We Built a Gen 1 Bronco Chassis with 2024 Bronco Suspension Technology

Hey everybody, this is Jason with Pat from the Garage, and I have with me my good friend Nathan from Porterbilt Fabrication. You go by Nathan or Nate? Whatever's easiest. I go by both. You can call me Nate though, Jason. Okay, I'll call you Nate. We want to introduce to you something really cool and exciting here. We have our first ever produced Gen 1 Bronco. A little history about the Bronco is this was conceived by the same guy that actually conceived the Mustang. So he had this idea of this civilian-based off-road vehicle. Ford was helping build Jeeps during World War II, and they kind of decided, hey, we should get into the civilian market, produce an off-road vehicle, something more comfortable than the CJ-5, more comfortable than the Scout, and that would be actually a little more attractive as well. And internally, they called it the GOAT, G-O-A-T, which is goes over all terrain. And so I think in the new Broncos, I'd heard they even got GOAT on the dials, little stuff like that. Very cool. We have right here our two-wheel drive version. And Nate, we're building this for a customer, but why two-wheel drive? That's what he wanted. He wanted to do a kind of a two-wheel drive, just long travel kind of setup. He didn't want to have front axles in the front, transaxle in the front. So he went ahead and asked us to do it this way. And it's pretty simple to do. A lot of this suspension we have right here, if you're going to look at it closely, is actually late model Bronco suspension. So we're using their upper and lower control arms, their spindles. We're using some locked off-road coilovers, Plymouth River Rack and Pinion. But the nice thing about this is this one is the two-wheel drive, but we're going to have a four-wheel drive option available also. And it's as simple as a pumpkin up here with some axles and turning it into a four-wheel drive setup with the same components. So independent front suspension, triangulated four-link. But let me ask you something. How often do you think people that are building brand new Broncos, Gen 1 Broncos like this, are going off-road percentage-wise? I would say maybe five percent. That might be a high number too. Essentially, the guy that's actually building this for his wife, knew comfort over four-wheel drive, right? That was kind of his idea. I want this to be as comfortable as I can. I want it to have independent front suspension. I want to be able to have my wife ride in this thing, have it sound cool. But at the same time, I want her to be happy with the way it rides and not a solid straight axle with all the four-wheel drive components. If you have a Bronco and you live in the Hamptons or wherever you live in California, in Malibu, and you just want to go cruise around, you're going to have the same kind of stance of a Bronco. But at the same time, you're going to have a little less fussiness of a four-wheel drive. So it will handle quite well. Because I see there's other Broncos that people are building. Why is it built this way versus some of the other Broncos? There's a few manufacturers out there building them. There are. And so when we first sat down and decided how we were going to do this and what our concept was, first off, we know we wanted to use the late model suspension from the Bronco. Okay. We scanned it. We measured it. We got it on our models to see how it fit. And it actually fits extremely well. It's going to let us have some manufacturing ease. We're just buying the components, not having to worry about building them. There's also a lot of versatility, a lot of aftermarket stuff that can cross over. We decided we would kind of follow along the same lines in the rear suspension as the brand new Broncos as well. They have a triangulated four link in the back. Did the same thing back here. Just trying to modernize it, make sure that it's something that's going to have a nice ride quality and have something that's going to be a little bit different than the others. I don't know anybody else that has gone this route on the earlier Bronco to take some of the factory concepts of the latest, you know, 2024, 2025 Broncos and try to adapt that into the chassis. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Of course, we've got a Currie nine inch housing in the back. If you know Currie, Currie's been around a long time. They've been building third members, rear housings and all this stuff. And they're virtually indestructible. And so you can pick up whatever gear you want. You can get, you know, 35 spline, 1350 yokes on here and it's made to perform. So we have modular motor mounts, just like on all the other chassis that we make. So it's easy to swap the perches out, swap these brackets out as well to get the motor to sit where it needs to for the different configurations. And this is set up for a Ford big block. This is a big block Ford. Definitely. So this is a little bit, a little bit unique. Yeah, I think we ended up with like 118 and a half wheelbase on this. He should be able to put, you know, close to about a 24, eight inch door in the back. And so they want to be able to make this to where they can jump the family in it and have a good time with it. So pretty excited. Of course, you've got stainless steel brake lines. You've got Wilwood disc brakes, all four corners and also components that are set up for the Bronco. So something went wrong. You can easily get replacement parts up front and pretty easy. So this is powder coated with our fat fender garage gray that we use. And then we also clear coat over the powder coat in addition so that we can provide optimal premium coverage of the chassis and make it as robust as we can. If you go look at all the specs of powder coating, a lot of the colors actually recommend that you put a clear coat over it. Just prevent oxidation and stuff like that. We just make that our gold standard, if you will, of just making sure we're providing the most protection we possibly can. This chassis is actually headed to Canada. Geez, poor guy. See what those tariffs do. They might be under the AMCA to where it's not tariffed anyways. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hopefully, yeah. Anyway, so we're really excited to get this out there and we're really excited to get it shipped. I do know that he has some C10 control arms that have to go with this when this ships. Correct. If you do recall that. I do recall. Okay. All right, so we're really excited about getting this out to our friends in Canada and we're really excited to kind of debut this again. It's available two-wheel drive, four-wheel drive, two-door, four-door Broncos. 118.5-inch wheelbase is what this shakes out to be and they're ready to order up. We got them ready to go. You can call us up. Our sales team will help answer any questions you got. Right now on these chassis, we're about 14 weeks. And then from there, it takes a couple of weeks to kind of get into powder coat, put it together and have everything come together. You can get it with a Coyote motor. You can get it with the drivetrain completely installed, drive shaft, everything ready to go. Just drop your Bronco on it. That's all I got, Nate. You got anything else to add? No, I think you covered pretty much everything. All right. Be sure to hit us up. Reach out to us and we'll be happy to get you your Bronco chassis. We'll see you later.