Full Build: Adding A '70s Ford Crew Cab To A Dodge Cummins Turbo Diesel Chassis

Today is our third new project of the season. We'll begin the process of taking a modern Dodge Cummins

turbo

diesel

chassis

and

adding

a classic 1970s Ford four-door

crew

cab body to it for a modern towing rig with a vintage look. Everything is today. here at trucks welcome to trucks well I know you guys have seen this tow rig before this super duty has been used to tow power block project vehicles for most of the last decade yeah and This thing has taken us everywhere and it gets. He worked pretty hard and, frankly, he got a little abused.

Ian and Chris, the muscle car guys, Mike and Joe, run it and it's been a good truck, but frankly it's seen better days. Now this Triton V10 has good power, but it is by no means power. a gas saver when pulling our open trailer, it works fine, but when we hooked up to our enclosure and hit some steep grades, we were able to use a little more torque, so we figured it was time for a new tow rig and so . You already know the ultimate in pulling power and long life. Well, they want a

diesel

platform, so that's what we're looking for today, but we'll do it with a little style and on a budget, so we're on our way.

Let's go back to our friend Monty Lloyd's collection of classic Ford Work trucks and if you remember, he's the guy who provided us with the body and frame for das bronco and sure enough, Monty had exactly what we were looking for for this F-350 XLT Ranger four-door. cab with a short bed resting on the long bed frame now had faded paint and some surface rust, but this body was in solid condition, which is a rarity for these trucks as they were used for pickup trucks. work, now, what minor detail do you have? It didn't have an engine, but that's okay because it was a gas burner and we want a diesel, all other systems were in good shape.

The southern truck now even the interior, although it smelled a little musty, was in pretty good condition, with almost everything good and This four-door cabin will be excellent for long trips in which we will look for other trucks, support for projects It's in good condition, the battery case is not rusty, I don't see anything else there, this mulch, just mulch, next we wanted to double check our research that we got. about 110 110 and a half 110 and a half yes, we'll leave a couple of inches of space for the clearance 154 and a half approximately to the center of the center great, remember that yes, now we're really seeing some potential with this case because you have to Noticing this rust, well it's just on the surface, this is the original paint, this is a really solid base to start with now, we know it's going to be a lot of hard work, but the fact that we found a mid-range

crew

cab from the 70s, it should be like that. make a really unique towing rig, now we know that a lot of you are putting later diesel models into these older trucks and we're going to do something along those lines, but with a slight twist, so we have one more stop to make.

So we headed to certified auto recycling in Ardmore Alabama and if you remember the door we put on the second chance Silverado, it also comes from a certified certification. Look, there's another one and today we're going to recycle a diesel transmission in Our new certified auto recycling towing team has almost every part you can imagine in stock for almost any late model vehicle on the road today. Their sales staff knows their parts and, in addition to local deliveries, they also ship internationally. We have many clients. who want to save money and use a used part on their vehicle because then there is no need to produce a new one, which saves energy and saves the customer a lot of money in case they wonder where all those parts come from.

They started out as complete vehicles that were total losses purchased at an insurance company auction. Each vehicle is methodically and care

full

y dismantled piece by piece. Up to ninety percent of these vehicles are recycled and believe me, they don't sit around for long, they become parts of your vehicle fast now these guys have hundreds and hundreds of clean, complete late model engines, domestic and foreign. We've seen Duramax and Cummins and Powerstroke diesel engines, as well as almost any gasoline engine you can think of. Take a look at this Cummins 24 valve. I thought about using something like this, clean stuff, ready to pack and ship, looks practically new and when certs dismantle a vehicle, they are very careful with multi-prong plugs, they just start destroying things, even covering up the inlets and outlets . from the water pump,

turbo

and oil lines and that way when shipped, nothing goes inside your engine.

Now, just like engines, these guys have transmissions in any type you want. Front-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive, manual or automatic, two- or four-wheel drive. Check this out, this is something similar to what we want to use now with a heavy-duty manual transmission for our new towing equipment, although these vehicles don't stay on the market long. Certified inventory is updated daily with a wide variety of both. In fact, domestic and foreign vehicles, while we were there, a brand new shipment of trucks was arriving, so we did a little snooping around and walked through the sea of ​​vehicles waiting to be dismantled, we found something that really caught our eye and it's not this.

Well it caught our eye, it's just not what we were looking for, believe it or not, this 97 series 2500 three quarter ton just rolled off the truck, nothing on it has been processed and we liked everything we saw on the interior. Well it's all good here on a truck and since this truck is a 97 that means it comes with the old school 12 valve which means it has mechanical injection set up and with less electronics to deal with, the swap is less complicated and a bit cheaper now, these 12 tubes, well, they make great power out of the box, but can easily be modified for more now, the radiator and AC condenser appear to be in excellent shape .

I think we have a good candidate here now. this right here is why this truck totaled pretty serious sheet metal damage and 157,000 miles, which is nothing for this drivetrain, it's just breaking down, but right here we have severe suspension damage since the wheels They got into the cabin, but it's still perfect for what we want it for and we want to make it clear here and now that certificates do not sell complete vehicles, they have been in the rules for a long time for us, so we can take this to house as a unit and show it to them.

How much time and money can certified auto recycling save you by dismantling it right here on site? Next we'll start taking our trucks apart and then now with the body separated from the rest of the frame I I I think we're at the point of no return we'll get a truck on the new truck oh wow stay tuned welcome back to the trucks, when we bring our treasure back here to the store and we can't wait to start our new project and as we talked. Before there are a lot of guys putting the Cummins turbodiesel in an old or new Ford truck, we decided early on that we wanted a diesel drivetrain in our tow bed just for reliability and the extra foot pounds. of torque, but like we told you, we wanted to do something a little different and it's an idea that I'm sure many of you have had at some point taking an old body and plopping it on a later model

chassis

.

Let's face it, this '97 Dodge benefited from over 20 years of technology compared to that old Ford. It has a partially boxed frame, a good strong drivetrain, as well as modern suspension and brakes, not to mention aftermarket support in the form of upgrades. We thought we'd go down that road and see what it takes to put that classic Ford body on a newer Dodge frame now, as you guys already know every solid project starts with a good plan and a little research tells us that this Dodge Cab Extended long bed has a wheelbase of 154 and three-quarter inches.

The Ford short bed club cab now measures 155 inches. They are almost identical and that will make this body swap even easier, yes, because we are going to have enough work. so everything in the cabin works, but by matching the wheelbase well at least we don't have to deal with shortening or lengthening the frame driveshaft exhaust system wiring harness or fuel lines and that will minimize the amount of time it takes to get this project off the ground. Our F-350 body is from 1979, the same year as Da Bronco, but that doesn't mean you're stuck with this front style because the fact is, these fenders are the same from 1973 onwards. to 1979, so you have a lot of options if you want to change the style of the front end of your truck now, even though our 30 year old Ford is a little rusty, we have no real problems with disassembly, now we weren't just hacking things . to speed up the disassembly process because we weren't sure what parts we were going to need from the body or chassis now, although only the cab remains, it is still quite heavy and you have to be careful with the lift arm or the positioning of the jack to Don't bend anything or lose a toe.

Now that the right front wheel is tucked into the cab, we had our suspicions about maybe some slight frame damage, but despite all that, this truck runs and pulls great. under the lift no problem, now taking our Dodge apart was a little easier because it is 20 years newer, removing the bed was pretty easy and we are also going to reuse our diesel fuel lines because that will save us money in the future. Way at this point we're not sure how much of the original Dodge wiring harness we're going to keep, so we'll disconnect it instead of cutting it.

This is the correct way to evacuate your air conditioning system and then we'll show you what our A cool new towing kit will look like we're welcome back to the shop. We're tearing down our totaled Dodge Diesel and have to take care of the air conditioning system before moving forward, which requires some specialized equipment that we simply don't have. Now, since we obviously couldn't drive a recreational truck to the service center, Jason Sanders from our local Ford dealership was kind enough to bring his recuperator and properly evacuate the 134a coolant from our truck's system, since we have to separate the cab from the rest of the drivetrain and believe me, an hour of work, it's definitely worth what it costs to do it right, so don't just release it into the atmosphere that way the penguins stay cool, the system is connected to the high and low side. service valves, then the coolant is removed from our system, filtered and placed in a storage tank that way it can be recycled later into another vehicle built into an economical truck projects that save you time and money now, obviously, We have a pretty big job. ahead of us with our tow rig body swap project and we have noticed that with our Cummins turbo diesel engine, every time we leave it in a certain location for a period of time it marks the floor, now what is leaking is the main rear part. seal, but with all the work we still have to do on this project, we're going to have to postpone it to fix it now.

The stamp itself won't cost you much, but the six to eight hours it will take. replace that seal well, that's what's going to bother you, so if you have a similar leak in your vehicle and you don't have those six to eight hours or you don't have those several hundred dollars that a shop is going to pay you We charge you to replace that seal. Here is an option. Now we all know about leak bars to stop radiator leaks, but now they make this additive that will condition the seals and they say will prevent the rear main seal from leaking.

It is designed to be used with all types. of seals, including two-piece and one-piece seals and rope bars, Leakage says it works by simply

adding

it every time you change the oil when it comes into contact with a seal, expanding it and restoring its

full

capacity. It is not foaming, it is not corrosive. and is non-clogging and compatible with all different types of oil, including synthetic, so depending on the oil leak, rear main seal repair may be the easiest and most cost-effective seal repair available, according to , this is ridiculous, we drop the bills. Hello, welcome back to trucks now. with the body separated from the rest of the frame I I I think we are at the point of no return you will get a truck in the new truck I am too hot now let's get back to reality and quickly nowWe wanted to take a minute and show you what we had imagined in our minds when we came up with this project.

We want to take our '97 Dodge chassis, add our Ford short bed, sleek four-door crew cab, and top it off with that classic front end. finish and of course bathe it in a slick coat of paint but keep the factory two tone which we think looks pretty good on the truck, maybe change it to blue and white, yeah and since it's a two wheel drive , I lower it a little. a bit now that was pretty easy but now we really have to do the work, I think it might be a bit easier without 20 pounds of jewellery, so I think it's time to go look.

Might I pause now, you may have noticed that behind that big Cummins turbo diesel is a five-speed engine, believe it or not, the five-speed version of this truck is actually rated at 35 more horsepower. and 20 pound-feet of torque more, so the 5-speed remains, we think it will be a little more. It's also durable for towing, but the NV 4500 series transmission has some issues with fifth gear and we'll get to that later and we won't throw out the rest of this cab either. These seats are comfortable and there is nothing wrong with them. The center console is good also we are going to use the gauge module for engine communication and who knows we might even try to fit this whole dash into our old Ford truck because this truck came with something our Ford truck never did and they are nice cup holders now yesIf you have any questions about this or anything else you saw on today's show, visit powerblocktv.com Hey guys, thanks for watching the trucks.

See you next week today. Body thieves are back at our diesel trailer body swap project. Our 97 Dodge frame was straightened and then we will do a simple hub and axle swap to make it a dual. Everything is here today on trucks. Hello, welcome to trucks. Today we return to our diesel tow rig project. We are in the process of removing parts so we can transplant some of this stuff to our classic Ford to give you an idea of ​​where this project started. Check this out. We found the truck we wanted at certified auto recycling, but it wasn't perfect, but right here.

We had serious suspension damage as the wheels went into the cab and even with the damage it had everything we needed for the base of our next project and when this truck crashed there was a combination of sheet metal suspension and even a bit of a There's a little bit of damage to the frame, so we've sent our chassis over to Gerald's Body to straighten it out and we're going to show you a little bit of information on what it takes to repair one of these heavy duty frames that are under these trucks. and while he's there, I'll be back to certified pick up a few more parts that should help with the stability of our towing equipment when towing our enclosed trailer.

Martin started his first body shop in 1977 and has been continually expanding the business since then, the current location is 10,000 square feet with 17 employees and state-of-the-art equipment, so if you remember, Gerald's Body Shop is the shop that gave us the quote for our second chance to work with the Silverado, so we got a big deal blocked. We went down to this state of the art frame rack and we're going to get this guy back up to spec now that we have the alignment equipment in the shop, but our mighty little pole is in no way strong enough to make a boxed frame. like this one, as we showed you before the wheel went back under the cab and damaged the suspension with it.

Gerald's frame tech, Greg, has been working on this a bit, got the frame kink out, but the bottom control. The arm is still back and the radiator support tab is still a little back. Now we'll see some cool metal moving around, but what's really fascinating here is how accurate and precise a laser alignment system like this is with the laser. scanner placed under a perfectly level frame measures that frame three times per second and transfers that data to a computer the software contains measurements and specifications for every vehicle made, including our big Dodge, there are also points on the frame that are measured with the laser and compared to factory specifications for proper realignment which is achieved by hanging flags from those strategic points and feeding the information through the laser back into the software.

However, how much the flags move during a survey tells the computer how much adjustment has been made and how much further it needs to go. No need to pull, the software even shows you detailed images of where to hang the flags from the frame. Once the laser has identified the flags we are ready to start pulling and this machine does not run on more than 10,000 psi of hydraulic pull. pressure with the system measuring three times per second Greg has instant feedback that he can monitor during the pull. In fact, he can see the measurements on the screen change as he straightens the frame just as he has seen us do.

Greg is hitting the frame. while under pressure this relieves stress, patience is very important when pulling and aligning frames and Greg Greenhaw has almost 20 years of frame alignment experience with the incredible amounts of force and pressure at play here, safety is An obvious concern and pull like this is best left to professionals like Gerald's Bodywork at Home. You didn't have anything like in the pool. You know, people use trees and tractors and everything else, but you know when you're putting seven, eight, ten thousand pounds of pressure on it. that's a lot and you should have something to actually hold it up, now take a look at it, it's actually a link from one of these pull chains that fell apart in a previous tech survey, while Greg likes to leave it, the fact is that It's a little memory.

While these box frames are some of the strongest out there and the most difficult to pull a line, what Greg taught us is that if the pull chains are straight and not twisted well, it is safer, less likely to Let that happen and you get a more accurate view. put the safety chains in place, well that's just what experience teaches you now, thanks to gerald auto body in pulaski, tenn, we can reach ryan at the certified center now, the reason i did the trip back here to recycle certified cars is so we can Change our Dodge Ram 2500 from a single rear wheel axle to a dual setup.

Now we know that we are not going to change the load capacity of our truck unless we change the leaf springs, but this wider dual axle will give us much more stability. which is especially helpful when towing our enclosed trailer. Now take a look at this shaft. It's nice and clean, even the rotor and brake pads look usable. Now, luckily for us, our truck is two-wheel drive, but they are changing this to dual. axle on a four wheel drive, be sure to match the ring and pinion ratio or else you will do a ring and pinion swap.

This dual axis is huge, but there is one more piece to the puzzle. This is what's in our truck. Right now if we tried to bolt a dual wheel to this well we would have major interference problems so what we are here to get are hub spacers that will change the offset of the wheel and give us enough clearance for our brake. parts that way we can use the same spare tire on all four corners of our truck now that we've been here picking up a lot of truck parts, but whether you need a window regulator for your minivan, a wheel for your daily driver or just a radio For your grocery shopper, well certified auto recycling is the place to call, let's load this stuff up.

I'm going to hit the road next, front to back, we'll turn our truck into a dooley and then it'll be an easy drum brake. update and review, stay, hello, welcome back, thanks to our Kendall crane, this lightweight engine and transmission returned to its place on our newly straightened frame. We just want to say thank you to Greg and all the guys at Gerald's bodywork, now certified, they had a lot. of options for us, but this is what we ended up coming home with: This is a Dana 80 from a 97 dual with 354 gears that should give us reasonable highway cruising rpm and decent fuel economy now that this brake hub The drum head is a little cheaper than the disc brake hub we showed you earlier and since our stock truck head drums well, it should fit without modifications as far as stopping power goes, but we got a cheap upgrade to help.

These drums work a little better now, as opposed to the separate rotor. and the wheel spacer assembly we showed you earlier, well this is an integrated unit, the rotor seems to be in pretty good shape while we installed them, we might as well add some new bearing grease and a couple of new seals now that we are there. We also picked up a set of dual tires and wheels, although they look a little rough at the moment. Well, they won't be when we're done. We will clean them all. Hit them with some fresh paint. They should look like new.

Well, for the tires, they're going in the trash in favor of more road-friendly rubber. Now one of the best things about switching to a dual system is that all six wheels and tires can be rotated, which really increases the life of the tires. Taking it down is pretty easy, we'll take a nut off the axle and remove the caliper safely like everything else on this truck, these things are heavy now, we could have thrown these parts away as they were, but we thought we'd take one in a few minutes, throw them out. blast on all the cabinets and prepare them for a new coat of paint and we also wanted to add a new set of wheel bearings.

Now, to remove the old tracks, we could use a regular old chisel, but in the installation. of the new races you need to use a brass drift that way you don't damage the surface of your new race and you will know when you have it fully driven because then you will get a solid metal on metal feel. It was time to make them look new again and we did it by spraying a new coat of dupli-color semi-gloss paint and since I was a little lazy and didn't mask what I didn't want to paint. We'll use some brake cleaner to clean the surface of the rotor so we don't gum up our brake pads, after that we install our freshly packed wheel bearings and a couple of new grease seals that way the brakes and wheel bearings stay in place. the front part. of our Dodge should be in good shape for quite some time.

A little axle grease on the axle is just a good insurance and be sure to install the hub carefully so as not to damage the seal on the sharp threaded end of the hub. This is followed by the pre-packaged outer wheel which carries the washer and then the axle nut is torqued to specifications and then backed up an eighth of a turn and finally locked in place with a cotter pin now due to the depth of the axle nut inside of the double shaft, it can be a little complicated to place a key. What we ended up doing was cutting out a longer cotter pin and installing it with some needle nose pliers.

We reused the original dust cap by gently tapping it with a screwdriver and a smooth face. hammer, now the only rear wheel axle we pulled is also a dana 80. We will keep it in case we can find another use for it on a project in the future. Now changing axle assemblies is quite simple and can be done with basic tools, but we have become quite accustomed to our overhead crane. Hello, welcome back to the workshop. Now that we've converted our diesel trailer rig project to a dually, we want to pay attention to a few maintenance issues before we get started. go further, so let's take these giant drums off our newly acquired axle and see what shape the brakes are in.

