A Custom UJOR-Sportsmobile Build

[notmiller]

My wife and I caught the van bug a few years ago when we borrowed her aunt and uncle's 2wd diesel SMB for a roadtrip around the western U.S. with our two dogs. We had an amazing time and were convinced we needed one.



During that trip we managed to get stuck in some deep sand in a remote area of Utah and had to be rescued by sheriff's via a help message sent with our Spot satellite messenger. That taught us that we HAD to have 4wd to best protect ourselves from our sometimes over-ambitious motives. After about a year of reading this forum and other sites, we finally took the big step. We will be splitting the build costs with my parents, who are retired and would use it just as much as us. We have always had heavily modified 4x4s in the family fleet, so this isn't anything new except it's BIG!

To save money and do it exactly how we wanted it, we decided to go a "hybrid" route and buy a used van, convert it to 4wd with the help of Chris from UJoint, and then send it to SMB for the interior conversion. We liked some of the components of the SMB 4x4 package and decided to use some of their ideas in our own build, as well. I'll be making my own custom modifications here and there when I can afford the time and hope to highlight those differences in this thread. I won't focus much on the SMB conversion as that tends to be fairly generic, which is boring! As for the van, we managed to score a 2003 E-350 Superduty Cargo RB with the 7.3l diesel and 31k miles. No, that is not a typo! It was a government van and barely used. Someone decided to spend our tax dollars on the biggest and best, and then it practically sat around for 9 years. The undercarriage looks brand new. At least now she'll get some real use.



After talking with Chris for awhile, we decided on a 4" kit along with his Stage 2 Dana 60 with the RSC upgrade. While we don't need the RSC, we wanted the bigger brakes and crossover steering. After some waiting, we finally went and picked it all up from the shipping company. :wings:



Big brakes! :Wow1:



I must say that Chris does an awesome job rebuilding these axles! They look like they're straight from the factory. By the way, the gears are 4.10s with the Dana PowerLok. For the rear, we went to a local salvage yard and pulled a Sterling 10.5 from a 2003 Excursion that we'll be stuffing with 4.10s and an ARB.



Okay, enough for now. I'm wasting precious daylight!

- David

 

[bknudtsen]

Congrats and welcome! Nice find! I look forward to watching the transformation. Feel free to post all the details you want, even if you think it's boring. Many of the ideas I have filed away for my build come from others' builds.

Brad

 

[notmiller]

Front Suspension

I'm actually a few weekends into this project, so I'll be playing catch-up on here to get to where I am today. Here's the standard pic of drilling for the UJOR front spring hangers.



I debated welding these instead of spending the hours drilling, but because of the crumple zone in the frame, there's not a whole lot of surface area for good welding. On the inner side of the frame rail, you're even more limited due to the radiator blocking half of the hanger. I know SMB welds there's, but they assemble it differently than Chris. In the end, I think Chris' design of bolting it is stronger because you're cross-bracing the frame by sleeving it and providing more structure to the area (if that makes any sense).

For springs, I chose to go with Deaver Springs. Chris was gracious enough to tell Jeff the specs he uses for the front springs. From those, Jeff was able to make me a nice set of custom springs. He sized the springs for a 9000lb van, which seems to be the typical weight of a SMB conversion. It took Deaver about 6 weeks to produce the springs as there is a huge demand for their custom springs. Once received, I slapped them on. Well, slapped is not quite the right word, as the fronts must weigh at least 60lbs, and the rears are labeled as weighing 110lbs!



These springs are NICE!! The fronts have 10 leaves and the rears 12. After initial installation and leaving the axle at full droop, I was preparing to weld in the UJOR upper shock mounts when I came across a big issue. The shocks didn't fit. At full droop and the new upper shock location, the front shock was about 3 inches too short to reach the lower shock mount of the factory Ford mount on the u-bolt plate. After talking to Chris, he wasn't sure why that was. I came to the conclusion that the Deavers have a lot more flex than the standard springs. I think one thing that causes this is a really cool feature of the 2nd leaf as seen below.



The 2nd leaf has what I would term a "partial military wrap". Not sure what the official name is. In compression, the 2nd leaf wraps around the rear bushing providing full support like the main leaf (it is fully wrapped around the front bushing). But in droop, the 2nd leaf becomes disengaged from the main leaf and makes it so the maximum droop is dictated just by the main leaf (and the limit hoops). This set up means you can run a thinner main leaf and gives you more travel than a standard spring pack. Maybe this is all old news to some, but it's new to me and is an awesome design!

 

[notmiller]

Because I now had much more travel than the stock UJoint set-up, I wanted to capitalize on this and decided to figure out longer shocks. I figured out that a shock with somewhere around 9-10" of travel would be good. At ride height, I had about 5-6" of upward travel (don't remember the exact off-hand) with the stock bump stop. I really wanted to keep this because I hate set-ups with very little upward travel. In order to keep the upward travel as well as the overall travel, I went with a remote reservoir Bilstein so that the shock body was as short as possible. With these longer shocks, the stock UJOR upper shock location would no longer be adequate and I really needed to raise it. My brother and I went through a number of different ways to do that and finally figured the best way to do this would be to cut a hole in the top of the factory coil tower and put a shock mount above the tower. And so out came the plasma cutter!





