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00:00Today on Build for Off-Road we got our FJ45 back in the shop. We're knocking out the final few
00:09items that need to be mocked up. Brakes, pedals, steering column, and at the same time we're
00:14starting some of the finish work in the bed. Today in the Build for Off-Road shop I've got
00:23my FJ45 project in here. Now this is a pretty extensive project. We've been working on it for
00:28a little while but basically it's an all-aluminum aftermarket body sitting on a front Toyota front
00:35subframe. So this is front frame section off of a Toyota Tacoma and then a custom frame all the way
00:41out to the back. It's got some super cool portals out here at the wheels. It's got a monster LS
00:46underneath the hood, six-speed automatic, and it's just an all-around kind of like super cool trail
00:52rig slash ultra 4 looking kind of like thing with an FJ45 body on it. So it's pretty cool. At this
00:57point right here I'm kind of ready to almost disassemble the entire thing and do all the
01:02finish welding on the frame and then we can coat it. But I do need to address a couple things in
01:07the back before we do that. So that's where we're going.
01:28The reason I have to rebuild the wheel wells in this bed is all because of the shock towers that
01:34we're using for our trailing arms in the rear suspension. But I also want to make them removable
01:38because I want to run a tube in between the two shock towers just to give them more strength and
01:44it'll also give me a spot to mount a spare tire. That tube will eventually have to be removable in
01:48the long run but for now we can just drill the hole and figure out where the tube is going to go.
01:52When I'm at a point like this in a project when there's so much to do I kind of like to work from
01:57the back to the front. So now that we have these wheel wells built I'm going to drop the other one in
02:01and then the next thing we'll do is start figuring out where the bed is going to mount onto the frame
02:05because it's literally just sitting on some chunks of wood right now. Then we can go over to the
02:09plasma table and build some bed mounts. I need the other one of these. I'm going to put it over here.
02:19Let's go to the plasma table.
02:31These little mounts basically just key off of our custom frame on the back and then we'll drill
02:50and bolt the bed onto these later. Whenever you're mounting a bed on something like this it's very
02:55common to just basically solid mount the bed in place instead of having to worry about isolators
03:00like a body mount because the bed you don't really want it moving around a lot. You want it good and
03:03stiff and also help stiffen up the chassis as well. So drop these in place, tack them, I think I'm going
03:09to go with four mounts on this entire bed.
03:14So with my new inner fender wells made and all the fab done for the mounts on the chassis I'm going to go
03:25ahead and coat this bed. Now I'm going to bed line both the inside and the bottom side all in one shot and I'm
03:33going to be using Seymour's new 2k protective coating. This is a hybrid polymer protective coating
03:40and it kind of bridges that gap between a do-it-yourself bed liner and a professionally installed bed liner.
03:46It's incredibly easy to apply at home in your home garage. You don't need a spray booth to do it and all you need to do is get one of these
03:53schutz guns that Seymour also sells. Set the pressure on your air compressor and it is very, very easy to do. As a matter of fact,
03:59I've done this on multiple beds. It's probably one of my favorite bed liners out there. All you got to do is mix
04:04the black in with the protective coat and it's ready to spray. I think we'll sand it first though.
04:23When you apply the Seymour 2k protective coating, the first step is what's called a coverage coat and
04:43that's what we have done right here. And when you do that, you're going to see that sometimes it might
04:48look a little blotchy and that's because really the whole goal of this first coat is to basically get
04:53a good thick layer of the coating down. And when you do that, you're kind of spraying over here and
04:58then we're spraying over there to make sure we get it into all the little nooks and crannies. But the key
05:03to making this whole system look really, really good is the last coat and that is our drop coat or texture
05:10coat. We're basically going to shake the bottle less times. We're only going to shake it for 30 seconds
05:16and then we're going to back the gun up, probably about 24 to 36 inches away. And then I like to
05:21spray it in a really cool little spiral motion and that gives us the best texture. Watch this.
05:27I'll show, I'll prove it to you. Nope, not much. I take this serious, man.
