Vital Designs 1993 Regular Cab Prerunner

[ChristianEwing]

Saw your recent YouTube on the ranger, and it absolutely amazing. I have been around all types of prerunners and this is one of the best ones I have ever seen. Are you gonna keep the 93 front end? When the v8 is installed will that be a manual or auto transmission? Listen to what you said about making all three pedals custom made, wondering the v8 will be a manual transmission. What exhaust setup are looking to use? What gear ratio is being used in this masterpiece?

Thanks dude. Yes! This truck is keeping the conventional 3 peice 90's front clip. It already has a fiberglass factory replica hood and 4.5" wider fiberglass fenders that was used on it previously and im building everything around that. The raptor conversion stuff that alot of these trucks get now is a no go on anything I build haha. When the time comes for the v8, it will have a built T400 behind it, no more manual. The only reason its staying that for now is because thats what the truck came with. In the dirt having a manual is more of a handful because you need to keep a hand on the shifter at speed through bumps or its gonna neutral bomb itself. Having a hand off the wheel is not the most ideal thing at speed, so for now it kinda is what it is. Once real power is thrown at it, youll need to have both hands on the wheel to control whats happening at all times. The pedal setup will be all one off hand made stuff to fit around the packaging constraints of what the truck is now, and then when it goes to a v8 ill redo a gas and brake pedal to be a little bigger and more spread apart since it will be missing the 3rd pedal at that point! Gearing on this thing as of right now is 5:43's in the 3rd

 

[ChristianEwing]

The next thing on the truck before I could go ahead and turn it around was bedsides and rear bumper. For big ticket things like that I like to have the truck faced towards the outside of the garage on whichever end I’m working on so I can step back a good distance and make sure things visually site properly. I did shorten the wheelbase 3 inches on this thing for the purpose of being able to overlap the bedsides on the cab to the door line. I do this to get rid of the gap between where the cab and bed usually are and it just makes everything look alot more seamless!

The tube structures holding the bedsides on all bolt to the backhalf with hand made tabs, and then the structure is 1” .120/.095 mains with the 1.25” .120 on the ends to have a bigger surface area holding them on. I still need to build the stringers that come down and grab the front and back side of the wheel openings but I’ll get to that at some point. There is no bushings on these either, all metal to metal mounting. And for the rear bumper, I just matched the same setup I’ve done on pretty much everything I’ve built. Simple, to the point, and supports a single spare nicely

 

[ChristianEwing]

The truck was put on all 4’s for the first time with the new rear end setup to be pulled out and turned around! It was cool to be able to get it out in the open and be able to really step back and get a good perspective on the whole thing. You can kinda get an idea for how narrow the rear end is with these outside photos

 

[Josh B]

When you get low on gas you'll be low on traction also. Love that spare sitting up top, adds a bit of weight, looks good too.
Builder, architect and engineer all in one, great job
You're all first class man it's awesome watching.
Will they be serving peanuts and mix drinks during the show?

 

[JOLENE_THE_RANGER]

When you get low on gas you'll be low on traction also. Love that spare sitting up top, adds a bit of weight, looks good too.
Builder, architect and engineer all in one, great job
You're all first class man it's awesome watching.
Will they be serving peanuts and mix drinks during the show?

not really. 4 links can be built with low amounts of anti squat which will transfer lots of weight rearward when under power.
link spreads LOOK like they will have good squat characteristics from where im lookin...
did you guys do a 4 link calculator to see what your squat percentages are and stuff?

 

[ChristianEwing]

When you get low on gas you'll be low on traction also. Love that spare sitting up top, adds a bit of weight, looks good too.
Builder, architect and engineer all in one, great job
You're all first class man it's awesome watching.
Will they be serving peanuts and mix drinks during the show?

Yes and no, if we are talking full tank to completely empty tank there could be a noticeable difference. With 50 gallons of gas, typically you are not burning through that all at one time, so a more realistic way of thinking about it is completely full to about half a tank. The remaining 25 gallons would be a constant for the most part. So we are only talking about 150lb difference. To put that into perspective, do you notice a traction difference if your buddy or ole lady hops out of the truck?

Thanks for the kind words dude, I appreciate the support! We will have a youtube video out on when we take it out forsure, my goal is to have this thing sitting at Offroad Expo here in California at the Pomona fairplex in October in whatever state its in for people to check out in person too

not really. 4 links can be built with low amounts of anti squat which will transfer lots of weight rearward when under power.
link spreads LOOK like they will have good squat characteristics from where im lookin...
did you guys do a 4 link calculator to see what your squat percentages are and stuff?

