Whitey turns red build thread! | Page 9 | Ford Explorer Forums - Serious Explorations

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Whitey turns red build thread!

Well, I figured this would be a good single source to document my next project. I've just finished a 10 month race truck build and finally got it out of my garage and parked on the side yard so I can start my exploder next!

So here's the info to make this whole project make a bit of sense...

I picked up this explorer, it's considered a '91.

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The catch with it though is it's a mutt... It's actually 4 expos pieced together to build something that runs. List of things wrong with it, no cruise control, no heater, no a/c, turn signals don't work, power windows sorta kinda sometimes work, power locks sorta kinda sometimes work, missing a lot of the smog stuff and won't pass smog here in Nevada, doesn't run right, engine/trans/t-case all leak oil, T-case motor doesn't work, and I'm sure there's some more. I bought it mostly for the parts on it.

What it does have... Cut and turned with 4.5" per side widened beams with uniball pivots, extended radius arms on heim joint pivots, plated and braced beam hangers, real beadlock wheels, full fiberglass front and rear, national leaf springs in the rear with some nice custom shackles, rear axle is a newer 8.8 with discs and 4.56 gears.

For conversation purposes, we'll call him "whitey"... Whitey is an auto trans and pushbutton (non working) T-case with manual hubs.

Now let me introduce you to "Red". Red is also a '91, only he's not been molested and abused and raped and pillaged of parts by multiple previous owners. Red is a 5 speed manual and manual transfercase from the factory! (I prefer manual and it took me over 5 months to find this...) EVERYTHING works on Red and works really really good! I have receipts from the previous owner of a ford crate motor installed by ford dealer with less then 20K on it. I also have receipts for a rebuilt 5 speed trans from the ford dealer with less the 15K on it. Red runs great!!! Only issues are inside, he's missing a center console, the headliner looks like it got in a fight with a lion and the dash is cracking.

Nice thing though, whitey's interior is in great shape and is the same color so it's just a matter of swapping out the parts!

Meet red...

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So the plan is to take all the fun suspension parts off of whitey and use them to build Red. Along the way I'm adding a few more custom touches and upgrades as well. Is this going to be some long drawn out never finished project? Heck no!!!! I have about 95% of the parts on hand for the entire build and I'm hoping for the entire build to take about 2 months total to finish EVERYTHING wanted with the only exceptions being a c-clip eliminator kit for the 8.8 and a front winch. I'm not saying those won't be done in the next 2 months but they aren't a priority and I'm kinda just waiting for a deal I can't pass up type situation before pulling the trigger on one or both.

So, here's the parts I currently have in my possession slated to get put on Red.

  • 12" king coilovers for front
  • cut and turned D35 beams, widened 4.5" per side, uniball pivots
  • Extended radius arms with heimed pivots
  • front 3rd memeber with 4.56 gears and powertrax no slip
  • custom machined axles for new wider track width, not cut and sleeved but new custom machined axles
  • 2" stroke hydro bumps for the front end to help for the occasional hard hit.
  • National spring leafs for the rear
  • custom shackles
  • 12" stroke king 3 tube bypass shocks
  • fiberwerx rear panels
  • newer ford 8.8 with discs, 4.56 gears
  • Detriot locker new in the box ready to install in the 8.8

Whitey has the 95+ conversion clip on it. While I like it, it's not what I want, so that whole clip is getting sold. Red will keep the classic front square body lines but I have a set of mcneil 6" fiberglass fenders currently on order. I should see them this week or next supposedly.

Also I'll be upgrading the steering and building a single side swing set steering for red to keep the bumpsteer hopefully somewhat minimal.

Now what am I building? Well, with the list of parts above you can tell it should be a fairly capable ride. My intent is to keep the interior 100% stock. No cage, no cutting, no craziness. Inside is going to get a mild stereo system and cleaned up. Because I'm not going to be tubbing the rear wheel wells tire size will be limited to what I can fit in them. I will be either on 33" or 35" tires mounted on champion beadlocks (different then the KMC beads that are currently on whitey).

