NPR 4wd conversion and camper build thread.

[glennm01]

Good to hear. I am probably going with a tan color. Any pics of yours?

I just went with plain white, as my cab was white to begin with, and I wanted maximum forgiveness. Also, I knew there would inevitably be some of the OEM paint still visible inside the door thresholds, and didn't want to contrast with that too obviously. Here's a close-up. From 20 feet away, it just looks like a white truck -- wide shots don't really convey much.

 

[javajoe79]

Ok nice. Looks good.

 

[javajoe79]

So I went with Hy Tech coatings for the interior and underside of the can. Pretty nice stuff. The interior uses their SC1000 sound control coating and the underside will be their metal shield coating. The exterior will be Monstaliner. The camper box will get monstaliner too but the roof will be Hy Tech's Bus Kote sealing and insulating coating. Hy Tech has a bunch of good stuff and thank to whoever it was on here that mentioned it. http://hytechsales.com/insulating_paints.html

 

[DzlToy]

Chris,

Are you planning to install additional sound deadeners such as Thinsulate or LLP? I was told years ago by an old car audio guru, that no one product does everything. The goal is to change the resonant frequency of each panel and break up the sound waves. Road noise does not have the same frequency as engine noise or gravel hitting the bottom of the cab/chassis. Sound deadener showdown has some excellent info on the various products used to attenuate each frequency. In residential or commercial building applications, high heel shoes on the floor above your office are a different animal than a train or traffic passing by outside your window.

I am happy to see that you resisted the urge to cover the entire cab in MLV. By making this common mistake, the cab's resonant frequency has been changed, but is now equal or even again, as a whole. Further, it's a massive waste of time and money and can add significant weight. Strategically placing small pieces throughout the cab, is a much better plan.

 

[javajoe79]

I hate MLV. I've had to rip that crap out of far too many hot rods and I've never seen much benefit from it. This is the base coat and just a start. I'm going to pack the pillars full of foam like they do on new cars and I'm coating the inside of the doors plus some foam if I can fit it.. The undercoating will add to it all and the Monstaliner helps as well. We'll be making some nice padded carpet pieces to cover the floor/firewall area and probably some panels with felt on them to soften up the area behind the seats. The roof interior panel is getting recovered with some nicer cloth and we'll add some reflectix between that panel and the roof along with the factory padding that is glued in up there.

Once all the coating is done I'll be swapping the cabs. I'm still undecided on building a new dash based somewhat on the stock dash framework or just using the stock dash with a custom gauge panel.

 

[DzlToy]

It sounds like you are well on your way to having a nicer cab than Isuzu engineers envisioned .

I am sure you are aware, but the big ECU OEMs such as AEM, MoTec and Halltech, along with companies like RacePack and AIM have some pretty sweet electronic dash setups these days. As you have the ability to build your own sheet metal or composite dash, I would certainly go that route. Set a few 7" Android tablets in and have a cool 'glass cockpit', e.g. one for primary gauges, one for secondary gauges, one for navigation, one for audio/video, etc.

 

[javajoe79]

It sounds like you are well on your way to having a nicer cab than Isuzu engineers envisioned .

I am sure you are aware, but the big ECU OEMs such as AEM, MoTec and Halltech, along with companies like RacePack and AIM have some pretty sweet electronic dash setups these days. As you have the ability to build your own sheet metal or composite dash, I would certainly go that route. Set a few 7" Android tablets in and have a cool 'glass cockpit', e.g. one for primary gauges, one for secondary gauges, one for navigation, one for audio/video, etc.

Yup those are options for sure. I do enjoy mechanical gauges though. I can get really good pricing on all of those digital offerings and it's tempting but my overall goal for this truck is simplicity. I will have extra space on the dash for all sorts of things but those will come one at a time. The main goal is keeping it roadworthy so at first it will go back together with just the dash framework as it is now.

 

[SkiFreak]

my overall goal for this truck is simplicity

From your work so far, I think that you have failed to achieve this goal.

 

[javajoe79]

Today I am about to do some surgery to the underside of the new cab for clearance to the injector lines on the Cummins. They don't hit under normal street driving but if I get it twisted up off road, one of them touches the cab and vibrates like crazy. It would eventually break I'm sure. I also have to make some clearance for the radiator on the new cab I think. The old cab was previously wrecked and pushed back a bit on the PS though so that might not be needed on the new cab.

From your work so far, I think that you have failed to achieve this goal.

You're not wrong. I'm still trying to achieve that goal though. I will say though that compared to MANY of these builds it will be pretty simple other than the fact that practically everything is custom fabbed. I'm just not in to a whole lot of electronics if I can avoid them.

 

[javajoe79]

I finished the undercoat this weekend. I used a spray gun from a lizard skin kit and it worked out really nice.

 

[SkiFreak]

Don't know what happening, but your pics have not been showing in your last couple of posts.
Maybe it is me, but I don't think so...

-- Turned my ad blocker off, but that did not help
-- If I copy the image URL and paste it into another tab it works... very weird.

 

[Fugly]

I can see the pic’s only using a phone

 

[SkiFreak]

Disregard what I said... it looks like it was a stupid Firefox update issue. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

 

[javajoe79]

I've been working on the access and entry doors lately. I got the three point latches done for the access doors and finished insulating them and covering them on the inside mostly. For the entry door I used push pull cables to put the handles up high so we didn't have to crouch down to open the door. Once the entry door gas struts are sorted out, I'll cover the inside of it too.

I'm still trying to brainstorm the seal between the upper and lower sections. At this point I'm just thinking of using some heavy webbing of some sort like pirelli webbing. Two layers I guess. We'll see. I just finished roughing in the subfloor so my next big project is that seal.

 

[javajoe79]

Coffey Fabrication and Race Prep

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Also here is the link to the photo album since they all disappear from here eventually.