Ruby Red

[Epiccreation]

Figured I would start a post around my truck. This is what started as a 2013 f150 I bought with the intention of towing around my foxbody project car. Well as all things in life my priorities changed and now this truck is my toy to go play in the sand.

Some old pictures first.

August 2019 when I got the truck. It is a 2013 fx4 5.0 with basically every option you could get at the time (it’s a lariat without the chrome. Nav, heated and cooled seats, sunroof, leather seats). Its got the 6.5 foot bed which I liked at the time because it allowed me to keep 4 spare wheels flat with the tonneau cover on it.


First offroading trip was a week later after getting the truck. I live in Michigan so me and a couple buddies took a trip up to st. helen to hit the orv trails up there.

As you can see I already smashed the running boards on this trip (the passenger side was smashed too don’t worry). This trip left me wanting to do the basic mods most guys do when they get a truck, level the front and put some bigger tires on.

Which I promptly did.



I went a little overkill on the shocks because I did way too much research and a puck level wasn’t really something I wanted to do (I had no real clue what I was doing lets be honest) so I got a way too nice set of fox 2.5 dsc coilovers



This is how the truck would stay for the rest of the year in 2019. I put a set of fox 2.0 smooth body shocks on the rear to replace the totally worn out stock ones.


To be continued…

 

[D.Reilly582]

Welcome! It's awesome to see another Michigan build on here!

It's better to go overkill on shocks than underkill.

How often are you up at Silver?

 

[Epiccreation]

Welcome! It's awesome to see another Michigan build on here!

It's better to go overkill on shocks than underkill.

How often are you up at Silver?

while this is true those shocks were ultimately a waste of money with the direction I took the truck in which ill post about later today.

My wife and I are usually up there a hand full of weekends out of the year. We will be back up there at the end of July!

 

[Epiccreation]

we now flash forward to march of 2020.




I started to look into doing a lift in the rear and getting more performance out of the truck but did not like the idea of rear lift blocks. So I got these. Icon RTX leaf springs. I liked these over deaver springs at the time because it came with an additional spring you could add to the pack to give it a little more loaded capacity and height.


Stock fx4 leafs next to the icon leafs



stance after putting on the leaf springs. returned some of the factory rake. I wanna recall it was like an inch or two higher than before.

Fast forward to April I got a set of method wheels to replace the factory gen 2 raptor wheels I had on the truck. These were zero offset which I knew I needed because I had discovered at the time that with the lift, you could install gen 1 raptor rear shocks and they would be the correct length but the wheel backspacing needed to be changed.



I also at this time added some rigid pod lights.



May 10th I put gen 1 raptor rear shocks on the truck to replace the smooth body 2.0 shocks I had previously on the truck.



Now somewhere around this time I made a devastating (to my wallet) discovery. A Facebook group called "Raptor Swapped F150's" see at the time I really wanted to get a raptor as my truck to tow the mustang around but they price was just too high for what I could spend at the time. This was awesome to me because I could get the performance of a raptor without having to pay the raptor tax. So over the course of the next few months I gathered up the necessary parts to do the raptor suspension swap to the front.



all the parts for the front gathered up.



A little in progress build picture.



driver side done. I remember having a hell of a time getting the lower control arm bolts out because after 7 years of Michigan weather they had totally seized inside of the bushings and did not want to come out. Other than that and needing a couple pry bars to get the cv axles out of the housing, it went off without much fuss.



a comparison between the 2.5 f150 dsc coilovers coming off the truck and the raptor length 2.5 shocks. At the time I thought these were the biggest shocks on earth (little did I know....)



here is the truck completed after the front suspension swap. The truck was now 6 inches wider than it was before.



Now as you can imagine I was probably going to have to some trimming to get this thing to turn properly right?



Nah I said screw that and just took the front bumper off and drove around like this for a while lol.

knowing I would eventually have to put a bumper back on it I looked around on marketplace for fenders and a bumper. Some guy near Indiana had a set of raptor fiberwerx fenders and a valance so I went and grabbed those from him.



at this point she was a solid 20 footer. My goal was to get the glass on, not necessarily make it fit like OEM.

Around this time I was looking for a raptor bumper as well. My girlfriend at the time lived on the other side of the state and I was visiting her when I saw on Facebook marketplace someone was selling a gen 1 raptor bumper for like 100 bucks so I convinced her to take her jeep compass and drive to Wisconsin which was like a 3 hour drive 1 way from her apartment. I wish I had the picture but I didn't think the raptor bumper would be THAT big that we would have issues putting it in her jeep compass. The thing ended up being so long that it damn near touched the windshield and the back glass. We drove home without being able to see each other. As you guys can imagine she was THRILLED by this lol.



but I got the bumper on.

this was about the middle of 2020 at this point.