My intent when finished is to have a clean fairly different somewhat head turning type daily driver ford explorer. I want a nice all purpose vehicle. Something I can cruise comfortably around town, hold a decent pace in the dirt, pull it into 4lo and go show my jeep friends what's up. It's not being built to haul butt or race around in. I actually own another vehicle that's MUCH more suited for that kind of stuff and actually is purpose built for that. I also am partners in an offroad race truck which this explorer will see chase duties for so why would I go out and jump this thing and beat it thru whoops when I own and have access to better tools for that job. It will be setup to handle the occasional hard hit though as you can tell.

So there's my novel!!! Following posts from here out will be mostly picture oriented to document the build and answer any questions people may have or what not so lets get started...

Khris
 



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That's the golden beast I saw at the Mint 400!

Very nice! Go TTB!
 



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NICE!!! Yeah, it was there. My parents actually were running around in it. I think it was pretty much at spectator #2 till about 10am when we broke our axle shaft in the race truck. We actually broke it and made it to the pavement crossing at spectator 2 so my parents happened to be right there and came over to enjoy our sorrows with us! LOL After that it was pretty much just sitting around our pit for the rest of the day. If you saw it at all earlier in the week chances are my race partner was probably driving it as he's stationed in London and flew out for the race and rather then having him rent a car I just let him use it for the week he was in town and I drove my diesel van that week. So chances are, when you saw it, I probably wasn't even in it or around but yeah, it was definitely around the race quite a bit that weekend!

While it has the "prerunner" look for sure, it's primarily my daily driver and my toy to go hang with my local jeep friends. It's never intentionally been jumped or pounded thru the whoops too much. If you look further back in this thread you can see I've got better tools in the collection to choose from for that insanity! LOL I do like the look though! I need to get the rear leafs sent out this summer to have them reworked and get the rear lifted about another 2".

Do you head out for many other races? Kinda normal in the scene or was this a first?
 






Yea, that was the first ORR I've been to.

Vegas is close so it was a good weekender.

I saw your Ex as I was leaving spec 2 at about 7am. I guess I almost ran over your mom's toes then. She spun around to look at my Ex, and the path was only about 3" wide by that time. I was looking at your rig and then HEY! people in the road!

Definitely gonna plan to do the Hammers next year.

Head'n to Moab with the group next month for some red rock action.

Your race rig was the cleanest rig out there, not a scratch.

Guess that's been taken care of. Lots of scratches now!

We need to have a talk with your partner/driver. NO air on the whoops at spec 2! WTH?

Saw him go by in the dark, and said to myself, "I could hold a better pace in my nearly stock 94' Explorer!" LOL.

Go hard early! break it early! and get back in there!

Just pull'n your leg. But it was strange how slow everyone was moving through there.
 






LOL, yeah, most likely was my mom for sure that early out there!

The problem with my race partner is he's still very new. We built the truck, he funded it, I did the labor. He got about 5 hours in it Dec of 2012. Then we lined up and raced it Jan of 2013 where he got about another 4-5 hours of seat time. Then literally that weekend he got orders to be shipped off to London. So then fast foward 15 months, he got about 45 min of seat time 2 days before the race and then at the point you saw him he'd been in the drivers seat for about 10 minutes. LOL That's literally 100% of his experience in his own truck. I've got probably 10 times the seat time in his truck then he does but till he retires out of the USAF in a few yrs it is what it is. The other thing was we had been told they'd built man made jumps in that area and with no prerunning we didn't know what to expect out of them so the whole first lap was a bit of a recon type run. I was set to be driving lap two and I promise it would've been a different scenario had we made it that far. I wasn't going to fly the first one but I fully intended to land, pin it and hold it pinned off the 2nd one. Unfortunately we snapped the axle shaft around mile 65 we think but neither of us having been in a truck with that failure and me not behind the wheel to really understand what he was fighting with to control the truck... We both just chaulked it up to his inexperience just showing. We made it to the end of lap one, inspected it, all looked good, switched seats and took off. As soon as I pulled off pit row onto the fullspeed section is was blatantly obvious now with me behind the wheel we had something broke and when we got to the first hill climb at mile 0.5 it was pretty obvious in my mind what we had happen. Not having spares, we limped it to the road crossing at spectator 2 and called it a day there. We went that far only cause we had a friend between spectator 1 and 2 that had broke a 3rd member and we were delivering their spare for them. They confirmed we were 1 wheel drive right there and well, that's that. People asked why we didn't have a spare shaft... Well, ask ANYONE and our bone stock toyota V6 with 120K on it with an auto trans should not have been able to break a 35 spline chromoly shaft. LOL, oh well, live and learn. We'll be back with a full floater next time!