Hiiiii budddyyyy I did not on this thing, this whole 4 link setup was done based off what the truck would allow. After doing this one and talking to multiple people, I have alot better grasp on what I need to do on the next one though. Not that this should have any issues, but I have alot better idea what to shoot for now. The only thing that kinda erk's me is there is such a broad range of whats "right" or "wrong". Im a very black and white kind of person so having so much "meeeh" room drives me up the wall when you talk to people about it haha!

 

[JOLENE_THE_RANGER]

Yes and no, if we are talking full tank to completely empty tank there could be a noticeable difference. With 50 gallons of gas, typically you are not burning through that all at one time, so a more realistic way of thinking about it is completely full to about half a tank. The remaining 25 gallons would be a constant for the most part. So we are only talking about 150lb difference. To put that into perspective, do you notice a traction difference if your buddy or ole lady hops out of the truck?

Thanks for the kind words dude, I appreciate the support! We will have a youtube video out on when we take it out forsure, my goal is to have this thing sitting at Offroad Expo here in California at the Pomona fairplex in October in whatever state its in for people to check out in person too



Hiiiii budddyyyy I did not on this thing, this whole 4 link setup was done based off what the truck would allow. After doing this one and talking to multiple people, I have alot better grasp on what I need to do on the next one though. Not that this should have any issues, but I have alot better idea what to shoot for now. The only thing that kinda erk's me is there is such a broad range of whats "right" or "wrong". Im a very black and white kind of person so having so much "meeeh" room drives me up the wall when you talk to people about it haha!

I don’t think there’s any right or wrong 4 link geometry.
well, let me rephrase. There’s lots of wrong 4 link geometry. But also lots of right! Less than 100% anti squat can be right and more than 100% anti squat can also be right. Having driven prerunneers with both low and more amounts of anti squat I do know that I prefer a vehicle to have less than 100% anti squat. my ranger for instance has 30%. So lotssss of rear weight transfer. My old silverado had something like 110%.
There’s people who prefer the opposite of me and that’s ok! It’s all in the hips baby.

 

[ChristianEwing]

Truck was turned around and then front got torn down. Old camburg kit and steering was pulled and sold, the 2.5x14” coilovers are gonna get freshened up and revalved/sprung for the new setup along side the bypass, and the last thing on the front of the truck was the engine. Since the truck got to this point, Ryan and I decided it would be a good idea to pull it and have him freshen it up a little bit so it atleast stops leaking for a bit and just make sure it’s good for the next while. This was the only thing left at this point not getting touched so figured **** it it also helped me alot having it out because I knew I was gonna box the entire rest of the frame rail in from where it got cut off in the rear up to the front factory boxed section. I did it in sections to break up the plate work as well as be able to add internal ribs every so often throughout the frame rails.

If I know a trucks getting to this point again in the future, I’m ditching the factory frame rails and just gonna start from my own with link geometry and front suspension pivots/steering built into it. At this point it was more of a pain in the ass and more time consuming working around the factory frame than it would be if I started with symmetrical boxed frame rails from the jump. Another one of those live and you learn deals. Once I got the frame boxed, it was onto smaller other stuff while I was waiting for my brother to get the beam kit drawn up.

Because of the way I laid the A pillar/Dash tube out I couldn’t drop the cage, so I cut little squares out on the roof to be able to weld the tops of the A pillars up 360*. Also got the A pillar tie in plates made and silicon bronzed in

 

[ChristianEwing]

Next was starting on the spare tire setup. I didn’t want to run the conventional Y-strap with a couple tabs and I wanted to try and push myself. I decided to do a hold down all made out of 1” .095 tubing. Radius’d the tire for the cradle portion to catch the tire and make sure when you’re loading it you never can smack the filler neck or fuel lines/vent right in front of it. That is welded to the fuel cell hold down and everything unbolts from the chassis to be able to get the fuel cell out of the top of the backhalf still. The top hold down portion pivots off 2 5/8’s heims and then I built the lock arm that pivots on bronze bushings with a ODI Lock-on BMX grip as the part you hold onto. Came out pretty cool for just wingin it the spare is locked down in the center with a rubber isolator that is adjustable to be able to account for different wheel offsets and If you get a flat tire.

 

[ChristianEwing]

This one I’m pretty proud of. Once we confirmed the truck was getting a proper beam kit my brother and I went to work. I am 100% against using some generic WIY/DIY parts on anything I build, so we designed and built our own kit from scratch. Basically everything I do is on my own and by myself day to day, but with bigger cad projects like this I commission my brother on it. I just don’t have the patience to sit at the computer for that long and draw something up like this, but he’s super efficient at it and does a great job!

