700hp, 40s, bypasses, tube chassis rock buggy build

I WANT BILLET EVERYTHING! lol

 

It's kind of the opposite of 3D printing. One method creates by adding material, and the other by removing it. Cool.

 

Exactly as you said! That's why 3D printing is cool since you can have cavities and geometry that's impossible to do with machining since you just add where you want material instead of needing access to remove material. Granted there are plenty of limitations with 3D printing, primarily strength since you're depositing material so the interface between each layer can be weak, where as a billet or other solid block is homogenous and consistent throughout.

 

Since you guys are on the topic of 3D printing and machining, I'm curious what your take is on 3D printing via welding. This company (MX3D - https://mx3d.com/) came across my work desk in the steel construction magazine because they "3D printed" a bridge in Amsterdam. I know very little about welding so as a guy who welded together a tube chassis , does this have any legs for parts machining or is that market going to stay with CNC forever?

 

For some reason just saw this. That is very cool! 3D printing via welding is definitely becoming a thing. There's a company called Relativity Space that has gotten a lot of traction for doing a similar process but they are building entire orbital class rockets to compete with SpaceX and ULA. So I have no doubt you could build a bridge or any structure with a similar technique. At the end of the day it's working around the material constraints, and if you have a good understanding of the material and manufacturing limitations then you can do anything.

 

Also my new knuckles are shipping so that's exciting!

 

Dude so sick I can’t wait

 

AND THEY'RE HERE!









I haven't played with them much, just a quick test fitting of stuff since it's the middle of the day. With inserts and sleeves they weigh around ~14 lbs, where as the stock ones with high steer weigh ~32 lbs. The bearing sleeves fit awesome! Slide into the knuckle beautifully, I'm actually kind of worried the fitment might be too close but on the one knuckle I test assembled it was fine.



The sleeve is a light press fit on the bearing, and I was able to tap it on with a mallet. Though I'm not sure how to remove it now... Probably should've put some windows on the side to get a punch into to pull them off. I also can't tell if they're too long by like .060" or if I need to tap the sleeve down further onto the bearing. The base of the bearing shear boss has a radius so that might be what's causing the issue. Easy fix either way.



The unit bearing with the sleeve on dropped right down! It's a close fit, but not much worse than the stock knuckle.



The brake caliper inserts slide in about 75% of the way, then I tapped them down with the mallet. Those should've been a bit more of a press fit, but they're so tight for that initial 75% I'm not worried about it. The tie rod inserts are however a pretty good fit, which is why they're not in any of the photos. I haven't confirmed the press fit amount, by tapping them with a hammer it feels right but I don't want to squeeze the tie rod slot without a bar on the inside to stop it bending inward.



The rotor fits great, the caliper fits absolutely beautifully and the caliper bolts are an awesome fit in the inserts. The second maybe issue, is the face the unit bearing nuts rest against might be too far inset since the nuts I THINK will bottom out against the shoulder of the unit bearing stud before the nut contacts the aluminum face. The nuts might thread down further than I think, or just put a washer under it, or thread the studs like two extra threads. I'll test fit the unit bearing into the stock knuckle and see how much stick out the threads have since that face should be the same location as the stock face, regardless not a big deal.



I grabbed one of the axle stubs and put a boot on it to test fit the bore and it slips right through beautifully! No more fucking with CV boots and getting them on and off inside the knuckle!



And the final picture of a benchtop assembly. I have not tested the ball joints besides confirming they will be a press fit and from feel/visually look to be correct. Tomorrow I can hopefully get the knuckles hardness tested at a local diesel shop which should tell me if they're correctly heat treated to T6, which is needed because there's a ~3x increase in strength over no heat treat. This is why I'm waiting to install the press fit parts because if the knuckle isn't heat treated I can send it out for heat treat to fix it. Once the material properties are confirmed I'll do final assembly!

 

That is really looking good!! Keep up the great work on this build

 

Shit yes

 

Hawtness...

 

The front axle is (mostly) together, and at least from the axle tube outward looks awesome!





The biggest issue has nothing to do with the knuckles, but apparently I'm the only one who has issues with the axle shaft getting stuck in the axle seal. I don't know what the deal is, I called RCV and the sealing surface is right in spec for the axles. The seals are the only type they sell at NAPA. I don't know what the deal is, but the shaft becomes so press fit into the seal (which is a metal band with a rubber ribbing) that it gets stuck.





I tried every possible technique I could think of, and finally gave it and said fuck it I'll just snatch it with the truck. I laid a tarp and some tables and shit to stop the shaft sling shotting through a window.





And I should've done that first since it worked like a champ and I was able to get both axles out!





The seal is so pressed onto the shaft I had to slit it with the angle grinder to release the tension and get it off. I put a bit of gear oil on the seal face before install, which was still there. This is actually the second and third time it's happened, one time before these seals it happened but at least I could hammer a rod through the housing and pop it out. This time with both stuck really screwed things up.





I ended up using a Kingpin axle seal (Spicer 36487) that was recommended, and shown on the left below. It's a more conventional deal with a big rubbery lip instead of a coat of rubber on a steel band, so the shaft shouldn't get stuck. I also like these seals since the metal part that's pressed into the housing has a really big lip to help align the axle shaft compared to the 99-04 seal. Time will tell how it seals, but at least I don't need an entire vehicle yanking the shaft to get it out. If I was on a trail and needed to swap the shaft it'd be nearly impossible. I considered turning the seal surface down on the lathe but if I got another axle shaft ever then it'd have the same issue, better to fix the actual issue being the seal. Why I only have this is beyond me, I've now bought 5 of these axle seals (2 sitting here new that look identical) and they all seem consistent. It seems like a stretch I'm the only one running RCVs (which by the way are meant for stock seals) and NAPA seals, but yet here we are and somehow they are clashing.