Look up TPF racing if you're on facebook. That's us with TONS of photos.


Hammers hands down is absolutely the best spectating event I've ever been too and that includes baja 1000 and stuff like that. KOH is mind blowing to attend! I'm going to try and make it this year too. Hopefully with my F150 if it's running by then but if not I'll take either the race truck or my explorer. Moab is on my bucket list too... Someday!
 






Just pull'n your leg. But it was strange how slow everyone was moving through there.

I bet most people we going slow cause of what we were told before the race by what was in there. Nobody wanted to ball it up the first lap not knowing how big the man made stuff was. You should've saw the paved road exit out of that gravel pit area. It was a graveyard of people that couldn't make the turn on the pavement and quite a few people balled it up there in both the morning and afternoon race.
 






The slow go'n didn't pick up much after daylight so we split to spec 3 for some high speed carnage.

There were some interesting moments 30 feet from the track with a sideways, 75mph, air-born truck, pointed right at you! Nobody lost control though; a least not entirely.

Funny story;

We got there at 2am and were roll'n around looking for a spot, and ended up down in the man made stuff at spec two.

My buddy was yelling at me, DUDE! :eek: you are on the track!

So I punched it! :burnout: Ha, the little purple Ex got to do some "official" track testing. :nono:
 












Someone told me the shopping mall was up this way!

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It's a darn good thing you brought the "Mall Crawler" then!
 












Even a good spotter could twist an ankle on that!
 






Someone told me the shopping mall was up this way!

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<====jealous..

Stuck inside for work this week with perfect weather and I keep coming back to look at these pictures..:banghead:
 






If it makes you feel better, I've lost faith in it over the last two days. Have had two times where I went to start it and it just wanted to pop and sputter and die. Reminds me of when my fuel pump was going out. Gonna swap in a new filter this weekend. Pump is less then a year old which doesn't mean it isn't bad but still, gonna start with the filter cause I have no clue how old that is. Figures it won't do it in my driveway though where I can work on diagnosing it but rather in the grocery store parking lot or gas station pump.


Those pictures are logandale about an hour north of my house.
 






..Been there..:D

Besides the maintenance you are doing check the rubber fuel line hose from the hard line betwen the filter and spv...Your solenoid purge valve may be getting stuck open or closed, possibly a speratic blockage..:dunno:

Double check for codes with a paperclip and not a scanner..;)
 






Will have to read up on that stuff cause honestly, I haven't heard of any of it. When I did the pump I tried to do the filter but couldn't get it to release with the goofy tool that you push in to release. I'm just going to cut the hard lines and slap it in there spliced with soft lines.
 






Khris,
I looked through this thread and I found where you mentioned you did the dip from dipyourcar but I don't see any mention of what you sprayed it with..

I'm looking at doing this on the Honda and if that works "ok" the X..

Did you talk about this in another thread or is it like fight club? :)

I was looking at picking up the sprayer system from dipyourcar as it isn't expensive.. 3 gallons plus sprayer and spare parts is about $350-ish..

~Mark
 






Yup I did my old prerunner truck and my exploder. I bought this but it looks like they're sold out...

http://www.gleempaint.com/noname.html

That is literally this unit that's at Lowes.

http://www.lowes.com/pd_326053-8918...L=?Ns=p_product_qty_sales_dollar|1&facetInfo=

I think it was about $350ish total the first time I did it with purchasing the sprayer for my truck. The expo though ended up being just a little over $200 cause I owned the sprayer at that point.

On both the expo and my prerunner I shot it first with the gunmetal grey. I think I used a gallon of that on each and then went over with the actual color. Read up on the dipyourcar forums, there's TONS of info there on literally everything and more that you'll need to know. The videos on youtube are AWESOME as well!!!! Let me know if you have any questions, I've done two complete vehicles and a jeep top now at this point myself. Far from a pro but I have some experience.
 






Yup I did my old prerunner truck and my exploder. I bought this but it looks like they're sold out...

http://www.gleempaint.com/noname.html

That is literally this unit that's at Lowes.

http://www.lowes.com/pd_326053-8918...L=?Ns=p_product_qty_sales_dollar|1&facetInfo=

I think it was about $350ish total the first time I did it with purchasing the sprayer for my truck. The expo though ended up being just a little over $200 cause I owned the sprayer at that point.

