COTTAGE GROVE, MN - The Orange rig is due for a makeover. Doing the project:RockStar project has kept me out of my orange rig all summer. From experience, I know the project:RockStar will spank the orange car all day long on the trail. The way I look at this is I need to make the orange rig good at some thing the project:RockStar is not good at. One thing the project:RockStar cannot do well is rally or jump. My thought is to build the orange rig into a rally/jumper that can still trail ride. 

Our goals are that It will remain street able, will retain trackick steering knuckles, have a center mount diff with long travel, and CV-shafts capable of 18 inches of travel.

To start a build like this it made the most sense to just start with a straight frame. We cut the front off of a 4 door tracker frame and trimmed all the extras away. The strut towers and motor mounts. We reused the Calmini 3 inch lower arms in the stock location for my new upper control arms. We mocked up an upper ball joint mount so we could see how much drop was needed for the lower frame. To keep the thing from being a monster truck we were trying to keep it as low as possible. The lower control arms were treated to some “dump truck” metal to help it hold up to the trail rash. Next we cut the original, slightly bent, frame out at the front horn. Then the new section was slid up and tacked it into place on top of the original remaining frame. A new upper ball joint bracket was made to replace the mock up one. To get more adjustability we opted for some dirt track coils and weight jacks

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