Builds Marshmallow's build thread

[nukegoat]

I built my sliders Oct'15 and never painted them, they are still bare. They have finally developed a few specks of this weird orange stuff.

Try pismo though. Instant rust

 

[nukegoat]

Jose is a bit more polished and he does have a better attention to detail.

Yes but he doesnt even have a skid plate

Your truck is sweet too though and I like how you don't really have a handle on how it will all end up.

I wouldnt say that... i am pretty intentional in spite of what may come across

For those of us in the rust belt, it's sort of like watching surfing. We can surf on our waves, but your waves and the way you surf them is much more interesting.

The fact that I don't see any rust in any of these photos is astonishing to me.

 

[Red Merle]

Yes but he doesnt even have a skid plate


I wouldnt say that... i am pretty intentional in spite of what may come across

Well, the plot thickens.

So what is the long term plan? Assuming all blue sky, of course.

 

[RFB]

2nd hammers trip didn't start so great. After feeling a bit overwhelmed by Sledgehammer, we started with the "easiest" hammers trail (tackhammer) which somehow I got high-centered on:

Then lower big johnson was fine:

Then upper big johnson was significantly harder (no pics, but a lot steeper and more rock stacking).

Then coming down boulderdash was tricky and tight and super sketchy:

Then this happened, which IMO is because of wheel spacers and/or scrub radius - the downhill + obstacle + fatness of land cruiser = forcing the steering box one way. The drag link yielded its happy way up into the engine. You can see more of the 5-link here.

Fortunately, a little "SLEEve" offroad action got 'er working again:

Then the next day we hit clawhammer, which is a great trail.

Note to self add 1/14 galvie pipe to "spare" box. good call man

 

[RFB]

OK, well, I might as well hit the Dusy. At like midnight:

Aaaand there wasn't many pics at this point because after 9 miles of mild bumpy dusty road, my upper link mount broke off. The entire front part of the tower wasn't welded on (I uhhhh... forgot? Not sure how it survived as long as it did) and it decided to take a vacation from the axle.

But the fix was to borrow a flux core welder some guys had with them and sort of weld a piece of angle to the bracket and then run a bolt with a ratchet strap through the lower mounting hole and around the axle tube. Then creep back out of there. I'll go back and finish the trail but this is really not my style of wheeling overall. Plus I was fairly sick and ended up coming home and sleeping for several days. But it sucked. I had to fix the rig to take a trip to pismo so the next weekend I put on a proper upper link tower:

Aaaand correct. @richardlillard1 can rest safe on this one:

proper is a gross understatement

 

[nukegoat]

Note to self add 1/14 galvie pipe to "spare" box. good call man

I am a big fan of carrying spare tubes. They can do all kinds of things. The hi-lift handle is one that most people already have, of course, but sleeving things is super useful. Imagine detroying a tie rod? you can sleeve, drill holes, run bolts as pins to connect sleeved things, etc. Tubes are great.

 

[nukegoat]

OK, so where did I leave off? I don't remember. I promise I have a lot of axle swap pics! But chronologically here's what was on my phone next. First, the startings of my skid plate. Since I have that rear link crossmember, I had an obvious sort of place to create a full skid plate. This is before I did the major attachments (up to the frame sides):

And then I bent and broke the upper stem mounts on my shocks so I decided to go with loop/loop bilstein 7100s:

 

[nukegoat]

OK, so in addition to a bunch of stuff I probably forgot, I decided it was time to go with bigger axles, bigger tires, etc. Given the lack of doublers (@ReformedJeeper ) - I knew I wanted something low, like 5.86, 5.89, 6.17s, etc. I knew that @wv_lx450 was running the 41.5 pitbulls and made them work, so doing the math, it looked like going from 5.29s to 6.17s while going from a 36.5 to a 41.5 would work.

