CJ8 Scrambler Part III, Brad Lovell Rock Crawl Champion.

Today, the Jeep Scrambler returns with great. Do it yourself, tips on bed, coding, custom axles and building your own tools.

Plus how rock racer Brad Lovell plans to continue his winning ways. You know, if you want to be the best driver, you gotta go out there and beat the best drivers. And that's, that's what we're after this year. Xtreme 4x4 starts. Now.

Now we know how you guys like to spend your weekends. Get up in the morning, pour yourself a cup of coffee, settle down in front of the TV. For some great how to television all in an effort to get inspired, get out there and work on your project when it's all said and done, you get up,

head out planning to knock out a couple of things you've been planning to do all week. At least that's how we hope you spend your weekends. Now, before I started working at Xtreme 4x4, that's exactly how I spent mine.

I'll tell you this, the shop that I used to go work in was nothing like the one behind that door.

Now, I know that the best way to describe this shop would be to honestly say it is over the top and it's a far cry from what most of you guys are working in on the weekends. We know that I've been there, I've done it and this place truly is a gearheads dream. I mean, we got high ceilings, a huge lift, unlimited tools and every piece of machinery you could dream of. I know most of you guys are working in a setting that's probably a little more modest, maybe something like we got set up underneath our mezzanine.

Now, recently we moved everything around here at the extreme shop to create the small two car garage and we filled it with minimal tools and equipment to prove that you do not need the big fancy shop or all the fancy tools to build hardcore custom off road trucks. You guys at home, you do it all the time. Now, so far we've made pretty good headway on a 100% custom Jeep CJ eight scrambler

with a rolling chassis consisting of a throttle down customs frame. Rusty's off road long arm suspension kit and a set of one of a kind 14 bolt axles, front and rear.

We dropped on an aluminum CJ A body from

Aquilo

Industries

bolted up a set of killer wheels from Mickey Thompson and Champion B lock wrapped with Interco 42 inch rubber,

installed the transfer case that you guys picked from our internet pole and the winner was a 203205 doubler.

Then with a set of pr p seats bolted to the floor.

We carried our Jeep over to essentially off road for a roll cage.

And today our Jeep is back with a brand new roll cage and some rock sliders fully welded. So they're nice and safe and we didn't have to buy a bender or a welder to get it done.

So what have we got in our scrambler so far?

Well, for just under three grand, we got two custom 14 bolts, front and rear,

the frame,

2500 bucks, suspension just around two grand.

The drive train floats in at just over 2500.

The body was just over 4000 tires and wheels around $3000. The rough total so far around 17,000 bucks. Not bad considering we have a complete rolling chassis.

Now that brings us to a question that we've been getting asked a lot about this particular project. What kind of budget are we looking at for this? Realistic two car garage built? Now budget means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Some guys will go out and spend 10 $15,000 on

tools to build a low dollar, $8000 buggy. Now, in the case of our Jeep, if you're just building one project like this one here, it's better to take that money you'd spend on tools and put it into the project yourself, you end up getting exactly what you want in the end without spending all that money up front.

Now, obviously, we aren't finished with this Jeep quite yet. First thing we need to do today is pull the body off the frame.

Now, with all the fabrication done in our roll cage, as well as our rock sliders. We're going to coat the inside of our Jeep's tub. Now to do that, we're gonna be using dup color truck bed coating. Now, this is a fully rubberized coating that you put on yourself with the roller that comes in the kit. Now, this will protect the inside of our Jeep as well as give us some noise deadening. Now, in the cage itself, we're just gonna use the spray on version and you're probably wondering what the cost of this is. You can probably do the inside of this Jeep for about between 50 to 100 bucks a spray in liner would be 10 times that

if you're working in a small shop, it's a good idea to wear a mask to keep the fumes from getting to you.

Now, with the body off of our Jeep, this is a great time to take care of all the wiring for our scrambler. This is a place where a lot of guys choose to save some money, but honestly, there's a lot of benefits to buying a complete aftermarket wiring harness like we have here from painless performance. Now, not only do we end up with a really nice weather resistant fuse block that we can mount right up on the firewall. The entire harness itself is color coded and labeled. Now, this will help with laying the harness out, but it also will help with diagnosis when we're out on the trail

with the fuse block mounted to the firewall. The harness is routed into the passenger compartment.

In most vehicles, the wiring is hidden but in an off road truck, keeping the harness in plain sight will help with diagnosis. If we have a problem on the trail,

we also picked up a complete switch kit from painless to control the lights and the ignition

and all gets mounted into a dash blank. We got from

Aquilo.

