Poison Spyder Buggy Part 3

Today on Xtreme 4x4. Jessi and Ian are wired up as they hop back on project poison spider. Plus, see how these mud freaks turn their Boers into submarines with a little homemade ingenuity.

Welcome to Xtreme 4x4. Another one of our poison spider builds. You can see we made a lot of headway on this too buggy since the last time you saw it. Yeah. As soon as all the fabrication was done, we stripped her down, put her on the trailer and took her to the paint shop and to our friend John Bohannon at Bohanan's concepts. Once we got the bruiser eight inside Hutch, our right hand man helped me prep the buggy which would have taken me forever to do it by myself. Goodbye. Cruel world.

Goodbye.

Next came a couple of coats of red primer

followed by three coats of PP G's Viper.

Red single stage paint.

It was nice. A Hutch to give you a hint. Prepping this chassis. Yeah, he's a trooper

and with back in the shop and in finished paint, we can start to bolt it back together and we're gonna start with the disc brake conversion on this rear Dana 60.

The Dana 60 rear drum is not only massive and heavy. This thing can pack full of dirt, water and mud, making it absolutely useless as a braking system.

So we're going to convert the rear axle to disk using this bracket kit we got from Blue Torch fab.

Now this is going to bolt up in place of the stock backing plate

and then we can go ahead and install the rotor in the CAL.

This kit uses a 1980 GMC three quarter ton front rotor and loaded caliper,

tighten the caliper bracket bolt, making sure the bleeder screw faces up

to stick with our red and black theme. I'm gonna go ahead and two tone the dash. But before I can do that, gotta lay out all our gauges in our switch panel now because this is a custom rock rod. We went ahead and chose a universal wiring kit and switch panel system for painless performance. Not only does this kit come with all of the switches that we're gonna need, but it also comes with circuit breakers. So if we get a short out on the trail, all we have to do is find the problem reset the circuit breaker instead of carrying a bunch of fuses with us.

After marking the location for the panel engages,

we can cut it out with the body style and mount it in place

the whole cut out for our switch panel. I can move on to our gauges these are our sport comp gauges that we got from auto meter.

They all have that brushed aluminum look. So it's gonna complement this panel and the whole dash is gonna look

remo.

Now being the fact that we don't have a very big dash, we also had auto meter send us these roll bar mounts,

so they'll just hug the bar like this

and then the pot will go on just like that. So you can hold on to the little ones and you can put them anywhere,

anywhere you want.

It's all your choice.

The last piece to go on this rear axle is gonna be a new indestructible diff cover.

We got ours from crane high clearance. That's a chrome Molly

alloy cover and it's a lipless design.

So when you install it, you're just gonna set it on the axle housing, line it up and check to make sure that the cover isn't overhanging on the bottom side of the diff. If it does, you just grind a bit of that cover away and then it won't get hung up on the obstacles or rocks. A crane also raises the diff fill plug up on the cover. So if you tilt your axle to compensate for pinion angles, you'll still have enough fluid in there for your gear set.

The brakes on the front axle are a little bit different. If you remember we had dyno

track put together one of their unit bearing elimination kits

and then modify it to fit this crane link pin spindle. But

we're going to change it even more. Normally, this thing would have the rotor pressed on from the backside just like the rear axle. But we're going to have this machine to accept a 2004 dodge hat style rotor. This rotor is bigger and it's going to give us more braking.

But the biggest benefit is we're going to be able to use a two piston caliper in the front. Now, we got this one out of a junk yard used for mock up and I've marked the center line of our new rotor on this axle and I just have to build a bracket to fit this. Now, the biggest benefit for us doing this is if we ever want to upgrade later to a set of aftermarket big brakes for this axle, we just have to remember that everything fits a 2004 dodge

to measure for the bracket, set the caliper in place

and mark the two center lines

using some cardboard.

We'll make a mock up and then transfer it to a quarter inch plate

and cut it out

during the break. Jessi will finish prepping the dash. But up next, these extreme mutters show us how they keep their rigs running under water.

We know that a lot of you guys are into Jeeps. A lot of you are into desert racing. A lot of you into rock crawling. But you gotta admit mud racers are a breed of their own. And in our last trip to smoke, run Pennsylvania, we learned the secret to surviving underwater includes silicone duct tape and

coffee cans.

Racing is a dirty business. And if you don't protect your engine, it can be costly.

Motors don't like water.

You'll know today when

the one gets water it'll start backfiring, carrying on. You'll hear it.