So, frankly, 14 bolts are great axles. Easy to set up. Beefy. Available with the right brakes,etc. Sure, they're boring, but boring is good. The big problem, though? Nothing deeper than 5.38s. Same with the high pinion dana 60 front axle... only 5.38 gears. So, I gave in and went with a low pinion dana 60 from a 1980s K30 along with the rear dana 70HD.

Next problem - I use my parking brake a LOT. A lot of axle swaps end up like a lot of the engine swaps - they mostly work but the last 10% doesn't. I wasn't willing to accept this, especially since I get out of my rig or have other people stacking rocks for me and messing around underneath the vehicle. So I knew I'd need a parking brake. BUT - most of the disc brake conversions for 1-ton axles use a front caliper (no parking brake). I could have just stuck with the factory drum brakes but I wasn't really into that idea. OK, so in enters the Dana super 70 (some weird axle off a 2006 GMC Savana). I could have just as easily found a new 14 bolt, or any other newer full float axle, but this one was in town and $300. So, I picked it up and salvaged the hubs, calipers, rotors, spindles, etc).

Some people may ask why I just didn't keep the super 70. After all, it's probably a stronger center casting, it uses dana 70 gears, and it has spanner wheels for carrier bearing preload instead of shims. Well, I'm dumb, and was concerned it wouldnt' work with an ARB. I also wasn't sure how easy an aftermarket diff cover would be to create (it's a 12-bolt cover instead of the normal dana 10). The D70HD from the K30 has thicker axle tubes (not like that matters) and I knew wouldn't offer any problems along the way.

OK, last paragraph - I promise. One other problem that I see with a lot of axle swaps is that people use centered differentials. Sure, the driveshaft clears, but you have to stick to single cardan geometry (coplanar output flanges don't care). So that's fine most of the time, but I wanted my pinion up and out of the rocks. So I knew I'd have to re-center the diffs (both of them). Interestingly, the front fj80 axle isn't aligned with the t-case, and neither is the rear. They're both off slightly (in opposite directions) which may lead to some persistent vibrations for people. Or not, maybe nobody notices. At any rate, I began the surgery:


Cutting up the super70:

The spoils!

The K30 axles (someone delivered these for me, awesome)

Using an alignment jig to weld the super 70 spindles onto the d70HD tubes at the correct offset:

3 carriers? Wat

One of the gear patterns (I think I used this one, but I may have tweaked it a little more):

And, done. A LOT of welding to stitch the tubes back together:

 

[nukegoat]

Interstitial -

I decided to run 37 spline (The "beefy" version of the dana 80 uses 37 spline) components on the rear axle. Here's why:

0) Offsetting the rear means I had to run custom length shafts.
1) The super 70 rear axle has the 14 bolt style hubs. These use a weird GM pattern full floater flange (8x3.563) which is smaller than the "cut to length" dana stuff.
2) This meant I had to get someone (Dean at "kickass offroad") to machine the flanges down
3) I really didn't want to have to go through this twice if I broke a shaft, so I wanted to go as big as I could.
4) 35 spline uses a 30 degree pressure angle, so the minor diameter (root) of the splines is significantly smaller than the 37 or 40 spline stuff.
5) 40 spline stuff doesn't fit through the spindles without boring them out
6) 37 spline 4340 "cut to length" shafts were available.
7) ARB made a 37-spline carrier for dana 80s that fits in this housing.

So, that's what I had made. I'm basically hoping I don't need to ever revisit this area.

Note the area in the "root" of the splines on the 37 spline shaft compared to the 35... substantial.

 

[nukegoat]

OK, well, times a wastin'. I just had my 3rd kid at this point in the story, but occasionally I had some free time and toodled out to the garage. Time to build the front axle on the bench. Here's a step-by-step guide:

First, you cut the ends off at unequal distances from the outer edge, then you weld them back on - on opposite sides - to give you the proper 6-ish" of offset that the cruiser transfer case likes. While you're there, add a bunch more caster because we're going to be running a CV front shaft as well (especially with a low pinion!)