Now the axle we picked up had a few miles on it and is well used, you know sometimes you get these drums. off may be a real bear that is frozen doesn't feel so cold now our brake drum had almost fused to the face of the hub so with the use of some penetrating oil and a few lighter taps with the hammer we were able to free it . but the shoes were still holding, we had to take a different approach, okay here's the locking lever, let's lower the star wheel, hopefully we'll collapse those shoes enough to be able to remove this drum, ah, that's better, now yeah They make specialized brake spring calipers.

It helps remove the springs and retainers and they are useful, but you can get by with just a couple of screwdrivers and a pair of pliers and I know thatIt seems a little intimidating with so much going on here, but a good tip is to do one side at a time, that way you can use the fully assembled side as a reference. Now, along with our brake shoes and drums, we also bought a hardware kit, so we will be replacing some of the springs, but it's a very good idea. To keep track of all the parts you remove with loose shoes, all that's left is to remove the parking brake lever assembly from the rear shoe.

If you miss a small electronic clip here, don't waste a lot of time looking for it, there should be one. The hardware kit is based on budget-friendly truck projects that save you time and money. Now we had to replace our shoes and drums just because they were worn out, but here is a great inexpensive upgrade for you guys who drive full size Dodges with drum brake axles that can do whether your shoes need to be replaced or not, it will What we are going to do is replace the Dodge wheel cylinder with a one ton GM wheel cylinder.

It has a slightly larger hole diameter and will put more pressure on the shoes against the drums when you step on the pedal, stopping your truck faster, the best part is these wheel cylinders only cost about 12 dollars each and are the best way to make the drum brake axle stop more like a disc brake axle, but much cheaper, hey, thanks. To stay good, we have our new GM wheel cylinders installed, we are ready to continue with the rest of the brake shoe installation, but before putting the new shoes on, clean the contact points between the shoes and the backing plate and lubricate them with some Loctite anti-seize now if you are working on drum brakes and disassembling both sides and don't have one side to look at for reference, all the DIY data is a great resource for step by step. step by step instructions on how to do almost anything on a particular vehicle and I'm sure if you're doing this job without the specialized brake spring pliers, a little more patience is needed now that each spring does a specific job and works. in a specific location so make sure you do it right you will only have problems with breakage in the future and some of these springs are under a pretty good amount of pressure so keep that in mind and with the springs and shoes installed.

We are almost ready to place the drums, but before we do we are going to make sure that the automatic adjustment mechanism and star wheel spin freely and function correctly. This should be a good starting point, now that most rotors and drums come with a sprayer. on the friction surface coating and that is there to prevent corrosion or rust while they are on the shelf at the parts store, so you want to make sure you remove everything before installing the parts, otherwise you will be going for the path. The brakes smoke and appear to be on fire.

Ask me how I know now we are ready to install the drum but you can't just throw it there and call it done you need to have a slight interference fit between the drum and the shoes it's a little loose now to expand the shoes we just turn the star wheel the only way that's going to get you there let's just a little bit of crawling that's all you want now yeah If you have any questions about anything else you saw on today's show, go to powerblocktv.com. Guys, thanks for watching, see you next week. Today we are back to work on our dual body diesel body swap.

We'll mount our '79 Ford bed and cab into our '97, then move the engine back enough to make everything fit. Everything is here today on trucks. Hello, welcome to trucks. Well, today we very appropriately return to the project, which actually started as a discussion between Ryan and I talking about. how much we wanted a diesel tow rig to take our projects and get them to closeout and even get new trucks to work on, but we didn't want to spend fifty thousand dollars or more buying a new one because these are trucks and we can

build

one and save money doing it.

We both really like the styling of this mid-'70s Ford, so this is what started it all, but as much as we liked the look of that old truck, we didn't want to get stuck in the '70s era. Engineering we wanted more modern suspension, steering and brakes, so instead of swapping a diesel engine for that old Ford, we thought we'd replace the entire chassis with this one from a 97 Dodge, it's complete with Cummins turbo diesel engine and heavy duty manual. five speed transmission now, we didn't randomly take the first diesel truck frame we found at the recycler, the fact is we did a lot of research and discovered that this 97 Dodge extended cab long bed frame is less than an inch different. in wheelbase than our Ford short bed crew cab making them perfect for a body swap, we made some upgrades and if you've been watching the shows you'll know we used a Dana 80 axle along with the dual front hubs which which gives us six interchangeable wheels. dual form now unlike the

ford

look at this frame the

ford

is a normal c channel and just a straight beam this one goes down two different times so we're tied to this top length here unless of course we want to channel the bed, but that's going to sacrifice cargo space and it's too much work for what we want to achieve, so the bed is tied to sit here, so our plan is to center the wheel arches with the axle right here and then

build

the rest of the truck from the bed forward wait a bit, okay, the Ford bed is not going to bolt to the Dodge frame.

We have a couple of problems, the first is this tab here. We want this cross support to sit right on top of the frame. rail so we need to make some cuts here now the other issue we have is this front bed support although it looks good now once we get that little lift tab we cut the back of the bed off and lower it down well, this is going to need to be lowered as well and since we cut it and we're going to move it anyway, we might as well align it with the mounting location of the existing Ford bed that is now being teased and fitted to the body of this truck. the fun part because you really can't make a mistake since the chassis dictates where the bed goes and we are building it from the back to the front.

Now a plasma torch will save you some time, but you can achieve the same results with a cutting wheel and a little martial arts practice too. Now the plasma cutter leaves a bit of a rough edge, so we are using a flap wheel to polish the sharp spots and also to hit the top side of the frame rail because that is where we will weld our new bed support after taking a Quick measurement, all we had to do was trim the factory bracket a little and reusing the factory bracket saves us a lot of time and frustration trying to make a new one. one now, once we modified our bracket all we had to do was turn it around so it faced in instead of out in the Dodge setup and it lined up with the factory Ford bracket then we just hit the road our welder and we burn.

Everything is fine now, we have the bed practically where we want it, but we are not going to screw it in yet. We want to leave it loose so it has a little bit of adjustment. Now we can start working our way forward. to the cabin now what we're doing for the cabin is essentially the same thing we're doing for the box. We are going to use an existing part of the body mounting bracket, but this time it will be in conjunction with the Dodge. body mounting bushing because you need to isolate the cab from any chassis vibrations, we will now cut this bracket, cut it to size and use the existing Ford body mounting location now to mount the body to the frame at the front , we had luck.

On our mounts, the factory Ford cab mount is right above the factory Dodge frame mount, so we can get creative with the welder and plasma cutter. We built a pedestal that uses the front insulator and bolts on. We'll box it in and reinforce it for ready strength, yeah, hand me that cab, okay, with the body mounting bushing in place, it looks like we need a bracket that's just two and a quarter inches tall, the cab sitting where it's supposed to. which should be, it looks like we have about six inches between them. the cab support and the frame support okay we have six inches from the top of the insulator to trim that buddy build it now these supports are actually from the original Ford chassis that we cut before scrapping the frame now in last instance.

This is just a mockup and this stand will be placed in a box for added strength later. Using the original boat locations on the Ford cab is really a shortcut because placing the bolt helps us center and locate where the new brackets need to be located. Next we'll move the engine mounts back and fabricate a new transmission crossmember and then the universal joint replacement will be easy, stay tuned, oh no, hey, welcome back to trucks, just the way we imagined it, We have an important free space. problem between the mechanical fan that connects and the radiator core support and not only that but we have half a foot between the back of the cylinder head and the firewall so we have enough room to put the engine back and that gives us the space we need in the front, but it will also help us with the location of the shift lever of our manual transmission, so if we move it back a few centimeters we still won't have to deal with lengthening or shortening the wiring harness or the lines. of fuel and you must remember that above the radiator and the condenser we have a horn and a thick intercooler to place in front of here, so it is essential to put the engine back, but don't worry because we have a plan and this is what Obviously, Our truck has a manual transmission, but trucks that come equipped with automatics have a shorter driveshaft due to differences in the overall length of the transmission case.

This is shorter than the manual transmission version by just over five inches that we will use. that measurement to dictate how far we back the engine out once we swap out the inputs, this driveshaft will drop right in at the five and one eighth inch measurement from the original engine mounts. We are making another reference mark that will serve as a guide. To relocate the engine mounts to their new home, the right frame rail now has a notch to make room for the air conditioning compressor. Now that we're moving the engine rearward well, the relief should also move rearward, which is pretty simple now.

We'll simply extend the original notch back about six inches, box it in, and weld it, which will preserve the original strength of the frame. Let's prevent these supports from moving. We used a plasma cutter cutting wheel and a jackhammer to remove them and nothing worked except Kevin Cool. It's hot? It was not that difficult. I don't know why it took so long to not miss our mark when we polished this paint to solder the mounts. Go ahead and trace the line with a cutting wheel that way we don't lose track of where we are now the engine mounts didn't magically change color we threw them into the bead blaster to get rid of all the paint because at this stage a weld contaminated is the last thing we want, just like the body mounts, we wanted to use as much of the factory

dodge

hardware as possible and now that the crossmember is about five inches too far forward, we had to cut the factory crossmember and use the outer pieces that bolt to the frame rail and the intersection that bolts to the transmission, okay yeah, everything good in place once we had the center, crossmember bolted to a new transmission mount that we got from O 'reilly's, that's how it was.

It's just a matter of modifying the ends of the crossbar so we can get a nice clean installation. We connected everything using an eighth-inch plate. Once we finished one side, we just had to make sure it was level before finishing it once again. Me, when that's good, welcome back to the trucks. Well, we burned off our motor mounts, as well as some additional reinforcements underneath and in the rear, so we're pretty sure they'll hold over 1000 pounds of motor. On the transmission here we have a boxed relief cut out so now we have room for the AC pump and the rear crossmember is fully assembled so we're ready to put this motor and transmission in and we're almost ready to put our El new driveshaft is almost based on economical truck projects that save you time and money,but before we install the new shorter driveshaft, there are a couple of things we need to take care of first, like we told you we need to change. driveshaft input from our old axle to the replacement that way it will connect directly to the back of our Envy 4500 manual transmission.

We also want to add a new set of universal joints because this used driveshaft we picked up well who knows how many miles it has or what kind of shape those universal joints are. Now a little spray circuit can go a long way to removing the stubborn C-clamps holding the u-joint in place and dislodging the u-joint caps, it only takes a few medium blows on the yoke, don't hit the Inlet seal surface or the area directly around the universal joint cover and with the cover removed you can clearly see some contamination on the grease and needle bearings and at this point it is quite obvious that this driveshaft has traveled some miles.

It might need a new set of universal joints and to make sure we don't distort the area where the lid slides, we used a piece of scrap pipe to dry. with the cap now some new gaskets are sealed and not serviceable like the dodgy factory gaskets but some like this one have a hole drilled and tapped for a grease nipple thats a plus because you will get a longer life but it is It is also a potential weak point as the drive yoke rotates and attempts to rotate the driveshaft; You want to index the joint so that the hole is under compression.

If you install it like this while the transmission yoke is spinning it will try to separate that hole creating a potential weakness and possibly leaving you stranded on the side of the road for installation, that same piece of scrap pipe again comes in handy for seating the U-joint in the transmission shaft. When installing the caps on the cross, you must ensure that the needle bearings do not fall to the bottom of the cap. In the past I have used a socket to seat the lid, but I thought a better solution would be to weld on a nut and washer and make my own little tool.

Much better than breaking out expensive tools right now, don't forget that you may lose a little grease from the universal joint during installation, so once you tighten the zerk fittings, go ahead and pump a few shots of grease into them. You will be ready for installation Hello, welcome back to trucks. I'm going to try this again. Is a little better. Is better. Let's screw this in tight now that the motor fits like a glove and we didn't even have to trim any blades. metal in the engine bay to get such a good fit, but some parts will be gone, like this vacuum actuated brake booster that came on this old Ford, we'll replace it with the

dodge

system that gets its pressure from the power steering pump. and we thought we were going to have to get rid of this apartment sized heater housing, but the good news is that it actually fits and if we regulate our turbo a little better we'll have even more headroom, but this is the most important thing we can do .

We have today look here, we have room for the radiator and the condenser and since the Ford grill comes out so far, we can even put an intercooler up here, even room for an upgrade, now there is an added advantage to moving the transmission back a few five inches. Outside of the shifter, this thing ended up in the perfect spot, we should have enough room between it and our center console. We're miles away from the dash, now talking about dashes, Kevin and I thought about the idea of ​​swapping out the entire Dodge dash for this old ford but after taking some good measurements we realized it was going to be a lot of work but we are going to change the groups because after taking them out properly we realize that they are almost identical in size so that they work well.

I'm just going to use the existing Dodge wiring, we'll create a couple of brackets, this thing should fit nicely here, well, we're really happy with the way this Ford body sits on the Dodge chassis and next time you see this truck . let's go a little further now if you have any questions about any products we use on today's show please visit powerblocktv.com thanks for watching the trucks see you in a week today we are modifying our five nine comments to generate more power for the super dually project and we will show you how to take care of the killer pin, everything is here today in trucks Hello guys, welcome to trucks, if you are following this project well, then you will know that this is the body of our super dually project a 79 Ford cab of four door that we are putting on a 97 Dodge chassis and as much as I am eager to get started on a cool paint scheme for this truck, well the truth is that we are just not ready to start the body work, however, we have getting the body on and off the chassis several times, putting together body mounts and discovering that we needed to back the engine and transmission back a good five and a half inches.

Well, we'll take care of that. problem but created another typical hot rodding problem now the turbo comes into contact with the heater housing. We want to keep this heater housing because we are also keeping the original heater controls inside the cover. Well we think we have this figured out and it might be easier than you think and it won't cost you a dime because what we plan to do is take this exhaust manifold and just rotate it that way the turbo will sit a little bit higher. up in the engine bay and hopefully it will give us the clearance we need between the turbo and the heater housing that way we can keep it now to make sure the turbo oil feed and return line is in place right, we're just going to index the front half of the turbo which way they're going to be in the right location now if you guys really don't like to squeeze a late model truck simply due to the overly complex nature of all the electronics under the hood and they prefer to tinker with an older truck with a carburetor simply For simplicity, you should take a look at some of these early diesel models.

You can make all kinds of adjustments and changes to make it work the way you want. You can control the amount of fuel that is poured into the engine before the turbo kicks in. Above you can limit the amount of turbo boost you generate and you can extend the rpm range at which these things generate power simply by turning a few screws and changing some springs. Now, these first five and nine

cummins

can easily make three or four hundred horsepower. and 6 or 700 pound-feet of torque at the wheels and still retains its daily driving ability, plus you have enough power under your right foot to tow a gigantic trailer down the street and still get 20 miles per gallon on the highway downloaded, of course, so Today we're going to show you how to unleash some of that power.

Luckily for us, the exhaust manifold ports are symmetrical, so it's just a matter of flipping the exhaust manifold over and, short of relocating a couple of brackets, they're out of the question. If there are any drawbacks to doing this now, in order for our turbo to sit properly in the exhaust manifold, we need to remove some metal. Now we don't want to get carried away because this manifold gets very hot and not to create any weak points, we use the same treatment on the turbo housing and once this is done we will remove all the metal shavings, then it's just a matter of half timing front of our turbo so that everything aligns.

Be careful with the impeller blades, you don't want to break them now, before we get carried away with our power upgrades, there's something we need to check guys, who are familiar with the five and nine

cummins

, what you know about the killer pin, Basically, there is a pin that is pressed into the block that locates the timing cover case. Now, this thing can come loose over time and can give you a major headache. If you're really lucky, the killer pin will just fall to the bottom of the engine and you'll never know, that's when you pack your bags and head to Las Vegas.

Now this job is still easy to do with the body of the vehicle, but you have to remove the fan cover and clutch panel. What do we do? Now, this is what you are looking for. You can see the pin starting to come out of the box. This guy is even especially when released. Now you can imagine the consequences if this pin falls off, if you're lucky. it falls right into that hole, it falls to the bottom of the case like Kevin said, but most likely this gear grabs it and forces it between the gear and the timing case, creating a big hole right here and a massive leak and If you are very unlucky, the thing that is going to fall to the bottom gets stuck between the crank and the cam gears and causes a big problem now, for all the havoc that that little guy can cause, the solution is incredibly simple, all you What you need to do is make a tab that fits under this bolt and holds the killer pin in place permanently.

Now a quick internet search will lead you to a couple of kits you can buy, but look at this, we found this in our junk drawer, so like we're going to do, you can make one with a hammer and a small punch, just put the pin back in its place, yes, now with the pin in its happy home, all is right with the universe again, now we can do something to keep it. there, which is easily achieved using the bolt location right next to the dowel, now using our scrap piece we simply cut a tab and drill a hole in it, we will install the tab with a slightly longer bolt to compensate for the metal. thickness and use loctite to keep it where we placed it well with our secure pin.

We are almost ready to start making some changes so we can increase the power output of our 5.9 diesel. We have now acquired a pair of Bully Dog meters. so we can monitor the boost and exhaust gas temperatures from inside the cabin now, before we finish the turbo installation, we're going to go ahead and drill and tap the manifold for this EGT probe. Now there are a couple of different points that you can choose from. To drill and tap an EGT probe, we placed some paper towels in the manifold to minimize the amount of metal shavings left after drilling a one-eighth-inch pilot hole.

We used a 5 16 drill bit to finish the job and with the hole drilled. I used an eighth-inch pipe tap to provide a mounting location for the EGT probe. This job can be done with the turbo and manifold on the truck. It's a little easier without it if you do it in the truck. Pack the tap flutes with grease to help retain metal shavings. There's a little trivia that you guys probably wouldn't know, but next up, Jack Roush stops by the store for a little trivia and then we have a sturdy replacement for our weakling. clutch, stay tuned, welcome back to the workshop.

