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?

 

[Turboyota]

First long distance trip
Late December 2021

Up until this point, @FatJeff had been driving the 4Skinner around town, dropping kids off at school, making Home Depot runs, etc. he hadn’t driven it in the dirt, and he had never ridden with me, or anyone else for that matter, in a fast(ish) offroad truck.

We did 250 miles of dirt from Indio to Chiriaco summit, then Bradshaw trail to Cibola, then down the Arizona Peace Trail to Yuma, then thru Glamis up the C-ANAL road back to Indio. It was the first time @FatJeff did any significant dirt miles.

Jeff took it easy, drove pretty slow, and got used to how the truck handled. His son had an absolute blast, learned 14 new swear words, and they slept well in the back of the 4Skinner.

Only issue was the AFM on the stock air box came unplugged after a particularly miserable 22-mile crossgrain trail that @Motiracer38 took is on. I quickly diagnosed the problem and Jeff was motive in short order.


Jeff didn’t feel comfortable navigating this waterfall (they always look tamer in pics), so whitetrashkyle drove the drop for him.

 

[Turboyota]

February 2022
Black Mountain wilderness & Hinkley area.
Dirt miles: 80ish
Beers: much to the delight of some of the technicians and fabricators from my work, I rolled outta the 4Skinner crushing a 32oz highlife at 7AM. Count for the day was around 20.
Lunch: turkey sammiches with extra mayo


Poker run organized by an engineer I worked with. I drove @FatJeff around in the 4skinner so he could get an idea how ridiculously hard and aggressively his truck could be driven.



We had a great fucking time.

 

[Turboyota]

March 18-20 2022

After the black mountain wilderness poker run, I noticed some disconcerting driveshaft marks on the fuel tank. I was throwing the 4Skinner into corners REALLY hard, and the 12” shackles coupled with soft red Energy suspension bushings were allowing a metric fuckton of side-to-side axle movement. Enough that the driveshaft was aggressively dry humping the gas tank. You can see shiny marks on the tank if you peep between the shock and the spare tire in this pic:


I remedied that fuckery by machining upper frame pivot bushings out of Delrin. New crush sleeves were 0.75x0.120” wall 4130 tube bored to 9/16”

Quickie way to safely hold and machine the OD of some bushings I had:


I have no idea why I’m wearing bitch mittens


Installed with what appears to be boat trailer wheel bearing grease as lube:



Added a 1.75x0.120” Wall DOM brace between the aft lower a-arm pivots at 9:30PM the night before the trip. I don’t painstaking clean all the rust off my tubes like @GahnRacing.


Notice the wet rags removing heat from the bushing assemblies


This trip was supposed to be Adelanto to Lake Isabella, but things changed.
@Dodah and I met the boys @sdecurti @Adventure Endeavor and @believeinbilly North of Adelanto. We went thru Hinkley, saw the F-22 crash site, crossed Cuddeback dry lake, went thru Randsburg, and then @GahnRacing blew a tranny outside Inyokern. Rain was forecasted in the lake Isabella region, so we stashed the broken ford ranger at @Motiracer38 ‘s camp in the Spangler hills area, re-thought the entire trip plan, then made our way thru Trona Pinnacles and skirted the lakebed to a breathtaking camp spot overlooking Searles Lake.

Adelanto


Cuddeback~ish


Looking West toward the El Paso mountains


Cuddeback


Trona Pinnacles


Outside Searles Lake

 

[Turboyota]

March 18-20 2022

The next day we trekked thru Death Valley, Argus Range, Panamint Springs, Darwin’s wash, Olancha, cactus flats, and ended up camping at Fossil Falls.



PlannedSon and I both enjoyed the comforts of the 4Skinner both nights.



300 dirt miles

Times I had to engage 4x4: once

Beers: far too many


Cheers

 

[turbomonty]

 

[turbomonty]

oh fuck she is uge! lol

 

[GahnRacing]

Polish the tubes faggot. @FatJeff deserves better..

 

[Turboyota]

oh fuck she is uge! lol

If you made that with ChatGPT, you should’ve made her titties gigantic. Do fucking better.

 

[turbomonty]

chatbot is pretty G rated it appears
dont be afraid of them little girls that are all active and stuff!