This kit is utilizing our preferred geometry for camber and caster, running center mounted radius arms to minimize caster change, this kit specifically is built around the camburg uniball spindles that Ryan already had purchased to run with the unequal length kit. With everything being drawn in the computer, we fixtured every part to make sure it was exact to the drawings. All the plate work was laser cut and bent by SDLC and it all went together like a big Lego set

 

[ChristianEwing]

Getting the beam kit on took some time, making sure everything was square, wheelbase was correct, track width was right, etc. Because the kit was drawn in the computer based around a frame rail that was hand measured there was a few things that needed to be tweaked to get everything to work right. Nothing major, but next time the frame will be 3D scanned before hand to make the process a little more seamless. The end goal with a lot of the stuff I’m doing and the reason why I want to build all the big components myself is to eventually offer all of the parts for sale to the public. This beam kit needs a little more tweaking and fine tuning before i offer it as a kit but this was a big step towards that’s for these rangers!

Once the kit was on the truck, I got down on steering. I started with cutting the steering arms off the camburg spindles, the steering arms need to be decently long to keep all the tie rods straight with no bends in them. When I’m mocking everything up and trying to find all the right pivot points for the steering arms and swingers I cut plates with a bunch of holes in them that are grouped together and tack them to the knuckles and the frame rails and just start cycling stuff and moving the pivot points from hole to hole until I find the sweet spots. It really cuts down time for me, I used to make a mock up tab with a single hole in it and then cut another if it wasn’t right, etc, etc until I found the right spot but this saves a shitload of time. Once all the geometry was figured out, I built the swingers to match the same design as the beams, final steering arms were built off the knuckles and final tie rods were made out of 1.25”x.250 wall 4130

 

[Josh B]

That;s some seriously fine stuff you do there Chris. I know a bit about welds and welding, even tho I was only a ship fitter, I taught a score of welders how to, and later they'd say, "I thought I knew how when I got here". I was really better with the drawings and a torch.
Actually after a few years I went back to carpentry anyway, as fitting had only been a means to an end
Carry it on Chris, you are doing some impressive work there

 

[rumblecloud]

How did I miss this thread?

@ChristianEwing:
What do you do in your spare time?

 

[ChristianEwing]

How did I miss this thread?

@ChristianEwing:
What do you do in your spare time?

Work on trucks I eat, sleep and breathe this. There is no other option when you're trying to start a business from nothing, on your own and self teaching yourself everything along the way. That being said though, I really enjoy what I do so I would be doing this regardless if it was paying me or not. There is something about the problem solving, skill building, creative nature of crafting these trucks from nothing that keeps me chasing the passion. Its a drug for sure, and ALOT more expensive than the ones you smoke, poke or swallow!

 

[ChristianEwing]

Once the beam kit was on the truck, it was time to start thinking about engine and trans. I knew with having the beam kit bump out where I wanted it too, the factory engine crossmember was 100% gone, and then Ryan and I talked about the possibility of the firewall getting cut out as well if tire clearance at full lock/bump got bad. Once I got the kit on the truck, I knew right away the firewall was gone. I pushed the wheelbase 1.5-2” forward from factory in the front, enough to still look proper in the fiberglass, and at full bump/lock the tire was all in the firewall.

I knew as well from the previous kit that was running 33’s that it was rubbing the firewall and the computer wiring (typically ranger stuff) so I knew it was gonna need to be cut but the amount it needed for the new setup was more than just a little patch panel. Instead of having a fugly looking hagardly patched up factory firewall with a bunch of factory holes in it, I just ripped it all out. Which was a blessing in disguise for multiple reasons.

After I cut the whole firewall out, I bumped the truck out on both sides, and just roughly mocked up the engine and trans in the truck and realized the clearance I had for the oil pan to the top of the beam was really close to keep everything under the hood still. Sooooo, I built the most low profile, stout, engine crossmember I could between the beams and oil pan. I was originally thinking a plate work crossmember but once I saw what I was working with I opted for some 1.75” .120 tubing between the two. There is a main tube that runs from beam pivot to beam pivot, that is 1.75x.120 with 1.5x.120 inside of it to keep it as rigid as possible. And then there is two other 1.75x.120 tubes to create an “X” over the top of the beams at the same angle the beams sit at when at full compression. The structure that’s in there now is way stronger than anything I could have came up with out of platework while staying in the same packaging constraints.

Back to the blessing in disguise. After realizing the clearance to the beams/oil pan and there was no factory firewall from holding me back, I ended up pushing the engine and trans back 7” from factory location. At the same time, it mitigated the issue I was having with the trans output being right on the cusp of the driveshaft needing to be a two peice shaft with a carrier bearing or a single peice shaft. So pushing it back put the output of the trans right in the sweet spot for a single peice driveshaft setup which I’m pumped on. Also, when I mocked Ryan up in the truck originally with his new PRP seats and the engine and trans still in the factory spot, the shifter was a good reach away when full pinned in the seat while simulating having harnesses on. So now the shifter is in a super optimal position for really comfortable driving