Powerful diesel engines and light trucks are common today, but that wasn't always the case. Jack Roush stopped by the shop recently and shared a little history with us. There's a piece of trivia that you guys probably wouldn't know, but do you know who was the person who put the first Cummings diesel engine in a pickup truck? No, really, about 20 years ago, Chrysler came to me and said they wanted to explore the prospect. of putting a six-cylinder diesel engine in a pickup truck and uh then what they had was an industrial engine, it wasn't a truck engine, heavy equipment, heavy equipment, diesel engine and it made so much noise that it wasn't, it wasn't uh We're not feasible, so we had to put a sound deadener in the firewall and dampen the sound of the oil pan and do some other things to make the package reasonable, but we did the first one really for Chrysler, cool, that's cool, there it is have. the man himself, it's great to be around a pioneer like that, well what we've had a chance to do is put in some new gaskets to adjust the valves, clean some junk off the front of this engine and since it's so easy to Let's do with the body out of the frame what we put in the new water pump just because once that's done we can now concentrate on raising the wick.

Now one of the easiest ways to add big power to one of these early cummins is with some pretty small parts. like this stage four torque plate we picked up from Bully Dog, this part now controls the maximum amount of fuel delivered to the engine at a certain rpm. Now you combine this with a couple of other mechanical improvements that we are going to make that will be easy to implement. The torque range of 300 horsepower and 700 pound-feet now the kit also comes with a valve to alter the signal to the wastegate to increase boost pressure to match the fuel increase.

Now the torque plate is located under the AFC housing and according to the markings. in the heads of the screws waspretty obvious to us someone was here before making some adjustments now before installing the new torque plate we want to install a 3000 rpm governor spring kit that we acquired from ats diesel and after getting a baseline measurement of the lever. Along the stem of the regulator spring, we removed the locknut, retainer, and two inner springs along with a pair of shims. Now, a magnet and a pick come in handy when doing tedious jobs like this and if you've ever played games. operation of the game when you were a kid, well, you're already prepared, so to prevent the buzzers from ringing or to prevent you from making up new words and chasing pieces, make sure you don't drop anything into the injection pump housing.

Now installation is pretty easy, it's the factory spring seat the new ats spring inside the factory spring followed by the retainer and lock nut just check your measurements are the same now we have one more spring kit to install from ats but this time it will go into the afc fuel or android control and what this does is control the amount of fuel that is delivered to the engine in a low boost situation. Now the governor spring kit we just installed will allow our engine to idle at about 3000 or 3200 rpm instead of the factory setting of about 3000 or 3200 rpm. 2200 rpm now, this afc spring kit changes things a little differently now, by installing a lighter afc spring it will allow more fuel to enter the engine in a low boost situation which will make more power and make the Engine responds better at low rpm.

Alright, we're almost ready to install our modified AFC housing, but before we do we finally need to install our new torque plate. Now the kit comes with an installation template, but since ours has already been modified, we are going to install our fuel plate in an almost fully forward position, which will allow for almost maximum fuel rack travel. Now we have acquired about 191 industrial injection delivery valves to help increase the power output of this engine, but we are going to postpone the installation until we have the truck running now the delivery valve basically helps measure the amount of fuel which is injected into the cylinder now if you are going to do this job you need to remove the delivery valve bracket to gain access and that requires a special socket, this is not the only special tool we picked up to work on this diesel, that's true , and you've heard us say time and time again that having the right tool for the job can save you time, money, even parts and that delivery valve.

The cap is a perfect example of that. Now in the Matco tool catalog are several diesel-specific tools, including this filter socket set, a clutch fan wrench, and this locking tool that is designed to fit into a port on the transmission adapter case and allows you to rotate. that high compression engine with nothing but a 3 8 ratchet, this is useful. They also offer diesel-specific filter wrenches, including this diesel compression test kit, which is practically a necessity if you have serious engine problems to diagnose, so it's good to know that no matter what you're working on, Matco, they They have the tool for you.

Hello, welcome back to Trucks. So far, all engine projects at Super Dually have been completed without any problems. Now it's time to move some big chunks while we're at it. We know we're going to make more power, we need to make sure it actually hits the ground now with the increase in torque, well it's obviously more than a stock clutch can handle so we have a heavy duty replacement now, who knows that. We'll find it when we remove this transmission because obviously someone was here before and incorrectly installed this bracket here, it's sandwiched between the bellhousing and the block adapter, but either way we're going to remove this transmission. what's inside get it updated good here is the clutch pressure plate and flywheel we took off the big dodge now it's not hard to see the clutch and pressure plate have been recently replaced the problem is it's a stock replacement and it's a cheap offshore replacement at that and we're just not going to trust the saw clutch with our power upgrades, the other problem is this, check the flywheel, it hasn't been resurfaced, there's glazing and hot spots all over parts, so they have a new clutch. on a steering wheel that hasn't been properly resurfaced, that's ridiculous now, the first time I put a clutch in the vehicle, I was 16 or 17, it was a 63 Ford F-100 three on the standard tree shift and I did the same thing .

I put in a new clutch and didn't bother to repair the flywheel and it was all glassy. The thing rattled so loudly when you released the clutch that it wanted to throw you out of the vehicle, well my excuse, I was young and stupid. back then and we learned from our mistakes, hopefully the other thing we're going to do is remove this rear housing and see if that problematic fifth gear nut issue has been fixed now, we don't need any more testing than that. that a stock type clutch assembly is not going to be enough behind our straight-line torque 6.

It's pretty obvious that the previous clutch that was installed fell apart, so for us at least going back with the stocker was just a waste of time and money, especially considering we're going to be making power upgrades to the engine, so we also We could upgrade the clutch, that's why we're installing a south curve clutch. Now this dynamax clutch kit we got from South Bend can handle up to 450 horsepower and 1,000 pound-feet of torque which should easily cover our power upgrades and offer some room for future upgrades now that this flywheel It has been re-bored to accommodate a slightly larger pressure plate and that will allow us to use a 13-inch clutch disc, which is an improvement over the stock 12 and a quarter inch diameter.

The steering wheel now also uses a sealed roller bearing instead of the original one. Needle bearing configuration that is exposed to contamination. Now this pressure plate is 5 8 inches larger than the stocker and also improves clamping force. Now the disk also received some improvements. They swapped out some of the torsion coil springs in favor of these neoprene shock absorbers. which will stiffen the disc allowing it to handle more horsepower and torque and the kit also includes a new throwout bearing and the alignment tool now needed between increasing the clutch diameter and choosing the material of the clutch linings which will We will eliminate early clutch disc failure and still have a nice smooth pedal after installing the flywheel on the end of the crankshaft using loctite and 100 foot-pounds of torque, the alignment tool allows you to perfectly center the clutch disc and then you are ready for the pressure plate which is installed using loctite and the bolts tightened in a star shape, now be careful not to drive the bolts in with too much pressure because the final torque specification is only 20 foot-pounds and again it will Tighten using a star pattern to ensure even torque. clamp loading Hello, welcome back to the workshop.

Well, we've already made some power upgrades, fixed some maintenance issues, and installed a heavy-duty clutch behind our diesel engine. We are almost ready to reinstall our manual transmission, but before we do we want to remove this rear housing and see if the problematic fifth gear nut problem has already been fixed. I already removed the PTO cover and drained the fluid so as not to dirty our work table. Now this silver piece here it is. actually the fifth gear retaining nut and what happens is that the 50 on the main shaft actually rocks back and forth a little on the splines, allowing the nut to move back, letting this assembly of the Fifth gear slides back and once slides back on the main shaft. enough to clear the fifth gear on the countershaft, well you're basically left with a four speed transmission, a repair to do and some options, and what we're going to do to fix that is weld it in now we're using a big clamp to provide a good base to the retaining nut before welding along with a glove to prevent splashing of the gears.

Now we are using the four notches on the retaining nut as a guide on where to place our studs so as not to pull the axle. balance now I know a lot of you are saying well you just ruined those threads and you're probably right it's going to be a pain to remove the 5th gear nut but if we have to get into the box and deal with timing rows or replacing bearings, we are going to replace the factory mainshaft anyway because it is the root of the 5th gear problem, it does not allow full engagement of the 5th gear splines, so an aftermarket unit will allow full engagement and eliminate the fifth gear problem anyway, so this mainshaft is sacrificable and at least this way we know we won't lose our overdrive.

We got one last trade touch on a new rear axle seal. Fill the transmission with the recommended fluid. Let's take this for granted now. If you have any questions about today's show, visit us online at powerblocktv.com. Thanks for seeing the trucks. See you next time. Today we have seven of the best custom hot rod builders in the country helping us. we take projects super dually, from a rough shell to a truck primed and ready to paint in one program, it's all here today on trucks, hey guys, welcome to trucks, there's a lot going on, we have a room full of people and a room. action packed because we are very serious about making good progress on the paint and body side for the super dual project and we hope to take it from how it is now until it is ready to paint at the end of the program, so there is no need Let's say we have a lot of work ahead of us and if you're wondering who all these guys cutting, grinding, welding and making noise are, they're not just day laborers we hired from local temp agency Ryan's.

Well we've put together a team of the best paint and body guys in the country and while you may not recognize their faces I know you've seen their work we call it the cv auto body thrash truck so let's take a minute and meet the team, welcome to truck body thrash in the shop today alan shepley allen owns mustang central in byron georgia and specializes in forecourt restorations of custom resto mods and complete racing and performance mustangs, he even has 10 years of experience. in experimental engineering and prototyping tim strange tim operates strange moves riding customs from cambridge illinois his specialty is custom street rods and evil street machines racking up multiple awards including america's top custom award for his buick 52 copper randy borcherding randy's workshop is a paint house in houston texas, where they perform high-end custom restorations and impeccable paint jobs.

Randy had several of his vehicles on the block and regularly competes in national and international car shows, constantly bringing home awards. Eric Saliba. We've shown you Eric's little shop of horrors in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee before, where they did custom projects with a focus on combining new technology and nostalgic looks in just a few years. Eric built impressive vehicles that have been featured on both television and print media. Jeff Greening. Jeff is half of the father and son team. owner of the greening auto company and with over 40 years of experience and a true passion for the automotive industry, jeff is responsible for the impressive paint and body work that has earned them worldwide notoriety and a long list of very satisfied customers jesse greening the other half of Jesse and his Their incredible talent has led them to be placed as one of the eight grand finalists for the coveted Riddler Award.

They have also been finalists for Street Rod of the Year and winners of the 08 SEMA Award for Best GM Vehicle. Brian Finch Brian is the owner of Finch. hot rod transformations in Hermitage Tennessee, his specialty is 60's and 70's era muscle cars and he builds them top to bottom including paint, he is on his way to becoming a top builder in the pro touring ranks personalized. Okay, now that you've met the guy, here's the Basically, we split the truck into about three sections, with the bed being the most challenging since we have to make our own double fenders, then there's a cab with the doors sitting on brackets in different places. around the room and finally the front. section of the nose or what we call the houseof the dog, we're doing a couple of different things now, but you better pay attention because these guys are good and they're fast.

Now we call this a thrash, but don't think for a second that it's not organized, these guys know exactly what to do and every member of the team had a job and got to work now everyone has a different specialty, street rods, mini trucks, muscle cars, but the common thread through it all is good old-fashioned hard work. and we're going to have to cut away some crusty shit metal to make room for new good metal. Well, we're putting a line of tape here to make sure we cut this panel straight. We're making sure we're just cutting.

The exterior panel when I cut this one, we are going to polish it. Randy is going to cut a panel and place it here on this edge here now, a lot of guys, including myself, prefer to use a sheet metal MIG welder, but it takes a lot of finesse to weld single wall sheet metal because of the area of Incredibly concentrated heat. I'm just trying to even out the spacing so we can keep attaching the metal to where it's easiest to attach and reason. We are taking it together because it will help us not have to grind it so much.

Now some of these sheet metal panels are new, but in other places we had no choice but to work with what was already there and Randy Borchening takes a crack at stating the obvious, well I've discovered some rust, it's a little hard to tell , I'm sure, but these are rusty areas, there are some very small ones back here, but they imply that the metal is very thin throughout this place. I'm going to cut out this entire area, we'll make a patch and we'll solder it back together. Yes, I think we can bring him back from the dead.

Let's resurrect it. Some of the interesting things we can show you are homemade. tools and techniques from all these guys like this tip from Eric: You're placing a crown on an otherwise flat panel to match the contour of the factory stamped door. Works perfectly now they make patch panels for much of this truck but not this one. shop, this is one of the rare shorter doors for the quad cab truck, so what Eric has done is used a 20 gauge flat sock and a brake, he made his own patch paddle and rolled it underneath, that's what 10 or 15 years of hacking mini trucks will do a good job for you now the front of the door was fine here but the back in the jam was eaten away by rust.

Nobody makes a patch panel for this, so Brian tells them what you're doing, like Kevin said. we want we want to maintain the integrity of this front panel keep it we don't do a lot of work we cut out where all the rot was we make a new piece of patch filler here we separate the panels we clean off all the rust treat it with a good metal preparation, come back with a small strip of metal on the back, we'll weld it on the end, sand it like new. Now it seems like a lot of work for just a small patch, but these guys know you. do it once and you'll do it exactly next more truck body junk stay tuned guys welcome back to the shop as you can hear we are wide open and our stellar team is making amazing progress on our project.

Super session of dual paint and bodywork, now they have a custom dual fender already welded and it looks very, very good, now all they have to do is replicate it on the other side, the problem is that it looks like this, it is hit, hit. Rusty just nasty and more than a few hours away from looking like the other side, but I have faith and I know enough about bodywork to stay out of the way when these guys are in the room, but one thing goes To hold these guys before they arrive to the other side and do the other fender flare, some of the rotted and well worn 40 year old bed floor sections are replaced, while LMC offers complete bed floor replacements, we opted for just a few sections and we just welded it to the solid center section since this is going to be a work truck well it's going to be covered with a bed liner anyway and no this isn't Ian Johnson's hair dryer it's a tool really cool one we got from Matco and it recycles the bang.

The mids and capture it so it doesn't shoot into the rest of the room does a great job now it's a big turning point in any project when we go from hard metal work to using some filler to tune up the Obviously, the panels Eric have the perfect ratio of hardener, but now any major paint and body project is a process of constant refinement, especially when you're used to the level of fit and finish these professionals have. You can tell a professional by their attention to detail. check the panel spacing, it's standard, it's nice and even to the top, but follow it to where Allen made his patch and it widens a bit more.

Alan, tell me what you're going to do, well, Kevin, this was it. anything but typical, we have nine guys attacking this thing at the same time, normally when you build this patch you would have the truck door, yes, but due to the problem of there being people in this vehicle at the same time, I had to close the door. the truck, so now I snuck over here while no one was looking and taped the door here and I see we have a gap issue, so what I'm going to do is go in, weld this in, close the gap and smooth it out. and left as good as new with the ultra thin layer of bondo blocked and blended perfectly with the rest of the door, these guys were ready to move on to the next step and that meant dragging many of the exterior panels and doors to the inside. paint booth for a thick coat of black polyester primer now Brian Finch is spraying the cloths with primer but Brian Smith from color and body supply hooked us up in a big way with all of our paint and body material, Jesse and Tim started over new with a new leaf. metal for the passenger side of the bed, but they still had to figure out how to make room for the matching dual fenders.

What we're doing is figuring out the location of this fender and placing it on the other side. a ruler along these body lines that are measured at the factory from the drawing about the same location point here, run a ruler along this body line down through the center line of these clips of molding, which are the same factory locations on the other side, measure down give us points and then we go and transfer them to the other side and although Tim Strange is quite skilled with the elf welder, he calls himself and he wants his belt back now with the first round of primer dry and ready to block Brian and Alan attacked.

Take it with 100 grit which is a very aggressive sandpaper but most of the primer will end up on the floor since this is the last stage of your filling job and here's why I had faith in Tim and Jesse with the precision work they did. Very little body filler was needed to make our new double fender perfect. Moving the car body was a week long exercise with an incredible amount of activity and there was no pretense with any of these guys, they all had fun, got along great and when a job was done. Well, they all came together on the next one until piece by piece, section by section and project by project, Superdually was really starting to take shape and while it may seem like a TV studio crashed into a body shop, it definitely came together. was making real progress, the next super dualies would be joining in, hang in there, welcome back to the trucks, but with hours and hours of fill work done, we're finally ready to apply some primer to the cab now with half an acre of sheet metal on the roof panel and 30 years of life as a work truck, guess what you're going to get some padding.

It does build up, but that's okay because it's very thin and will even out the surface where the primer will be applied and can lock on pretty easily. The primer we are using again is clawson, all you need is a high build polyester primer. and it is literally bondo spray, it is the next stage in the body work process and the final stage of filling, as we had so many different highly qualified people we swapped some tasks, this is the second coat of primer after blocking on the doors and the first coat on the hood, Eric wanted to shoot and shoot at the poly through the giant 2.5 hole in the Unesco water spray gun, so he got to work laying down a thick coat of poly primer now that these panels had been blocked time and time again.

By repriming you can really see the fact that these cats know what they are doing. The reflection of the wet primer shows that these panels are laser straight and really ready to paint. Now, assembling the bed was probably the most ambitious section of the project. body work with both headers banged up and rusted and no dual fenders. It was a very aggressive project. Tim and Jesse did an incredible job grafting the LMC steel fenders onto the bed in true Street Rod style and it shows on Randy. primer Since this project took place over several days we had plenty of time to allow the primer to dry completely once it was we tied it to our crane using several heavy duty ratchet straps with the help of five or six people and we lowered it carefully. on the frame check it out it's the first time we see the super job with all the body work done we can see it as a truck again these guys work fast so pay attention we will split into teams and the people will start hanging the doors.

I'm going to mount the doghouse in the front, hang the fenders on it, put the hood on and then the last thing is to grab the bed, make the bed like new. We were now primarily focused on the outer body panel and will completely paint the inner fenders under the hood and the inside of the cab once we are a little further down the road. Now the reassembly along with the rest of the project was a complete and total team effort with everyone working side by side. like they've known each other for years and we'd have these guys back in the truck shop any day of the week.

This is just one of the many times we're going to take this thing apart and put it back together so the gaps are It's not perfect, but yeah, it's air, it's cool Hey guys, welcome back to the workshop, check it out. The primer is barely dry. The body is reassembled and supported on the chassis. All the hard work our all-star team put in has paid off. This seems completely wrong with over 200 years of collective experience, the team managed to accomplish over 400 hours of work in just under five days. We're not kidding and look, we have cool custom dual fenders, the panel gaps are correct. the panels are straight, all the rust is gone and this is in the final primer ready to sand off some color.

