The Baja350 - a Dentside Story

[the_fablab_]

There is no way the truck will need a 400lb main rate, use the loaner springs to figure out your corner weights Mike, crank them down until your desired ride height is achieved, then measure the spring to see how much it compressed.

 

[DesertGoat]

^mikey nailed it. The 350 single rates are just dinged up loaners from the homies at Accutune to figure out corner weight so we can order the right stuff later. I just wanted the mental win of setting it on its own weight - I know these aren't final.

Aside - Accutune has been helpful yet again with figuring out the hose routing for the reservoirs on the coilovers. Got that all tuned up last night for mockup, pics below. so now I can send them back to the shop 1 more time to final torque all the fittings & refill with oil. Now I have to get brave enough to print the final version of the resi mounts haha

 

[the bodj]

What material will it be printed out of? I'm curious how it's going to hold up, but cool implementation!

 

[DesertGoat]

PPA-CF is my intention. Has a temp resistance higher than what the reservoir bodies "should" get to.
Seems worth trying.

in other news - I'm beginning to start on the back half. Started by welding up all the holes in the cab wall from removing the OE full tank. Then I added clevises to the rear cab tube stub-outs & stripped out the dana 70. that big boy will eventually find it's way underneath my supercab tow rig.

The clevises are the same pieces I used for the engine cage interface - so there will be bushings here as well. I'm going to standby on adding the down tube from the top of the cab until I can get things started and visualize the whole tube layout & make a call at that point. I'm def leaning towards adding them for safety reasons. kinda blows my aesthetic vision though. but I don't wanna die... so there's that.

Last thing was to mount up some S2's to the front grille as they just showed up & I couldn't help myself.

 

[DesertGoat]

Started on the back half of the truck. Chopped the frame off.
my original plan was to reuse the OEM frame since it was like ~1/4" thick and a 8" tall c section & perfectly flat. But after rigging it up and floating it to where I would need it to get ~11 inches of uptravel, I decided that I didn't like the way it was going to look.

Pivoted, starting the rear frame rails out of 3" square x 3/16 wall A500. Looks a lot cleaner. no rivets to burn out. still a nice flat surface to build from.
Now just waiting for my trailing arms to be finished so I can start making more progress with this.
3d printed some hub-centric little doodads to help hold a tape measure on center solo so I don't have to keep calling a friend over for help.




While I wait for the trailing arms - finished up mounting the light bars up front. Stole the idea from Kyle Craft's brown truck, I love it.
Then painted the fender mounts.




Bought myself a new whip that I've wanted ever since I drove one in ~2011.
Will try not to get distracted from the truck too much

 

[gascapkevin]

That generation of CTS-V are so sick! I hope to one day be able to secure a CTS-V wagon. What are the details? Manual or auto? stock engine bay or does it have some goodies?

 

[DesertGoat]

That generation of CTS-V are so sick! I hope to one day be able to secure a CTS-V wagon. What are the details? Manual or auto? stock engine bay or does it have some goodies?

I wanted a wagon so bad. But the most affordable one I could find was +$10k than this sedan, had +30k miles, had an accident & a check engine light. They're bananas expensive but also so damn cool. really wish I was able to make it happen but oh well. This sedan is badass too.

It had some aftermarket exhause & a cold air intake & a tune.
I'm reverting it back to 100% stock. partly because of CA legality issues and partly because I'm not a teenager anymore & I want this thing to keep it's value as much as possible. From the ~month I spent searching, let me tell you that finding one without accidents and without a pile of mods is super rare.

 

[the bodj]

I know you've built a truck before, but don't you want to get the links on and cycle the axle to see how high you want to mount your frame rails?

 

[DesertGoat]

ho' fo' sho. I left everything tacked just in case I got the height wrong when cycling happens. My trailing arms are being fabricated by a 3rd party so I'm waiting on those to show up to get everything finalized with the method you described.

for this height I did this:
- with the factory frame, non-cut, I slid the axle underneath with the tires on and measured ~1/2" gap to the bottom of the frame rail. The front is set at ride height.
- I know that I have ~8" up travel in the front
- So I cut the frame and set the bottom of the frame rail at +11" from the factory height.
- That should result in ~11.5" of available up-travel space. I don't think I'll need that much but I figured it was a good enough SWAG to keep making some progress. (SWAG = aerospace term for Sophisticated Wild Ass Guess)

 

[DesertGoat]

Been in a bit of a holding pattern waiting for parts to show up. So I pivoted from the back half over to figuring out a bumper + skid.

I wanted to reuse the original 1974 bumper that the truck originally had. So when I chopped the front frame off years ago I had saved myself a little 6" section of each frame horn. So the following pics are my attempts at grafting the 1974 frame horns to the 1991 raised chassis. It looks a little goofy because there needs to be a notch for the grille to rest in but overall I'd say i'm ~75% satisfied. Not thrilled, but not gonna cut it off and try something else, lol.

Also started the foundations for the skid plate that will attempt to protect the steering swingers.
Ordered up the 1/4" aluminum from SendCutSend so i'm waiting on that to come back so I can finish tabbing & welding out this structure & then the front end is all done with fabrication.