Now with our dash in place, we're gonna go ahead and lay out as well as wire up our gauges. Now, for this truck, we got a complete set of auto meter gauges, a water temperature, oil pressure, fuel level as well as a T and a speedometer.

Now, these are all mechanical gauges, so we'll be able to keep a good eye on what our truck's engine is doing. Now, if you're looking at the,

he's thinking they look a little bit different. Well, this is the best example. It is a reverse rotation speedometer that pegs out at 100 and 80

MPH. Now, the reason it's like that is this kit was originally designed to go into replica cobra kit car packages. But we just thought the classic styling of these gauges would look great in our CJ.

We're taking a break from our scrambler build to head out to Southern California

to the We Rock Western Nationals where the unlimited class used to get all the glory but not anymore.

When the We Rock series kicked off in Paris, California, the once dormant pro mod class found itself front and center. It's a great, great class, having doubled in size during the off season. We've got

a

lot of top drivers coming to this class. All title hopes had to go through the main man of Pro

mods. You know, if you want to be the best driver, you gotta go out there and beat the best drivers. And that's, that's what we're after this year

with more. We rock and U Rock titles in four years.

Brad Lovell knows how to beat the best. A lot of these guys that, uh come out for the racing and the crawling, they wanna go big or go home. They wanna, you know, winter break attitude,

the attitude we take is if we don't win, we wanna take second, we, we wanna be consistent and accurate and get the job done with his older brother out front.

The levels dominate. My spotter is a fellow team owner, my brother Roger. You know, I trust him more than anybody else out there and really integral part of the team. We work really well together. They've been working as a team long before going pro. We built this night,

New Go Kart when we were kids and we had a nice steep driveway and somehow I ended up being the test pilot and he gave me a shove down there and

got a little bit of death wobble up front and went end over end and I ran up crying to mama with a busted head. But,

uh, you know, it's always worked out that way where, you know, Roger has done great things technically and can really watch from outside and get the correct lines. And I'm just dumb enough to get in the truck,

spending their youth wheeling the trails of the Colorado Rockies. It's there that level of boys developed and

honed a special sibling connection. We're both on the same wavelength and,

you know, when he's telling me something, he can just be using

whatever words he has and I know what he's talking about. There's no rift in communication there. So that's a big advantage that we have whether a defending champion or a rookie, the jitter

that come with the first obstacle of the season,

he hit the hardest one of the year coming off that first drop. We were a little bit, uh, I was a little bit nervous and then as soon as we came down that I told Roger, hey, I'm ok now and then the rest of it went well from there says a good run, good way to start the event. Brad's really good under stress. He's really good about knowing when to hit the throttle and, and when to relax and we've got really good communication skills. So

when I'm, when I'm talking to him on the radio, I can start

hear and breathing hard or something like that,

relax, relax, expecting to use the Paris event to break in their new rig. You know, it makes it a little more challenging with a new car instead.

They were at mid season championship form. We've never wanted a rock buggy. We've always wanted a rock truck under the hood is a Ford 347 which is a board and stroke 302 spider tracks axle housings. And it's all based around a Ford

inch system. The true high nine came through and put a high pin in there to give us a little bit more clearance.

We have a ha steering system that's a full hydraulic system. Really? What's helping us do the best this year is these new shocks from FAB.

It's their dirt logic line.

It's a two and a quarter inch air shock tucked inside a two inch coil over coming off the vertical 14 ft wall obstacle.

The shocks came through,

the BFGS were holding, holding, holding and then slipped and I was like, this isn't right. This isn't right. But, you know, the suspension soaked it all up and we recovered right out of there so it feels good to have that one behind us. He's a good driver. He's learning a new car,

but he, he reacts real quickly to it. He's really good about knowing how the cars are gonna be

as a battle raged behind them for second place. The levels never let up. It's another course town. We had a really clean run on the course here we're having a really clean day, feeling good with the win at hand. Brad could have skipped the shootout. I think everybody's gonna want to see a performance out here. So

hopefully we won't disappoint these Colorado kids never disappoint.

It's been months since we've done a rock crawl and we're right back there working great as a team. So it feels good.

Build on a budget Xtreme 4x4 projects that save you time and money.

Now, when you're working on four wheel drives, there's no question that there's a lot of specialized sockets. Now, one of the most common is the four wheel drive hub socket that we use to remove the spindle nut from the spindle itself. Now, if you do a lot of axle work, it's worth investing in one of these. But if you're just gonna work on a project one time or you're in a jam,

you can build your own

just like that.