05:40Once you've finished your texture coat and you have the texture that you like,
05:44then you're done spraying. The 2K protective coating is dry to the touch in about an hour and
05:49that's when you'd want to unmask everything. You can get into some light use if this is a truck bed
05:54coating in about 48 hours, but really you should give it a good week before you put anything in
05:59the back of your truck. Now that our bed's done, we can focus on the cab.
06:14When you're building a custom vehicle basically from scratch like this FJ45, there's going to be
06:27lots of time spent on mocking parts up because it's not just as simple as getting a part to fit
06:33this vehicle because we're building a custom car. Now that's why the bed was modified so heavily to
06:38fit around our shocks. We may have to modify the floor in here to fit around the transfer case,
06:43but before I jump down that rabbit hole, I want to make sure all the driver's controls are taken
06:48care of first. So that means a throttle pedal, a brake pedal, and of course, some type of steering call.
06:53I needed that. I found it.
07:09Woo! An essential part of figuring out pedal position and driver position is going to be the
07:16steering column because it's pretty much a fixed item inside the vehicle. Now when it comes to
07:21choosing a steering column, honestly, if you're looking for the best selection out there, it's
07:26going to be from a company like I Did It. I Did It has a full line of steering columns, not just for
07:32your street rods, but also for your race cars. If you're building a full-blown race car, they have
07:38pro-fab columns that are incredibly light, all aluminum construction with a bearing at the top,
07:44Delrin bushing at the bottom, and they even make them bolt in for some of the popular race car
07:49applications like Ford Mustangs. They offer universal ones that you can add tabs to,
07:54weld them in place, and mount them in your vehicle if you want. If you're looking for something that's
07:58a little bit more street-friendly, you can go with one of their universal collapsible columns. Now this
08:03is what would be considered sort of like a street rod style. You can see it's a very small column.
08:08There's no turn signals or tilt action. It just has that classic look. It's in paintable steel.
08:13It is splined at the top to accept popular steering wheel adapters, and then the bottom
08:18is a double D to go down and connect with most steering U-joints. If you're looking for a little
08:23bit more creature comfort inside your vehicle, they offer steering columns, both paintable steel,
08:29chrome, or black powder coat with things like nine position tilt, so you can adjust the driver
08:35comfort, integrated turn signal switches. You can even order it with an ignition switch in place,
08:40or you can have basically no ignition switch in the column at all mounted up in the dash.
08:45They even have ones that have column shift. If you want all the possible features that you could
08:50get inside your vehicle, they offer columns with both tilt and a telescoping feature that allows you
08:56to move the steering wheel further or closer away from the driver with just a simple twist of the
09:01horn button, and it has an integrated nine-bolt steering wheel adapter built into place with a horn
09:07button. But that's just the column. All the accessories, I did it has those as well. Whether
09:13you need double D shaft that's built-in collapsible for safety features, all the Borgeson U-joints to
09:19connect to many different styles of columns as well as steering gears, and the adapters to connect the
09:25steering wheels that they offer for all these columns. But this, to me, is probably one of the
09:30best features they have. I did it has race car style quick disconnect. So this is a weld-on quick
09:36disconnect. Would go on something like one of these pro fab columns right here. You'd slide the
09:41disconnect on, weld it in place, and then your steering wheel becomes removable with this disconnect.
09:47But they also offer that same design to fit on a standard steering column. So you can have all the
09:53creature comforts of a modern tilt or telescoping steering column with the quick disconnect feature,
09:59so you get that race car style with integrated horn button. That's just cool.
10:06Oh, look at this one. It's kind of like a race car. I can do a race car. That could be cool.
10:13Or, oh, what about this one? It kind of looks kind of street roddery. Oh, street rod. Oh, very nice.
10:18Street rod. That's kind of cool.
10:24What about this one? It's kind of like a tilt column, but not really a tilt column.
10:27Or we could go build some mounts.
