Poison Spyder Buggy Part 2

Today, a certain extreme team member is bent on finishing the spider on time while the other just wants to have fun.

Plus it's Baha trucks on steroids at the Laughlin Desert challenge.

Welcome to Xtreme 4x4 and our wicked poison spider bruiser eight Rock Rod. We started with the prebuilt chassis and then went ahead and build our own double triangulated for link on our rebuilt da 60 with superior gears and a Detroit locker. And then we dropped in a GM

performance parts, all aluminum LS one followed by a four L 65 E automatic transmission and an Atlas I transfer case, a killer drive train for a killer machine. This week, we got to finish up all the fabrication so we can tear it apart for paint. And then we get to build a custom front axle. Let's get to work. All right.

The list of items that need to be added to this chassis before we send it out is pretty long,

but with a good plan of attack, we should be able to bang them out in no time.

The first item is a spare tire mount.

Don't breathe in the galvanized fumes.

Mhm.

I go.

Now, this chassis is designed to accept the Jeep TJ front hood and grill shell. And we got these pieces from four wheel drive hardware, a great source for Jeep parts and we drop this grill shell in place.

You'll see that it's got to be trimmed around all these tubes. And when that's done, we can make mounts for these holes right here.

This chassis was designed with the gigantic storage area right in this spot over here. And we don't wanna take away any of that space by putting a fuel cell right in the middle of it.

So we're going to Rock Valley to have them custom build one for us. As soon as I get the measurements, I can make a template for them.

I'll mock up a fuel cell by cutting a template out of this cardboard box

with it in place. I can check the location for our mounting points.

Poison Spider included these trick little hood hinge blocks that we can weld on to hold our hood in place

with the in. I can check the location of our mounting point.

Then weld the blocks to the chassis

for a radiator. We spotted this little beauty at the sea

show

and earmarked it for this project right away.

It's from flex

a light and it's a heavy duty two core aluminum rod with built in fan. But the coolest part is these adjustable mounting brackets with these little T slots. And this thing can fit into almost anything. You can even move the mount

right to the back.

This will tuck right up into place under the tube

and these mounts can be bolted into place

before we can even begin to think about driving this truck. We need to get some seats in there since we're gonna be spending a lot of time in this rig on the trail. Comfortable seats are an important decision that you need to make. So, we went with Mastercraft for one of their fully suspended sportsman seats

and they put on this new CDU

fabric for us that's not gonna fade in the sun and it's gonna be resistant to sand and dirt also.

And if you ask really nicely, they'll even put in your own logo for you.

Once we get some measurements,

I can build them out

over.

All right, thanks.

I'm gonna use quarter inch steel by using the hydraulic press as a brake with these dyes that we made out of angle liner and C channel.

I'll add some corner gusts for strength

measure and drill the holes

and with the sliders bolted on,

I can weld the mounts to the chassis

with the seat in place. We can go ahead and install our seat belts. Now, we also went to Mastercraft for a comp certified three inch wide belt

and we got it with a clip attachment. So once we weld these brackets that we got from a manufacturing to the chassis, we

clip the belts in and we're good to go

for the steering on this monster. We're gonna go with the full hydraulic system that we got from PSC. Performance steering components has been in the industry for over 20 years and we went with our hydraulic crossover system comes complete with a pump, a reservoir ram

return hose and even a normal out,

I'll need to fab up a mounting plate for the valve

tack it into the chassis

then bolted in

after the break. Trophy trucks take to the air at the world famous Laughland Leap

when Xtreme 4x4 continues.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4. The show that's all about off roading. And so far you've seen us build some pretty serious trucks in this shop, some more hardcore than others, but none as serious as the million dollar trophy trucks that battle each year in Baja

instead of the 500 to 1000 mile races. These guys run down in

Baha.

The score

Laughlin challenge is 244 mile races.

This is probably the wildest for off road that we do. The B 1000 I think is a piece of cake compared to this.

Here. You just got to go pedal to the metal and make it happen.

When you do the long races, you kind of set a pace. You can be there at the end or at the finish line.

You're going 150% from start to finish. This is not for Wusses. Let me tell you.