Here is mid-fabrication of the passenger side mount:



The mounts themselves were fabbed from 3/16" steel plate. I used the poor man's metal brake to form the tabs by cutting a shallow slit and bending them with a hammer in a vise. Then I put my sad TIG skills to work.





In the end, I think they came out pretty well and look fairly stock (except for the fancy shocks). Here's the final driver's side mount:





The driver's side required a notch to be cut in the upper right corner to allow a socket to fit for installation/removal of the shock bolt. The passenger side was fine without a notch. The final mounts ended up sitting about 2.5 inches higher than the stock UJOR mounts (SMB mounts are in a similar location to the UJOR mounts, as well).

 

[notmiller]

Congrats and welcome! Nice find! I look forward to watching the transformation. Feel free to post all the details you want, even if you think it's boring. Many of the ideas I have filed away for my build come from others' builds.

Thanks, Brad! I plan on having SMB do just the basics to save money and I'll do the rest. So hopefully there will be some interesting work ahead!

 

[loren85022]

Scribed


Sent from my iToaster

 

[evanthebruin]

Sweet project man. Subscribed.

 

[notmiller]

T-Case

For the transfer case we opted to go with a 3.8 Atlas II. I thought about using an OEM case but it looked like the available ratios were 2.71 or 2.69, and with the low gear in the 4R100 tranny at 2.71 coupled with 4.10 diff gears, this gives you crawl ratios of 30.1:1 and 29.9:1, respectively. I'm spoiled in my current truck with 96:1, so I wanted something better than what OEM offered, especially when this van starts gaining weight. With the Atlas, my final ratio is 42.2:1. And I must admit, the selectable front/rear drive is pretty cool, although who knows when I'll need it (but I've said that about a lot of stuff).



I spent a lot of time researching forums trying to figure out whether the Atlas would even package well with the 4R100 and couldn't find a definitive answer. I heard both yes's and no's. I know SMB made a few 7.3s with the 4x4 conversion but didn't know whether they used a special adapter. I decided to do it anyway and just make it work somehow. After ordering it, my wife and I made a visit to SMB in Fresno and were talking to their 4x4 guy, Heber, and he told me they may still have the special adapter they used that allowed them to mount the t-case without removing the stock 2wd output shaft or even dropping the tranny at all. It sounded too good to be true! He ended up digging one out of their attic and I bought it.



It turns out it really was too good to be true. The adapter basically mounts to the back of the tranny in place of the 2wd tailhousing and takes up the length of the shaft and then accepts the Atlas on the back end. Once I actually crawled under the van and mocked everything up, I realized this adapter put the Atlas so far back that I would have to relocate the entire front hanger for the gas tank. This also meant shortening the tank much more than you would with a standard 4wd tailhousing and output shaft. So consequently, I scrapped the SMB adapter and went the hard route and dropped the entire tranny. Since you have to tear apart the entire transmission to remove the output shaft on the 4R100 we opted to do a standard rebuild and beef-up of the trans even though it only has ~30k on it. I'd rather not have to remove it again for a loooong time.

Trans back from the shop with 4wd output goodies:



For those interested, the output length of the shaft past the tailhousing is about 1.25":



A side note: If you're going to do this, buy a transmission jack from Harbor Freight or something. Using 2 floor jacks is extremely difficult since you need to pull the tranny straight back. I did it coming out but definitely did not want to do it going back in. You waste so much time adjusting, securing, aligning, adjusting, supporting, adjusting, aligning, re-securing, almost losing it, supporting, etc etc. Couple that with working on your back and it's definitely no fun and time consuming! The cheap one from HF is decent.

To mate the Atlas, you need a total spacer thickness of 1" from the output face of the Atlas to the mating face of the trans. The Atlas comes with a 3/4-inch adapter ring to provide more clocking options. You have 2 choices here: (1) Eliminate this adapter and go with a 1" thick spacer. This limits your clocking options to the higher degrees (15deg and higher, maybe?). (2) Keep the adapter and add a 1/2-in spacer. This gives you less spline engagement but still more than enough. You also keep all of the clocking options. I went the 2nd route and I'm glad. After heaving this thing up and twisting it around on the back of the trans for awhile, I found that I could run 7deg clocking, clear the floor pan, and still have an adequate front u-joint angle.





By the way, I'm running a 1350 CV in the front and a 1410 non-CV in the rear (or at least that's the plan). Running a CV at the t-case requires the output pinion axis of the axle to ideally point directly at the output flange of the t-case. Clocking the t-case at 7deg doesn't give you this, but it's not too bad. I've done this on other builds and not had any problem. Problems would arise if the angle gets much higher than 20 degrees at high speeds, which this will never see. Shifter modifications and installation will come later.

 

[notmiller]

Oh yea, for those interested, I used Chris' trans support extensions except I shortened them to 1-7/8 inches. I think they're 2.5 inches stock? Eventually I'll build a new support with integrated armor because I'm a clearance nut and I think the support hangs down too much!

