Project 4Skinner: Unclean, uncut, unkosher and unashamed

[Turboyota]

March 2021

Total Chaos is an awesome company. Their products are robust, fitment is great, and they have a decades-long history of performance and reliability.

New bushings and inner sleeves. Everything got copious amounts of Superlube.


Clearance for upper arm


Effortless install! If you look closely, the frame appears to be welded where I cut it to tweak/beat/coax it back into its home. Since it appears to be TIG welded, I must’ve not filled my MIG bottles… this was still during Covid, so maybe that was my excuse? I don’t remember…


Trimmed out the inner fender with tin snips.


Got shit tacked together for fit check


Made a doubler plate for under the frame VIN. See bottom left of photo:


Looks like I finally got MIG gas, and made some extra gusset templates from beer boxes


Inner fender trimmage on drivers side


Tigged the upper arm shock mount chingadera.


Used the hand template digitizer


drivers side mostly burned in:


Extra shock hoop gussets on drivers side also:


Tidy packaging

 

[Austen2019]

I would remove the brake bar in the rear applies brakes when suspension compresses

 

[Turboyota]

I would remove the brake bar in the rear applies brakes when suspension compresses

Why? Haven’t had any issues with it. There’s probably 6000 miles on it so far

 

[Pictafiedesign]

I would remove the brakes, because dirt slows you down enough as it is.

 

[Turboyota]

Late March 2021

Beers: At least one Coors Heavy as shown in the pics. So realistically probably 6-9 beers.

Didn’t have left hand jam nuts for the inner tierod ends, so I made some out of the stock tierod adjuster. Not only does it jam against the tierod extender, but it pinches also. So that’s pretty fucking cool…





Final result:


Simple & effective. And I didn’t have to drive anywhere or wait for parts.

New moog idler arm and tierod ends. Spares of every balljoint and steering component live in the 4Skinner dezert kit.

 

[Turboyota]

April 2, 2021

Started on January 19, and both front and rear were dirt ready April 2nd. Fucking sweet!!

Sleeperific!!

 

[bullnerd]

Damn Dude. Props on a build thread from memory.

 

[Turboyota]

April 20, 2021

I decided to shave off the bottom of the front frame rails in preparation for the new crossmember. If I was fucking smarter, I would have cut off the tow bar abortions like this… cutting thru the 1/8” and 0.090” frame rails would have been waaaaay less painful than s-l-o-w-l-y cutting thru the 1/4” plate and welds like I did…. Approach angle is gonna be like 0.69% better this way, so that’s fucking sick.

Trimmed both sides with a sawzall.


Internal frame gussets forged from jap samurai sword steel can be seen here. More on than shortly.


Made bottom closeout plates from 1/8” mystery steel


Inside of the frame rails got 3/16” P&O plate that was welded to some of the stock internal frame gusseting.

***flicks 0.080” jap samurai sword steel internal gusset before welding to 3/16 plate***
“That’s not going anywhere”


Ah yeah! Lookin’ tidy!


Fitting front crossmember. It was either 2x2x0.25” wall or 2x2x0.188” wall.


Lookin’ fairly straight, I burned those bitches in with some fatty caterpillar weave welds


Leia doggo puppers!!!!


Stock bumper brackets had been shittily booger welded to the abortive mess of a front end, so I made new bracketry from what appears to be 1.5x1.5x1/8” angle iron


Evidence of abortive shitty welds still evident here on the right side of the stock bumper bracket:

 

[Turboyota]

April 24, 2021.

Bumper brackets

Time: 1.6 hours
Materials: 0.075” (14ga) sheet for the bent bracket and 1/8” HR for the vertical gusset.
Tools: cardboard, vise brake, bandsaw, Ameribrade, MIG, vise grip welding clamps
Beers: since I started at 9:50AM and finished at 11:30AM, I’m guessing more than zero…




If you dont have one of these gems, buy one. They are available from Amazon, Grizzly, and wherever else you fancy buying chinee tools. They are worth every fucking penny.

 

[Turboyota]

June 27, 2021
Location: Calimesa hills prerun grounds
Participants: whitetrashkyle and @h0runner

Dirt miles: 15+
Smiles: 69
Laughs: aplenty
Beers: likely

The 4Skinner performed amazingly. I remember being absolutely stoked on the performance to simplicity ratio.
Anakin Skywalker: “we lost something”

Size difference is fucking crazy! I think this was the maiden voyage for the WTK F150. It got lots more backhalf cagework later on.


Yeah, that’s a JAZ jeepspeed cell mounted backwards atop the stock 18(?) gallon tank.


Simplicity



Double the HP and suspension travel makes a huge fucking difference

 

[bullnerd]

Is there a build thread on the WTK TT?