10:36Of all the column choices that I had from I Did It, I'm going to go with this collapsible
10:40painted steel tilt column. Now, I chose this one because it was going to work really well with that
10:46cool quick release on the end, and plus it's going to give me some things like turn signals that I'm
10:50going to want to have on this truck. But I do need to come up with a column mount. Now, the body is
10:56designed to accept a factory FJ45 steering column, which I do not have, so I need to come up with
11:02some type of mount for this, which means I just need to bend a piece of steel to basically cradle
11:06around this tube. The easiest way to do that is with another piece of steel, a hammer, and some plate.
11:14See what that looks like.
11:21A little bit more.
11:25A little bit more.
11:40Good.
11:44Tilty.
11:59Driving.
12:00With the steering column mounted, we can now start to work on our pedal placement. Now, obviously,
12:08there's only two pedals in this truck. There's a brake pedal and a throttle pedal, but because our engine is a
12:13takeout and we're using a factory computer I'm going to just be installing a factory throttle
12:18pedal. Now this is a pedal out of a 2010 Chevy Camaro that's what works with our computer but
12:23because we're using this modern drive-by-wire pedal we can take advantage of some aftermarket
12:28support for that that makes the vehicle better to drive. This is a pedal commander basically
12:34throttle intercept module so what it does is it takes the information that comes out of this
12:39throttle pedal and then adjusts it before that data gets delivered to the ECU. That means you can do
12:46things like remove the throttle lag on the pedal that's normally found in modern vehicles. You can
12:51set the vehicle up for eco mode if you're trying to save a little bit of fuel or more power. You can
12:55adjust how the throttle reacts when we're off-road so it'll make the vehicle easier to handle in the
13:00rocks but the neatest thing about the pedal commander is something new. It now has theft and deterrent
13:07built right into the actual unit which is nice because most off-road rigs like this they don't
13:14have keys you're just basically leaving them on the trailer or you're leaving up the trailhead when
13:18you're out wheeling and they are very susceptible to being stolen. Pedal commander can essentially make
13:24the throttle pedal completely dead at the flip of a switch inside the app ensuring that nobody can drive
13:31this vehicle if you don't want them to.
13:37Here we go.
13:48Today we're working on the FJ45 project finishing up the majority of the mock-up before it gets
14:06totally torn down for finished coating and paint. Now I want to weld out my rear suspension links so I
14:12can finish flexing out the suspension and to do that I'm using a tool that I have always wanted here
14:17in the shop and I'm so glad that now I have one. This is the Woodward Fab through hole welding
14:24positioner. Now for those of you that don't spend a lot of time in the welding world you're probably
14:28wondering what is a welding positioner? Well essentially what this is is it is a large eight
14:34inch three jaw truck with a two and a half inch hole that goes all the way through it. What it allows
14:40you to do is if you're working with round pipe or tubing that's under two and a half inches you can put
14:45any length you want all the way through this machine and then instead of when you're welding
14:50trying to work your way around you can use the foot control to turn it or you can just set it to a set
14:57speed and it will automatically roll the pipe or tube around. If you got a weird shaped item you can
15:03just put it in the eight inch jaw just lock it into place and it'll basically continue to move it while
15:09you weld. It just makes your life a lot easier. Using the panel on the side you can adjust the speed that
15:15to eight rpm or revolutions per minute depending on how fast you weld and you can also change it
15:20from the automatic to the foot pedal or even the direction in which it turns. Having one of these in
15:27a shop is so nice if you weld a lot of link bars or turbo piping or even exhaust it just makes life a
15:34lot easier and it's adjustable from zero degrees or flat like this can tip all the way up to 90 degrees
15:41or straight up in the air or 30 degrees and 60 degrees in between. I'm gonna weld that now.
15:47Before we mount the cab of our FJ45 onto the frame we need to make sure that we don't need to modify
16:09the floor of it. The engine and transmission are already in place but we need to figure out if
16:14the transfer case is going to clear and in this particular vehicle I'm going to be using basically
16:18two transfer cases. I got this NP205 that's going to go in the back and then in front of it is going
16:24to be a range box or doubler that will make this transfer case even lower gear ratio. But because this
16:30is an old 205 that I just picked up online before we do any of that work we're going to go ahead
16:34tear it down and freshen it up.