Once you get water in your engine,

it's gonna cost you a couple of $1000 to fix it. It's over. I mean, you have a boat anchor

with three extreme mud holes, muddy, run raceway, puts these men and their machines through the ultimate waterproofing test. Nothing like it in the world. I mean, I did a lot of back

water and back in the mountains and stuff when I was younger, but

not like this. I didn't have to waterproof him when you were just going out in the woods. But

this is intense

itself.

The pits, the consensus is do what it takes with whatever we'll do it. Waterproofing the distributor.

Is that what duct tape was made for? I guess

everybody has their own ideas on waterproofing. 90% of it works plastic grocery bags,

inner tubes, whatever you can get your hands on.

You got the silicone and everything around the carburetor. We, you see there's blue grease on there that's hard grease, grease, the first water, it's around the distributor. You also put caulking around your cap of your distributor,

we grease the

boots on the spark plugs and onto the distributor to

keep the water away. You have to waterproof. Incredibly. I mean, this tape, everything, duct tape, probably at

least a roll of duct tape underneath the hood and waterproof everything and silicone and

just grease anything you can imagine to stop

the water, even a coffee can, can make the difference. We come up with the stop the water from going into the intake

and it's two coffee cans, tick welder together

and that snot you see on it, it's uh

off of a lawnmower bagger

and run into the inside of the vehicle to keep the water and mutton going in there, you get any water down the car brady or not

competing were big blocks and small blocks full size and not so full size. There's also a Willie's

something different.

You know, you don't see them every day.

This is a 52 Willie's wagon

on a 77

Jeep

frame

that's been built by Blood sweat and beers because you drink beers and you bleed when you're working on it all the time. I've had that on all my trucks

because it's true. It's all Jeep. There's any modifications of the motor,

the motor and the rest of it's all strictly Jeep with a 401 Jeep engine in it

doing about 400 horsepower. The motor performs pretty good. It competes.

I'm, I'm well, pleased with it

with the slop that is mud racing.

He decided to move the radiator.

I moved the radiator in the back because it stays cooler back here because it can get in the air.

And when I'm running my fan

it,

it makes the mo the water's got to travel further and it keeps it cooler.

It's worked real well. Chuck knows waterproofing the engine is the key to success, but getting it right has been the hard part. It takes a long time. It took me four or five years. I come out here, I'm sitting in there in the water hole, getting food out,

you know,

but it really makes it feel good when you can make it the whole way around that track without it watering out or breaking up or anything and it's running good.

Generally go out there and give it all we have, you know, what's nice if you can bring it back

and load it on that trailer.

You had a good day.

I like the name of that will. He's blood sweat and beers. Just like a Canadian Hero. Red green often says duct tape is a man's best friend. We'll be right back.

Got a show idea for Ian and Jessi, email them at Xtreme 4x4 tv.com.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4 and our poison Spider bruiser eight build up.

Now we got the gauges and the switch panel in. We can begin to plan out our wiring harness, wiring A two buggy is a little different than just replacing a harness in a stock vehicle. And because of the serious conditions that a harness can see, you got to plan it a little bit differently.

And when you're planning out a har,

the first thing that you're gonna have to do for anything is determine how many circuits you're gonna need.

So we just simply made a list because we're gonna need

our circuits for off road lights, our cooling fan, our fuel pump, our tail lights,

our power supply to the gauges in the switch panel. Anything else?

We probably need a power feed for our engine harness

which we use to control this all aluminum LS, one small block that we got from GM performance parts.

Now, if you remember we made that engine to a four L 65 E computer controlled transmission.

But the nice thing is, is this ECU and harness kit that we got with that package will control both the engine

and the transmission at the same time. Now, there's a lot of wires to hook up and things to mount, but everything can only be plugged into one spot

for the items that we're gonna be sending power to. We need to figure out what type of circuit each item needs. Some of them are gonna use a relay and others are gonna use a simple circuit.

Our rock lights, for example, are led units which draw very little current. So we can just control them through a switch. But our electric fan, our fuel pump or off road lights, draw a lot of amps. So we're gonna have to run them through a relay

and a relay is simply an electrically controlled switch

that gets its power from a separate 12 volt source. So when I flip the switch to the cooling fan, the power goes through the relay which activates an internal switch, pulls the power from the source and goes straight to the fan, which eliminates

the fact that we might burn out our switch

to keep things a little bit more organized. When we start to lay out that harness on the floor, I'm just gonna take some rough measurements of where we want the main harness to run through this tube chassis.

This is gonna make things a lot easier when it actually comes to pulling wires through this mess of tubing. We're not gonna have a bunch of wires in a rat's nest trying to figure out which way they go. We'll be able to bundle them together and actually make a main harness.

A

good starting point for any wiring harness is a floor layout with the measurements that Ian took. We can go ahead and start doing that right now. Thanks.