With that task out of the way, knuckle time! I pressed in the inserts, pressed in the ball joints, and tapped the hole for the steering stop bolt. I did slightly panic when I pressed in the upper ball joint because the lip sat above flush which I didn't expect, but I came to find out different ball joints have different thickness lips, however the distance between the shank and the bottom of the lip which contacts the knuckle surface is the same. Which makes sense, but I would've thought there'd be more consistency there.


I did run into an issue though, the bottom of the unit bearing where the bearing sleeve gets pressed on has a pretty good sized fillet that I did not account for, because of that the bearing sleeve sat proud of the face the unit bearing nuts contact so they couldn't tighten. This was an easy fix on the lathe, I shortened the sleeve and added a chamfer.





Moving to actually installing the first knuckle and everything went great! I reassembled the axles and freshened them up, and they slid right through the oversized unit bearing hole and into the axle and through the new seals! By far the quickest and cleanest install of the RCVs, absolutely awesome and that upgrade by itself is almost worth it.





Next up the unit bearing, which is a snug fit (makes the bearing fitment into the stock knuckle feel sloppy) but everything lines up beautifully and it's together!





The second possible issue, is the shank part of the unit bearing studs sits proud of the surface the nuts contact, only by maybe .010-.015". I ended up with a box of washers that fit perfectly over the bolts and inside the cut outs, so I honestly can't say if I meant to do that? I put washers on everything to stop the aluminum getting chewed up, but I did note that surface should be raised .030" so the nuts would probably seat even without washers. I'll use washers either way, but they shouldn't be required.


The one thing I will say, is the extra room around the axle joint is awesome to work around! The stock knuckle can be a bitch to get tools to the nuts, this was an absolute breeze with tons of access.




The stock knuckles, while not hard, have always been a bit of a bitch to work around. I can't stress enough how easy the new knuckles make it. If you break a RCV, pull the caliper, pull the unit bearing easily, and pull the shaft out. You cut out all the struggle bus of the CV boot and fucking with greasy parts and needing specific sockets and extensions to reach things. It's so easy!


Moving on to the brakes, nothing exciting. The rotor fits perfect, caliper bolts line up great. I had ordered washers for the caliper bolts, again to save the aluminum, however they are not required.





The high steer slot was 1.650" but the tie rod spacers ended up 1.690", not sure where I came up with 1.650" but they probably should've been 1.700". I turned down the spacers a little and then they fit great. If there's a RevB I ever sell I'll correct that so off the shelf spacers could be used fine. You'll also note I only have the outer bolt hole sleeved, for some reason I only bought sleeves for one set of holes. I can't run the inner hole on this axle anyways, but would've been nice to sleeve the inner hole just to protect it, but I didn't want to wait.





And that's it! Everything installs like factory or easier! Should be stronger, saves almost 40lbs, and makes a lot of things more simple! Might be putting lipstick on a pig, but I cant justify fabricated axles right now but $2k for these bought a lot of upgrades I think. I was even thinking I could design some billet steel inner Cs to swap the whole knuckle assembly tona fabricated housing in the future...


Oh and I forgot to mention above, I hardness tested the knuckles and they were an 80 for Rockwell B, so right in spec from what I've found for 7075-T6. Way harder than T0, and harder than 6061-T6 so I'm confident they are the correct material and properties!





In other news of the buggy, I've been slowly working on stuff while I was waiting for the knuckles. The chassis has had some bracing happen and some more to come.





I also dropped the old drivetrain back in so I can truss out the engine bay around the exhaust, as well as install the new carrier bearing, and lastly build the new trans mount.





There's a number of other improvements happening as well, the new engine is just about complete and needed a bit of fabrication to fit things around the supercharger/new heads which sit lower so had some interference.



I'm not sure if I'll bring the buggy to KOH (recreationally), I'd like to but still a lot to do in two weeks, though relatively speaking I've almost finished fixing and upgrading everything I wanted and bolting it back together should only take a couple days so we'll see.

 

WOW!! That was a bit but it looks like things all worked out. Pulling shafts with the truck! Hilarious Ratchet??? What ever works. One heck of a rig that’s for sure, what a monster!

 

As my father a foreman machinist at Pratt and Whitney always said, "if we can envision it we can engineer it". Well done!

 

Back and unloaded from King of the Hammers! Lot has happened in a short period of time.

First exciting news is I bought a semi



First diesel I've ever owned hahahaha. Got it for $9k (well $10k since we negotiated adding in some super singles in the back too). Flew up to Idaho with my neighbor who's a diesel mechanic, looked it over, and drove it back getting home at 3am. Externally it seems in pretty good shape. Inside needs a deep cleaning and some of the climate controls seem a bit fucky, but for 20 years old and $9k for the truck what do you expect. My current plan is to remove the 5th wheel plate, flat bed it so I can haul the buggy for short trips, and then add a gooseneck ball and normal tow bar. It got 8.5mpg driving back from Idaho at 80mph, so will get the same or better mpg than my Tundra does towing and I'll be able to tow whatever I want. Oh and it has 250 GALLONS of fuel hahahaha. I am absolutely stoked. I did trial by fire and once out of Boise I learned how to shift it in a truck stop and onto the interstate we went! Anyways, super excited for that. Might start its own build thread.