To be continued...

 

[Epiccreation]

So mid 2020 we are at here and I am enjoying the truck at the dunes on trips but I find myself just wanting more and more performance out of the truck.
Couple pictures from trips in June / July





At this point I wanted the rear width of the truck to match the front, so I ordered ADV raptor bedsides for the 6.5 foot bed.

And got to chopping.



This was the first time I had ever done bodywork like this and at first was pretty intimidated by it, but I gave myself a week to get it figured out. Unbolted the bed bolts and scooted the whole bed like a foot back, I bought an assload of cutoff wheels and slowly but surely cut until I could get them to fit. Lot of on off on off on off with the bedsides.



At this time I also installed a SVC bump stop kit with King 2.5x2.5 bump-stops. I went with this kit because I liked that the bump stop cans were adjustable, so that if in the future I wanted to tow with the truck you can adjust them down or if you have bypass shocks mounted through the bed, you can move them up for more up travel (foreshadowing)



And here was the truck after all of that work was done.

couple trips to the dunes and was happy with the truck again.



Loved how wide the truck looked from behind now. Used Bora spacers to get the track width in the rear wider too.

I noticed the ball joints on the upper control arms were wasted at this point so saved up and in September ordered some SVC upper control arms.


Around October I had the truck regeared as well. All this time I had been running the factory 3.55 gearing and with the 5.0, I was hunting for gears on the highway constantly.

Went offroading with some jeep friend that same month.



And one last trip to round out the dune season, Our dunes close at the end of October for the season.



to be continued....

 

[Epiccreation]

With too much time to think and with some newer friends who had trucks that were quicker than mine out in the dunes, I decided I wanted to go with longer bypass shocks through the bed for more rear suspension travel, so I schemed for a couple months and in December right before I pulled the trigger on some new fox shocks, some Kings came up for sale locally for a price that was too good to pass up.



King 3.0 x 18" bypasses with all the fixings. 5 tubes, +3 rod ends, extra extra extra big finned reservoirs, these things were sweeeeet.

a very good friend Paul (Offseason Fabrication on instagram) built me a bypass rack for my truck since he also had a 6.5 bed truck and at the time there weren't really anyone building these setups for 6.5 trucks, let alone anyone in the midwest at all.




He built it so that I could run two spare tires vertically in the middle, and tie down a cooler in the middle of the bed as well.



It turned out really really nice and I was stoked on it. It was bumped and strapped at 17.5 inches of travel, I believe it was 10 down 7.5 up which I though at the time was a ridiculous amount of travel. Was super excited for the season to begin.



Someone locally was selling a (I believe) GJ motorsports 3rd brake light setup so I picked that up as well. The off season winter projects were piling up.

Early into 2021 Someone was selling a set of used raptor 3.0 king front shocks so I ended up getting those as well.



While my truck was down at Pauls I kept coming up with small projects I wanted for the truck. Paul is a much much better fabricator than I am (imma be honest here do not know how to fabricate at all really. I have a welder but have not used it ever and its really the one thing I need to learn how to d still to this day) He ended up fabricating a side exit exhaust for the truck as well.



And he also did a frame cut front bumper since the bumper my girlfriend and I went to Wisconsin to get was smashed to hell at this point, I smashed it like the second trip out to the dunes which you can kind of see in the other posts with how wide the gap is in the middle compared to the edges. She was not amused by this lol.





Couple pictures of everything drooped out during the alignment and nut and bolt check on the truck.



Once I got the truck on I put on the limit straps and the king 3.0 front shocks.



And got two spare tires and ordered 2 more method wheels to go with it. Along with some nice tie down straps from SDHQ.



And this was how the truck would be for the rest of 2021 basically, with some minor tweaks here and there. I was so pumped with how the truck was performing. The 3.0 shocks all around really helped to smooth out a lot of stuff in the dunes and the bump-stops gave me the confidence I wasn't going to totally smash the axle into the frame if I got caught out on stuff.

More dune pictures



July I installed both the 3rd brake light and some Baja designs squadron sport lights I had traded off a friend.



Also in July I had ordered and installed some ADV +2 raptor front fenders as well to replace the fiberwerx fenders I had on there. The fiberwerx fender on the passenger side had a huge chunk missing on the very tip of it that bothered me ever since I had got them. The ADV fenders were on a 4th of July sale if I remember correctly so I ordered em up and slapped em on.




And that is how the truck would sit for the rest of 2021. A lot of the changes over the next couple of years are much more incremental leading up to present day so I'll probably condense those posts a little better moving forward.

To be continued...

 

[BlackJacket705]

Cool Build!

Welcome from just passed the tip of the mitten.....

 

[Pictafiedesign]

Nice dude! I'm out in Michigan also. Welcome