We know this is on its way to becoming the cool project we planned on paper, but don't forget that you can get any. one of these guys to help you with your project too just follow the web link on the truck and power block websites and look them up but don't hire them all at once now on behalf of everyone here at truxx tv we wanted to send . They came home with a few things, so we got them a cool truck t-shirt in their size, a license tag, some cute stickers, and some self-explanatory licorice on behalf of our friends at Anesta Water Spray Equipment that we sent them to each one of you. home with one of their new supernova spray guns designed by maní farina.

Good team now in all seriousness guys, thank you so much for your hard work and time if you have any questions about what you've seen on today's show or If you'd like to get in touch with these guys, go to the Power Block website, truckstv. com, check it out thanks for watching the trucks. See you next time, who will be the licorice? Today we are spraying soundproofing inside the super dual project cab and adding a DIY bed liner and we have some painting tips to help you get a perfect paint job. Finally we'll give Super Dooley some chrome.

Everything is here today in the trucks. It looks pretty difficult. Hello, welcome to the trucks. Super dual project. It was going to be a one of a kind vehicle, now we were going to submit a request for a new diesel dual trailer rig that we could use as a parts finder and to take our rigs to off road events and things like that. Like that, but then we started thinking about it and you know, we don't buy trucks, we build trucks, so that's exactly what we said we would do, but instead of using a dueling used platform to fix it,We decided to go in a different direction. and get two completely different vehicles and combine them and this is what we ended up with super dually: a '79 Ford body placed on top of a '97 Dodge dually chassis and we had seven of the baddest metalbenders in the country come out and help us.

He straightened out the wrinkles in the body and in less than a week these guys brought this truck back to life. Those guys did a great job on the outside of the truck getting it ready for painting, but there just wasn't time left. pay attention to the inside, so that's what we're going to do today. This is a 70's era truck and back then they just didn't focus as much on soundproofing and insulation. Combine that with the fact that we are using a 12 valve Cummins diesel and they are not exactly known for their quiet operation and you can easily see how it would get a little loud and boomy here in the cabin, so let's address that and try to keep the diesel noise and road noise on the outside of the truck keeping it comfortable and quiet here on the inside now inside the bed except in a few places where we have repaired to replace some rotted metal it is almost exactly as it we found, but remember.

This is a work truck, not a show truck, so it's a little rough, but that's okay, we'll prep the surface, not worry too much about a few little dents or nuts here and there and put a thick coat of paint coating on it. box to this thing. Now inside the cabin we are going to use a product that the horsepower guys have had very good luck with in the past and that is lizard skin spray sound insulation. Now we have had success with adhesive soundproofing mats before. Good, but spraying on insulation has some advantages. Now they have a couple of different formulas, first their sc or sound control formula, and this will really reduce the noise and vibration inside the cabin and also protect everyone. surfaces from continued moisture and corrosion, any rust problems we would see, this material is good for about 300 degrees Fahrenheit now the other option is its ci or ceramic insulation formula and it is good for higher heat applications as it can Withstand temperatures of approximately 500 degrees.

It will also reduce motor and heat transfer by approximately 25 degrees and since it is water based, although easy to clean, it is environmentally friendly and you do not need a respirator to apply it. Another advantage of both coatings is that they work well. On really very thin products, only 40 mils are one millimeter thick and that will prevent you from altering the fit of your interior panels, saving you extra work and a big headache. Now you can use both products on the same panels, but if you do. Make sure to apply the sound control formula first. To spray it, you will need a gun with a fairly large hole or opening, since today we will focus on the interior.

Let's use this. one now, this stuff has a pretty thick consistency, so use an electric drill with the paddle mixer and go ahead and mix it for a good while. If it helps you count to 100, you want to make sure it's mixed well now once you're happy. everything is mixed evenly and you have saved as much product as possible; Go ahead and dip the mixing paddle in water, meaning if you want to reuse it once the lizard skin sets, it will be very difficult to remove at the very least. I'm not making a mess now, this sprays very easily, especially if you use the spray gun they offer, but if you're using a spray gun you already have, remember to switch to a larger diameter tip before you start.

It's always a good technique to use an overlapping pattern, whether you're spraying paint or laying down an insulation-type product like this, but this is much more forgiving. We're also applying some insulation to the rear panel of the cabin because basically this entire huge cabin is just a big steel drum and the more places we can spray on sound insulation, the better now spraying off-white insulation against the contrasting brown paint makes Make it really easy to tell when you have full coverage, there's no need to pile these things up in very thick layers. and if you're not really happy with the texture of the final product, remember that this material can also be sanded and painted, so if you have exposed panels, don't be afraid to use it on those too and with the cabin nearing completion.

Time to pay attention to the well-used bed is over, we've removed the rust from the flaky surface of the bed floor with a wire brush and removed all the dust, so we're ready to rock and roll now that we've shown it off. In the past you prepare rusty metal with the chemical to prepare it so you can put a bed liner on it, but there are different ways to do it. This time we will do it differently with por-15, which means paint. on the rust and it basically bonds to the rust and creates a solid layer that you can then put the bed liner on top of, just like the bed liner that we're going to put on top of for 15 is a moisture cured urethane, which which means it doesn't need a catalyst to cure it, it uses moisture in the atmosphere now I'm not using pore in the good metal it will need a different primer.

Next we will apply our DIY bed liner and then the painting secrets will be revealed, stay tuned and you can see the perfect impression of my hand on the steel Hello guys, welcome back to the store. Well, our lizard skin spray for sound insulation is dry to the touch for the most part, but like most spray coatings, it needs a full 24 hours. heal completely so we can't crawl over here and do any work, but the good news is that there is a lot of work to do in bed, that's right, there is a lot of work to do on both projects, but they are both easy to do, so which makes them great DIY projects that you can do at home.

Now I've gotten a little head start by adding some seam sealant to some of the gaps and covering the bare steel with some duplicolor primers from the The bed liner system we're putting in here likes to sit on top of a liner instead of bare steel. Now this is a pretty recent thing from dupli-color, they call it their bed frame DIY bed liner kit and it's a little different than what I've had before because it's a moisture cured urethane which means it uses traditional water or moisture in the atmosphere to bind it and turn it into a very strong coating.

Now one thing I like about duplicolor is that they know how to put together a kit and everything you need is included here including a tray, an applicator that will create the right texture and look great, a stirring stick, a prep pad for the surface, even a touch-up brush to get into those hard-to-reach corners. and areas you can't reach with a roller, oh yes, providing paint to the surface of your bed and everything clean like ours is a red scratch pad, it's all you need to create the tooth or texture on the that the bed liner needs to settle, now do it yourself, obviously. means doing it yourself so be prepared to burn some calories because the sacrifice of not paying someone to do it is a bit of hard work that's all, now with paint prep there is no such thing as too clean and the thin coat of dust I have.

If you blow it well, it would interfere with the adhesion of the bed liner, so you'd better make sure the substrate is clean. We will follow up with a final clean up of the dupli-color paint preparation in a spray can, this ensures that all wax, grease and contaminants are off the panels and will further aid the adhesion of our new coating to the panel. bed. Now, the piece of masking paper that I'm using to sit on, just make sure not to drag anything else onto what I'm trying to cover on top of to keep things cleaner.

Now there is no real technique for applying the first coat, but the roller gives you the opportunity to smooth out any runs or clumps in the coating. Now that's another benefit of using the piece. of the paper is that I can paint from the corner and not get caught now the first layer doesn't look like much but that's okay it's not supposed to have one purpose and that is to hold on to the second layer of the bed liner the second layer is what it has the mill thickness and strength and texture and look of a bed liner now the second coat is where the magic happens and where you get the look of a professionally applied bed liner now two coats will give you a strong coating , but if you have to apply three well that's not a problem either, this one can be coated and repaired unlike a vulcanized coating, now you may notice that we are putting the coating over the dents, but that's okay because this will be a work truck and We're going to use it for one.

It would probably take 30 or 40 hours of bodywork to get to the inside of this one. the bed is soft and frankly it's not worth it when they're going to hit it again now from the time they make the bed it will probably take you an hour maybe an hour and a half to apply it but it's time well spent . because it is an attractive layer and hides many sins, there you have it, the second layer surely gives it the texture and strength that you want. Another good thing is that, as we said before, it is water based, so if you make a mistake like I did. right here i went over my masking tape it's a simple water clean done next is proactive painting tips and then we'll try on the biggest piece of jewelry in the store stay hey guys welcome back to the trucks we're getting closer and closer from being able to apply super dual paint now that we have the lizard skin inside the interior and the bed liner inside the bed, we can finally focus on the exterior panels, speaking of which we wanted to show you the paint scheme. that we chose for the truck this is Summit Racing's new line of clear base coat paint systems this is their bomber blue and gunmetal metallic we think the color combination looks great the clear has a nice shine it will hold up it will look fantastic on it truck now, talking about a paint job, you always want to strive for the perfect paint job, well the secret to a perfect paint job is actually not a secret at all, it's a technique and it's not just a technique, It's a lot of different procedures combined and it's being thorough every step of the way, so what I wanted to do is show you some things that will really help you achieve that perfect paint job.

Now you will always see me painting in some type of monkey suit or painting. Suit with gloves and a good breathing apparatus and as important as it is for safety, it is also important for controlling contamination. Contamination is your enemy in a paint job. The things that get in the paint come off your skin or your clothes and it is very important especially to use. gloves and here's why now this is a piece of bare 20 gauge steel that I put my hand on and held it there a couple weeks ago for about 15 to 20 seconds and you can see the perfect impression of my hand on the steel , this is because the acid and oil that I secreted from my skin deposited on the steel and reacted, they will be trapped on its surface between the layers of primer, between the layers of paint, especially on bare steel, so It's a great idea to wear gloves now, these blue gloves are nitrile, we get them from Kimberly Clark and they are very good protection against the contamination that gets deposited in your work.

These latex gloves don't hold up as well under solvent, but they're better than nothing. Now contamination can also come from your equipment, so it's a no-brainer to keep paint guns clean, but there's one thing you don't want to do: you don't want solvent getting into the air inlet. The reason is that the inside of these ducts are not coated like the outside and they will actually rust or corrode from the inside with moisture that is insolvent, so here's a good idea: this is just a simple and cheap vacuum cleaner cap , cap the end while cleaning your paint gun to keep moisture and solvent out of the inside of the gun's air passages while cleaning it Now, after the spray gun is clean, use a dedicated spray gun lubricant, these will not react with the paint, just a drop on all metal on metal areas, that's all you need, that way your gun will be ready for the next time you pick it up and resist the temptation to use metal objects to clean the internal passages of the paint gun, such as a clip or these welding files, these can damage the highly machined internal surfaces and ruin a paint gun, only use products and equipment that are dedicated and made specifically for cleaning a paint gun , these also do not decompose under the solvent.

Now another area where you canget contaminated or dirty on your paint job is the air hose, so every time I do a paint job, I will. Prepare the hose with some wax and grease remover and clean the first three or four feet of the hose that way you know you are not transferring dirt or contamination to the panel that is actually very close to the paint gun. Now here it is. something old school now think of your car in the paint booth as a big giant magnet and all the dust particles floating in the air like pieces of steel that will be absorbed by your magnet and it's your wet paint, well here you go An old school trick that is very easy to do, remove the paint or rust, in this case, from a piece of frame and simply screw a chain to the frame, make sure it hangs from the floor in a clean place too and what will it do? do this.

What you want to do is unload the magnet and really help remove the static cling that's going to attract that stuff and all that other contamination that you don't want to remove from your paint job on those panels. Now, each of these tips on their own, well, they will help, but combining a lot of different, really proactive, good tips creates a mindset that you will have a clean atmosphere and you will be careful when doing your procedures because remember the perfect paint job, well , it's all in the details and every little bit helps Hello guys, welcome back to the store.

Well, the Super Dualies project is getting closer to being ready for that blue and gray paint scheme that Kevin showed you earlier, but once we get it done, we won't miss a beat. Raised and dented factory grill on this thing, let's upgrade it to something a little cleaner, a little meaner, now this is a factory replacement grill housing with a billet aluminum insert, looks pretty sturdy now that I've measured the factory dodge. radiator and intercooler condenser setup and they require about seven and a half to eight inches of space now if I measure from behind the grill to the face of the fan clutch it looks like we have a little over nine inches of space to deal with with now, obviously we will have to remove the center post from the factory radiator core support, but we will reinforce it with something else, it will be tight if we need a little extra space, well, we will just remove it. the mechanical fan and replace it with two thinner electric fans either way.

I think we are in good shape today. The Super Dually project receives a new paint job. We've got some of our friends from auto body thrash back at the booth to help get this behemoth. looks even better than when it was new, everything is here today in trucks Hey guys, welcome to trucks, we will be super dual projecting our 79 Ford body sitting on a 97 Dodge chassis that takes up almost every square foot of our new prep station. and it's almost ready to spray some color on it, but this project didn't start out looking all that clean if you remember, it was quite a mess to get this once rusty She-Hulk sheet metal to look like this old Ford had now been sitting on.

The weeds for at least the last 15 years, while everything was fine, it was definitely tough and that required a lot of patch panels to replace the rust with solid sheet metal, but we had a lot of skilled help in the shop where these guys removed it. To a large extent, they helped us achieve our goal of having the truck buried in a thick coat of high build primer and ready to paint. Now I know you guys remember Randy Borchardting from Paint House from the Auto Body Thrash Show. Well, he was kind enough to fly. all the way here from Houston, Texas to help us set this up and, frankly, it's nice to have help because this is the size of a small house.

Now, obviously, some work has been done since you last saw Super Duty. It was in black primer when we finished the thrash and now it's in gray primer. What I did was block it with 100 grit followed by 180 to level the surface one last time and then we sprayed some Summit Racing 2k Gray Urethane Surface Primer. to prepare it for a cold coat of paint, but I used a different system on a different set of sanding blocks than I normally use to prepare paint. This is what we are looking for. These are Skyline Corporation soft sanders that we picked up. at our local matco tool dealer, yes they are soft and flexible, but interestingly they have different shapes molded into the sanders so they can effectively contour and lock in the different shapes and curves on all these different vehicles, which is perfect for our Doubly Because there are all the different shapes in cleats and hard lines, we now also use the style line sandpaper and although they are flexible and contouring, the benefit is using both in one system.

Now this is how soft sanders normally work. What you do is take your sandpaper and apply it to the block, stick it on and you have a sanding board, but when you go to the outline you see these creases, what those creases do is they lift the edges and of course this is overkill, but those edges are fine. they are going to dig into your base or your paint its not good here is the magic of soft sanders you take your paper you place it on the contour first you take the soft sander contour down to the panel and you have a convex or concave surface that matches the panel that you are blocking, no creases or creases and nothing will get into your painting and what this does is give you a very effective tool tailored to exactly reflect the image of the panel you are blocking it saves time and will have a better result, we will see how it works throughout the truck.

Randy is no stranger to pushing a sanding block and we both agree that blocking a vehicle is one of the main components to getting a good paint job, we are wet blocking with 320 grit super flexible paper, now it comes for the On the way to you, this truck will look like a big square box, but trust me, there is no flat panel by any means, but you can see how. These smooth sanders conform to contours and will literally prevent you from digging grooves in the paint that will show in your top coats. This little guy fits this curve right here.

The bottom line is that it's all about the tools and having the right ones. tool for the job, these will do it using a guide coat, it's obvious what it does, it shows you where the low and high spots are, and having lightweight sanding boards that come in many different shapes is a huge benefit, especially on this truck. or any custom project other than just flat panels for wet blocking with adhesive paper it just hasn't been possible until I found this now with conventional sandpaper the grit goes away when it gets wet and the adhesive doesn't work at all.

It destroys the sandpaper, but the style sandpaper obviously we use it wet and the adhesive stays active, that's pretty good and when you push a sanding block against the panel, it really helps to have that panel still attached to the vehicle, you just gives something to work and although we spent our time wet blocking the sides we decided to hit the roof with some d.a sanders just to knock it down because the truth is the only people who are going to see that roof are the weather helicopters now with the doghouse blocked and ready to paint, well we have to blow it up again because remember this is a complete color change and we have to paint the inside and before they can be painted properly, they have to be prepared like everything else and now. now we have more sanding, one of my favorite sayings is that the harder it is to sand, the more important it is to sand it so that the back and all the cracks and crevices are also prepared and these red Norton pads do a great job of fitting. to all tight contours and is a coarse enough grit that will give the sealant plenty of teeth to grip now with the help of Randy, our smooth sanders and the superflex sandpaper from the style line we are making great progress on. super dual way, so let's talk.

As for the paint, we've shown you our spray panel with the two colors we've chosen for the two-tone Super Duly using Summit Racing's new two-stage clear base coat paint system. Now this is a professional level system on a budget. price, they have different clear coats different speeds of hardeners different selections of reducers base coats epoxy primers surface primers and even the chemicals you need to clean it to make it a complete system but most importantly you get these downloadable p sheets that are Available on free summit websites they go over everything, mixing ratios, application guides, drying times, all the information you really need to use these chemicals correctly, so it's not just about the chemicals, it's about knowing the rules. and that makes it much easier below.

We're finally spraying paint and Randy is creating an awesome ghost logo and then painting the cockpit and reassembling the Super Dually. Pay attention. Hey guys, welcome back to the trucks. Well, it's safe to say that the Super Dually is a big truck, so a paint job is a monumental task, but no. That doesn't mean you can skimp on details like this hole that's right in your line of sight at the top of the bed and no matter how long it takes you have to commit to taking care of the details at this stage and that's what makes the difference between a splatter job and a really good paint job and it fixes the paint job itself.

Time in the booth pulling the trigger on a gun probably can't even be measured in percentages if you're actually smoothing a vehicle, especially a large one. On one like this, we have a lot of time on the panels, multiple primings and blocking and it just takes so many hours, hundreds even thousands in the case. Of show cars before painting for three or four hours and with everyone approving our progress, we are ready to move on to the next step, which is a coat of sealant. We are using Summit brand epoxy sealant. Now epoxy is literally a spray glue that sticks to everything and everything sticks to it, so with the right mixing ratio it not only ensures that our base coats and our paint coats stick to the surface, but also that we have a uniform color to spray our paint.