Fast forward a bit and I wanted to take the buggy to KOH, though worst case I'd take the Can-Am. As of the Thursday before KOH, the front axle, rear axle, and new engine were ready to go. But first up was to swap tires around. From the last race I had a very bent wheel that wouldn't hold air, another tire with a nail, and another tire with a side wall gash. I had two cheap spares I had picked up, so swapped the sidewall gash tire since the tire shop said it couldn't be fixed. Plugged the tire with the nail. Put the spare tire/wheel on as a main. And then tried to fix the super bent wheel. After using a press to bend it out and resulting in a crack (it had to get unbent maybe 2" or more), I decided to do a couple cuts to stress relieve it and allow for some "petals" to be bent back.



I then bent them vaguely into shape, and drilled the base of the crack to try and prevent propagation. I then welded the inside and outside.





I then took a flappy disc to clean up the bead area.



One thing I did not think of, was the inner lip that holds the tire bead from slipping inward, also doubles as a seal when installing a tire. Air seal forms there, bolt on the beadlock ring, pressurize it, and the inner bead pops over that lip and then seats against the main lip. Because I didn't think of that and just sanded those areas down, we had to use the classic starter fluid trick to seat the bead.



Which worked great! Though my sanding wasn't perfect, and probably wouldn't of hurt to lather some RTV on. The bead holds 5psi of air but anything more and it leaks back down. Good enough for a spare and I'll touch it up more in the future, lay some more weld down and then spend some time smoothing the transitions out.

Additionally, I had mounted the old 5.3 with the trans and Atlas to test fit some stuff so that was still sitting in the chassis. I made a new trans mount since the old one was a drop out cross member that I had since deleted to brace the bottom. I also reinforced some stuff, and dropped the engine pan to make an engine skid. My engine pan is a Tilden baffled unit with integrated skids that sits about 2" shorter than the stock pan, so I had to pull the stock pan to make the engine skid. I'll show pictures of the skid later since I didn't take any making it, but explains the stock pan being dropped.



I also reinforced the winch mount. I am a stage 12 retard and the winch mounts I had made that I thought were 1/8" were actually 1/16" so super thin. I finally got around to fixing them by cutting some 1/8" overlay plates and welded those in.



Sometime on Friday I finally pulled the mockup drivetrain. At this point the plan is to leave Tuesday or Wednesday. Again, both axles, and the new engine, are ready to go. Press start on the timer now, since we're building a buggy!

Friday at 3pm we have the bare chassis:



Next up is integrating the new engine to the old transmission and Atlas since it's easier to drop the whole assembly in as one piece. The front of the buggy gets used as an engine hoist to remove the engine stand.



And shoutout to my buddy, he helped for the vast majority of this and couldn't have done this timeline by myself by any stretch. He put the entire rear of the car together by himself while I got the wiring and front end put together, and then helped me finish up the inside. Hopefully he can codrive for races as was the plan before since he deserves it.

Oh, forgot to mention, the trans pan also had to be swapped for the very original transmission I had a long time ago that didn't have reverse. That bad boy has sat out back for a long time and finally served a purpose by lending its pan. To reiterate, the trans pan had been severely dented when the front crossmember broke and bent backwards. I don't know if this was entirely mandatory since I thought the shifter was stuck on the trans pan but after dropping it didn't seem to be the case and the stock pan hadn't cracked. Regardless, fresh pan and gasket had to get put on too. With the new engine integrated to the transmission we dropped that in.



I think this was the end of Friday night. The engine, transmission, atlas, fuel cell, and some coolers had been mounted and the rear axle staged.



The wiring harness had been draped in, which at this point looked like a cluster but really wasn't that bad. Most of the wires hanging out are comm wires that area really long and get strung through the chassis to plug into helmets and stuff. For the most part everything was labeled and straight forward. The passenger side was easy since it was a fat wire loom, the driver side had all the comm stuff to hook up, and the center was a bit of a cluster since relays and stuff needed to be hooked up too. But at least it was in and starting to take shape.



Saturday I didn't take any pictures, but this was the end of the day on Saturday. Starting to look like a car again!





That really wrapped up the big external stuff. Sunday I only have two photos of also, nearly an exact 24 hours later and looking almost identical to Saturday. However it's all the details going in now. Steering lines hooked up, brake lines, electrical, interior panels, lots of little components.





I also talked to the guy who had tuned the 5.3 before the last race, and got on his schedule for the new 408 to get tuned the next day. Sunday ended with firing the new engine and running it just long enough to get oil pressure. Effectively at the end of Sunday it was a drivable and functional vehicle, albeit needed paneling and tuning and the front driveshaft still.

Monday was wrapping things up. Like this stupid bolt for the engine mount that was too big, but slid in enough to get stuck, so I removed it and lathed it down since I didn't have time to buy a different bolt hahahaha



By 3pm Monday the buggy was rolled into the yard (both to get good cell service away from the faraday cage of a shop, and because the new setup is insanely loud) and "Dr. EFI" of Project Gattago remoted into my laptop and spent a solid hour remote tuning the buggy. All of it was at idle and blipping the throttle, so not even driving it around since there was no seat hahaha. Dude is an absolute animal. I'll have him check out the tune again, but 12 hour notice and he was able to get it running like a champ and it probably did 100+ miles with neutral rev limiter retard banging and full throttle obstacle and desert abuse and didn't skip a single beat.