And you know the difference between this and a NASCAR event. A hamburger wrapper blows on the track. They cause a yellow flag here. It's racist.

It's all about going for it. You know, just standing on the gas and

making everybody cheer.

There's a fine line between running it hard and pure insanity. And these drivers race that line.

This is essentially the fastest off road vehicle in the world.

Any other vehicle race in any other series throughout the world

has limitations that these trucks don't and we will slaughter anything that's out there. Almost every male in the whole United States screams of their four wheel driver pickup truck, you know, going out off roading and this is just a few levels above that at a cost of a half a million dollars. These machines do more than go fast

kicking off the race weekend was the Laughlin leap where the fans got a chance to see these machines fly.

Something that everybody comes out and tries to see how far they can make these big pieces of iron fly.

If I was in that truck right now, that'd be so,

it'd

be awesome. That'd be really

cool just to fly through the air with them. It's like getting shot out of a cannon. Let me tell you from the moment you step on the gas all the way till you leave the lift it. It's like you're taking off out of rocket ship.

Not even $3000 for the winner was enough to convince some drivers. We prefer to save our equipment for the race day. Travis Coy's 157 ft leap earned him this year's title. We did it, we came through, just held it wide open

and we got the farthest jump today.

Jason Baldwin didn't win the leap but he doesn't care. It's all about going fast across the desert.

Last year. The Californian went fast and won both the score and core titles. It was a heck of a year and our goal now is to try to do the same thing and win some more races. He'll go for the repeat in one of the most advanced racing machines on the planet. What we're racing here is a heavily modified

F 150 Ford. The only thing stuck about it is probably the sticker on the front, front grill

with close to 800 horses. His unique suspension allows him to pound the desert at 140

MPH. You notice on this truck, the shocks lay horizontally instead of vertically

and we've got this big swing arm assembly and what this does for us is is it gives us the ability to put the weight where we want it behind the rear axle.

Basically just makes the truck go faster and a lot smoother through the big bumps. It's like doing 140 miles an hour on a hovercraft across the desert through 3 ft hole. It's pretty wild. The desert is a brutal place and to survive and win the score championship is bigger than any one driver.

You have to have a fast truck, but you have to have a strong truck. You can't have light of a truck or else it'll break it really, it takes years and years of development to make these things work right. In order to get that number one plate, we all had to work together as a team to get it. That's what it's about out here. It is working as a team at Laughlin Jason limps to an eighth place finish over the two day event. But a rough weekend isn't enough to smash this racer's soul. You really have to love what you're doing.

And, and the thing that I love about about this is that you are on the edge a lot and it's addicting no matter how you do in the race, there's a real sense of accomplishment there.

Those horizontal shocks are pretty snazzy. They are pretty trick and we have to build a custom suspension underneath our rock rod. But first we need to build the axle to fit under it. So don't touch that dial. We'll be right back.

Got an idea for the show. Drop us a line at Xtreme 4x4, tv.com.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4. We finished up most of the welding on our poison spider bruise a chassis.

And now it's time to start dealing with a custom front axle. This axle took a lot of planning and a lot of research to truly become a bomb proof axle because building an axle from scratch isn't as easy as throwing in some lockers, some shafts and gears. But the nice thing about doing it this way is not only can we set a custom with, but we can go through the entire axle and analyze every part and eliminate potential weak points

ready.

We started last week by removing the old axle tubes

which will now be replaced by these 3.5 DM half inch wall pieces that we got from industrial tube and steel.

We cooled down the axle tubes so they'd shrink making them easier to press into the housing

at

the wheels. We opted for some kingpin inner seas. Now we got these from crane high clearance axles and they come in multiple tube options and they're full chrome molly pieces for extra strength and these things are ready for any custom application

kingpin, front axles are getting harder and harder to find. So by using these pieces from high clearance, we can turn a ball joint axle into a stronger kingpin style. There you go.

And when you start messing with the front axle components, you're gonna wanna keep in mind

the caster angle which is the relationship between true vertical

and the line drawn between the upper and the lower kingpin

and we're gonna put ours at about 6 to 8 degrees. Positive. Can I have that angle

for?

Thank you,

done it.