First of all, what really is the main function of a sealant coat. Now it takes about 30 minutes before you can spray the base coat over the sealant, which is about the amount of time it will take you to clean your rig and mix your base colors, we're starting with gunmetal metallic from the Summit Racing color palette now once you have downloaded your p sheets they will tell you to catalyze the base layer this does a couple of things and forms the base. the design is a little softer and gives it a chance to chemically cross-link with the base coat and for the clear coat to set into it, which is pretty important and makes the whole thing one continuous layer instead of a bunch of stacked layers now there is a specific technique that we are using that we all agreed on for this paint job as it is completely disassembled and that is to follow the same recipe for each piece no matter where it is or when you shoot it and it starts by using the gunmetal gray on each part of the panel even though it will be two tone, what this does is establish a repeatable pattern that we can transpose to the rest of the panels and that will guarantee a color combination combined with the correct technique that we did not want now. let randy's talent for custom painting go to waste while we had him cooped up here, so we assigned him the task of creating a cool ghost effect with the super logo appropriately at the top of the header and he came up with something really simple but very Cooling a candy with a little bit of added pearl sprinkled on our blue gives it a ghostly effect where under some conditions you won't see it and under other conditions it will just jump out and it will be obvious that it has two effects, one where it disappears and one where it appears now with randy burying his graphic and of course, another member of the auto body thrash team showed up to give us a hand.

Brian Finch came ready to get to work and had no qualms about sharing his point of view. Now Brian has a bit of an opinion here this is the inside of the door I ruined that's the one he ruined so what's your point you get what you pay for we won't pay you now all hands on deck we put on a real production vibe so we can do this job now, if you use a preset recipe or guidelines, you can get away with using different painters and get the same results, which is pretty important in this case because we're testing a new paint system now on top .

Call this a budget paint system, but you'd never know it from spraying it and it was great to get feedback from these guys. The paint covers very well when it first sets. It's very forgiving, you know, for someone who maybe isn't. an expert in weapon setup or proper technique, the paint just goes on and does what it's supposed todo, especially the clear coat, the clear coat, you know, it turned out well, um, if it had had a good flow, but you could, you could hammer it and it wouldn't work well, so you know, I'm very impressed with what it is.

I would use it now painting super dually like we are doing, it saves you a lot of time masking in some preparation, but the price you pay well is multiple painting sessions and having a place to store the pieces, even with all that, it is still easier We would have to try to fit the whole truck into the stand, we simply couldn't get that truck into the stand at the same time, plus if I had to shoot that truck at once. My arm would get tired. Then I would go home and put Humpty Dooley back together.

Stay here. I opened. Hello, welcome back to trucks, but we are knee deep in the paint job for the super dual project. some parts are shot, some parts are primed, some parts are masked, but there's still a lot of work to do for all three, obviously any paint job constitutes a lot of work and a substantial learning curve now if you're trying to weigh . the difference between commissioning this and paying someone to do it or doing it yourself think about it like this, we have three guys working it's about 60 hours of work and that doesn't even consider the body work that was done before you How are you?

Seeing now, that's just the spraying of the paint, which doesn't also consider the disassembly and reassembly after doing the wet work, so again, just for the paint job, you're going to have about four thousand dollars of labor at any body shop throughout the United States. plus about fifteen hundred dollars in material costs, so if you want to weigh that against a bit of a learning curve and figure out how to do it yourself, you have options because you can save some money and pay someone to do it. your paint job or invest a little money and a lot more time, do it yourself or just find a project that already has a clean paint job now with all the prep stations and high tech paint booths and do this and be modern. efficient that the painting process itself hasn't changed much since they stopped using brushes to spray paint in the first place and that was in the 20's, now a spray gun is essentially identical to a carburetor where you mix a liquid with air .

Over the years, spray gun technology has become very sophisticated, even when you're like Randy if you've been spraying paint for over 20 years. Sometimes you stick with trusted, proven technology, like the case with its Accuspray siphon gun. I call him old faithful. Spray everything perfectly the first time. I don't have to go back and fix scratches or uneven metal issues. It works every time and I don't see a reason to change that, yes it's a little harder to clean, it's a little more inconvenient at times, but the finished product more than makes up for it and if you've seen some of the awards, Win a Job impeccable that Randy kicks over and over again.

Well, it's hard to argue with that kind of success. How does it look good so far? Come up here now with the excess spray wiped off, the paint dried and everything laid out smooth as glass. It's time to reassemble the fun part. This is the last time we'll be putting the doors back on the cabin, so of course we'll spend a little time making sure we don't damage the paint, but we also have good panel gaps and good alignment, save it now in the doghouse, well that's a different story because not only have the skirts and back of the firewall not been painted, but we still have to do things like figure out our address. link, what steering column are we going to use, what type of brake booster are we going to use, so this is purely a mockup, but I have to tell you that after all the hard work and all the time it has taken us to get here.

We can't wait to get this together Hey guys, welcome back to the shop, last time we showed you this shot we were revealing the fresh bodywork and fresh primer, but check this out. Kevin Randy and Brian put in another long week of work. to give the super dooley project this super stylish blue and gray two-tone, then i buried it and cleaned it up, and we can't thank those guys enough for kicking and working hard, heck, randy even dutifully placed the super logo on the top header to nice and cool custom touch, now we tried two different things here, the first was a new unconventional sanding block system that really saved us a lot of time on super dual prep, the second was the so called economy racing paint line of summit and the The base colors are well distributed, the colors are uniform and consistent and although this truck was painted by three different shooters, it was completely disassembled, everything matches when you put it back together and the clear coat speaks for itself, the brightness and depth are beautiful. so two advantages to both systems in my opinion and what that does is you get super prepared for a whole new set of projects.

Hello, welcome to trucks. We are making great progress on the project super dually installing the glass doors. but as you can see well, there is no driver control, so essentially this is a glorified television prop until we find a way to make this classic body communicate with the new modern chassis and a big part of that is the steering systems. cooling for the engine turbocharger. and passengers in the form of intercooler radiator and air conditioning condenser, now we definitely want to try to reuse all these original parts, it will save us a lot of money and we can avoid going to the aftermarket to get some custom units now, if possible, I would really like to use the original Dodge center support.

It has the integrated mounting locations along with the correct clearance between the intercooler condenser and the radiator. Also, it would be nice to put a modular unit like that in now that the radiator was damaged in the ruins, the mounting pins are broken, it's leaking and well, it's in bad shape, but it's perfect for a model because we don't have to worry about damaging it Now, all we have to do is try to make this work after a After careful disassembly of our freshly painted truck, we were able to move forward with what we call Plan A.

Now we were trying to preserve as much of the sheet metal as possible. the Ford factory. I'm trying to get all the Dodge components to work, um, yeah, okay. The good news is that we have clearance between the fan clutch and the radiator core. The bad news, obviously, the radiator is too wide, so we are at a crossroads. We can design a complete custom cooling system for this truck and spend a lot of money. that we don't need to recycle the dodge system that is designed to cool this engine in the first place and work with all the other components of the system that we are going to reuse in this truck, so at this point it is much cheaper.

So that we can reuse the Dodge stuff and recycle and trim some sheet metal after verifying that our sheet metal surgery was successful and that the radiator fit well, we tried to simulate it on the vehicle after hanging the inner skirts on the upper panel that we left fall. the radiator in place and although it fit well, it quickly became apparent that we weren't going to have enough room for the intercooler and A/C condenser, we were also going to have issues with mounting locations and clearance for the radiator cap. radiator, it was just going to end up being a hodgepodge of parts, so I was on plan B, so after removing the Ford header panel we quickly assembled the Dodge core support with the radiator condenser and intercooler, feeling lucky ones, yeah, okay, a little bit more trim on these inner fenders.

I'll be able to lift this up a half inch from that fan and figure out how to match the hood later. I think I do see hood pins in the future, and with the center support sitting on the original Dodge frame mounts, we took a measurement back to the fan, then took that measurement and got to work relocating the body mounts. We now use the cutting wheel as much as possible for a nice clean cut as the frame tapers right after the original bracket which we knew we needed to flatten. and that involved some rectangular tubes and a bit more cutting, yes I'll take two of them please, now Kevin's method of cutting a slight curve in the tube using the cutting wheel is clever.

He's making repetitive grooves a little deeper. and deeper every time you don't want to force the blade there and try to spin it, the wheel will break and become a spinning wheel of death and destruction. Next , that should work fine, that clearance and everything, hey guys. Welcome back to the workshop. Well, with our cooling systems in place, we went ahead and hung the fenders so we could try to reinstall the grill. Make sure everything lines up on my fingers. My side is in good condition. Well, it seems that's the only thing keeping us going. A perfect fit, this flange right here on the grill is coming into contact with the condenser.

We can trim this down and it will be great. We will have enough free space in the hood and our Dodge module works perfectly in this Ford. dog house, that's awesome, get lucky once in a while, yeah well now that we've established that our cooling setup will work and the grille will fit with a little modification, we still have another problem we need to solve. tie the inner and outer fender together and find a way to attach it to the Dodge core bracket, so our plan is to cut some sections from the Ford core bracket that will join the inner and outer fenders, with a slight modification and bolt to the bracket from the Dodge core, will add some reinforcements, we'll be in good shape, but in typical hot rodder fashion, one fix led to another problem, now we have to find a way to incorporate a hood latch through that. bridge later, you may have noticed that we weren't very careful when trimming these inner fenders or aprons, that's because they're banged up, they're damaged, they're rusty and they're stress cracked and that's it, so we've got a new pair from lmc truck the shipment just as you see them they already come with the edp coating which means electrical deposition primer that is electrostatically applied to the metal making it very strong and very complete corrosion protection so they will probably last longer than the vehicle and we are going to use the existing bolt hole locations that way if we have to do any service on this vehicle it is a simple procedure now this is a process I refer to as hobbing because you don't want to cut too much now we are saving the upper tie bar for a couple of different reasons number one houses the latch number two gives us the correct spacing between the fenders after loosely bolting on the center ford support To maintain the spacing between the fenders we put the Dodge cooling on the relocated mounting tabs and draw a line around the outside edge so we can see what else we have to trim the Ford center support.

Basically, this is a refinement process and After a lot of trial and error, now following our scribing lines, we are trimming a little more to get a flush fit from the center support on the Ford to the radiator support on the Dodge. The other piece of real estate that was preventing us from a flush fit was the lugs that normally mount on the Dodge's fenders. We want to get in and out with that flap, so after a quick test fit we decided that two union were not going to work and the Ford one had to go, it's uh.

Yes, no, and after further reducing the Ford header panel, we made two separate pieces and kept the sections that attached to the fenders and inner skirts. Now, as far as attaching to the Dodge core support, we're still working on that floor. like this well that mocked up cool we'll clean this cover these will come off we'll weld our front bracket to the dodge bracket our top tie rod is still removable this is working great Hi guys welcome back to the store now that we have our Dodge cooling system is crudely grafted onto our Ford sheet metal, but we still have the Ford factory steel inner skirts in place, that's because we have some work to do on the firewall, we have the steering column, brake booster and master cylinder to install together with the master cylinderclutch and even the wiring harness and there may be some interference between those items and our inner fenders here so we may have to trim some to get clearance and once we do all that and have it all simulated we can transfer our measurements to our lmc replacement inner fenders and install them and speaking of steering columns check them out now even though these steering columns are about 20 years apart they are actually quite similar with just a few subtle differences they both have mounting brackets. which attach to the pedal assembly and firewall and luckily for us the distance between the steering wheel and this mounting flange is almost identical on both columns meaning we won't have any awkward issues with steering wheel placement as It will be located right where it is. you need the dodge column now, well it's a tilt wheel, it has the combination wiper and turn signal switch, the ignition switch is built into the column and the steering wheel even has the cruise control switches, making it makes it really convenient, but before starting the installation.

Um, we have some work to do on the wrecked Dodge Cab, what we're doing is removing this reinforcement plate. The reason why manufacturers use these reinforcement plates is because even if they used a single thicker layer of sheet metal for the firewall, but the use is repetitive. The brake clutch and throttle would eventually fatigue the sheet metal causing it to crack and they don't want it going anywhere after drilling the dozen spot welds, we finally ripped it off the firewall, it wasn't that hard, I got it. Before installing the gusset plate we had to clean up the firewall a bit and that meant removing the entire wiring harness from the original ford so we had room to work with now the ford firewall has the same reinforced double panel we are just going to trim the ears and place the dodge piece right on top.

It's pretty obvious that this will work pretty well, but we have to trim the dodge piece well on the slope of the ford. Now we create a horizon line to make sure everything is at firewall level, this is no big deal, just a bit more carving and trimming now with the plate in its final position using the internal pedal box bolts as a locator, we can do our final trim for the brake booster and for the steering column now, if you are aware of the tools we are using to perform this surgery, you have probably noticed that other than this air saw, they are all Matco tools that You probably already have it in your toolbox, so it just goes to show you that the most important tool in your workshop is probably between your ears Now with the location of the gusset plate locked in, the next thing to do was drill the holes to through the firewall that mount the power brake reinforcement.

Finally it will allow us to do a test fit on the hydraulic booster bracket, master cylinder and steering column to see what kind of clearance we had in the engine compartment. Well, our brake booster and hydraulic booster master cylinder are going to work, but we only have about a half inch of clearance between the master cylinder reservoir and the air inlet and the way this diesel engine is going to move under torque, we're going to want a little more clearance than that, so we'll have to get creative and see what we can come up with either way.

This wrecked Dodge reinforcement plate is saving us a lot of time and a lot of manufacturing work. Hello, welcome back now that we know where our cooldown is going. To be that way, we went ahead and compromised on locking it in place and welding the Ford bracket to the Dodge cooling module frame and did some sort of cool old school custom trick by combining the two pieces to make it look a little more from the factory using quarter inch steel rod and 20 gauge sheet metal. Now the first thing I did was place the steel rod, bend it by hand and secure it in place on the edge of the bracket, then what should do is take the 20 gauge steel rod and tack it in place. top of the rod, the important thing to remember is to leave as much of the circular rod exposed as possible, that way you take advantage of that perfect rounded rolled edge and create a patterned look.

Now we'll prime, block that and paint it. with some semi-gloss black paint and it will look factory original. Now here we have the hydraulic boost mounted on the backing plate of the Dodge which is rosette welded to the firewall of the Ford and the steering column and steering shaft are installed but as you can see the shaft is not long enough long, it is not a problem because it is round. Here we can sheath it to whatever length we need and still keep the sliding shaft feature, which is a nice safety feature in case something bad happens, but where is it really? starts to come together is inside the cabin, take a look now the Dodge's pedal box is a piece of cast aluminum that is held in place by the four hydraulic booster bracket bolts that clamp the firewall between the two column Steering is bolted to the pedal box and again to the three backing plate bolts that we removed from the hood of the Dodge, but the nice thing about all this is that the location of the pedal and the orientation towards the steering column is exactly maintained. just as the factory designed it, so we don't do it.

We don't have to redesign any of this and if you're thinking this looks a little ridiculous with the column sticking out too much, we'll check it now, with the four dashes in place, you can see where we are. Come on and if you remember that the Dodge group fits inside the Ford Dash, the important thing is that the steering wheel is exactly where it should be. I have plenty of room between the column and the steering wheel, and I can see. right in the middle of the Ford windshield, just like the factory intended, obviously this crunchy seed is going to go away and we're going to do some other interior upgrades to get rid of the rat's nest, look here, we're going to modernize this truck. and make it cool so the super dooley name isn't just a name today our ford dodge hybrid tow rig is getting even closer to reality we are putting an extended steering axle new painted headlight buckets under the hood and planning a new exhaust for the super dually project everything is here today on trucks Hey guys welcome to trucks well we have our little super dually back in the shop because we have made good progress on our other long term projects our 49 classics chevy are almost done and the thunder is moving along nicely, but we didn't want to get ahead of ourselves because we're going to need something to tow it, so we made some room for our ford dodge hybrid pickup truck now that we're at it.

We're going to start by trying to hook up our Dodge swapton steering column, we're going to do something with this mess of wires and see if we can get our Dodge instrument cluster to fit into the dash four and just because we have a nice coat of paint on the outside . It doesn't mean we're done with the paint because we want it to look as good when we open the hood as it does with the hood closed, so we're going to replace these ugly wrinkled aprons with new ones. We got it from LMC and our hybrid center stand, well, it needs a little primer and a little paint.

Also, some of the first 79 trucks had round headlights just like ours. We want to turn them into square headlights, so we picked up these LMC cubes, but because we have a bit of a mix here, we're going to have to craft them, no big deal. We'll show you how now that the doghouse is out of the way, it's much easier to get to these. parts now, if you remember, the steering column that we changed on this old Ford was the Dodge steering column, we have it attached to the Dodge steering shaft, obviously we have the Dodge steering box down on the frame, now the steering shaft on Yes it is foldable and that is a safety feature in case you ever have a head on collision that steering axle will collapse instead of sending it through the cabin and turning you into a skewer of the steering axle so it's definitely a characteristic that we want to preserve, it should be beautiful.

Simple, just going in here, lengthening the bottom of the axle about five or six inches should be a piece of cake now, when choosing a place to make the cut on our steering axle, we couldn't just pick it at random, we had a couple of things to do. consider first we have to leave room for the steering shaft to actually collapse and second this joint is isolated by rubber to dampen vibrations obviously we are going to have to do some welding so we don't want to put too much There is a lot of heat too close to that rubber now Since the steering is an important part of a vehicle, well, we don't want to skimp on this solution, so we take some dom that matches the outside diameter of our steering shaft and then line it with some smaller diameter tubing that way we can plug weld them and perimeter weld them, making this solution stronger than the rest of the steering shaft and something we can feel confident with now, just like a driveshaft, universal joints on a Steering shaft are indexed and we wanted to make sure it went back together like it came apart, so we drew a line along the steering shaft so we could make sure it did.

The plug welds are obviously from a MIG welder, but we switched to TIG welding to do the rest. and that's for a couple of reasons: one we want to limit the heat input, remember we have a rubber insulated universal joint and two, it limits the amount of post-weld cleaning, we don't have to sand this to make it look nice , a quick coat of paint will fix that. Now we could have ordered a custom steering shaft, but that would have cost money, this only cost us about 30 minutes of our time and some scrap materials, and don't forget your lit loctite. screws like these, you're going to need it great now, like we told you, we're upgrading from the early rounder 78 headlights to the more modern, more visible square headlights and normally this would just be a bolt-on thing that we wouldn't do.

