PART ONE: BAGS AND BRAKES, PROJECT CHEVY

[Music] hey guys my name is Jacob this is my Chevy 1500 this uh started Life as a longbox GMC I chopped the box down chopped the frame down I should say and it's static dropped right now on Springs with drop spindles I finally pulling the trigger and I want to build an air suspension kit for it so full disclaimer uh I've never done air suspension before but I've been researching it for a bit I'm going just jump into it cuz that's how I learn just by getting my hands dirty and getting in stuff um I'm going to share with you guys what I'm doing why I'm doing it and then if it works out great and if not I'll learn a lesson the hard way and maybe you guys will learn a lesson uh you know what not to do by watching me we'll see how it plays out um here so check list out down here here's my goals for the for the truck first of all I want to drop lip I want my lip when I hard Park this thing that's 4 in right here so my goal is to go 4 in from where we stand so if we walk around my truck right now these are 20 by 8 and 1 halfs I I'm going to roll the fenders I might have to pull them I might have to widen it we'll see but so if you imagine my Fender sitting right down here with the rim is this is my goal for when I hard park it now I want rides ride height to be 1 in lower okay so pretty much where my fingers are right there I want the tire to be kind of sitting around here ride height and when I really dump it we get down to 4 in down there and Beyond the with the ride height uh I'll have access height which will give me another but another two or so inches off of that I'll show you why I'm picking 4 in is what I'm planning on doing so here's my back again imagine my Fender sitting down there kind of on that that first lip right there of the rim tucked up into the fender I have more than 4 in of clearance on the tire here my goal on this drop is I don't want to chop my box I don't want to have to tub this I don't want to have to do anything inside the box that stopped me from making this my daily driver I use this for work um a mechan obviously hopefully that's obvious and I'm always hauling you know I got to haul Parts Waste Oil Garbage for dump runs picking up metal for fabrication whatever so yeah here we go now on the side if I take off just a a little bit of my inner lip on the rear of the box side I hope I will clear I'm running a parallel four link on this and as we dump it the axle will want want to shift a little bit but that could be avoided with a triangulated for link but I didn't want to move the fuel tank here's the parallel four link kit and a center link thehe joints we'll weld all that up I bought these switches these are momentary I can build a switch panel inside and an air B an air valve air switching valve this is nice too cuz you can have all of your uh air pressure aners in one side to monitor everything I got a little 5 in one gauge so I can watch all four corners air [Music] [Applause] [Music] pressures [Music] n [Music] [Music] he [Music] front end's going pretty good so far I've removed the ABS pump here uh ABS has never worked in this truck since I've owned it I'm upgrading the brakes I'm doing rear disc conversion changing out the master so you know what just get rid of that um I've been driving this thing pretty low for a while and it scrubbed my tires bad Jacob I didn't get it aligned before we will align it this time and if I get one more season out of these tires that's great so this side the webbing cut a lot there's no internal webbing like this side had uh the internal webbing as well now my plan here is to get this thing on air on its own and make sure everything's trimmed enough and then I'm going to go back and build the fenders out properly and I'll probably pull the fenders and paint them all again properly from the inside um it's a lot of a lot of pieces of the project okay guys I got my uh 1/4in plate I'm going to drill 5 and 1/2 in holes and will cap these cups see if it works okay guys I got uh this kind of assembled so the top plate I tacked in in place when it was in the vehicle and when I'd seen this online I seen other people teaching me how to do this cuz this is my first time so I learned online and it's normal for this to be offset so my Airline side here is facing inside to the frame so this cup I put up over those fingers that come down and I held it back as far as I possibly could but right here it hits the control arm inside and then the centering Rod is going up through the shock mount hole so it really only goes in one place and not centered so tack Tac I'm going to weld all this in solid and then I'm just going to build a piece right here and just weld this in so part of the problem that I had when I did this is I looked all over town for 5 in tube couldn't find it anywhere I ended up going with 5 in pipe quarter wall that's all I could find so the difference between 5-in Pipe and 5-in Tube 5-in tube is measured on the outside edges and pipe is measured on the inside so 5 in quarter wall it's 5 plus a quarter plus a/ quarter right versus 5 in Tu measured on the outside the quarter and the quarter is on the inside the thickness is on the inside so when I originally had planned on this I knew it was going to be offset and I bought that Big 5 and 1/2 in whole saww bit to build these plates but I anticipated using a little bit smaller cups and even if it had been offset there wouldn't have been a gap here so it's kind of a bummer um you know at the end of the today after going through all this I like going the hard way cuz I learn a lot doing it this way but if uh somebody was about to do this I would say just order a kit for these even if it's a fabrication series kit and you still have to weld it all together they're cheap cuz I was surprised