Budget Jeep Continues

Welcome to Xtreme 4x4 and part two of our cheap cheap build up. We decided to build a good trail truck by spending no more than five grand in parts.

Yeah,

we started by building an RT I ramp. So we would be able to score our Jeep before and after our modifications.

Ok.

The first thing to do is lock the axles using quick locks, front and rear.

Then in order to fit the new 35 inch Super Swamper

Boers and performed a spring over axle

and then the icing on this cake was a set of Terra

Flex revolver shackles, front and rear

and then I built a set of bead locks using the rock stomper bead lock kit.

Then once all that was completed, the Jeep made another run at the RT I ramp

and then it scored 971.

Pretty impressive. Yeah, too bad. You weren't there to see it.

Hey, don't get mad at me because I got sick. That's all right. You're working twice as hard this week because today we're gonna deal with some of the things that come up when you do a lift, like steering shocks, brake lines and then we're gonna finish up this project with a custom roll cage on the cheap.

Of course, we have to deal with steering on this Jeep and there are a couple ways to go about it. The first one we're gonna show you is an absolute no, no otherwise known as scary steering.

We went ahead and bent this drag link to give us clearance in our steering system just to drive this truck around the shop. But by no means, should you do something like that and then take your truck out on the street or even the trail? And when you're pinching pennies, it's not about spending as little as you can. It's about spending what you have in the right spot. And one option would be to install a drop pitman arm.

Once the factory pitman arm is gone,

you install the drop pitman arm and reattach the drag link.

Now that drop Hyman

arm might be the cheapest solution to this problem. But you can see when the revolver shackle unloads, that drag link is still contacting that leaf spring. So I installed this for nothing. Well, not for nothing. We just want to show one that when you do a spring over, you've got options. Exactly. Which is why we're gonna install a high steer kit, which does exactly what it says it's gonna do. It's gonna relocate the drag link and the tie rod above the leaf springs.

Look at that bar.

Now, there are a lot of options when it comes to high steer kits.

And most of them involve using a Dana 44 flat top knuckle. Now, you can go to a wrecking yard, find one of these used knuckles. You can then find a spindle support a caliper, a rotor, hope that they all work together and then hope that it's got the same bolt pattern of the wheels that you already own or you can get a kit like this from SRC precision products. Now, this comes with D

44 outer knuckles.

They include their high steer arms already installed.

And they also have these heavy duty tie rod and drag links and these things are solid steel. So, you know, they're not going to bend,

but the best thing

is they also have these trick little brake brackets.

And what that's going to allow us to do is reuse our stock CJ7 rotors and calipers. So when we're hunting for parts for this thing in the future, it won't be hard to find them.

And of course, the metal in these components is of a higher quality, making them stronger than the factory pieces that you might find in the old junkyards.

And you also have the option with this kit of getting a hind joint or a tie rod end. And we went ahead and just chose the tie rod ends

to put it all back together, slide in the axle shaft,

then put the spindle into the knuckle

that the SRC brake bracket

bolt up the caliper mount,

we tried to use the dust shield

but it was rubbing on the rotor.

So we tossed it.

Next is the rotor,

but you may have to grind off the caliper bracket bolts, clearance

when it spins without rubbing,

install the bearings,

nuts

and hubs

and you are there.

All right. Moment of truth.

No, I'm just kidding. Now, you can see as we put the tie rod in, we have clearance above our leaf springs and they're not in the way of our axle anymore. So we're not gonna be hitting any of our steering components if we hit a rock, which is a very good thing.

The way to really test this is to jack up the front axle and compress the revolver shackles and then check for clearance

and it looks like it might be tight when we turn left. I still think we just need to put our regular pit on our back on.

We'll see, check back after the break.

You're probably right.

I think when you come in it'll hit

after the break. Rock racer, Marty Hart shows off his custom built buggy. See if it's up for this rock and roll challenge.

We're in the middle of our cheap Jeep build here at extreme. No more than five grand into that CJ seven for a good trail truck.

But for five extra grand,

you can build one of these competition rig that could win you some races. That's good. Stop, shut it down. Now, speaking of races, everybody loves rock and roll and at the rock and roll challenge, it's rock crawling. Combined with rock racing

with a 75% attrition rate.

The rock and roll challenge in Hot Springs, Arkansas

is one of the toughest off road races in the country.

Yeah, it's tough.

It's extreme and it's awesome. It will test your vehicle, it will test it with a day of rock crawling and a day of speed. This event did more than test these trucks. It pummeled them, broke everything yesterday, fixed, it came back and broke more.

If you normally trail ride,

that's fine.