On both the expo and my prerunner I shot it first with the gunmetal grey. I think I used a gallon of that on each and then went over with the actual color. Read up on the dipyourcar forums, there's TONS of info there on literally everything and more that you'll need to know. The videos on youtube are AWESOME as well!!!! Let me know if you have any questions, I've done two complete vehicles and a jeep top now at this point myself. Far from a pro but I have some experience.

I've watched a bunch of Fonzies (sp?) videos. When he dipped the red honda that had crappy paint he sold me on it. My honda looks like that, except mine is gray.. The colors they used on the honda is what I want.. so I was going to use that...

Their (dipyourcar) sprayer kit looks nice and comes with spare tips/seals etc.. so it looks like it is worth the $125-$150 price tag..

I figure $350 for the first vehicle and then maybe $200 on the 2nd (X) since I'll have the spray and the X will use 4 gallons instead of 3..

Who knows.. Maybe I'll do the van :)

~Mark
 






I'm pretty happy with the dip in general. It's not perfect and not real paint obviously. It can stain from wet road grime coming up but if you keep it washed it's very very minimal. It's holding up pretty decent. I have a couple spots on my exploder that are starting to peel from wear and tear but it seems to hold up decent to brush marks and desert pin striping down the sides at least.

My yota prerunner before...

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whoops, memory was wrong, I actually spray paint primered my yota. I did the grey base dip on my expo though for sure!

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Finished

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Tons of pictures during the process here...

http://s67.photobucket.com/user/sirhk100/library/Toyota/Plasti Dip?sort=3&page=1

And actually, I sold that truck this past nov and the current owner actually dipped it again with a different color that I actually love!!! See this link... LOL, and yes he's selling it already! I told him it would suck as a daily driver... Oh well, not my problem! LOL


http://inlandempire.craigslist.org/cto/4422715312.html



For my expo though, I know for sure I did the gunmetal grey base dip on my expo cause it was the white fenders with red cab so I wanted a solid base and then the gold. I will say, the red was a bit scary spraying, it doesn't cover nearly as thick as the grey or gold did. Along the way I was nervous it wasn't going to cover but 5 coats got it done. On the forums I've read that the red is one of the harder colors to lay down cause it doesn't cover as well as many of the others. Figures that's the first one I'd try...
 



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Still out using it. Been fighting a starting gremlin but rolled the dice and went on a big run yesterday anyways. Didn't have a single issue the whole time! Well, at least with it starting, I did leave some plasti dip on a rock wall...

Have one picture on my camera I need to upload and I'll take a picture of two of the proof of abuse evidence on it today when I get off my ass and go outside. Either way, had a blast with it!

Trying to blend in!

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Vegas in the background.

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Lets just say I know I'm wider then jeeps now! LOL

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I guess they have their own road system or something?

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Sliders earned their keep AGAIN on that drivers side rock right here!

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This dude slashed a sidewall on a swamper and tossed his spare on. This is his spare tire that he put on after it flatted about 50 feet later with another slashed sidewall. He decided to try to drive out of the canyon on it. Didn't work...

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My spare tire is now rolling around on the front of that jeep... This was us getting it out of my ride.

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Dodging bushes...

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And the dip peeler...

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Trying to line up as wide to the pass I could, btw, we'd already gone thru this the other way too. It was an up and back trail. Nature of the beast, I made it up damage free but it was really close and I was pretty sure I was going to loose a fender on the way down.

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btw, in the moment, I had no idea I had the body lean in the drivers seat going on in that picture above! LOL

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Once I got up in it, I gave it a couple shots trying to shimmy it back and forth more to the passenger. I was able to get it a little bit as my first line up would've for sure taken off the fenders. I'm actually snapping a picture with my camera in this shot below that I'll grab later today to show really what I was trying to avoid here.

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Got it lined up about as good as I felt it was going to get but wasn't enough. Asked to have some guys stand on the pass rear bumper and pass rear end of my slider to maybe try and get it leaned over a bit more. It actually did help some.

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Finally said screw it and went... Left some dip on the rock walls here from my fenders and also even the rear hatch pillar. Missed the window by about 1/4 inch judging from the scrape on the window trim piece! LOL

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And just a generic scenery photo...

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