Wasting time with it on TV, however, with our hybrid center stand becomes a bit more of a problem. Check it now, we know our headlight bucket is in the right place because of the tab on the grill and the bottom bolts that locate it, but these Normally, two tabs screw into the top of the Ford radiator support, which has changed, so what we're going to do is get rid of these guys, make a nice top cover plate and screw it into these two existing bolt holes and try to get a factory. look with the tabs cut out, we are going to make this really simple by just using a simple cardstock template that I am going to place on the two existing core support bolts, although this is simple it will be very effective and do exactly what we want it to do, but first we will polish the top of the headlight hub bare because we are attaching our support plate with rosette welds, now using existing bolts, it's nothing new, it just makes things easier and keeps it.

From guessing where those bolt holes should be and making sloppy adjustments with screws tightened, we know exactly where our rosette welds should be. Once we know the welds are good, we'll file them with a 24 grit wheel just to tidy them up. and make it look a little more finished so now our headlight bucket is mounted rock solid with factory fasteners and more importantly we can point it so we can see at night and the bucket itself is removable and it really didn't take us much longer. to do it the right way Hello, welcome back to trucks, we are working on the project very properly making sure that when we open the hood everything looks as shiny and professional as the rest of the paint job.

Now we like it when they comment. In the programs we listen to it because it helps us make better programs. One comment we hear on the street time and time again is that you make it look too easy on TV. Well, we're taking this seriously. I'm going to slow down and show you the process and show you the troubleshooting because even if you have all this bad equipment you still get into trouble and I've always said that the biggest difference between owning a paint gun and a painter's skill. to solve the problems you run into so we're going to take a little extra time to show you all the steps it takes to eliminate problems before they start and that starts with these panels right here these aprons are brand new from lmc and they come with this edp layer, you may be saying to yourself why prepareOk that it looks like a top coat for a couple of different reasons: it's very thin, it's a good primer, but here it looks like a thin primer even with the scratch pad.

I'm burning the edge and right here this scratch, when I go to smooth and level that scratch, I'm on bare steel, so don't listen to the forms on the internet and say you have to strip all of this down to bare steel. Don't do it, but you have to prepare it properly and prepare it for a coat of sealer and then paint it now. These hood hinges are prepared in the media explosion cabinet. We have aluminum oxide beads that outline the metal very well and remove paint. They are fully prepared so we don't need the red scratch pad on these, however I am wearing gloves.

Your bare fingers will leave oils and skin acids on top of these things and cause fingerprints to break out in hot spots. It will make a mess, your paint could literally bubble and peel off, so whenever you handle freshly sandblasted pieces or raw steel pieces, wear gloves. These are new headlight buckets and consist of E-coated metal and raw steel that we use for the top. hub assembly now we need to coat them with a primer that is compatible with both surfaces and we'll talk more about that later but check this out here is where I marked to drill the holes for the mounting bolts now we use a ink marker for these the We use it a lot here and I use it a lot in my home workshop, however I have learned the hard way that if you apply primer on top, the ink is very strong and can be absorbed. your painting, like I said, I paid the price for that lesson, so if you're going to use a figure eight marker to mark and create stencils, that's fine, you can use it all day, just make sure you get rid of that ink first. you go through the painting and priming process now this is the factory intercooler it's going to run super dually again it's factory powder coated it doesn't look too bad but it has a couple of nicks so let's shoot it just in case, to make it look good though before you touch it with a pad remember this thing has been on a diesel truck with over a hundred thousand miles on it is covered in this nonsense this diesel fuel will react with your paint so before Before you prep, you have to pre-clean, now every paint manufacturer known to man has their own version of a pre-cleaner, so to get to the top, it's good, but we're going to use it in this pump sprayer. instead of taking it out of the can so you don't pour it all over the floor the pump sprayer is really good because you can build pressure it's not aerosol so it's safe for the environment and it allows you to do this and remove that layer of contamination on your pieces.

Look, that's diesel fuel. I don't want to put paint on top of that, look at that, so what you want to do is repeat the process until the rag is completely clean when you take it out of there and only then are you ready for a scratch pad. We have prepared every piece we are going to spray, except the sandblasted material, with a red scratch pad. These are color coded, with red being the thickest, it will give us the tooth we want for the primer and then the paint. for gluing, but there are a few other tools you may want to have near your paint or body shop.

Single edge razor blades. Well, they can be very useful for masking details, like we're going to have to do on these ID tags that we want. Keep this information so we can just trim the masking tape around them next time you see these pieces, we'll show you how to apply a great paint job on top. Wow, I have vacation. See the problem we showed you. Hello, welcome back to trucks. We have all our parts assembled, cleaned, scraped, nailed, everything is ready to shoot. Now let's talk about what we're going to put on top, since we have the Summit Racing paint system on the body.

To continue with that theme, starting with their epoxy primer, which is a great base coat for both bare metal and prepped painted parts, plus we'll use their hot rod black, which is a true urethane, meaning it has a catalyst. So it will be very strong and also with a semi-flat it will have a nice sexy shine. Looks great. I already have my sealant mixed in the cup. We're ready to film one more thing. This, oh, is a good fuck. mask, it's not paint protection, okay, I have all the pieces crossed out, but look at this paint booth, look at the hose, look at the filters between rick and tim, strange with the search and restoration and the messy muscle car, marvin, it sorry guys you're just using an Old tack cloth glues the air hose with epoxy and is a great sealant for a couple different reasons, not only does it adhere extremely well to both powder coated painted parts and steel parts naked, but also has an open window of several days to get where you don't.

You don't even have to sand it to apply a top coat now every time you paint a radiator or A/C cooling system like this, don't cover it too much, give it a mist coat, you want the paint to adhere, you don't want to restrict any guy. of an air flow so use a light touch Now we are getting great coverage with a single coat with this sealer so there is no need to apply a double coat it just adds time for drying in the curing process; however, when working with bare steel Parts like these hood hinges ensure that you flex the hinges and cover all the bare steel.

You only get one chance to seal and the top coat may not stick to the sandblasted metal and be as sexy a fashion statement as those sexy blue gloves. Are they there for your protection? Just get used to using them. The sealer should sit for 30 minutes before applying the top coat. That's enough time to clean your paint gun and mix the paint, which is a three-step system paint catalyst and reducer in a four to one to one ratio, that's four parts paint, one part catalyst, one part of reducer and I don't think it is one hundred percent necessary to remove these parts just because they are under the hood, supports and so on, it is a great habit. run a tack cloth over your work pieces because it gives you one last chance to make sure your pieces are ready to paint and do a final inspection now with this paint of course it's black it covers extremely well but we're putting on two coats because that's what the sheet says p now, just like with the sealant on the intercooler and the a/c condenser, I'm just painting the hard metal parts and staying away from the fins, you don't want paint buildup or restrict airflow, the rest, two coats completely wet, that way it flows well and you get the strength and protection you need from a two coat catalyzed system.

Now, as ridiculous as the safety equipment may seem, it allows me to concentrate on painting and that's what we're doing in the paint booth, think about it, okay, this is one of those cases where not everything goes well, I I ran out of paint and I haven't finished painting, a little more mixing and we'll be fine, it's fresh. just enough for it to blend back in, but you know sometimes they wait for you. Hello guys, welcome back to the store. Now this blower cover plate that Kevin was painting turned out great. The problem is that while he was there making it look good, I was. here making the executive decision that we were going to get rid of this whole Ford A/C box, so Kevin, good operation on the patient died, now we're going with the Dodge A/C box for a couple of reasons, one of the which is much more compact than this entire Ford. mess and two, we are going to have direct connections to both our air conditioning lines, our heating lines and more importantly to the wiring harness, so the only challenge we have is making this fit into the Ford firewall.

Now speaking of wiring harness, check this out like we told you. We want to keep the steel for the dash, but we also want to use the Dodge instrument cluster because the wiring harness connects directly to it, so we have to find a weight for the two to work together. What we did, we trimmed the bezel part out with the rest of the Dodge's dash and we can use it, come in here, make a flat filler plate so we can recess the cluster and this trim panel into it. We'll have a little more extra space here, maybe we can put it in. a couple of gauges or a vent on the dash there either way should look pretty neat for now we want to show you something else we want to add to this Ford Dodge Cummins truck now on our 97 Dodge here's everything that's left of the factory exhaust system it's just the downpipe, not even a muffler, it's now three inches in diameter and that sounds like a pretty good size, especially you guys who are used to the exhaust system sizes of gasoline engines, but diesels flow Lots of air and we plan to make a good amount of power, so we wanted to upgrade to a Flowmaster four-inch system that we acquired at the summit races.

Now the flange will clip directly onto our factory installed turbo, but will quickly reach the full four inch diameter now for a muffler we purchased. A four-inch Flowmaster Pro Series and with its cool shell design will keep heat within the exhaust system instead of radiating and soaking into everything around it. This pro series muffler will also give us moderate to aggressive sound levels outside the truck but will limit interior resonance now if you have ever spent any real time in a car or truck that has a lot of exhaust hum that can wear it out, tire you out and drive you crazy, so that's something we want to avoid since we're going to be spending a lot of time inside this Ford truck and since this 4-inch aluminized system is completely mandrel bent, it should handle multiple power levels, including where we are now: factory 5 9 and 97 trucks are rated at 215 horsepower.

And with the slight modifications we've made to the engine so far we should be a little better than that now, since we're not doing a competitive sled puller with this truck, we're just looking for a solid but powerful towing rig. the four inch system should be enough now to top things off, it has a nice five inch polished tip making it almost as big as your teenage neighbor's honda four cylinder muffler, but it should look good, especially alongside our work super elegant gray and blue paint. Guys, thanks for watching the trucks, see you next week and visit us at powerblocktv.com.

Today we are hard at work wiring plumbing and installing gauges on the super dual project of our 79 Ford F-350 body that we mounted on a 97 Cummins powered Dodge. chassis that has become dual, everything is here today in trucks Hello guys, welcome to the trucks, well, today we return to the super dual project, our 79 Ford Crew Cab body that we have on top of our 97 Dodge diesel chassis, now We are in The point in this project where all the important parts are there and we just have some final work to do, connecting the steering and brakes and doing some plumbing and wiring, now those things tend to take up a lot of time. but the good news for us is that today we have some help in the workshop.

Now you guys remember Tc Pedic from Bahia One customs. Well, tc did such an excellent job on the class six project that we somehow managed to convince him to come here to the truck shop and he helped us with the job super because, like Ryan said, even though 80 of the big chunks are in the last 20 percent, take 80 percent of the time, it sure is nice to have a couple of capable hands here to help us now fill. In the ridiculously large vacancy, the Ford heater box that was left, TC decided to use 20 gauge sheet metal, by the time this is all cleaned up, it will look a lot like the factory roll that is around all the factory holes in the firewall, very good.

The rolled edge not only looks original but also strengthens the metal and fits the man quite well as if it were made for it, huh? Now he is no stranger to custom work, in fact he can do almost anything he sets his mind to and the first. The order of the day was to simulate the Dodge heater box in the Ford Dash, figure out where the plugs go, all set and a little more force applied to the metal, a coat of paint makes it look like now you can always find a way. About a two person job, but it's actually nice to have two people sometimes to finish it.

We put a coat of seam sealant around the inside edge to keep it weather resistant. Now this is the original Dodge truck radiator that we have to make. The conversion was front collision damage and frame repair whichwhat had to be done and you can see signs of that here is the clutch fan here are the blade marks and it obviously got into the core in the veins and right here you can see it was actually leaking we knew this was going to happen Now it's time to get a new radiator so we called rockauto.com and got this direct replacement since we are using all the original Dodge cooling module, now this is something you are going to do. you run into if you're working on vehicles that have been totaled before or simply lose something in the process of a time-consuming project.

This is the bracket that holds the intercooler in place. Screws into the bottom of the center support. Now there's left and right in your mirror image, so since I don't have one and don't have time to go to the parts dealer and buy one, I'm just going to make that process pretty simple. do it rightIt's pretty obvious, you can take a cardboard template and then flip it over and basically just make your mirror image between the two pieces, like this. Now I have my left and my right, so from there trace it up until you reach something flat.

Stock uses the dimpled die to make the force viola new dodge parts using a heavier 18 gauge steel. We made the hole stronger using a flared hole die or a dimpled die that we picked up from light racing and then went to the brake to make the turns. All the time we are paying attention to our template and comparing it just to get the right angles. Now, if you don't have flex breaks or dimpled dies, you can still do this. A vise and hammer will get you almost anywhere. I want to go paint and try it, show us this is actually going to work very well, thank you.

Now it feels great to know that we have passed the mockup phase and that this is actually our final fit. Our cooling module is locked in place, including the new radiator, but the radiator isn't the only thing we got from rockauto.com. We also asked you to send us a new heater core and new OE style replacement power steering hoses, as well as these molded ones. radiator hoses from the doors and that's one of the cool things about rockauto.com and our truck since most of the transmission is factory. One phone call to Rock Auto gives us everything we need.

The first thing we have to do is place this heater core. before we can hang the hvac box be ready, if you have ever replaced the heater core you know it is much easier to do it with the entire hvac box out of the vehicle so the timing couldn't be better to replace the heater core. this one with the hose ports drilled out and secure mounting locations on the firewall, now it's time to finally hang the heater box, hopefully for the last time, a final test is to place the old board over the heater box newer and more modern. and with a bit of carving and trimming, this seems to fit pretty well too, no one will be able to tell there's all that modern stuff under there, there's been quite a few modifications in there, but it looks good, we'll even have a glovebox, right?, oh, we'll do it cool cool good job man hey guys welcome back to trucks where we're buckling some things into the project super dually now with the Ford bed sitting on the Dodge frame we weren't.

We were able to fully install the fuel tank because the top of the tank was hitting this deck support rail and rather than opening our wallets and spending a lot of money on a custom fuel tank just to avoid this clearance issue, we went the route easier, we just made a Relief Cut in the support rail, then we'll come in here, use this bent piece of sheet metal, fill it in, we'll have the clearance we need and we can run the storage tank. Now this project is metalworking 101, just a simple piece. of flat sheet metal bent to follow the contours I cut into the bed rail and then spot welded the entire perimeter and the best thing about a project like this is that if not, it's at the bottom of the bed.

It didn't turn out perfect, no big deal now, the top of this bed was neat when we did the car body move, but the bottom was a little sloppy, so I removed the big chunks of flaky rust with a brush. wire. and a scrape pad, I'm going to go over it and apply an Eastwood rust converter which will transform this rust into a paintable surface and once that dries we can go over it with some type of bed liner or base coat and close. on these things it brushes out pretty easily and you don't have to be too careful now, one spot on the bed floor that we didn't have to deal with was right here in the middle and was preserved by a leaky pinion seal that didn't let the metal is rusting now with the rust converter fully cured you can see that the bottom of the bed floor has changed from rust red color to a black color and that means it has converted the rust into zinc phosphate which is safe to cover On top of the superior part. and that's exactly what we're going to do using this dual color bed frame.

Now this is the same material that we used on the inside of the bed, but this time we will use it as a base coat, now we could have painted it. the bottom of this bed with a little spray paint, but the base coat not only covers the imperfections but also absorbs some impact, so the rock chips will simply deflect instead of coming off the paint, leaving the metal exposed. Now we have sprayed the bed liner on the inside of our fenders as well and that will prevent stones flying from our tires from causing damage to the sheet metal and causing paint chips.

Now before we drop the deck into place, we want to make our final connections to the fuel tank. and the fuel lines now the fuel lines in the engine compartment have been capped and protected, but these ends here have been open to the atmosphere, so in case dust or debris gets into the lines again, we want to make sure they are removed. washed and clean so let's blow some pressurized air through them and make sure they're washed now diesel fuel doesn't evaporate like gasoline does like I said they've been open for a while well we hope that there is not too much. fuel in them anyway, they have to be flushed before hooking them up to our kind of expensive diesel engine that should run one two and now we have all the clearance we need and we still have to use our stock. tank Hello, welcome back to trucks.

Now it's time to start wrestling with the wiring harness, but we have a little problem to fix first. The good news is that the radiator and engine location are in the right place, all the hoses fit and the boost tubes look like we won't have to change or alter them. The bad news is that the boost tube is hitting my apron. freshly painted I hate when that happens however this is a single wall panel and you know a little bit of trimming we can fix that put some kind of border around it make it look nice and neat solve the problem now sometimes no No matter how much planning and mock-ups you do, you still have to cut out a bit, so that's what we're doing now, the masking tape is to protect the painted surface while I take my saw around the corner.

Keep this in mind, you can always cut more. I'm cutting the minimum here in hopes I can get by, if not I can cut a little more. It's much harder to put it back in and I obviously need a little more space. One of the best things about that giant truck we are working on is that we didn't really have to take anything apart to have enough clearance and room to make the cuts we needed on a smaller vehicle, this wouldn't be the case but we had luck. The boost tubes and couplers are original and in excellent shape so they are still tight.

A Matco radiator hose tool really does the job. trick when we are reassembling that gives me the clearance I need a small piece of vacuum line on this hard edge we are done when we took apart our donor Dodge truck we were smart enough to label many of the connectors on the harness and label where the harness in the engine bay but we didn't label everything and wanted to make sure we had it right so we bought this 94 Dodge it's pretty much stock to use for reference now the engineers spend a lot of time putting the harness in the engine bay of the motor so that it doesn't rest on anything hot or hit anything that moves, so we wanted to emulate that and save ourselves potential headaches in the future by simplifying it a bit.

Start with what I know and then just go from there you know as you go you'll find that the headlight ends the alternator wiring and you can put it in and the more you install the easier it gets because each line is each wire is dedicated to a specific place. Hello, welcome back to trucks. It feels great to have a super dual project so close to being a functional vehicle again. One of the last details we are doing on this truck to make it complete. The vehicle must place the Dodge's wiring harness all inside the body of the Ford, which is a solution in itself, however, it creates a couple of problems and a couple of challenges.