at how expensive just straight steel was I bought uh stuff to brace the rear end for my four link five link and I bought this piece of pipe and I bought two chunks of pipe for the tie rods to do these so I could build the the tower up it's $170 with tax that's insane I don't have a discount on steel like I got lots of discounts on Auto Parts but yeah is it worth it probably not for the amount of time I'm putting into it but I'm still enjoying going this route just cuz I'm learning more about it um yeah so I'm going to do full welding here and then where my Airline is I'm going to switch out to a 90 like this and I'll drill a hole in the side and this side so my Airline can run straight in I will feather out all the edges everywhere I'm also going to f weld the bottom seam here um this is more less intrusive to my bags than these two edges so I'm going to do full seams and then I don't like grinding my weld it's a pretty nice weld but I do want them to be super smooth so my bag rolls over it when it's pancaked out you know it'll work and then uh I take everything apart paint the internals inside and outside and I have to duplicate it and build the whole same thing again for this side so it's a fair bit of screwing around but it's exciting I'm getting there [Music] okay guys I kind of have the cup set up um something that just skip my mind when I'm building this is I want to have all my travel out here and I'm taking all my measurements from the outside the bag sit so far in right like in the pivot point that your bag's not moving very much to achieve how much right you actually are getting so basically I did a whole bunch of like math trying to think where I was going to have this land and my pressures are too low still so I'm going to have to adjust the cups again and take a bit more off not the end of the world but I think I should jump into the back and get the backs all done and get this on four bags before I get too carried away cuz it's easier to take material away from this then it is ADD material if I go too far also I am planning on putting an LS motor in this thing I'm going to add more weight to the front end it's going to change the Dynamics of everything again so I have been doing a really poor job filming this thing I've made some progress but I'm going to show you where we're at now I'm going to take this all apart again and actually show you what I did you can kind of see here I have the uh I have the notch cut out for the tie rod and everything I built the brackets for the bags lots of trimming um it's been a lot of on off on off trying to figure it all out I ended up having to change my spindles out I had these beltech spindles but they were actually from an 88 to 91 single cab which had smaller brakes and all the brakes I bought were for the uh for a 95 truck like mine is and then when I realized that my spindles were different I did some research and I ended up going with jgm spindles so these drop spindles don't push the wheel out like the belex do the belex actually push them out about half an inch so C clearance is awesome in the front now so with the rear end I did get the four link mock up I did this with the Box on that was the hard way of doing it for sure I'm kind of uh like I have to work on it with the box like this like I work alone here I don't have anybody to help me move the Box off the Hoist and I don't have anywhere to store it so it is what it is also I drilled out my rotors just to get them mounted up I wanted to make sure I had like a true fitment for when I started trimming out the fenders up here for [Music] clearance [Music] I should be focusing on my C Notch but I'm waiting for my friend to get back to me that's going to give me some steel for free so I have a few hours in between working on some other customer stuff I think I'll work on my caliper brackets so here's the idea I got these from Monte Carlo SS and I got my calipers from a Cadillac El Dorado I'll throw the ears up on everything I can't remember off the top of my head but I'm going to be able to run AP part break so I'm going to work on building some uh some brackets I got some plate down [Music] here [Applause] [Music] okay here's my plan guys I'm going to hook these calipers put the pads in there um I've gone ahead and thrown this rotor on my wife just dropped this sweet little card off from Costco look how cool this is look at that oh my gosh and it holds my drill and it Glides so smooth okay so I'm going to bolt this rotor on I'm going to put the caliper here and I'm going to vice grip it all so it's exactly where I want it to live and then I'm going to take my template and I'm going to try to figure out with those holes where these holes are going to be and then I'm just just going to make a rough one out of uh some flat bar I have down here some plates sories and tap it drill it and see where it looks like it wants to live and then when I get one done I'll just duplicate it and it'll be a mirror image on the other side so then they should be same same let's try it [Music] oh [Music] so the idea is kind of working here um this is 10 mil right here that I have to build another piece for to offset it a little bit and it's obviously uh a little bit I mean it's would right but it's getting us real close to where it's going to be [Music] he [Music] okay I'm trying to build some uh caliper brackets for my truck these are hideous I know I know my first time using a plasma cutter and it shows but I have an idea so bear with me here now these are close right I made my template I tested it with wood it seems to be close now I'm going to take these and I'm going to weld them together just with a few uh tacks kind of all over the place to keep them the same and then I'm going to try and form them together and that should give me two