What They Don't Tell You About Building a 1970 F100

Today we got this 1970 Ford F100 four-wheel drive that we're working on. Walk you through a couple of the things that we're dealing with right now, just on the day-to-day stuff that takes us through, you know, just the build process and assembly and drivability, test and tune. Not all vehicles are perfect, but we just want to make sure we deliver a great product to the customer. My name's Roman with Fafnir Garage, just going to go over this four-wheel drive 1970 F100 and just talk about stuff we deal with, you know, we're going to go through it from front to back. A few things right here, you know, obviously suspension, usually we try to line everything. In this case, obviously we just adjust total tow with your lower arm and then once you adjust your steering wheel, you just adjust it right here from the top. Once all that stuff's dialed in, obviously you're trying to get drivability, steering wheel track true, eliminate dog tracking from the rear, but for the most part, I mean, nice four-wheel drive suspension, straight axle Dana 60, sway bars, we have a nice power steering cooler right here, mounted in the front, you know, a 12-inch coilover suspension front and back, true four link, and then a triangulated four link in the rear. Holley headlights, retro bright headlights, you know, adjusting headlights, just something simple. Some people overlook, you know, factory grill, so we can pop the hood right here. This one actually has the Godzilla, I believe, other than the swag truck, this is one of our first Godzillas we did. We got your red top Optum over here, our ECM box mounted up here just for all your connections, obviously factory hood hinges, can't go wrong with the boxwood green, the two-tone for sure. Over here, we got our 37-inch tires, our Mickey Thompson 17s, manual locking hubs from Warren, actually pretty cool. It's got a 10R80 transfer case with the F-150, 10R80 transmission with the F-150 transfer case. So then we got our manual locking hubs, our Amsteps, Kintzer Industries actually supplied our Amstep kit, so we just installed those. So can't beat that. I mean, with a truck this high, you definitely want something a little bit to help you jump in the vehicle. I mean, I have a problem jumping in there. On the backside, tailgate, just, you know, just adjustment, bumpers, everything, you know, making sure everything's solid. Our fuel door, our Fat Fender fuel door, can't beat that, you know, always a great product. We actually just started driving this truck. So we got our temp tag ready to go, or actually it's our temporary permanent plate, but ready to go. Tail lights, make sure all your brake lights work. Try and adjust suspension, ride height, scale the vehicle, and just try and go through everything. This is our 12-inch, one of our first four-wheel drive chassis, as a matter of fact, actually on coils. Nice toolbox here, you know, plenty of stuff to put extra space, storage, everything. We bedlined it, and then we added a box of green to match, so it came out pretty good. On the inside, just about buttoned up with the inside. Obviously our Fat Fender door panels, we installed billet. Our billet power windows, obviously our door handles, we still have a couple things to button up, our bezels, you know, our lock rods, glove box, our glove, Fat Fender glove box insert. I believe our valance, we actually do the same thing. We actually make these in-house, but we do sell these and we make these, we designed them. Our bench seat, cupholders, you know, it's an option to put, have our cupholders mounted right in front like this, or we actually offer center mount between the bench seat. We're just about buttoned up with this thing. We got to wait for the steering wheel to get back, I believe getting wrapped, so. One of the big things we're dealing with right now was brakes on this thing, actually, surprisingly. You know, we're trying to get optimal pedal ratio with piston size diameter for the master cylinder. We had to change the rear calipers to get them a little bit smaller. Originally we had front calipers mounted front and back, but we're trying to utilize, there's not enough volume because it's a sequential master cylinder, so we had to put smaller calipers in the rear. We put F250 rear calipers in the rear, had to make custom bracket, just trying to deal with all that. So we had to up the master cylinder size because the piston diameter on each individual caliper had to get changed. So we wanted a little bit better of a pedal because it's a little soft pedal. So by upsizing the bore on the master cylinder, decreases pressure slightly, but it makes your pedal feel a lot better. If you put a smaller master cylinder, it'll increase pressure, but your pedal feel gets a little bit worse. In this case, we had a thousand PSI, every single caliper going into them. So we wanted to, obviously, we had plenty of pressure there. So we just want to increase the volume going to each caliper by measuring the pistons to figure out that we needed the bigger master cylinder. So instead of our using our traditional one inch master cylinder from Wilwood, we actually just installed an inch and an eighth master cylinder just to help us out and give us a better brake pedal. So we just got that master cylinder installed today. As you can see up here, I guess I open the hood one more time. So this is actually our inch and an eighth master cylinder or a inch and an eighth master cylinder offered by Wilwood. So we just got that installed today, bled the brakes. So hopefully Monday we can go drive it. We have a couple of things to finish wiring up on our M steps, but for the most part, it's already been running. We already took it on a couple of test drives. It's got two revisions for a tune in it. We just got to do a couple more things and hopefully she's ready to go and we can go put our thousand miles just like we do on everything. We want to give a customer a great product. We want something to be reliable, something the customer can literally turn the key, push the button and enjoy a nice ride. There's one more thing I want to talk about is the e-brake setup on this actually. So we're utilizing the factory pedal assembly inside the vehicle. But in this case, instead of our using our normal e-brakes to go to the calipers, because obviously we made some adjustments, pulled all the brake shoe stuff out of the components out and then install different calipers in the rear. So we actually have a driveline e-brake set up by rustic disc brakes and this is set up for a four nine inch and actually bolts onto some of the factory factory bolts on the back for its mounting locations, has some, a few adjustments where we actually had to shim out the disc brake because obviously you're trying to line it up as best as possible within about a 16th of an inch off the actual disc itself because I mean it utilizes brake pads, which is actually pretty cool. And this is actually the cable or tension rod. Right now we're working on a 3D printed bracket. This is actually a prototype we're working on. Don't mind the electrical tape right here. We're obviously still in the process of securing it and mounting it correctly, but this is actually a 3D printed cable bracket. It goes onto this link arm. So it's all going to be routed and it mounts up here to the factory cable coming out of the, out of the cab actually. So it's actually pretty cool. It works well, holds the vehicle, and it's actually designed for a four nine inch. So going over everything from front to back, hope you guys appreciated kind of everything we talked about, went over, and just some of the stuff we go through day to day over here at Fat Fender. We appreciate you guys' time. So stick around for some of the final tests in tune and we'll be back at it.