Immediately after tuning I got in the truck and drove into Hurricane UT because the carrier bearing kit I got from Busted Knuckle was for 1350s, except the Atlas had a 1410 yoke which I didn't have an (easy) way of replacing. Luckily this dude who has a company called Driveline Tech had the parts I need! He builds driveshafts for all the local guys I guess and had just the yoke I needed! I plan to use him to get my proper driveshafts made, but in the mean time I was chopping up what I had and making new driveshafts!

The front driveshaft had to get extended, part of the benefit of the new carrier bearing was lengthening the front driveshaft since I've had to go to lengths to not have it limit travel since it was so short. But to go full ghetto, the easiest way to do that was to cut the shaft in half, slide in a tube the next size down, and weld it together! Janky as hell, and nowhere near straight, but it held all week and did the job!



I also made a mount for the new carrier bearing, again no pictures but I'll show some later. Monday night concluded with the buggy at 99%. Running, driving, steering, 4WD, electrical, everything except the drivers seat and floor which hadn't been put in so the carrier bearing could be done. This went from a completely bare chassis Friday at 3pm to this Monday at 11pm.



That is the end of the re-build pictures. Tuesday morning I installed the seat and panels, took it for a quick test drive around the block, and then we loaded everything into a trailer! Here's a quick video right before we went to load it:

https://youtube.com/shorts/jKmhqHtPs2k?si=XzkuUi5SoJKLhDWE

My friend had just gotten a new truck, so we used that with my cab over camper and his enclosed trailer and put the buggy and his RZR into it. The buggy had to steal some tires and wheels from my neighbor so the rear axle could fit between the fender wells, but otherwise it was a great setup and nice not to take multiple vehicles! We decided to leave early Wednesday since we had a friend driving through from Salt Lake City for KOH but he wasn't gonna pass the house until late.



And the buggy out of the state for the first time!



Again, I really struggled to get pictures of anything.

The first night there I ended up doing Turkey Claw (the easiest trail in Johnson Valley) as a feeler for the buggy. I did a lap around camp to make sure the engine was running fine, which it's an absolute monster, and then went straight into some rocks to test the new knuckles and other tweaks. No pictures, Turkey Claw was a breeze. After that we lost our friends, got them on the radio and they were at Chocolate Thunder so we headed that way. At the bottom of Chocolate we decided to go up it, we're here with the buggy and it's made for this so no beating around the bush. Plus it'll be easy for our friends to find us (probably not an issue in reality, the thing is so god awfully loud, it's probably on par with some of the loudest big dog Ultra4s and I know they're running the same mufflers). It was probably 3 cars wide of traffic in classic fashion, but our friends found us waiting at the bottom and one of them said there was a higher line to the right and do I want to try it and it'd go around people. I said sure, we'll check it out. Went up this far right line, went over this pretty good sized rock which the buggy handled like a champ--it continues to impress me how stable it is and the insane travel of the rear is awesome! Once getting past a couple people I ended up trying to thread through some rocks on the right that no one had really been lined up for, which leads to this video:

https://youtube.com/shorts/i2nwt1VuhGo?si=Wsyswm2FZsOuFt6l

And just like that it was on the roof! Pretty slow roll. I felt so close to having it. The driver's side panel was laying against a rock, and as I backed up to drop the passenger back down the drivers rear tire ran into a rock/hole and that's what sent it over. It was a riot and a lot of fun! No one was trying those lines and just sitting parked, and showing up with the loudest vehicle you're obligated to party a bit hahaha



The hilarious part is, a guy runs up and shouts my name that he has a winch, and it turns out it's a guy with a EV swapped 4Runner I codrove for in a race in Sacramento a year ago! He hooked up the winch and they continued the roll direction and it was back over!

End of this video shows the winch over:

https://youtu.be/gF3PvoGAC7Q?si=ji8vF9XR5t2q8bus

After rolling it over, we climbed back in. I will say there was a very scary moment where I was asking everyone around me if we are clear, and no one was giving a definitive "no" including a guy standing right next to the drivers side, so I put the transmission in neutral to roll off the huge rock the driver's side was sitting on and level out before firing the engine (since I knew we had leaked out some fluids) and the whole thing slid back a bunch since the brakes had gotten squishy (air in the lines from flipping over?), and it turned out there was a guy right behind us and he was spooling in his winch line (not the guy I codrove for) and as the buggy rolled backwards he barely got out of the way from being squished. So many things that could've gone better and safer in that regard, but huge thing there was to get a definitive "yes you are good to back up" from someone and know they have scouted behind me. Everything ended up fine, but it was very close to bad.

Likewise another scary thing, I fired the buggy up, oil pressure was good but I didn't know the oil level since the dip stick didn't show anything at all. Since I had oil pressure right away, I called that good, but wanted to get off the trail and out of the way fast so I could look it over. Well my buddy who had been riding the whole time wasn't fully strapped in I learned afterwards. I had seen him fucking around with his lap, but he had been holding a bunch of stuff already so I thought it was just that, but it turns out he was struggling with the belts I guess. I'm thinking he didn't loosen them so was having issues clipping them in. Again, nothing bad happened from that, but another lesson of getting a definitive "yes I am strapped in" before going. I had assumed since I was fully belted in already that he was, when in reality I have a lot more experience with fast entry/exit and especially with this vehicle and belt/seat setup, so me thinking he's had tons of time was extremely stupid and could've ended badly.

