Design

With the decks and rails recently completed and mutant vehicle applications being open, it is time to finalize our design. That means quite a few drawings, meetings, and some model making (including a 3D CAD model).

Final images to be posted here soon.

Ready for Paint!

Brett and company spent a long weekend putting the final welds on the decks and rails.

Today was a gorgeous day. We cleaned the warehouse, ran Decotoro, and took pictures of it’s current state.

We even had a friend come over and do a drone flyover to get some interesting isometric shots!

Check out the shadows of the decks and rails.

Jounce Bumpers

We have not come across many mutant vehicles that use a Ford Ranger as a base. I did find one however. I corresponded with them about our build plan and they seemed to think we were on the right path. The one suggestion they provided was to invest in a good set of jounce bumpers. There is quite a bit out there in the jounce bumper/bump stop world and it is a wide price range ($10 – $400). In looking at jounce bumpers and bump stops, everything started looking like Kong dog toys to me. Did you know that Kong dog toys were designed after suspension bump stops?

We wanted something that would touch most of the time with some load and still have some travel. In the front we are using a pair of bumpers from Airbag Man Suspension out of Brindale, Australia. On the rear we have a pair of Daystar, Universal Stinger bump stops.

While the front stops easily went into place where the original bump stops mounted to the lower control arms, brackets had to be made for the rear stops

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The Team

Usually there are three to four of us working on the Decotoro at a time and usually some people drop by. However, it never works out that all five of us are working and someone drops by. So we never get a team picture (and we are not going to the effort of a tripod and timer to get it either). Finally, tonight, people dropped by while all five of us were there!

So, there we are. From left to right: WayWard, Brett, Sos, Jackhammr, and Chico.