install the new output shaft, we will have to completely disassemble our turbo 400.

We'll start by pulling out the pump

with the pan removed. We can pull off the valve bodies

to gain access to the center support pool.

Then the input shaft

clutches and bands

while the transmission is apart, expect the clutches for wear.

If you find blackened or worse, bare friction disks, the trans will need to be rebuilt.

Once the planetary gear set is removed,

the output shaft can be replaced.

Then all we have to do is put everything back in the case.

Oh my God.

Easy as pie.

Well, that's all we have for you today because one, we're out of time and

two,

we're all out of used parts. But don't worry the next time we got the old bottom drawer buggy back in the shop, we'll be slipping this drive train back between the frame rails, wiring it, getting ready to run and then even hitting the trail. So we'll see you next time.