Anyways, on happier notes, with it fired up I completed the trail, quick clip of that:

https://youtube.com/shorts/rVNyHY9Ku7w?si=QLM7spqT9ByEsgeF

The buggy was fine from the roll, couple things dinged but nothing broken. Put a quart of oil in and she was in top form again! I had meant to rig up a janky "catch can" thing and totally forgot, so I think the oil was from the valve cover vents since all the other fluids seemed fine. We also bled the brakes at the top of Chocolate and she's been cherry ever since.

The rest of the week was your normal KOH stuff. I helped pit for Amber Turner 468 like usual. Didn't do much besides help at main a bit, my only claim to fame being I fixed their radio since someone had gone full complicated with repeaters and stuff and evidently never tested the radio after programming that shit.



The CEO and Chief of Operations (?) of Dobinson USA visited our camp since he knows the guy from SLC, so I gave both of them a ride around Johnson Valley in the buggy which was cool. Gave quite a few people I know rides. The buggy finally working after 5.5 years and finally going to the event we all gather at was a big deal hahaha. It ran like an absolute champ and near flawless. The carrier bearing sits on bushings and I didn't have the correct size washer for the bushings, so the bolt head ended up pulling through one side which made the carrier bearing slap the chassis a bit, fixed that because someone had the correct size washer that I somehow didn't have in the whole shop.

No one with our group really had a rock buggy, and I didn't want to run any trails by myself, so Chocolate and Turkey were the only things we did. I did Turkey kind of on Saturday night as a final trail, which ended up as an absolute cluster fuck. This Jeep JK was stuck and no one could get around him, and for some reason he couldn't winch himself out. I eventually gave up, ran around to the back and down the whole thing backwards so I could winch his fat ass out of the way. But that thing was so high centered, my warn 9000 lb winch would barely budge it. At one point I let off the throttle and the voltage dropped which resulted in a world of hurt.

I set the buggy up with effectively a high current and low current wire paths. The low current wires all go through the switch pros since it has internal fail safes if there's a current spike (ie no fuses). The high current wire path is a line that goes from the battery, through the master kill, to the starter motor, then the alternator, then the winch. All of those daisy chained together. There is a single 150A fuse right off the battery for those. When I dropped the rpms, the battery voltage dropped to like 8.5V, causing the current to spike from the winch, blowing that 150A fuse. I had completely forgotten that fuse existed, I thought it was big enough it would never blow unless that big ass high current wire broke and tried to weld itself to the chassis. Because of that daisy chain through one fuse, and because all the other systems were on a separate set of wires, the starter motor wouldn't engage even though the rest of the systems would fire up including the starter relay energizing. That alone isn't enough though, if the 150A fuse blew while running who cares, winch and starter and alternator dead. But because the voltage fell so low, the switch pros low voltage fail safe activated and shut down power to everything including the ECU. The ECU would've been fine, but it saw the ignition switched power from the Switch Pros turn off, so the ECU shut down. Winch dead. Starter motor dead. Engine turns off. Winch now stops pulling so much power, so the switch pros reactivates. Everything turns on. Press start, and relay clicks but the starter motor won't engage.

That's a long story, but I'm now stuck after the one obstacle on turkey claw, failed to pull this JK out of the way, and everything seems to be working except it won't start. Luckily this is all a huge learning experience. The JK it turns out has a winch behind this hidden cover, and it's evidently larger than mine since he hooks to me and pulls himself out. Lesson here, get a snatch block. On the plus side, because I have the electric brake booster, even though my engine is dead I have full braking and not working hard. And on the plus side, I am out of the way past the main obstacle so people can drive around me all day luckily. After a lot of troubleshooting since I had forgot about that stupid fuse, like literally an hour+ of trying to figure out wtf is going on with the starter, I finally find that fuse which is buried in the wire sheathing off the battery since it's a big fusible link that bolts inline, so I had fully covered it and the bolted connections to keep it shorting against anything. Removed that, bolted the wire onto the battery, and she fired up like nothing was ever wrong! Lesson there, remove that huge fuse entirely. I had it there to stop the big like 0AWG wire from welding to the chassis if it ever got pinched, but I don't know if that's really needed since I have the master kill which shuts down both hot and ground to everything, so if something starts sparking I just hit the kill switch and nothing besides the battery terminals directly touching can cause shorting. I think for simplicity that fuse should just be deleted permanently. And that was a great topper to the end of the week hahaha



Otherwise, it was an animal! The new shock tune (front bypasses have a 20 face shim and 30s for comp, rear have 20 face and 35s for comp) seemed pretty good, in handled the chop really well and I don't think I ever used the bump stops fully and I took some hard hits. Probably need to stiffen the shocks more since running out of bypass adjustability still, or maybe time for some bigger shocks or a professional to look at tuning them.