16:43Come on big gear. There we go. Oh yeah.
16:52Now the beauty of the 205 is it's an incredibly strong transfer case. It's been used in a lot of
16:58one ton trucks for many many years and what makes it so strong is the fact that it is a cast iron case
17:03heavy duty gear set inside. But some of the downfall of this case is you only have one gear ratio and
17:10that is less than two to one. It's like 1.96 to one low range ratio and no one really makes an upgrade
17:17for this case to get different gear ratios in it. It's also hard to adapt this to a bunch of
17:22transmissions. So you can fix all of that by adding something that's often referred to as a range box to
17:29the front of it. Now what this range box will do is it will adapt this transfer case up to pretty much
17:34any transmission you want. In our case we have a 6L80 so six speed automatic. So that's what this
17:39input is for as well as this universal round bolt pattern that we can use. But it also gives us
17:45another gear ratio inside it. Inside here is a planetary gear set. There's a little shifter right here that
17:51when you shift it it'll give you an additional 2.72 to one ratio. So that means that we've essentially
17:57taken this fairly strong, actually incredibly strong, but low range case. So it ends up like
18:02like I said before under two to one. Now we have a two to one in this case or we can have a three to
18:07one up here or we can combine the two of them and basically get a five to one. So it gives us more
18:11low range options. The only downfall to this package honestly is that it makes it very long
18:16because we're going to be mounting this range box onto the front of the 205. But if you have a wheelbase
18:21like we have in our 205, it'll work out fine. The only thing we have to change in the 205
18:26is the input gear that will then spline into the range box.
18:33Put the big snap ring on there.
18:38Put the little snap ring on there.
18:41One tricky part whenever you're rebuilding these 205s is that they use a lot of these loose
18:49roller bearings. Most modern transfer cases use some type of cage bearing and the 205
18:55does have these in some key locations, but it still utilizes a lot of these loose bearings. And
19:00the tricky part is you got to get the bearings into specific positions and you can't have them
19:05falling off. So in this case, I need to get all of these roller bearings down inside of this output
19:10shaft and they need to stand up. And the easiest way to do that is to just coat them with a good
19:15amount of wheel bearing grease when you put them in.
19:40We're finishing up all of the mock-up on our FJ45 and we're pretty much ready to tear it down to a
19:50bare frame to do all the finished welding. But also one thing that you need to focus on when you have
19:55vehicles like this is maintenance. And important is keeping track of the fuel system because these
20:01vehicles do sit for long periods of time. One thing that can rob power out of your engine is
20:07basically varnish and carbon buildup inside your intake runner as well as your fuel system.
20:13Hotshot Secrets Gasoline Extreme is designed to eliminate all of that from the fuel system.
20:20One bottle will treat up to 20 gallons of fuel or essentially one tank full and its proprietary
20:25PEA detergents will help strip all that varnish out of the fuel system and eliminate the carbon
20:32deposits that build up in your intake runners or in your combustion chamber. It'll help improve
20:37fuel economy, give you a little bit more performance and smooth out any rough idle that's
20:42been picked up on your engine from just sitting for so long. It's a great thing to keep around
20:46for a vehicle like this that sits for a while but it's also great for your everyday daily driver
20:51just to keep it performing well.
21:01Here we go. Bam!
21:03So at this point now that we have our bed test fit again obviously all the fab work is finished back
21:09here. We know that the transfer case is going to fit underneath the floor so we're good with that.
21:13We've got our pedal positions and our steering column in place. Right now we're at that point
21:18which is probably one of the hardest points of any project even though this thing looks like a
21:21complete vehicle. The only thing to do now is to completely tear it all apart, do all the finished
21:28welding on the frame, do all the finished welding on all the suspension, paint, coat everything that
21:33needs to be painted and coated and then put it all back together just to get back to this point right
21:38here. So that's what we're going to do.
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