Then, make a magic weeble wobble tool out of little DOM tubes and the hydraulic press and a wire wheel for cleaning the inside of the tubes (remember the seals are at the center section, so all kinds of crap gets in the tube on a dana 60:

Then set up some gears just to get that over with. Don't forget to forget to install your inner axle seals so you can remove it all and re-assemble it.

Then polish your turd. Start with foote 35 spline custom inner shafts (remember, odd offset! hooray!), CTM u-joints, Reid knuckles, Foote outers, new SRW hubs, etc. And add a truss some day.

 

[nukegoat]

OK, I'm skipping a lot of steps here, obviously, like some of the nuances of measuring, assembly, hurting myself, etc. But I moved all my woodworking stuff over to the side of my garage because at this point I knew it would pay off to have that space back. Sort of a sad day but hobbies demand sacrifices, I guess.

Removing the old rear axle. I never really said goodbye to him. One day I disconnected that rear driveshaft and, well, it would never be connected again. Depressing.

So then, uh, I guess it goes "about here":

And the coil buckets are very narrow so I had to get creative with this one and truncate it. Note - I used these off-set coil buckets that you'll see in the next couple of pics to stretch the rear a few inches back - just to give myself a little more room for the tire/door clearance.

Remember the rear links that I swore worked really well? I just decided to roll with them:

And rolling it back out to weld everything on. Pro-tip for anyone getting into welding this stuff. Whenever you can, weld flat. For amateurs like most of us, you are more likely to get good welds and it's easier on your tips (I always start getting splatter on the nozzle when I weld upside down):

The process of re-install, align, check stuff, tack some things on, roll back out, reweld... I think I did this 4 or 5 times for the rear axle. Some stuff, like that top nut for holding the wishbone on, was just for mock-up. I don't have photojournalism of it all.

 

[nukegoat]

Alright, I didn't bother with completing the rear axle because I decided I'd like to move on to the front, so I rolled out of the garage on those sweet 31s, then turned around, and rolled back in.

Few know this pain, but I assure you all, it is the worst way to spend 4 hours of your life - cutting off all the old bracketry. Gross.

 

[nukegoat]

So I then proceeded to get the link mounts on the axle tacked on (except panhard)

Panhard was a bit trickier. Because of differing lengths between drag link and panhard, it's not actually as simple as just making them parallel. That might be basically right if they were flat, but if they're not flat (even like 10-20 degrees of static misalignment) you need to look at their swept displacement curves in order to eliminate bump steer. So, I started on cardboard but eventually wrote a program and then just decided it would be easy to do it all in Excel (for visualization) so that's what I did. As you can see on my rudimentary method, though, the "parallel" approach I initially started with was actually substantially incorrect (needed to move it up 1.75"):

OK, but that sucks because it's interfering with the pumpkin. The stock cruiser track bar is all bendy so I decided to follow suit. Too much bend but I don't have a tube bender, I only have a borrowed "tube pincher" from harbor freight that received a pretty hot supper during this process.

I loved my pitbulls but they were really always in the way. They also liked to try to roll out of the garage when I wasn't looking. Each tire is over 100 lbs - like 118 or something (according to Pitbull, anyway) so once they got moving, they would destroy things (like my safety goggles, etc)

Starting to check articulation. I guess the truss is on now - which I also had to "customize" to fit my slightly-different-than-a-stock-front-dana-60 axle. Thinking I should have gone part-tiem and just let the driveshaft vibrate a little. But, well, you soldier on.

 

[nukegoat]

And it's coilover time. If you've worked with coilovers, you know that at some level they sort of suck. You have to check interference EVERYWHERE it seems and they behave in ways that you can't predict. The mounts need to be within like .0001 degrees of orthogonal to ride height otherwise the little tiny heim joints bind. They don't like being installed or removed unless the axle is PERFECTLY at the right height. Once installed, the dual rate slider sort of rubs and makes weird noises on the threads of the coilover body. And then you have to run bump stops and limit straps because otherwise they'll explode in a fiery ball.