This is what I'm talking about now. This is the original '79 gauge Ford instrument cluster. Outside of the cockpit we have now, it's obviously a challenge to get all of these gauges to read the emitters on the Dodge, especially since it's a computerized vehicle and the Ford wasn't, especially when It's about the speedometer. This is a mechanical speedometer. Our Dodge has an electronic speedometer. Now I suppose you could use part of the Ford's wiring harness, splice it together, and read your schematics. I'm sure someone has done it. However, it makes much more sense to use the Dodge group especially. considering that there are two multi-pin connectors that automatically connect all of these emitters and gauges, including the speedometer, which makes it easy to use, especially since we are using, as we said, the entire Dodge harness that now mounts this on the dash of the Ford .

That's quite a challenge and that's where good old hot rodding comes into play. Here's something I wanted to show you and the way we solved that problem, problematic plastics of some type have always been used in vehicle construction as vehicles have gotten newer. and the plastic content has become higher, for example, this is the Dodge truck gauge cluster bezel that we cut out of this piece here. The truth is that most of the interior of that 97 Dodge was made with this plastic so we want to take the cluster and install it on the four dashes, well the four dashes are mostly metal and you know you can't take a mig welder and welding metal to plastic, so there's your challenge, how do you join these two pieces together?

Well there is a Reply to that, if you remember the second chance Silverado that we literally glued on one of the headrests when we made that vehicle, it's called panel bonding adhesives and they are as strong as a weld if you prepare it correctly, this is a pba that we Using this is a Norton speed grip, it has a 40 minute setup time, it flows really well and it doesn't even matter what brand, there are all kinds of brands and options for you and literally this is what we did. I used a combination of mig. welding and bonding adhesives welding when you had a metal to metal bond bonding adhesives with a plastic to metal bond and creates a tooth combination that is permanently attractive and very strong now this is the simplest technique it is literally a bolt through a hole in a 20 gauge tack, the end grinds the head to make a nice flange and now allows me to mount my switch plate and house the HVAC controls.

Now on this side we house the headlight switch which is bolted in from the back of the Dodge Truck, so I just used a tape measure, made a zip tie here, some basic sheet metal bending skills, welded them together, used the holes that they are on the existing switch and it is now removable and it is permanently installed now for the group, I have a simple tab on either side at the bottom that just holds it in place and it screws into the top here and here what you have It's a removable trim group with all the controls we need now, as cool as it looks here, it looks even cooler on the vehicle.

Now, with the board in place, you can see how this starts to work. It looks like it's supposed to be seen. The dash pad covers about a third. Some exposed bras will be very forgiving and it looks like it belongs there. Everything is going to work just as Chrysler engineers had planned,right down to the cruise control buttons and speakers. We could even put an airbag in there if we wanted, but here's the real message: don't be afraid to try it. things try some adhesives try some soldering techniques break out your fabulous equipment this is not that difficult all you need is to think carefully and follow your thoughts it is very hot hey welcome back as we are on a sort of diesel topic we thought it's about time Before we got back to work on the project super properly, our body changed to a '79 Ford sitting atop a '97 Dodge chassis with the bulletproof Cummins 12-valve turbo diesel under the hood.

Now we are almost ready to fire this up with the exception of a few cleaning tasks, one of them is some sort of air intake system, now the combination of these two trucks has worked surprisingly well with many things falling into place or almost, with the exception of this area here that was taken above next to the huge air conditioning box in the Ford cabin now, obviously, Ford didn't take into account the presence of a giant inline six with the turbo snail hanging off the side, so so the box had to disappear. Fortunately, the dodge system fits under the dash, conveniently behind it.

The Ford firewall we now have room for the turbo, but the factory intake system for this turbocharger interferes with the Ford platform, so again we have to do something a little different now that we were so lucky with the AirAid system in the C10 exchange. We thought we'd go back to airaid and see what kind of options they gave us for super jobs. The first was this standard cold air kit for 94 to O2 Dodge Cummins trucks. Comes with plastic conduit, an insulator and an additional. heat shield since it's so close to the turbo, all the hardware you need to mount it, as well as this giant honking reusable air filter that has the right amount of surface area to get the right amount of air into this engine, plus from the fact that this system is carb certified if you need to pay attention to that but it's not the only option airaid has for us or you just introduced your ubi system which means you build it it comes with everything you see here, including a giant. filter one filter mount several different coupler options a bag of hardware brackets and clamps that you can use to create the system you need, but the best thing is here: this is a heavy-duty ABS plastic duct with different shapes and different angles with These designed ribs in which what you do is cut between the ribs. and you have something where the coupler can hold on and it won't slide, you obviously have tons of options to create the system you need in a single app and by the way, if you send them a photo of the system you created, they will send you a free gift .

This is a great option, but what we're going to try to do is make the original system fit first. The good thing about something that adapts to the original equipment is that we know it. 100 percent that it will fit the turbo and clear the alternator and like any other mockup we will leave it loose so we can move things around to get the best fit. The original cold air kit comes with an insulation box, but we're going to leave that aside because we know the properties are drastically different under the hood. Now the good thing about this Airaid filter is that it is not symmetrical and we can play with its shape to make it fit the free spaces we have to work on now somewhere that gives us the option we want.

We can create a mount up here, although we filtered the boxes out of the question, so we'll have to find some sort of insulation between the turbo and the. filter but we'll deal with that later for now this works today we're back on the project super dually we're adding running lights and making our Ford headlights and taillights work using our Dodge wiring harness everything is here today in the trucks guys welcome to trucks well today we're back to the super dual project and we're finally making some real progress on this beast it actually starts and moves around the shop the last time it did this well was a long time ago and It looked a little different now with the right front wheel tucked into the cab, we had our suspicions about maybe slight damage to the frame, but despite all that this truck runs great and went under the lift with no problems, So now that we've got this truck up and running, it's time for us to start focusing on the things that will get it road-ready, like fusing the Dodge's chassis wiring harness to the Ford's lights.

We also need to put some clearance lights on this thing through the roof and turn them on. the dual fenders and obviously we need to hang a couple of bumpers on this thing so we have some work to do now the clearance lights give us a heavy duty look that frankly we just wanted for this truck but the clearance lights on the dual fenders, well it's a regulation so it's important to have it, but on the other side of the cab we went to the LMC truck and got this kit here. Comes with cool looking light gaskets, the lights have their own bulbs and harness as well as a switch that matches the old fashioned look of the four. board with screws and a fuse, all you need to install, but you can't just randomly screw it into the holes on the top of the sheet metal, you have to start with the design and that starts with a marker, some tape, obviously we want A balanced look, which means finding the center point of the roof and making our design based on that.

Here's an easy way to do it: don't stretch the tape, but use a drip rail drip rail, fold it in half and your center point is now revealed. We're using a standard setup of lights on a lot of double cabs, which is a group of three in the middle and one in each corner, so we just put them together to see what looks good now sometimes when I talk to myself , the director asked me to repeat what I said for the show, it's ten and a half inches right here, Kevin, repeat it, there's ten and a half inches between these two lights here, so we'll repeat this measurement on the other side.

Turning off the lights at the top of the cabin is not really rocket science, to tell the truth, sometimes this job is like a pressure cooker in which many things happen at the same time and more than once it manifests itself directly towards the camera It follows the profile of the sheet metal style line at the front of the cabin. We're going to move forward six inches from the style line to the light location. Sometimes we mess up a little just to break the tension, but the truth is, this is serious business. things because you don't want to damage the paint, so the design is really important on many levels.

Now this first initial hole is for passing the power cable through the sheet metal, the rest of the location can be adjusted and finely tuned. tuned on a smaller level because of the way the headliner is outside of the vehicle so we don't have to worry about damaging it, we have a quarter inch hole with a rubber grommet that will go inside, the grommets come from an industrial warehouse. and the rtv sealant is tightly closed now between the grommet and the rtv we have a waterproof and weatherproof seal and it also allows the light to sit flush so we can adjust the final location each marker light in the lmc kit comes with its own screws, one screw is grounded and grounds the light chassis to the metal sheet of the cab, completing the circuit.

We'll seal it from below later. Technically, these are actually passing lights, but to us the flat pages make it look like it. like the real f-350 dually that is complete with a diesel engine now these are completely custom dual fenders because ford didn't do a dual on this body style truck so when it came time to pick out some fender lights we couldn't we just go to a catalog and pick up some 79 Ford dual lights, they don't exist so what we did was go to the summit races and we bought some of these super tough 99 to 07 LED fender lights, they're kind of They're small and oval, so they should match our rounded fenders quite well.

Now out of the box, these lights are clear with a bright silver reflector and they stood out too much so what we did was mute their appearance. a little with a couple of coats of two-color Nightshades lens paint and that way they'll blend in pretty well with our fenders. Now, just like the lights on the roof of the truck, we want our fender lights to be symmetrical, so I have a bar that crosses the top of the bed rails where I measured from and we measured from the style line about five inches and marked our hole, then it was simply a matter of drilling a hole big enough for the light base. to go through and do that we are using two different step drill bits, you can use a regular old drill bit to accomplish the same thing but a step drill bit works great on thin sheet metal to create a nice clean opening and since we exposed some bare parts steel on our new paint job or a relatively new paint job we go ahead and seal the metal just with a little touch up paint that way we don't have rust running down our fenders now the lights on the super duties are fine .

They're horizontal, but on our rounded fender it's not going to fly around, so we put them vertical and they'll look good. Remember that the amber lights go to the front of the fender and the red lights go to the back. Also make sure the paint is clean. so the double sided table stick Hello, welcome back if you're just catching up with us, we're obviously getting back into the project very dutifully and it feels great to have this almost ready for the road last time we were under the hood that we showed off. We show you the new Airaid cold air intake that works perfectly for the different confinements and space configurations of both vehicles being combined and we also talk about the need to isolate heat from the air intake charge from things like the turbo, the manifold and the A smaller area under the hood that will force hot air into the engine.

We have found a great solution for that. Look at this. The manifold guard and turbo blanket come from a company called Heat Shield Products and we picked them up from summitracing.com. They are made specifically for the original Cummins 12-valve turbodiesel and come in a couple of different finishes, but both are designed to reduce underhood temperatures by up to 50 percent. Now Thermal Protection Products doesn't just have stuff for diesel trucks, we have a full line of products covering almost every thermal insulation need you can imagine, including some great solutions for in and around the shop that are coming in very handy now. when it comes to energy needs.

It has the standard dual battery setup found on most diesel passenger trucks and we are going to continue with this until we discover a product that replaces both batteries in a diesel truck with just one battery. It's pretty cool, the lead acid battery was invented in 1859 and has been the standard battery for cars and trucks for as long as you and I can remember, but just because it's always been the one used doesn't necessarily mean there isn't something better, In fact there is something better, this is the battery that never dies and it is a lithium battery and despite weighing only 19 pounds, this is not a mockup, this is the real battery, this battery will outperform two lead batteries -acid in the truck, it will provide consecutive restarts and many more functions, a lithium battery It has a charging efficiency of 99, which simply means it has more stored energy available, which is easier to recharge and play.

This is a completely redesigned battery technology and with our dual battery, it now gives us a 90 pound weight savings compared to traditional dual lead acid batteries since there is no lead. This battery does not need lead terminals. Lead is a very non-conductive metal. It has approximately seven percent conductivity. These aluminum terminals are 65 conductors, so battery power will reach your vehicle much more effectively. Here is the never die feature, if for some reason you drain the battery with the stereo or winch, all you have to do is press the power reserve button and you will be able to start over to where the alternator can kick in and start. it gets you out of trouble so you essentially never die, it has a reserve tank and that can be a big help now, you may or may not know it but normally a lead acid battery takes about 20 minutes to recover after a single crank with the never dies it's about five minutes so you can see where that buff would kick in if you're having trouble booting intoa cold day or something.

Now, a battery gets completely discharged, a typical battery sometimes you're looking at a trickle charger for a day. more than that with this it's an hour maybe a little better than an hour talking about chargers, they also have several different battery charges to suit the battery and the need, whether it's a motor home, a boat, an ATV high performance, whatever, check out visit their website and learn about battery charges and by the way, if you think this is a fragile high tech device, think again, this battery is tested with up to 150 g i.e. 150g of impact without fail and if you are subjecting your car to that. we have different things to think about besides battery survival let's see how it performs in the dooley even though it is a powerful, high torque, heavy diesel that loses a little weight in the front, well it is never Plus, just keep in mind that when you're losing a second battery, you have a ground circuit you need to complete.

We had to ground our engine block back to the chassis. Now the battery trays on the old Ford were rusty, so we got two more from the LMC truck, but I'll probably return this one. Never Die Batteries come in a ton of different configurations and sizes, both in physical size and power output, so you can go to their website and find one that fits your vehicle. Yes, do it. Hey guys, welcome back to In the shop we finally fired up our big diesel and we are in the process of making it drivable and that means matching the Dodge chassis harness with the Ford lighting.

Now a tool that makes it much easier for us is the power probe hook. We don't have to have separate wiring diagrams for the Dodge and Ford to match the harnesses. We can use our power probe hook and it's a smart tip to help identify the circuits, whether it's a ground circuit, high beam, low beam position light, whatever it is. You don't have to come here and change the dial on your multimeter to find out, just touch the tip of the circuit and it will tell you what's going on now. Another interesting feature. Look at this now.

The cabin light kit that Kevin installed arrived. with its own rocker switch and wiring and all that mess, but we want to keep things simple and just connect the cab light wiring to the existing Dodge marker light circuit, but we don't want to overload the circuit by doing so and powering these five additional. lights now, you guys may or may not know that you can use the hook to turn on and energize circuits for testing purposes with the push of a button, it turns on all five and it even shows us that we are only drawing 1.1 amps per By turning on these five lights so we are Within the margin of error, we can add a draw of one ampere to our existing circuit and know that we are not going to blow a fuse every time we turn on the headlights, we now wanted to show.

See the difference in amp draw between the filament bulbs in the cabin and the LED lights we have here on the fender. Now keep in mind that the hook is connected to the battery on the front of the truck and we have a lot of them. of slack in the power cables up to here in the rear, we now had a draw of 1.1 amps for our filament bulbs and for the fender lights we have only 60 milliamps, it's a pretty stark contrast. Now let's say you need to power something that requires a little more power, well the hook can do that too, so you have an electric fan on a 30 amp circuit and the fuses blow intermittently, you replace the fuse and it's fine.

It goes on for a while. until it explodes again and drives you crazy. Well, you can use the hook to turn on the fan and monitor the amp draw. Now our fan only draws five amps. It's obviously in good condition, maybe the one that gives you a headache. increases to 35 amps on first start or after running for a while and gets hot, draws too many amps, you already diagnosed the problem quickly and accurately, replace the faulty part and continue, now the hook has an adjustable circuit breaker and is going to anywhere from two to 65 amps, that's pretty impressive with a little tool like this, making it a good tool to have in your toolbox.

Hello guys, welcome back to the workshop. Well, the Super Dually project is really moving forward. We have our passage lights installed. A new battery drops into this thing and it starts, runs, and moves around the shop at least under its own power. Now we've done some work fusing the Dodge's wiring harness with the Ford's lights, but when it came time to put it in. We fished the light lenses out of some boxes and this is what we found lenses that are broken, beat up and generally in bad shape now, even if the lenses themselves weren't beat up, look at the difference in the color and the The new ones we got from LMC Truck not to mention the new ones will look great with the new paint.

Once we have these things installed, they will give us the safety and visibility that this truck had when it was new. Now some of you may even notice that we have the 97 Dodge third brake light grafted onto our 79 in case you couldn't see this giant truck stopping with only two brake lights, which now brings this truck into a modern era. It is the LED position lights on the fenders and the high visibility halogen headlights on the grille that help to combine the old style and modern technology today we are cleaning the interior and protecting the exterior in the super dual project inside we are reviving the door panels and adding new carpet outside, we're adding some serious custom bumpers, it's all here today on trucks, welcome to the shop, well there's a saying that's pretty common among the hot rod world and that is that the last 20 of the project requires 80 at the moment is pretty much where we are with the super dual project and one of those moments where it spongy is, frankly, the interior, but the good news is that the entire gauge cluster, all the electrical systems, they're all connected and They are all working perfectly now the truck as well as the dash is this hybrid combination of two different vehicles the dash uses the stamped steel housing for the original cab because that's what fits in there but the cluster fits into this plastic bezel that it came from the Dodge truck and from Of course, you saw us put them together with an adhesive, but since then I finished it with a little filler, used a textured paint and some two-color semi-gloss black to make it look like a piece of stamped steel.

The vents here, well, they're original Ford ones and we just gave them a shot of paint and they'll match this dash perfectly. It's obviously new. Here's why it's new. This is the original dash from the old Ford truck. and as you can see it's pretty beat up, eyebrows messy and look at all the cracks it's just rotten, each one of those cracks represents about an hour of repair so it made more sense to us to look in the LMC truck catalog and order a new one now, speaking of the lmc truck catalog, there are a lot of interior components from those guys for this truck. check it out now we have no doubt in our minds and probably yours now that this truck was a work truck now if the four door cab didn't give it away well the condition of the interior probably should have been abused and that's ok for a work truck, but we are trying to revive it, these trim panels are a little beyond, they are busted, dry rotten cracks, just not worth saving, so thanks to the LMC truck we have direct replacements at least for the front doors, now for the rear ones we have a little problem because the rear The doors are weird, they are a little narrower and frankly no one shows reproduction panels because they are such a limited production that no one makes them so we could repair a little bit and save what we have now, these are the inside of the back door. trim panels and they're not really in bad shape, but we had to do a little repair here, we just used some two part epoxy, repaired the back where the crack was and voila, it now looks much cleaner than this one guy.

Here is how it came out of the box after being knocked down and needs to be primed as you can see it is very well primed and this is what we ended up with this, it looks like a new one and that is thanks to This vinyl and plastic die from lmc truck se called colorbond and it matches the color of the original trim panels we got from lmc and it sprays beautifully so they look like new now usually when you prep them you use a scuff pad that you get. all the cracks and crevices, but look at all the lines, look at all the tight spots here, you're not going to fit this in here and it's going to take hours and hours and hours to prepare this, so we found a way to prepare this. things that are non-invasive and do a great job with all the cracks and crevices, and it's actually very easy to do and also saves a lot of time, so if you or your friend have a blast cabinet with some aluminum oxide or glass beads, can do it.