The engine is an absolute animal, and for being tuned at idle essentially it is awesome! The transmission I know is just sucking power, it's the same 250k stock unit since I didn't have time to get a nice transmission. The low load range needs to be chilled out a bit though, it's so insanely torquey in low range, there is no way to give it throttle without it being too much torque. You're either idling or jolting forward from just a tiny amount of throttle. Which makes crawling kind of hilarious, since you're more of mini bouncing along and sounds like it has a huge cam as you barely tap the throttle and it jumps over things. This engine has been a long time coming, it is so awesome and the first engine I've ever fully built from the ground up. The fact it fired right up and runs great is so cool! I did WOT runs all over, I'd bang it on the limiter when the 22RE morons would come flooring their little four bangers, it is just an absolute unit of an engine. God there's so many things I adjusted and never posted or took photos about too. Like the power steering pump bracket I had to mill and make a new plate to reorient it to clear the blower sitting lower on this engine, that then made the idler pulleys need to be adjusted to get the belt tension correct, so much stuff happened in those couple days it's wild and the fact it was so incredibly reliable right out the gate is so cool.

God this update is so long already. I took a bunch of photos of things that need tweaking or were done to the buggy so I'll run through those.

The buggy would occasionally pop at idle from the exhaust, though post roll that seemed to stop for whatever reason. But the trailing arms have a lot of soot on them, I don't know if that's from running rich or just purely from the exhaust having no tips. I need to add tips!



Here's a photo of the rear underside. It's looking a lot cleaner. Tearing the whole thing down and rebuilding it and being able to reassemble stuff that was in a more logical orientation helped a lot.



The back end as we all know is a bit of a cluster for mounting. The roll was kind of funny, this poor fire extinguisher had the nozzle ripped off and got dented, but the radiator fans that stick out were pretty much fine and the antenna of all things was unscathed from being upside down.



This panel got a bit of love. Also the chase bar got bent, and even caved in the roof panel it bolts to slightly, but it still works fine!



This door tube got a pretty good sized dent from presumably the roll?



The side panel got real chewed up. I like it. Also i-spy the small tires in the back. They're on 20s and originally we were gonna put them in front but they hit the high steer.



I got some Busted Knuckle links for the lowers. The aluminum upper links are actually heavier I calculated than the 1.75x.120 uppers I have so I left the uppers. You can also see the engine skid cradle thing, it's removable with some tube disconnects at the chassis. I'll probably add some diagonals up to the motor mounts, but we didn't have time and it was low on the priority list.



Here's the carrier bearing setup. I made a super sweet bracket that was one piece and all bent into place. It has a straight slot and a curved slot to allow the bearing to be located where needed. The driveshafts I made are not remotely straight, but between the bushings and the slots it's able to flex all over the place and works fine. I'll have that guy in Hurricane make me some good ones. It's all 1350 U-joints now instead of the 1350/1410 combo I had before.



The knuckles didn't miss a beat! The only thing I might do, maybe a V2 modification, is a steel "boot" that wraps around the LBJ area to reinforce it since aluminum gets wrecked pretty fast from rocks. This is the only real damage, and even the LBJ is pretty well worn down. I may have run into a pretty good sized rock at 35mph between the knuckle and diff, call it testing and it was "intentional".



Other side is fine. I might try running the inner holes and see how far I can push the steering with where the shock mounts are. The knuckles were great, but let's be real, a hundred miles, three rock trails, that's hardly a test. They had no issues which is great, but if they did already something would be majorly wrong. It's kind of sad how hidden they are, I don't think anyone ever looked at the buggy and was impressed with the knuckles unless I pointed them out. You see some Reid Knuckles being flaming orange and know it's them, like with the RCV boots. These are actually low profile looking at them, or maybe I just hang out with the wrong people hahaha



I need a catch can. After the roll I "fixed it" with my original quick fix, which was to run a hose from one valve cover to the other and poke a hole in it hahahaha. I actually like this concept so much I might build on it, because if you're on your side the majority of oil will just go from one head to the other and not into the catch can hahaha. I also prettied up the wiring and lines a bit more, the fuel lines don't do that big retarded loop and just plug in right next to the front injectors. I also had to lengthen the coolant breather thing for the heads that connects to the thermostat housing--quite a few hoses got modified last week when the new engine went in.



Link mounts are the same as before essentially, but braced a bit more. This wasn't an issue but needed doing. I have some absolutely awesome concepts for one piece billet link mounts with shear pins that don't use bolts, but I don't think they'll get incorporated on this chassis ever.



New trans mount is really low profile and a surprising amount of effort went into it to make it friendly. The transmission lines need to get shortened evidently too.



The fuel cell filler cap is as always an absolute pile of shit. I need a different one. Or maybe I'll design my own that doesn't suck absolute ass. Billet filler with O-ring seals and check ball? We'll see. Radiator fan shroud got some upgrades, the previous mounting was horrible so I welded some plates to the radiator itself on the side and now you fasten a couple bolts inside the fan shroud to the radiator directly. It's extremely secure, and in the roll the fan shroud got hit slightly and bent a little but held on fine and still plenty of clearance everywhere. The shroud is my favorite aluminum part on the the whole vehicle, it turned out so good. I also had to delete the fuel cut offs from the main/return line, whatever ones I had were so shitty and started spraying all over the place. Luckily I have enough shit in my fittings box that I was able to remove them and not change anything and put some straight pass throughs in for now.



And that wraps up my post for KOH 2024! Just got everything unloaded. Have a list of stuff to tweak on and improve as always, but the buggy is working great and I can't wait to do some wheeling in Sand Hollow again! And pretty soon it'll be loaded on the back of the semi which will be so cool!