But all that said, they do work better than regular ol' coils and shocks. And fit in less space, sorta. Here is my mockup "coilover" - the "King 1.75"

The real fox 2.0s, with fleecey "DSC" adjusters

Installing a bump stop pad:

Installing bump stop cans:

OK, getting sick of welding:

Still need to do limit straps. And some day a front sway bar.

 

[nukegoat]

OK, time to refine tire clearance issues. There was no way my windshield washer bottle or battery box were going to survive in the factory locations:

Yikes - barely:

OK - so new battery box out of like, 14 gauge sheet metal. I am not proud of this:

 

[nukegoat]

Alright, did a better job on the battery tray and also ended up doing the master cylinder re-sizing while I was there.

But we're looking better otherwise:

Most stuff mounted and ready to go:

 

[nukegoat]

Quick op-ed on brakes...

So the stock cruiser brakes aren't great, but they are trying to stop a heavy vehicle with fairly small rotors. Bigger brakes stop better, but they require more fluid. More fluid means a softer pedal. Unless you use a bigger MC, but then you get lower pressure in the lines. So you aren't really stopping any better if you size it equivalently.

Nowadays, even modern gas engines typically either boost the brakes electrohydraulically (UZJ100, 4th gen 4runners) or they use hydroboost (GM half tons, etc). So we're asking a lot out of the stock brakes.

Given the difference in caliper size, I needed almost twice the amount of fluid displacement to actuate these monster 1 ton front and rear calipers. I tried 4 different GM master cylinder sizes. a 28.6/40mm step bore, a 1.125 straight bore, a 37mm straight bore, and eventually landed on a 1.25" straight bore (off a 95 K3500 or something). The pedal is a bit soft, but the additional pressure really helps the calipers clamp the rotors. The other benefit of having a slightly undersized master is that you may still have a chance of stopping the vehicle if the engine dies or the booster leaks or something. This has real value to me - I want to know that if the rig stalls or dies or someone is under it and the booster is leaking, that I can still just mash the pedal with my body weight and keep it from moving. And this size does.

 

[nukegoat]

OK, now it's time to figure out how much fender I need to cut out of the rear. I just kept articulating the axle and then drawing a line and cutting back further. It's sort of partially re-attached but not in a way that really makes me super excited. I hate body work. @LandCruisinMy93 does much better work in this regard. Follow his thread for how to cut fenders, not mine:

And with big tires flexing, the lugs on the outsides of the pitbulls are trying to rip the filler tube off, so I had to cut this and use a flexible tube and zip tie it further towards the back of the vehicle. Annoying. It was at this juncture in my life I realized I probably should have just gone with 40s? Too late now.

Alright, but with that, we got 'er rolling around. Lots of weird looks from people.

 

[nukegoat]

OK, time to do a few more things. Bump stops for the rear:

Time to hook up the e-brake cables. Decided I sort of liked the way Toyota did it, so I spliced a bunch of weird OEM cables I bought on amazon (I bought like 7, destroyed 2, and used 3? whatever) from various GM vehicles.

and I can't get in and out of my garage without going down to 0 psi so let's just run a suck-down winch for the rear and wire it up to the OEM antenna momentary switch (remember, i never had one anyway?)

Time to wire the ARB compressor:

And let's throw a Currie anti-rock on the rear, too:

But then, disaster struck on the way to work (Yes, I decided to drive this to work one day)

 

[nukegoat]

I hear ya. This summer's heat is making me rethink cutting off any part of the rig that would expose me to the elements. Driving in 110° temps without AC sounds miserable. Having a desk job and being indoors all day has made me such a yuppie.

Yeah, word. I'm not even into camping. If you finish the Rubicon in one day, you can just stay at the Hampton Inn in Truckee and get a complimentary breakfast.