Starting with a piece of scrap, exhaust tubing, we're gonna weld on three bowls, add a piece of scrap, flat plate to the back

and a large nut for a wrench

and it works great.

Now, not only does building this socket, save you a little bit of money, but can also get you out of a jam. If you're working in your garage and you don't have the socket in your toolbox, just build whatever you need and go from there. It takes a little bit of ingenuity and it pays off in spades.

123,

we pulled the body off of our Jeep Scrambler in order to paint the cage and bed line the inside. Now it's time to do the same to our frame.

Now, just like the cage we got from essentially off road, our rock sliders look awesome.

And with the Kota bed liner, they'll stay that way for a long time

as I'm sure most of you have figured out by now when you're building a truck from scratch, you spend a lot of time putting stuff together and then taking it back apart to take care of all the little details and our axles are no different. We originally built that housing to set up the wind and then mock it up into place and put our suspension on it and now we can take care of all of the internals. Now, it's gonna start inside the differential with the Detroit

O Locker that'll turn a set of 538 gears that we got from Yukon.

Now those in the rear will turn a set of Yukon cut to length, chrome molly shafts

up front. We had a set of Yukon shafts, custom blind by hudlow

axle. We'll join those to the outers. We set of CTMU joints and then finally at the wheel, we'll use a rock and roll off road drive flange.

The Detroit locker will provide us with ratcheting action when turning,

but also give us 100% traction when wheel spin is detected in the dirt.

538 years give us a final crawl ratio of 88 to 1 when the transfer case is in low range,

ctmu joints are great insurance and their heat treated 300 m frost and rebuildable bronze bushing is one last item to worry about on the trail.

Our front shaft started as bare Dana. 60 units from

Yukon

Hudlow axle just down the road, took our measurements and were able to cut and spine them to length,

rock and roll off road drive plunges are made from 4340 heat treated Cro

Molly,

locking the wheel and axle together for strength. Now, most guys will not run a drive lange on the street

because the axles will always be turning.

But for off road crawling,

they can't be beat

if the 14 bolt axle has one drawback. It's the low pinion

but pin guard from Great Lake off Road will protect our drive shaft from rocks on the trail

painted crane green to match our knuckles.

Now we decided from the very beginning that a stock CJ gas tank would work great in this project. We are gonna protect it underneath with a Kilby gas tank skid plate to keep it from getting damaged when we're on the trail. Now, every now and again, when you build one of these trucks, you just get lucky. And that's the case with our fuel level sending unit. This is a universal sending unit that came with our auto meter gauge. The float rides in the fuel as you fill the tank up. It has a little variable resistor in here. Normally, you'd have to drill a hole in your tank to mount this in place on this tank. It'll basically replace the stock sending unit

right on the top.

It's gonna weld up these little holes

with the sending unit modified. We'll drop it into the tank, hold it in place with the stock locking ring

and we'll drill a hole and add a steel dash six fitting for a fuel line

and then we'll mount it all up underneath our frame

before the body goes back on the frame. We're gonna take care of our exhaust using a Flowmaster Super 44 off road muffler.

It's made from 14 gauge diamond plate steel

so we can mount this muffler under our Jeep

and not worry about trashing it.

Now, the Jeep grill shell that we picked for this project is actually a factory replacement TJ grill shell, the lines on it are just a lot softer and yet it still has the classic round Jeep headlights that gives that old school style. Now, the radiator that we're going to mount into this grill shell

that itself is pretty rat.

This fully polished aluminum radiator is from doc's blocks.

They specialize in engine swap rides like this one set up for a small block Chevy in a Jeep TJ grill shell,

the integrated fan shroud and electric fan is cool, but the best part has to be the cap.

Now, the hood on this Jeep is gonna be very unique. It's a 100% clear Lexan

hood that we got from Trent fabrication. Now we got this clear hood, not so we can show off the motor, but for a very different reason, if we put a steel hood on this Jeep, we roll this Jeep over or hit a tree, it's gonna end up

with a nice big dent in it. Now, Lexan is the same stuff they use in race car windshields, it bends, it doesn't break

or dent. It's virtually indestructible. We just have to trim it to fit once we put the body back on, but

we got a pile of little stuff done today. And the next time we have a Jeep back in the shop, we'll take care of some induction on the motor as well as the change the oil pan out, swap out this mock up transmission for a real transmission, get some drive lines in it, basically get it one step closer to hitting the trail. Now, if you're working on a small two car garage and you're at this point right here. Well, you're gonna have to get all your junk that's on the driveway and on the front line of your house in

before the neighbors complain

in our case,

just leave it right there for now.