Tucked away infront of the rear tire, and just behind the driver’s seat is a custom mount designed to hold two Odyssey 925 batteries as the accessory batteries.
On the passenger side, a single 925 battery will serve as the starting or reserve battery.
Here is the battery mount for that.
Both battery mounts are based on Odyssey battery boxes that i successfully built, deployed and sold for off-road applications for a number of years.
Brakes.
Project Bronco is expected to be on the heavy side, and even a light truck needs good binders with 40″ tires.
Here I faced some difficult decisions and not a few challenges.
First, for the sake of simplicity, packaging, and reliability, I didn’t want vacuum boosters or a hydro boost.
So full manual brakes it is. But that’s a big challenge to have brakes good enough to slow this big thing down adequately without huge pedal effort.
To that end, I spent a bunch of time talking to brake component manufactures and race car builders and came up with what I hope will be a good braking solution.
We will find out if I’m am a hero or a zero in that department when the truck finally drives again.
In any event, here’s what I came up with:
Double CNC master cylinders (1 1/4″ bore, IIRC) hung in a forward swing position to get the reservoirs out into the engine bay.
Remote controlled balance beam for the masters.
Custom, high leverage pedal.
14″ trophy truck discs bolted to custom machined Colman rotor hats with Wilwood 6 piston calipers on custom brackets.
Here’s the brakes after I machined the hats and the gas slots into the rotors with the rather large calipers on the left. On the right are the factory GM single piston calipers and small-ish rotor that came with the Dana 60 axles.
I’m pretty fond of the brake pedal I came up with.
Here’s the rotor and caliper installed on the front axle. They just clear the 17″ Walker Evans beadlock rims.
Another small but important item is the coolant overflow tank, which had to be shoehorned into a very tight spot in the engine bay.
It has an external level reading tube, radiator inlet/outlet line, overflow line, and uses a radiator cap so that if the cap goes bad on the radiator, a spare is always on hand.
Here it is being pressure tested on the bench.
The firewall and inner fender wells were challenging, to say the least. Lots of complex shapes.
The front inner fender wells, IMHO, turned out really nice.
The goal was to protect the engine bay as much as possible from tire-thrown debris, while still allowing easy service by being fairly easy to remove.