But when you enter the,

it just asks so much more of you and your vehicle. And so when those guys start hitting these obstacles, I'm trying to get up there at a speed versus just crawling. It's, it's,

it is a hold another dimension to the sport

during the 19 eighties. Marty Hart earned legendary status in a TV racing. Now, pro rock crawling is his bad

is challenging. And to me, I like a challenge. You know, anybody who races off road racing or anything likes a challenge with his custom built buggy. He's up for a challenge, but I built it to be the toughest that there is out there on the market right now. So I can actually ask everything that I can get out of it without having to babysit it because you can't

babysit it when you're asking to race against these pros.

I designed the car for visibility in mine. So I put the rear engine, I used the 4.3 the Vortec 4.3 and we figured it somewhere in the neighborhood of 202 115 horsepower

and where it stands right now. And uh but mainly

torque is what we want.

We had to mount it sideways because of the, the, the length of it. And the fact that the, the actual 5.0 transfer case sits beside you,

the Atlas is pretty big and it's gotta be offset a little bit. So in order to get the shortest wheel base possible, we, we actually turn the engine a little bit sideways. This thing has curry axles in it,

uh that are custom made with 4340 axles, 300 M on the shorts. That's the material used in the axles just so they won't break. We have them all set to one side because when you turn the engine sideways with that huge power glide, everything goes to the right to because you're actually sitting level with the transfer kicks being a single seat car, the yokes would be far to the right. So we had the pumpkins moved over to the right hand side of the car so you wouldn't get all those drive shaft angles in that at one time, you were just crawling around on rock and you can pretty much as bolt, any shock on your car would take it.

You can't just put any shock on there. Now, I use fox shocks. We use Johnny joints and big aircraft aluminum, uh, link rods

and that allows for them to have a memory. You can actually hit something and they'll bow and flex back a big asset to the vehicle

at Arkansas.

Marty backed up the talk as he dominated both the speed and rock crawling events to win the buggy class when you build it and drive it. You know what I'm saying? To me, that's a lot more rewarding.

Becoming one with the vehicle. To me is the one of the most important things, whether you're an off road car or a short course car or a motorcycle or whatever,

you've actually gotta

know what it wants and what it doesn't want. So if you get all

of your talent

to drive it

and, and you feel like you're ahead of it, then you go change something, but sometimes the car can actually give you more than you can drive it.

That's, that's what you're looking for. Best of all about the rock and roll challenge. Marty Hart was able to show off those old racing skills.

You get to actually camera, I mean, you have everything that this car can give you from the bottom to the top. You know, when you get up through this stuff between the trees and the rocks and the things a foot or 2 ft off the ground, bouncing and wheeling and what have you.

It's a pretty good rush.

Want another rush, Jessey and Ian will show you what goes into building a competition crawler after these brief messages.

For more information on anything you've seen today. Check us out online, Xtreme 4x4 tv.com.

Welcome back to extreme in our cheap Jeep built and to stick with our most for your dollar theme. We went ahead and invited rock steady racing into the shop. They're a new rock team and the guys from Whale Enterprises built this buggy a little different than the rest.

These guys took a fuel injected four cylinder Saturn engine and installed it in the rear.

But it's how they get the power to the wheels that sets this crawler apart from the rest,

both front and rear Dana

sixties were flipped to turn in the opposite direction

because the power coming to these axles is reversed.

This crawler splits the power from the engine to the axle by using a transaxle instead of using a transmission and a transfer case. Now, if any of you have ever had the pleasure of tearing into one of these Saturn trans axles, you won't find a set of typical planet

gear sets. Like in most, you're gonna find a set of hell

gears that are in constant mesh and that's a lot like a transfer case.

And for those of you who think that the transaxle is the weak link? Think again, they did some pretty serious testing on this thing broke an axle in the Dana 60

the trans survived. Now, we asked the builder of this buggy Brian Whaley from Harrisburg Pencil

you

to come in and just give us some insight.

Like where did this all start?

It really just started with an old Saturn car that we had around in a pair of Dana sixties. It's not exactly the most conventional drive train. Most people use a transmission and transfer case when they build a hardcore rock crawler.

It's extremely lightweight for the parts that we used

and great power to weight ratio. It really climbs. Well,

how does the competition react when you bring a Saturn transaxle out on the rocks?

They were really surprised and really skeptical, I think a lot of them didn't think that it would work.

And, uh, during the first few runs of competition, we did have some bugs that we had to iron out. But after that,

we got it really dow and especially at the second competition with 1/4 place finish with the four wheel steering. It really maneuvers around well, through the cones. When we compete,

we actually have a drive train disconnect so that we can disconnect the rear ax. When we do front digs in competition, it really makes the vehicle more maneuverable. We have, you know, about 10 grand in parts into it. And

many, many hours in labor.

Well, Brian, it was nice to meet you. Thanks for coming by. Thanks for having me. You got an awesome machine here

back to the Jeep. Jeep.