 

Bad.Ass.

 

Add it your calendar for next year

 

I definitely need to and we need to link up for the mint

 

Took the words right out of my mouth!!! (ANIMAL)!!! Fricken amazing!!! Holy Moly y’all got after it that’s for sure!!!! Get er done!!!! Very cool very cool indeed!!!


That is so cool!!!! the stuff y’all take that thing over is awesome,, it amazes me how much that machine will do!!

 

Sniv's Tales of Mayhem and (Mis)Adventure!

 

Amazing! That was like reading a good book!

I still don’t understand how you have time to sleep, have a girl, or keep a job with all these “hobbies”.

 

Hahahaha, with the exception of throwing the buggy together over the weekend I actually feel like I'm pretty lazy especially in the winter. Efficiency is key for the time I do get to spend on hobbies, thus why I have things like the plasma table since otherwise stuff takes forever, and even more forever to do nicely hahaha. And not having kids (yet) helps too!

 

I've done a couple things since KOH. First was moving the tie rod to the inner hole which increased my steering angle from 30deg to 42deg



The ram isn't quite maxed out but I had to trim so much shit, and the RCVs max at 45deg so it works out. I can't steer further without hitting the shock. Nearly a 50% increase in steering plus will speed up the steering ratio, though I still want to go to a 2 turn orbital.




Can't wait to try it out in the rocks! It's a considerable difference driving around normally.



And then the recent thing was I found cylinder 4 wasn't firing, as well as the blower was only making 2psi and the bypass valve wasn't fully closing. I think I found the issue being a plug wire that was cracked and shorting out. I replaced that coil pack and the plugs also, and changed the oil. The oil looked great, normal super fine metal shavings and no large chunks so the engine seems happy! I bumped to 10w-40 since the oil pressure seemed a bit low and that's a common thickness to run. I also welded a new filler cap on the radiator that's oriented (more) vertically since the previous cap was next to useless for filling it with how angled the radiator is. I also temporarily zip tied the bypass valve closed to test what max boost with the new engine setup is. I then started running into issues the past two days of the serpentine belt eating itself even though nothing seemed to change. I ended up welding a flange on the back side of the tensioner pulley since the serpentine was falling off the back side for some reason, and then next tracked down that one of the idlers wasn't in plane with the other pulleys so was pushing the belt slowly off of the power steering pulley. I have no idea why all of this started having issues, it was fine at koh and then I pull the belt off and reinstall it and then everything got hacked up somehow. I think I'll scan the front end and design some billet mounts for everything in the near future, I've wanted to do that for awhile since the belt routing and mounting can be improved.



And holy shit it pulls like a mule now. I think it may finally have achieved the title of this thread with how much power it's making Running as a N/A V7 it already made the 5.3 feel slow, but this feels like almost a double in power with it properly running. It pushes you back into the seat launching in 4wd pretty good, and that's only at 8psi from the blower and still with that original tune done at just idle and blipping the throttle. My Tundra does 0-60 in sub 5s and this feels not quite that fast but not far off. I'm really happy with how it feels now, and the engine is running great. This is also through the same worn out old 4l80e and torque converter. New trans and converter and maybe a smaller pulley and it has a lot of power left on the table. I'm also only spinning it to 6k, so theoretically it's just chilling and not working very hard.

Oh I also added a proper catch can!

Yesterday was the first trip to Sand Hollow in awhile.



Didn't really get any photos, stole some from my friends.









Buggy is working great. The new steering angle made a huge difference, I would've been backing up all over before.

I'm thinking I might need to put a larger alternator in, we stopped at one point and I turned the engine off and just a few minutes of the fans and fuel pump running killed the battery (though it self recovered).

The new engine seemed a bit more tame for crawling than at KOH, not sure why. Maybe just the different rocks. The thing is so brutally loud, I might change the exhaust or try to add more mufflers. I can feel my ear drums shake even without full throttle if I don't have a headset on, and I can live with it being loud but when you're trying to crawl or idle and can't hear anyone talk it's a bit much. We were talking about having the exhaust exit up and over the vehicle instead of dumping in front of the axle might help too, thats obviously how a lot of Ultra4 setups are and a lot of them run the same mufflers I do.


The carrier bearing had some issues coming loose, got it tightened up temporarily and then dropped the front driveshaft off at Driveline Tech just down the street. He's building me a new front driveshaft and I'll drop the rear off to get copied soon too. There's a race end of April and the front was thrown together for KOH and needs to be proper to go fast.


I did a quick sprint through the West Rim loop at the end, the buggy is all around doing awesome. Shocks need some more tuning but it's handling great, has tons of power, and does alright rock crawling so I'm very happy how it's working. Turning into a really fun dual sport setup!

 

Holy sweetness! Lots of hard work and trial/error shining through on your skills! Looking good for sure. That transport rig is killer too.

 

When I saw that there was an update to this post, I immediately thought to myself, "I'm going to ask about that tractor you bought and tease him about not including an update about that too." But lo and behold, just a single photo to preemptively shut me down! Hahaha!

 

LOL! Buys a semi to haul his buggy. You definitely have northern Berkshire roots in there.

 

Love the "Not for Hire" on the semi. Just incredible to read what you post. I definitely have no knowledge on this stuff, but its still just enjoyable to read your posts and be in awe of the pictures. Think its clean how you got the back of the semi set up to haul the buggy.