The short job of these things is how now neither the blast cabinet nor the media really cares what you're doing with it, so reduce the pressure to about 20 pounds and you'll be able to safely blast this plastic without eating it. You can see what a short job it is to get rid of all the nonsense on the top layer of that textured plastic. This trim panel took about 15 minutes to pop and about five minutes to dust out of the cracks. Once it's done right, you're ready to go. Get ready, so I'm going to put on three pretty substantial coats of colorbond paint and let it dry for about an hour, probably an hour and a half, to make sure it's nice and dry to the touch and it's not falling off your fingers now.

In any restoration job you will find things you missed and the great thing about Colorbond interior paint is that it is easy to use and requires minimal preparation and you don't have to set up a paint test to use it to install. Your door trim panels require pin-type clips on the rear doors. There are spring steel clips on the front doors. They come with the LMC trim panels. Ours, since they were steel, were reusable. I was kind of happy to put them on but after a while I finally heard what he was saying now the door handles get the same treatment as the trim panels except for the chrome ends which we wanted to keep chrome, the fasteners are hidden by a snap cover and the door handles, as well as the window cranks, are in good shape to save.

We just cleaned them with a little steel wool and some moms metal polish and with this door completely finished it's one more thing off the super task list. Hello, welcome back, try the fit and mockup. is essential when building a vehicle especially a custom vehicle where there are several different things at play and the interior is no exception for us, we have the LMC truck on our side and the availability of carpets even for this strange club cab truck . We have the back carpet section with the footwells and it is combined with the jute backing, so with the jute with the nice carpet and the lizard skin spray ceramic insulation that we have already placed on this floor, we should be ready to start. and it's just a matter of trimming a little to make sure the footwells and everything lines up, which we're ready to start here except the front section with the new Dodge shifter and the pedals and a couple of More things I have to take into account, for example where it reaches the baseboards.

Well, I've got some trimmings, some measurements and some trimmings and some measurements and some trimmings and some measurements some trimmings and some measurements and some trimmings and measurements, all good as long as Kevin's been doing. Some interior work and carpet cutting and measuring. I've been building some custom bumpers for our super dual because ordering a couple of them from a catalog just isn't going to work. They will fit the Ford or Dodge body. frame, they're not going to fit both, so we had to make our own. We started with this cardboard template, after mocking things up on cardboard we transferred those measurements to our torchmate cnc plasma cutter which made cutting the plates quick.

Realize that you probably don't have one of these torch companions in your shop or at your disposal, but you can do the same job with a magic marker, a ruler and a band saw or even a cutting wheel on your angle grinder. A little more time, now we are going to incorporate a step into the rear bumper and these dimple tinted holes will add a little styleof tensile and strength to this otherwise flat eight-inch piece of steel, then it's time to weld this whole mess together. and to not concentrate too much heat in one area of ​​the bumper, we welded around the bumper in different areas in four to six inch beads, same with the polishing and after all that cutting and welding, this is what we ended up with.

We made this front bumper from 3 16 steel plates. We cut holes for the fog lights and cut oblong holes in the center to help with air flow. Now for the rear bumper it's more of the same, mostly 3 16 steel plates. Except for the step part where we used an eighth of an inch plate just because it was easier to bend and work with, now the Most of it is welded and mig ground, but this weld here, well, we went ahead and tig welded it because it would have been hard to put a grinder in there to smooth it out and make it look good.

We also added a couple of holes for the license plate lights, as you saw, we added a couple dozen dimpled die holes for a little traction in our step and Since this is a work truck and we're going to be towing a trailer quite often but obviously we needed a trailer hitch so we went to the summit races and picked up this v5 rated hitch that will allow us to tow a trailer up to 10,000 pounds or 12,000 if we have a weight distribution hitch now, Like everything else on this truck, it had to be modified to fit, so we cut out the center of the end plates, moved it up, and tucked it in a little. a little bit to make it fit our frame a little better, that looks good, cool, okay, okay, I'm not going to fall off now, with the front bumper installed, you can see that these openings are not just to break up the design. of the bumper will be functional once we cut out this lower grille housing, that will allow air to flow through here from this little sheet metal panel and cool the bottom of the intercooler and the AC condenser radiator, which will help this work truck works fine.

And great, now we've left enough room down here for a truck decal and we'll be able to fit some fog lights in here once we trim the grille housing out a little more, but needless to say we're pretty excited about how this bumper turned out Hello and welcome back, what a difference a carpet kit makes to the interior of a vehicle. This thing looks like a new truck again, and in addition to the two-piece carpet kit, we also have kick panels to install. I want to bring your attention to something else, these are the pockets that go under the door panel on the front doors, well you know, what you see worn out won't happen since the two piece carpet ended up here, we had a lot left over , so thanks lmc.

What it just gave us is the ability to make a nice upholstered panel underneath that trim panel. Here's another thing we have: These sill panels are brand new and are available for the F-150 and this Club Cab truck, but the transitions in the back, well, not so much, but this is where our mom friends They come in handy - this is your metal polish, some steel wool backed by a microfiber and voila, we make our old thresholds and transitions look as good as the new ones, since they are not available, thanks to the mothers they saved us the rear, now we made our bumpers with hot rolled steel and with that hot rolled steel comes this grayish lamination scale that is a slippery, difficult to remove surface that is difficult to get. paint to stick now if these were just jeep bumpers well we wouldn't worry about that they need touch ups anyway to avoid hitting rocks but for this truck we wanted the paint to stick for a long time and luckily we have a blast cabinet big enough to fit all this bumper in and we can sandblast the mill scales.

It's really one of the most effective ways to do it. Now there are also chemicals you can use to try to remove it, but if you don't. If you don't have a blast booth and don't want to waste time with chemicals, we wanted to show you five different ways to try to mechanically remove this mill scale with varying levels of success. You can choose which one works best for you now, the first one. What we're going to try is a wire brush attachment on our four and a half inch Matt Kill angle grinder and while this tool is usually quite effective at removing base coat and grime, it doesn't do anything other than polish the surface . air grinder with a medium grit refinishing or resurfacing disc and again with the same results it just made the metal shine, we then moved on to a medium grit sanding disc on an air grinder.

This started out looking quite promising, the drive was making quick work of it. to remove the scale, but things went downhill after that, as the newspaper quickly clogged with tough mill scale and it was just like rubbing the metal and polishing it, but at least we were on the right track, then it was back to the grinder angle and a coarse 40 grit flap wheel from an industrial warehouse, this started out. It also looked pretty good due to the layers on the flap wheel and the overall grain of the flap wheel. We were making pretty good progress.

It wasn't causing too much damage to our flap wheel. This might do the job, so we tried an extraction disk. That's not something we use in the shop that often, but it's pretty effective if you're wondering what a stripped disc is made of. They are basically individual abrasive grains sandwiched in an open network of nylon fibers. I think the stripped disc does the best job. removes mill scale without creating 40 grit scratches everywhere now all I have to do is is there any strip for Kevin to paint Hello welcome back well super service is close enough to being ready to road where it was time to talk about wheels because the simulators on the old steel wheels weren't going to cut it so we called the guys at Nashville Wheel Company, talked about some designs and this is what they sent.

Check it. This is a super strong forged and polished 195 with standard width. It was cut to size. from Greening Auto Company comes with a billet aluminum center cap and they even took the time to mill the super dual project name. Now it's not just the fronts, we had them send us the full set of six and the rear wheels are polished. Just as perfect as the fronts they got a cool center cap and again included the project name so we can give you the same custom features. Now a 19.5 is big enough to look modern but still gives us enough sidewall where we really can.

Put this truck to work and enjoy a smooth ride, but for those who want larger sizes, check out these. nwc offers wheels up to 26 inches in diameter so you can go to the Nashville Wheel Company website and order pre-engineered wheels ready to go. or work hand in hand with them like we did and create your own design. These wheels are 100 percent American made and they even offer matching trailer wheels, so head on over to nashvillewheelcompany.com and check them out. The prices may even surprise you today. We are finally taking the super dual project to the road.

I was expecting it to be a little more 1979 and a little less 1997. But first we're updating the steering components, aligning the wheels and fixing our instrument cluster and now 0.2 ohms, that's perfect. Then we'll hit the roads and trails to see if all our years of hard work have really combined a 79 F-350 body and a 97 Dodge chassis into a really cool job and tow rig. It's all here today at Truck Tech, hello guys. Welcome to Truck Tech. Well, the day has finally come to take the Super Dually project for a test drive. We've been working on our 97 Dodge chassis and 79 Ford body hybrid work truck for quite some time now and there are only a few things left to do. do before we can get this out and see how it drives and how it tows, now there's no doubt about it, this was a very ambitious project that took a lot of work, but in the end we got a cool, unique work truck that I'm looking forward to. take a test drive, but like I said, we have a couple things to do first: The steering linkage on our dual was original to the donor truck, and looking at all the mud and grime on this thing, it looked like it survived. a pretty tough life and the wear and steering linkage indicates that too so we are going to replace it all now, the idler arm was the main offender but we also had some play in some of the tie rod ends and any Play in the steering linkage can affect an alignment and you can't get a good alignment until you take care of that.

Now to remove the pitman arm we are using a matco puller, we preload this a bit and give it a couple of wraps with a hammer, our puller is a good quality tool but if you borrow it from the local parts store , the quality may not be adequate and you can help save the tool by applying a little preload and tapping it with a hammer to Release it now. The steering replacement parts came from the LMC truck. We picked up a new pitman arm, inner and outer idler arms, tie rod ends and adjusting sleeves, but we are reusing our original center link, it's nothing more than a solid piece of metal, not a wear item.

We are also reusing our original steering stabilizer because it appears to be in good shape. Now these adjusting sleeves, sometimes you can salvage them from your original linkage, most of the time the threads are stuck and have seen some corrosion, so we picked up a new one. I also applied some anti-seize to the threads to not only prevent corrosion but also to make adjustments much smoother. Now you can install these pieces on the axles one piece at a time, but I like to do it on a bench. above so I could install it as a set now some of these parts came painted others didn't but I took the time to paint the ones that weren't and before throwing away the old worn out steering linkage I went ahead and matched Increase the length of the assemblies steering rods so we will have to make a minimal amount of adjustment once we have everything installed.

Now most of these rod ends come pre-greased, but it's always a good idea to add a couple more doses of grease first. hit the road, so now after replacing your steering parts you probably already know that the next step is to do an alignment and we've shown you how to use a couple of tape measures to rough out the toe and alignment so you can limp. Go to your local alignment shop and have them finish things, but if you're good at replacing your own steering linkage parts, you'll probably be able to do your own alignments if you have the right tool.

These quick alignment tools really simplify the alignment process by attaching to the wheel so you can measure the three variables of alignment, wheel camber and towing using the wheel mounts level and the supplied measuring tapes. I like the fact that it clears the double wheel overhang and by doing it ourselves we don't take any risks. The guy at the alignment shop is damaging our expensive custom wheels. Right now, once you have the accessories attached to both front wheels, you can use the supplied gauge or level, connect it to the accessory, and go through the process of turning the wheel a certain number of times. degrees to get your wheel reading to measure camber, you are using the same gauge and you don't even have to have a level work surface, just place it on the ground in front of the tire you are working on, set the gauge to zero and Any slope is taken into account when measuring camber to measure toe, we simply use the supplied tape measure and place it in the slots before and after the wheel, compare the difference and if you have to make any adjustments, simply we turn the steering rod adjustment. sleeves to get it where you want once we have this set up we can finally hit the road next we just have one more solution to get it right less of an over resistance which is pretty good for a liquid and then super dually finally hits the road Highway Hey guys, welcome back to Truck Tech.

Now that we're done with our alignment, we're almost ready to hit the road, but after turning the key on and starting the engine, I noticed one last lingering issue that I'm going to need to get this fixed right. with the engine running. It is quite evident that the oil pressure and level gaugesfuel gauges are working properly, but the tachometer, voltmeter, and water temperature gauges are not working. This is what I did to diagnose the problem. Now the voltmeter is the simplest. to diagnose as long as you have system voltage and a ground on the other side it should work fine now pin number eight the green and yellow wire is our battery or system voltage point and we are good we have 12 .38 volts so we switch the meter to a continuity test, connect the other wire to a good chassis ground and complete the test and it's pretty obvious we have a good connection now that we know the problem is isolated to the instrument cluster let's take a closer look now on the back of the instrument cluster is the printed circuit board or circuit board for the instrument cluster and these wavy lines are called traces and they are what carry the current to the bulbs or meters. what a good trace it's supposed to look like, it's basically a flattened copper wire laminated in plastic, this trace here obviously has some issues, there's definitely a continuity issue here, this one looks like it needs some repair too, here's another bad one here and it is the main power source for many of the bulbs that are not working now to fix this you have a few different options and none of them are that complicated all you are trying to do is essentially complete the circuit where it is partially damaged.

Now, between these two terminals there is no continuity, we have a dead spot here in the trace, so we will fix it with a simple jumper wire. Our little red jumper wire basically provides an alternate current path and now 0.2 ohms. that's perfect, another option is this rear window defogger repair kit. This is a conductive liquid that is applied with a brush and when it dries it acts very similar to a wire. A little thin tape will prevent me from painting outside the lines. Now this point has continuity, but. It's clearly been damaged, so let's reinforce it first, get rid of the plastic, go down to the copper, we just want to isolate this trace from the others.

Now the other traces are laminated in plastic and somewhat protected, but I want to keep them. the repair is limited to this area and we give it a few coats and we should be good, a little extra material will ensure the repair can withstand the current load. Now the repair on this burned place is definitely a little more aggressive. a lot of liquid, but we'll see how it works. I'm probably being a little over the top here, but it has to carry current, so I'll do my best now the repair isn't the most aesthetically pleasing, but in this case, it's definitely a premium feature to the way, lesson one on resistance, which is pretty good for a liquid and, just like insulation protects a copper wire, some clear packing tape will help protect our repair and give us the best chance of success now same.

Parts of that repair weren't all that pretty, but it's hard to argue with the results. Check it out, we have light bulbs on that we didn't have before and our meters are working pretty well and it sure beats shelling out about 300 bucks for a remanufactured cluster mission accomplished when we get back it's time to pay for the project super dually stay put Hey guys welcome back to Truck Tech where we'll finally get some time at sea on this monster super truck project dually love that turbo whistle man after working hard on this for a few years on and off it sure feels good to have some Time to finally sit down, in fact I'm really surprised at how smooth this thing is on the road.

I expected it to be a little more, uh, 1979 and a little less 1997. The tires and wheels should be well balanced, no wheel movement, no brake movement, a little more wind noise, but you can't have everything right. These 12 valve Cummins engines are all mechanically controlled, there is no tuner or electronics, so if you want to make modifications or upgrades, you have to get your hands dirty, but they are a lot of fun to play with and they respond very well to modifications. The power gains are truly impressive. Some minor modifications we made to this truck really sparked it.

Raise the fuel plate regulator springs Allow the engine to rev and give it enough fuel Let the turbo do its job Our diesel engine is backed by an NV 4500 five-speed manual transmission. I know some prefer to tow with an automatic, but I actually prefer to tow with a manual. I feel like it gives me more control and you're not looking at a three or four thousand dollar inspection bill when it comes time for a rebuild. Put a good clutch on it like the south curve clutch we put on. Come on in, we've also fixed the 5th gear nut issue plaguing these transmissions, so we should be good to go for maintenance for quite some time.

We have the turbo running right now. Our closed trailer is empty, guys, the trailer. Knowing a lot about enclosed trailers, half of this is wind resistance, not necessarily the weight that's inside, so it's a pretty good representation of a loaded trailer that he doesn't know, now we've got a Cummins under the hood, right? Who has the coolest truck? Quieter, smoother ride, probably a little better, but ours is cooler, for sure, our crew cab truck is not very common, but it can seat four people and some gear, as long as they're not NBA players. Now there is no doubt that he will not compete. with a late model mega cab for added comfort, but still a good truck and a little hard to find.

Our aluminum wheels are from Nashville Wheel Company and are a great modern take on a classic dual style and are wrapped in commercial grade rubber. It should last over a hundred thousand miles, which may be a little tough compared to most light truck tires, but that's the tradeoff you get with so much durability now that this truck's interior has been redone and also has a new carpet, a new headliner and the Ford and Dodge Dash mash, the front seats are also off the Dodge but the back is the original Ford bench that Kevin just applied some gray tint to to match the rest of the gray inside and it turned out nice.

Well this thing drives great as does my 94 Dodge. I thought the bodywork would make it ride a little rough or add a little extra wind noise but so far so good, I did pretty well at tracking the alignment, fairly straight, no wheels, straight wheels. Go ahead, yes sir, this has to be one of my favorite body styles of all time, this makes for a cool toe and work platform, look how much boost we do here, fourth gear, a little load, it's okay, you have boots, you have all the reels up, which generates 30 pounds of momentum. The egts are under control rolling like a freight train now these Dodge trucks have an over cooling system it's definitely working on this truck at 90 degrees AC it runs good and it looks like we did pretty well with the engine tunes too no we are getting a lot of extra black smoke, it doesn't make sense. waste fuel, our 70s crew cab is definitely unique, it can carry four people and a house down the road and with the two tone blue and gray paint job and the diesel under the hood, our super dual is 100 awesomeness American.

Hello guys, welcome back to the workshop. Today was definitely a good day. It always feels great to finish a long-term project and have a successful day on the road trying things out now on a project as ambitious as this. When you get to the end, there are some things you wish you had done a little differently. This truck is no exception. The air conditioning worked great, but could use a little help from some tinted windows and these side mirrors. It looks great, but while towing, I wish I had a little more visibility to the rear. These are minor changes and easy fixes.

We've done some interesting and unique projects over the years, but this one seems to have received the most attention. I think people just. Dig into the body style of this truck, Speaking of which, having a '79 Ford Crew Cab body on top of a '97 Dodge chassis gives us modern suspension brakes and drivetrain, so it's the best of both worlds and, In the end, the truck technology ends up with a very cool, one-of-a-kind Work Truck and the fact that we didn't spend 40 or 50 thousand dollars on it makes it even better.