We started with $5000. Right. Well, then we put lockers on it, did a spring over kit, shackles, wheels and tires and a bead lock kit.

Spending a total of 2370

leaving us a grand total of $2630. Well, we spent 880 on our high steer kit

that leaves us about a

lot more money to spend

that leaves us about.

Now with that leftover cash, the next thing we're gonna tackle are the brake lines. Now, whenever you do a lift, you may have to lengthen your front and rear flex line. And the cheapest way to do that is with a hard line extension.

You simply pick up a union and attach it to the factory hard line

and then install a short premade line to that

and it will move the Flex line mount closer to the axle. Now, this is obviously the cheapest way, but it's certainly not the best way.

Now, the better way to deal with this is to add longer flex lines. Now, these are the coolest invention that come from crown performance. It's got the Teflon inner core Kevlar, a protective coating, the steel braided line and then a vinyl protective coating on the outside of that plus it's got a one piece and so it's less likely to break, check out all the color choices, all

the

color.

And the best thing is, is you can call up crown, they can custom build you one of these colored lines, any l for a bunch of applications and then they'll hook you up with the dealer to sell it to you.

First remove the old fitting.

The new line is attached to the frame with the supplied bracket, hook up the hard line

and attach it to the caliper.

The last thing to go on the drive line are these Edelbrock extreme travel remote reservoir shocks. These long travel shocks come with valving options and we chose the medium valving because we didn't want to lose any of the articulation in our rear axle.

Now, you can see with the spring over lift, the stock shock mount has been moved too high up on the axle even for a stock shock,

let alone those Edelbrock extreme travel shocks. So we're going to have to break out the bandar,

the plasma cutter and make some new shock tabs. But what if you

have those tools? Well, we gave a company called A and a manufacturing a call and they sent us this catalog and it's full of all the shock tabs or brackets that you'd need for any fabrication project. We had them ship us a bunch of these little shock tabs that will go ahead and weld on the axle

to mount our new shocks. We'll install the upper mount

position and then weld on our new shock tabs,

then mount the reservoir.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4 and our cheap Jeep build up less than five grand into this Jeep to build a great trail truck. Now, one of the most common questions we get asked here,

aside from his Jesse's single is what kind of tools do I need in my shop to fabricate with? And the most common tools other than grinders and hand tools and welders and band saws are tubing

beers. The tubing menders come in really handy when it comes to roll cages, bumpers and even shock hoops like the ones that we built here for our extreme travel shocks

by bending 290 degree angles and welding them together. We end up with a hoop,

then add the shock tabs

position on the jeep and use a plumb bob to line up the mounts

and we

at home,

you've got a lot of options when it comes to benders.

Now, you've seen us use this

alignment, electric Super Bender a lot on our AJ and Ranger builds.

Now, one of the coolest new tools that we got is this set up from Tub

Shark. This comes with an air hydraulic bender and their tubing notch are all on one cart that they call

the shark pool. This is definitely your one stop bending and notching workstation. Now, if manually bending is more of your speed you can buy or even build a manual bender like I did here. Now, this bender uses a series of dyes and this long handle to bend the tubing.

What if you're not sure if this whole fabricating thing is really up your alley and you're really looking for the first step. Well, here it is Williams Low buck tools offers a hydraulic manual tubing bender, a tubing notch

and a set of tubing clamps all for 850 bucks. And it includes one die size of your choice. We chose inch and a half. And we're going to build the entire roll cage using this setup. And we're going to include that 850 inside our budget

or if you've been fabricating for a while and you're ready to take it to the next level, you can find some pretty neat tools at places like trick tools there. You'll be able to find things like adjustable protractors,

digital and liquid filled angle finders, tubing, positioners, tubing contour gauges, and you can even get digital software which will help you with your two menu.

Put your side in first,

the front hoop is easily bent into shape and after a couple of test fits,

that's good.

We toss out the factory crash pads

and hold it in place with a clamp.

Then we measure

and notch our roof spreader

and weld the new front page in the place.

Well, there you have it our hardcore trail rig on the cheap, less than five grand. I think we got a good trail truck and most importantly, it's safe. Yeah. And for as much as I roll these things over, safety is a very important issue.

You haven't rolled this one over yet. Not yet. But I will.

Now, I don't think we're done with this truck. We're gonna keep putting money into this thing, but first we should go find out how much we have left. That's a good idea.

The high steer kit was $880. We put 150 into the brake lines. All four shocks were $640. How much were the tools? 850 for the bender. And that,

uh, how much was the tubing? 8686 that leaves us with 24 bucks in the bank.

That's just enough money. So we get a little bit of food and some gas for the trail and, and thanks to Brian W for bringing your buggy in. That's awesome. And stay tuned for next week because we're gonna have our own buggy in here. Building it right here on this shop floor here.