This is also a good time to actually draw an official wiring schematic for your harness. And that way, if you have any problems in the future, it makes it easier to diagnose,

we never know what kind of elements our bruiser is gonna see. So when we talked to painless performance and told him about our project, they had suggested the off road six kit because it comes with these waterproof switch boots and this waterproof fuse panel. So it's gonna go ahead and keep all of our electrical stuff dry.

We are going to use a sliced main power feed for each switch. Once the main power wire is in the box, we tap into it for constant power for the off road lights and cooling fan.

Now that all the wires are run, I will start to bundle them together into a harness.

I have completed the schematic of the entire system and by following it, I can easily see that we are not going to have any major problems.

The most common problems when building your own harness are unfinished circuits, unprotected circuits that don't have a fuse or a circuit breaker or a bad ground.

Now, when you come up with a wiring schematic, the best thing to do is just think of it like plumbing.

The electricity has got to flow through a circuit breaker or a fuse that will act as an automatic shut off. If something's wrong,

it will have to go through a switch to control whatever you need to.

And that's like a manual shut off and then it has to travel all the way to the device that you need to power, then once it reaches that device, it needs to go to ground to return back to the battery. And you can do that through a ground wire right back to the negative posts of the battery or you can use a common ground and that's just screwing it to the chassis

and then it will use the metal in the chassis or the vehicle's frame to go all the way back to the battery.

There's a circuit that people have a lot of problems with and that would be your headlights and your tail lights or your brake lights and your blinkers. Sure, you've seen it when the guy is driving down the road hits his brakes and his front turn signals come on.

So there's a way to prevent that. And that's by using a diode.

What happens is when you put the power to the switch, you're gonna have current to your headlights,

it's also going to go through the diode and out to your tail lights. If you flip the switch the other way, you're gonna have power out to your tail lights, but the diode is gonna stop it.

So if you put a diode at your brake lights, your bleaker won't come on when you hit the brakes. So for that guy driving the 32 Ford in my neighborhood, go and buy yourself some diodes

with the switch panel installed in the dash. We just have to run the harness throughout the entire chassis and we're going to protect it by using the split braided slee

that we also got from painless. And then all we have to do is hook up the battery and all the light.

It's good to go

having fun.

They work.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4. We got the poison spider put to bed for a while and we're going to get back to work on our J Jeep and the ultimate Jeep, the AJ.

We're gonna be taking them both out on the trail next week, but we gotta finish up a few things first. Now, as you know, he is the number one killer for transmissions, start burning your clutch disks, your drums weld themselves together and then you can't go anywhere. So we had B and M send us their new high tech cooling system comes with a unique plate and fin design

and it's got a built in electric fan. So with this and our auto meter trans temp gauge, we should have no worries

with the stock tranny line fitting removed, we can replace them with quarter inch NPT to dash six A N fittings we got from Earl's,

then we'll run dash six line from the transmission to the sensor block and on to the cooler,

the cheap Jeep needs one more thing before it's ready for the trail. And that's new drive shafts. When we finished the spring over lift, it left our stock drive shaft at an unquestionable installed height and certainly not ready for any hard core off road. So that means new drive shafts, but we're going to make them ourselves and we're going to make square drive shafts. Now, I know what you're thinking. Square drive shafts. What's up with that? Well, it's been done many times.

They work well for true off road vehicles. Not for the street.

We're going to start with a piece of two inch, quarter inch wall tubing and insert into it a piece of inch and a half quarter inch wall tubing

that'll leave us with a telescoping shaft. But because it's square tubing, it acts just like a spine shaft. Now, you could get a set of custom blind shafts made, but you got to remember this thing is the cheap Jeep. So it's done on the cheap.

Another item that needs to be addressed is that by having a 383 Chevy small block and in an aluminum radiator, we're gonna need to have some custom hoses. So we went to Earl's to get these form of flex hoses and they come with these billet aluminum connector sleeves with silicone rubber on the inside, put them on, cut the hose to fit and put in some coolant.

A good trail truck needs a good CO two bottle like this one that we got from source one, we can fill this with high pressure CO two and then dispense it through this liquid filled adjustable regulator to run air tools or fill our tires on the trail. After we air them down,

we'll just bolt this one to the cage with the supplied mounting bracket and we'll be good to go. One thing we,

for this Jeep was a manifold to run our A B air lockers. We have two solenoids, one for the front, one for the rear and we'll just plug it into the bottle. I add a little tag so we know to keep the bottle under 90 P si when it's plugged in and now that these two are pretty much done, make sure you stay with us next week because we're taking these two out AJ and CJ head to head

on the trail road trip.