It was about 10:30 when I left the shop Friday night in my big-block blue Blazer. I was supposed to be in Boise, Idaho, by noon, with a truck that no one had ever seen before, had ever driven before, and on top of that had certainly never been off-road before. What Fabworx Off Road had done in just under seven weeks was unbelievable. They basically took a totaled-out '74 K5 Blazer and brought it back to life. In less than two months, Fabworx was able to produce a (basically) turnkey truck from scratch. In fact, less than scratch. The repairs they had to do just to get a decent platform were horrendous.
In the last two days, more progress was made than in the last two weeks. The entire team buckled down to get out what was to be one sweet K5; that is, if it left the shop under its own power.
We had most of the truck together up to the last 48 hours, but it's those last little pieces that eat up so much precious time. The interior had really not been started save for the rollcage, and the power steering had been left until the last minute as well. By the time this K5 would leave the shop Friday night, most of the team had already sacrificed dinner, and I think Bryan McCully was ready to strangle me. It came down to Dave Williams and myself, at 10 p.m., with Williams trying to talk me off of a ledge after I realized there was a chance I might not actually pull this off. We had been up for 24 hours, and I still had to drive up the west side of the country in less than 14 hours if I wanted to keep my job.
1. Before we started on the interior we made sure the last bit of mechanicals were in order. I had ordered two heavy-duty driveshafts from the Driveshaft Superstore, with 1350 U-joints at one end and 1410 U-joints at the other. My thinking was that these two 'shafts were so close in size that I could carry a whole spare and use it for either end, or swap 'shafts around, should that become necessary for some reason. | 
2. To feed the power-steering box and supplemental Redneck Ram hydraulic-assist ram, I called PSC Motorsports about an off-road steering-pump kit. This kit came complete with the pump, reservoir, and bracket I needed to get this pump going... | 
...The power-steering lines off the last year's donor truck were still good, so we hooked them up and plumbed the box. Fabworx made a simple bracket on the driver-side shock hoop to mount the fluid reservoir to. Our mechanicals had been completed. Now all we needed to finish was what surrounded the driver. |
3. Bryan McCully and Forrest Moore put the final touches on the rollcage and made sure that all tack-welded spots were finished and sealed on the Team Tube 1 3/4-inch rollcage tubing. Notice how all the tubes are coming together in one spot, on one tube, instead of at multiple spots on the main runner? For maximum structural integrity, you want all angled reinforcements like this meeting at the same place, not 2 inches apart from each other, and not on different points on the tubing. | 
4. Here is the (almost) finished cage from the top. Fabworx tried to keep to a minimum amount of bends. The straighter you keep your cage tubing, the stronger your rollcage will be. Each bend you add to a tube decreases the structural integrity of it. | 
5. Forrest Moore worked on getting some coilover mounts made onto our rollcage. Part of the cage was hard-mounted to the frame here to take the brunt of the force from the coilover shock being in this location. |
6. After some initial ideas, Moore came up with this coilover shock mount complete with dimple-died 1/8-inch sheetmetal tacked in for strength and a finished look. It allowed us to mount an 18-inch Radflo coilover with secondary Eibach 250-pound coils over 350-pound Eibach main coils for a dual-rate setup. | 
7. With the rollcage finished and the coilovers mounted, this Blazer could almost be driven away, save for the lack of seats. To get our suspension seats mounted, we called up Kartek Off Road for some universal seat sliders. Kartek's sliders will fit most race and suspension seats, and were easy to mount onto our seat cage's welded tabs. | 
8. While Dave Williams, Brandon Gaut, Billy McCully, and Forrest Moore were helping finish the rollcage and seats, Bryan "Tiny" McCully went to work on the bumpers. The front bumper was built out of 1 1/2-inch and 1 3/4-inch tubing, and attached to a custom box that was welded to the frame to hold the front 9,000-pound Warn winch. The rear bumper would end up with a similar tube design and build, but would hold a 15,000-pound Warn winch for big pulling duties. Our thinking on winch sizes was this: In the front, a 9,000-pounder would suffice to get me up and over obstacles. When I had something really big to pull, I'd want to be pulling from the rear. And if I ever got really stuck, the only way I'd want to go is back out the way I went in. |