mirror images of each other so hopefully by the end they're going to look decent quality um hopefully this works you can buy these brackets for this from a company called I think Cunningham machine uh because I live in Canada by the time you paid American dollars and shipping and all that it was pretty expensive for I have steel sitting around for free so I wanted to try to do it also because sure they offer a kit for this C1500 but what happens with the next vehicle if I build something really weird and unique and there's nothing available uh I enjoy the process of just learning things so we're trying it but we'll see how it turns out let's [Music] go [Music] he [Music] okay guys finally some progress so I built these brackets from scratch obviously as you've seen me do um the first one that I built I made a few little variations and mistakes on it I welded it a little too hot I put the slightest amount of warpage into it um I just didn't spend as long fitting up the form and stuff what's weird that one took me a lot longer to build than number two and number two came out way nicer I'm be honest uh the fitment here is perfect it's not warped at all my caliper holes are perfect nothing's pinching um yeah so I'm pretty happy with how this all came out I mean we're not going to win any SEMA competitions but the old guys at the copy shop High frequent you're going to be like o the LLY that rear disc brakes on that truck yeah I'm pretty happy with it so I welded this one flat on the table the other one on that side I had kind of propped up to make myself comfortable this one I left flat on the table hoping the table would act as a heat sink and then I welded it sideways and I welded the whole thing in small like one inch increments working here there here there here there um so it didn't work at all and you really have to be uh take your time to drill and tap these holes so I did one first and then bolted the caliper up to make sure I was in the right spot for the second one a lot of on off on off marking marking you know these axles have been in and out so many times anyways progress so I don't know how long I'm going to make this one video at first I thought I would do like the whole truck and I would try to get it as much done as I could on it and to make a video of like straight through but the reality is this is just a ton of work to do so I had the front end on bags right now I've already built all of that out and I lost most of my footage for that so no big deal cuz it's not finished I have to still Mount up my shock location and stuff so when I do that we can go over everything and I'll explain what I did and at least show the finished product um that was a ton of work right on off on off little grinding little cutting little this and that um it's a huge learning curve doing this I'm doing this for myself for the first time I learn by just jumping in the stuff and getting in over my head and then figuring it out and I enjoy it so in the next video we're going to jump into building out my C Notch so here's the plan so this C Notch that I kind of did before um yeah it's not very nice and not knowing so much but you're not supposed to have like sharp squared off edges they can lead to press cracks I guess in the frame and all that jazzz I didn't know when I did this before this is I've been driving this daily for a few years now and it's time to do it properly and big it make it bigger so here's the idea is something along the lines of this so we're going to come up as high as I can go while being a frame or sorry but while being under the box still right the whole Pro the whole idea behind how I'm doing this is I don't want to mess with the box I want you to look in the back of the truck and it still be a fully functioning box nothing built out so I'm going as low as I can possibly go before my diff goes through the box and my Notch has to be within reason under here so there won't be straight edge it'll be I might round these or I might cut them like this I don't know so next I'm going to cut out all of these and uh then the top plates and I'll weld everything in and then I'll cut out in here and then I'll build it all out inside once that's done I can get the axle back under here I can get my four link hooked up yeah once the axle's in I can figure out where I'm going to mount the bags where I'm going to mount the pan hard bar to keep everything centered and then uh yeah I'll do the whole back end on the next video and get this functioning and then try to get the box back down and the interior is coming along nardy wood grain steering wheel got a wood grain shifter um floor mats that match the uh roof liner and the visors I am going to get a seat cover for now because I don't know how to Pooler you and I'm not going to pay somebody to do that right now and then it's got a big it's got a nice little stereo in with a sub and this is just rough mockup for gauges but we're going to have gauges in here basically we'll be running uh this will be the air suspension gauge it'll have five ports on it to display Each corner plus tank pressure and then we'll have a a wide band and a oil pressure gauge if I do hook that up just kind of here from mockup it's been sitting in my in my toolbox forever hope you guys like the project so far welcome uh welcome aboard and I'm going to keep posting videos about it as I get some more progress I've been procrastinating doing it but I think it's time to get it out there um hope you guys like this track shoot me a thumbs up if you do shoot me a subscribe thanks for checking the video guys

Channel: Finding Our Way

Views: 7,736

Keywords: air suspension, rear disc conversion, bagged trucks, chevrolet, gmc

Id: g8cbc9shTlo

Length: 28min 0sec (1680 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2024