When you're starting with an empty housing like we did here, you have no baseline to determine your opinion depth. So you're gonna need to invest

in a tool called opinion depth checker. Like this one we got from TND machine,

it will ensure that your opinion is sitting in the right depth of the housing as it's related to the ring gear. And that will ensure a good gear tooth pattern when you're all finished. Now, this is a pretty extensive tool and it's not for the amateur. But if you pick one of these up, you're gonna be the envy of all your four wheeling buddies. We're gonna be installing a matching set of 513 superior gears on a Detroit locker in the front axle, but these are reverse rotation gears. And you can see that just by looking at the different angles on the teeth,

the benefit of having a reverse rotation is that you're gonna get your pin above your axle center line, which is gonna give you better clearance and better drive sha

angles. Now, some people will take the rear housing, move it to the front, build this multi million dollar axle around it and leave the standard gear set. Now, the problem with that is is that you're gonna have a low opinion

and a high point gear is built with a drive side and a coast side.

And when you move that power to the coast side, it makes it super inefficient. It's gonna starve your gears of oil and it's gonna lead to premature failure.

With the pin depth set in the housing, we can pull the checker out and begin to install our superior gear

and we've got our shim

pack, our dial indicator and all of our special tools ready. And this takes a lot of work.

And if you missed our episode last week on how to set a set of gears up, don't worry because after the show, if you go to our website, we're gonna have a page on there. That's gonna take you step by step on how to install a set of gears in a day of 60

colors. Graver green happens to be a distinctive color on all crane, high clearance axle parts.

So I'll give them a good coat before they're bolted up

to give this outer knuckle on superior senses. The super cool kingpin rebuild kit comes with all the necessary components

with our spindles in place

instead of planning our brake system. And I went to dyno

Track and had them send us one of their unit bearing elimination kits so we can run this rotor support and a hat rotor and then eventually run some multi piston calipers on this.

It's an almost complete axle. It's time to start measuring for our shafts and

the guys at Superior sent us this form that we need to fill out for all the information needed. And then once that's done, we can send out the information for this axle and a re axle for a brand new set of 35 flying chrome molly pieces.

And when those superior axle shafts show up, we're gonna link the inner and outer with the ultimate and indestructible

and more importantly, rebuildable joint from CTM racing. And then we'll cap everything off with a set of dried

fangs from poly performance, made it a 4140 fully heat treated chrome Molly. And this is going to ensure the ultimate connection between the outer shaft and the wheel hub itself

and make sure you stick with us to the break because now that we have an axle, we can actually build a suspension for it.

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

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4. We got our front axle under the chassis and by using some of the similar suspension geometry that we used on the rear,

I can go ahead and start planning out my front suspension

on the rear. We're ready to start installing our new coil over shocks. Now, these Bill Stein 9100 rock crawlers have a lot of new technology in them. A standard coil over shock requires fast cycling or high speed movement of the piston inside the shock. Well, these shocks are designed to work under slow speed movement, which is what you want in a rock crawler.

Now, we're going to put them together with some IB

14 inch, 200 pound springs. We got two for each shock. We'll set them up in the rear, lower the truck down, check the ride height, move them to the front and do the same. If the front sitting a little bit lower, we'll pull 1 200 out and swap in a 250

see if that can change. We'll just put it all together with some tabs for A N A.

The front core link is very similar to the rear except for the fact that the lower links are not as triangulated due to engine clearance issues and mounting point issues, but that's not gonna affect our anti squat or instant center. Although it will affect our body roll, which is the roll axis, which is the body wanted roll in itself. But as long as all the mounts are at the same height, we should be a ok

with the chassis sitting on its coil overs. We can go ahead and take the first measurement for our drive shaft,

then we'll come back out and pull the springs out of those coil overs, compress the suspension and then extend it and take those measurements and we're ready to order our shafts.

Well, that's all we could squeeze into today's show. But the next time you see this rock rod, I will have painted it and it will be well on its way to going on or off the trail. That's right. We're gonna plummet, wire it and fire it

and then we'll have this thing out. It's a lot of work, but I know we can do it

and you might need a new shirt.

Actually, I'll probably just throw this one away. So if you have any shirts for Jessi, send them in.