Monthly Archives: October 2009

My First Big Project

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The first big project I took on was building an offroad truck. And maybe I’d do some desert racing with it. This took a lot of research. I mean I had just bought a welder having never welded before. With a quick lesson from a friend and a bit of self-study, I felt ready. I also didn’t understand roll cage design which I needed to know well since it may save my life if I crashed.  So I asked a lot of questions, came up with a design, showed it to some people in the business, and just did it. There were always people telling me I was going to fail along the way. But they seemed to disappear as my project came closer to completion.

And after I completed it, well I was quite pleased. I had several people in the industry look it over too. Many wanted to own it. I had a racer in a trophy truck (the top racing class) tell me to race it this weekend! But I decided after all my work, I didn’t want to beat it up in a race. I was really happy with my design. It performed great offroad, was street legal, had a usable bed which was very unusual, and looked fairly stock except for the big tires and extended fenders. It was a lot of fun on the road too. You could hit curbs at 60mph and you barely felt them. And landing a 5 foot high jump was smooth as butter.
Interior Cage
Front
Suspension
Bumper
Bed Cage
Jump Testing