Cool stuff all around!

 

Threw some GoPro mounts on the chassis and spent a few hours fucking around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2Uzb5mNueA

I need to pull the plugs again and see how it's looking, it feels fine but one of the exhausts sounded a bit weird. I ordered a second wideband, but the Holley somehow doesn't have misfire detection which blows my mind, so besides monitoring left vs right AFR and how the engine sounds there's no easy way to know if it's firing on all 8 (I've used a IR gun but that's not very reliable since the rear header tubes are hard to get a good reading off of). I should probably buy ANOTHER set of plug wires and swap them all out to be safe, course for all I know it's running on all 8 fine... It certainly feels fine, but I thought it felt fine when it was only running on 7 too so now I'm worried.

Still waiting on the new front driveshaft. Talked to Tyler @ ADS a bit more (not about the video, just in general) and he gave me some valving recommendations and sent me some .020" shim packs.

Despite all that, what an absolute blast it is to drive around. Without the front driveshaft vibrating away it's so smooth, flooring it and accelerating past 70 still seems surreal to me, this big lumbering crazy vehicle I built actually being able to do that. I'll probably look back in 5 or 10 years and go wow that thing handled horribly, but right now I'm enjoying it and loving it! Hopefully get the shocks revalved in a week or two, go down to Sand Hollow and throw the GoPro on it to get some footage in the whoops and do some shock tuning before the race in Vernal.

 

HA!!! Way nice! One heck of a ride you have there!

 

Took the buggy out over the weekend, no rockcrawling but put 65 miles on it with my buddy fully suited up.



I got a new driveshaft from Driveline Tech in Hurricane, I had dropped off the old shaft after the last trip down.





Beefed up the carrier bearing mount and made a new bracket for the new setup. This is the 3rd front driveshaft iteration and hopefully the last. I was hoping the Busted Knuckle carrier bearing kit I had could be reused, but the dude said their kit was really weird and recommended replacing it all for parts that are off the shelf and easy to replace, so I bit the bullet and said sure.

A quick drive the other day to test it and started getting a misfire again. Found that the same #4 cylinder spark plug wire had gotten fried. The heat protection sleeve wasn't doing as good a job as I had thought, so as a temporary (or permanent?) fix I wrapped all the plug wires in aluminum foil and then put the heat sleeve over them. Kinda ghetto, but I think will do exactly what I need. There was also a plug wire on the driver's side that was starting to get brittle and have the coating flake off. I'll probably rig up some plug wire mounts to try and further secure the plug wires from the headers, but the headers I made are pretty tight.

For the test run this weekend we also hooked the boost bypass valve back up. At this point I think the bypass valve may just be inherently fucked up, since it's extremely inconsistent revving the engine and watching it actuate. I won't fix that before the next race, so decided to hook it up and I'll get that sorted in the future. Since my intercooler is really small, I'd rather the bypass valve be hooked up and not make much boost since it'll keep the intercooler/steering cooling loop cold, where as when it's always in boost that cooling loop gets really hot.




The next Bonneville Offroad race is in 2.5 weeks, so this was a good test run doing a loop around Sand Hollow and Warner Valley. It was also the first time my buddy was able to fully suit up and properly check out the fire suit/neck restraint/helmet combo. She runs like an absolute animal! No issues whatsoever, no front driveshaft wobble anymore. I'd like to solve the boost issue, but I don't know if I'll ever put more power through this thing than what the current pulley can do. I had thought about putting a bigger blower on, but it makes so much power I don't think the chassis can take anymore. There's so many things that limit it before power---bigger shocks, front suspension travel, steering fidelity, etc.

The biggest thing it needs is a better alignment. It's not horrible, but past 50mph you can feel some oddities of how the suspension is cycling and the steering. Last time I raced I got a proper alignment and it made a huge difference in how controlled it felt and how it handled.

There's also a handful of other small things I'm going to change before this race. The pedals are pretty awful in how they're positioned, really have to crank your ankle back at rest so going to fix that. I ordered a larger master cylinder to try and stiffen the brake feel up too but we'll see how well that fits. I'd still like a 2-turn orbital, but for how expensive orbitals are I think that will wait. The steering is improved with the tighter turning radius from moving the tie rods though so that helps. I'm also going to revalve the shocks again, I got some more shims in from ADS and some more advice about setting them up.

The suspension is alright, I thought before it was pretty good but pushing faster through stuff and I'm finding the limits again. I'm going to stiffen the shocks up a bit more, and then open the ride height bypass tubes more to try and make small shit feel better. The bump zone actually seems pretty good, the whole loop and I never got into the bump stops more than 1" which is where I want. The bump zone is incredibly stiff, combine that with the bump stops and it takes an extremely hard hit to fully bottom the suspension which is what I want.

I'm debating increasing the ride height 1-2" to make it ride a bit better, though that'd compromise handling somewhat. But right now I think I'm only at 8" of up travel in the front, which is really 6" before you hit bumps. Another inch or two would help quite a bit.

The drivetrain ran extremely cool the whole time. Engine never got over 192 I think, trans was sub 150 the whole time. Diffs were nice and cool. No misfire issues finally! It still amazes me how reliable this thing is, I don't really think of something built from scratch to be reliable, but she's been an absolute champ. If I can keep the tires alive and avoid running into any fences, should be a good race in a couple weeks!