 

[ujoint]

LOOOOOOOOKIN good!!! Give me a shout on the steering stuff.

 

[notmiller]

Rear Axle

As I mentioned, we got a full-floater Sterling 10.5 locally for about $500 from an '03 Excursion. The van already had a Dana 60 with 4.10s, but why would I run something stock? We want this van for the long haul and we tend to go places like Yukon and Northwest Territories where we get a few hundred miles from civilization. A full-floater gives you a nice sense of assurance.

With the help of my brother, we swapped the 3.73s and LS out of the Sterling and put in 4.11s from Yukon and an ARB locker. This is probably the 4th or 5th axle my brother has done, so it was nice having him in charge of this portion. If anyone is interested, I have tons of pictures of this work.

Stock Sterling set-up:



Checking backlash on the new gears:



The stock diff cover is a thin, stamped piece of steel with a big neon signing flashing "Rocks, please destroy me!" Coming from a rockcrawling background, I wanted a nice piece of armor to protect everything. I opted for a DIY cover from Blue Torch Fab. They make a weld-it-yourself (WIY?) kit for the Sterling axle. The main pieces are 1/4" laser-cut, formed steel plate and the flange is 3/8" thick.



Compared to the stock cover:



I spot-faced the bolt holes on the top side because the weld bead ends up getting too close to accommodate the flange head bolts. I also fly-cut the mating surface after welding to ensure a good seal.



When I went to install it to the Sterling, I found a big problem. The cover hit the copper tubing for the ARB and I couldn't bend the tubing enough to feel safe about running it. The cover slopes over too drastically right near the tubing in the below picture.



So I ended up scrapping all the work I put into this cover. I was able to sell it on Pirate4x4 and make a couple extra bucks to offset my time investment. After doing more research about cooling issues, I opted for ju$t going with a Mag-Hytec cover. I've always been hesitant about aluminum covers since they're cast and consequently brittle, but apparently covers are shot-peened nowadays which should make them stronger. Plus, if I do manage to crack it, I can always use my Atlas and run strictly FWD!

So this gets me to where I currently am today. Yesterday I pulled the rear leaves with the help of my wife. It's nice that she loves the van as much as I do, otherwise she would not be happy with this marathon van build I've been doing. Today is Day 4 of straight 10-12 hour days! I plan on welding on the rear spring pads provided by UJOR and mounting up the rear Deavers and setting her down on the ground. We'll see how it goes!

Here's a nice comparison pic of the 12-leaf Deavers compared to the OEM 4-leafs.

 

[Gonejpn2]

Awesome! Subscribed.

 

[notmiller]

Fuel Tank, etc

So yesterday I cut the fuel tank to fit with the new Atlas. I used the UJOR kit for this with some adjustments. With the UJOR kit you make your cut about 10-1/4" from the front vent hole. With the Atlas, I could make it closer to 10-7/8" and squeeze out that extra 1/8th of a gallon or whatever it equates to!

Cut line to front vent hole:



All welded up and leak tested:



Anyone curious about what the inside of the diesel tank looks like (gasoline tank may be the same?):



Today I mounted the tank and it fit perfectly, which is good since I never did a test fit before welding! I have a little over an inch of clearance to the growth on the back of the Atlas that I think houses the shifter detents.



If I really wanted to, I probably could have left on another 1.5 inches and just notched the side flange on the tank to clear the Atlas in that region. It would be a PIA to undo the filler hose on the Atlas though.



And for those who wonder, like I did, what the hell my tank is hanging from when you drop it for the first time, it's those two semi-rigid fuel lines and an electrical connector, presumably for reading fuel level.



I also finished up the front brakes today using Chris' brake line kit. I had to switch to his 8" kit because of the longer travel I had in the front.

Here's the portion you have to grind down for the new fittings to allow the clip to fit from behind:



And a final shot, minus the ABS wiring:



For those of you with a keen eye, you'll notice I'm not running the OEM sway bar. I didn't like how the sway bar mounts to the rear of the axle and then runs the endlinks up to the frame. I felt like it left a ton of stuff hanging low and wanted to eliminate it. I went with a Hellwig sway bar that mounts to the stock sway bar location from the old twin I-beam suspension (don't remember the p/n offhand, but could let people know if interested). I did have to notch the stock UJOR hangers and included some additional notching just in front of the sway bar to make sure the limit hoops on the springs don't hit the hangers during full compression. I haven't completed the endlinks because I'd like to get the interior conversion done and get the van sitting under its final weight before I weld on tabs. I plan on doing a u-bolt flip and making my own u-bolt plates with integrated shock mounts and bump stops, but that is still in the works.

And the big news.... I welded on the rear spring pads, mounted my 4" lift Deaver springs, and bolted up the axle.



But wait, something's wrong here. Why the hell am I so tall??? :Wow1:



Ummmm, Houston, we have a problem...

 

[SWbySWesty]

subscribed!

 

[lstzephyr]

Nice! Lots of work and some awesome components to boot.