-[laughing] Rob. -What's up?
-Vanilla Ice? -Cover's blown.
[laughing] Oh, man!
[Bill Carlton] He wants this '23 F-350 sitting low.
[Rob] I need this thing to be the street sweeper.
[Matt Lipp] We do a special order with the Godzilla motor.
So, we'll be somewhere in the sevens with this on it.
Oh, yeah!
We're gonna be bagging this truck a little different
than we normally do.
We're gonna put electroluminescent paint on his logo
and make this hood light up.
[Jamie Marshall] That stuff pops.
[Ryan Garner] Now, it's time to cut this thing.
Those four inches we took out will just be our little secret.
[Jose Mendoza] We're gonna turn all the chrome that's on the trucks into gold.
I'm gonna bring something to Florida that they ain't never seen.
Dude, dude, dude!
[theme music playing]
[Bill] I'm Bill Carlton.
I built my first truck when I was 16
and, ever since, me and my guys have been out here
creating with our hands,
building the biggest, lowest,
baddest custom trucks and cars in the game.
People don't come here for what they need,
they come here for what they want.
This is Texas Metal.
[upbeat instrumental music]
We got shirts coming in, we got our new design coming in also,
so it'll be good.
-Gearing up for the winter. -Man, I love it.
[Rob] Hey!
What's happening, guys?
You must be Bill.
-Man, I am, man. -How you doing, brother?
-I'm Rob. -[Bill] I mean, I'm doing good.
-Good to meet you. -[laughing] Rob.
-What's up? -Vanilla Ice?
-Oh, my cover's blown. What's up, bro? -[all laughing]
-Good to see you, Bill. -How you doing, man?
Man, I'm great.
Hey, man, I'm a big fan.
Yeah, I appreciate it. Same to you, man. That's why I came to see you.
You know, we've had a long list of people coming in and out the door,
average Joe to huge celebrities.
But, today, Vanilla Ice coming through the door
is really something special to me.
You know, I grew up on this property listening to his music.
So, it's pretty cool to have him come through the front door today.
Listen, man, I got a problem.
Yo, he'll solve it.
-[all laughing] -I know that's right.
I got a stock brand-new Ford dually Platinum,
and I need it to go fast.
I need it to look badass.
I need it... I need your touch, man. Your passion.
I need this thing to be the street sweeper.
Man, let's see what you got.
All right, let's go.
Bill is a freestyler, and I like that about him 'cause I collect cars.
So, for me, it's a big thing, you know,
to come out here and have my truck custom-done.
I think I'm in the right place here.
Texas Metal, you know?
I'm gonna bring something to Florida that they ain't never seen.
All right. Well, there she sits.
Not much. I mean, it's a nice truck, you know, for a stock truck.
But she needs some work.
[Bill] Four-by-four, huh?
[Rob] Yeah, they don't sell 'em anymore without that.
-[Bill] Oh, yeah? -[Rob] Yeah.
[Bill] So, what's drawing you to this dually?
[laughs] I do construction, so I pull excavators and all kinds of equipment,
and I might load this up with some drywall.
But I want it to be a show truck, nice truck.
But something I can also go get, you know, construction equipment.
-Still use it for work. -Still use it for work, yup.
[Bill] You know, I love that idea.
I mean, you just don't want something sitting in your driveway
just looking good. You still wanna be able to use it.
-That's it. -[Bill] I love that aspect, for sure.
I mean, what do you think about
seeing it down a little bit?
[Rob] Oh, 100%! You know, you gotta set that thing right.
-But will it be able to hold the weight and all that? -[Bill] Oh, man.
You know, we'll get rid of all the leaf springs in the back
and build a big, heavy four-link, so you can put all that power to the ground.
Then, Rob, on this, we gotta do air suspension.
You gotta have that adjustability,
you gotta have that ride quality.
-[Rob] Yup. -[Bill] And you gotta have that ability
-to pull an excavator or cinder blocks. -[Rob] Yeah.
-[Bill] Whatever it is. -[Rob] I do, yup.
Having that adjustability of that air in the back
-to control where your ride height's gonna be... -Yeah.
...is most definitely a must on this.
That's what we need to do, man.
-Wheels and tires is most definitely a must. -Oh, yeah.
[Bill] Some 26s on it.
[Rob] Yeah. You know, I know you know the wheel setup.
That's important because,
you know, you can make it or break it with the wheels and all that.
-So... -[Bill] That's it.
[Rob] Gotta put some showcase wheels and tires on this thing.
-Any accent colors you're thinking? -Gold.
I'm a gold fan, man.
Man, I'm a gold and black guy.
-You like that? -Oh, yeah, for sure, man.
[Rob] I just wanna turn it into some butter, man, you know?
Make this thing be where, you know, you turn the corner
and people are like... [exclaims] "Okay."
I mean, there's 100 trucks sitting there and, then, this one comes walking in.
-You know, that's the one. -[Bill] Right.
One thing I really wanna see is what's underneath the hood and everything.
Let's see what we're working with.
Let's have a look.
[Rob] They came out with this new motor, the Godzilla.
And I know you can put some horsepower on this thing.
So, this might be a surprise to you,
this dually is not a diesel.
-[Bill] This gas? -[Rob] A Godzilla motor.
So, we gotta take this new Godzilla gas motor...
-[Rob] Yeah. -[Bill] ...and you're wanting it to outrun
-the twin diesels? -Yeah.
It's a challenge. Them diesels go fast.
[laughing] Yeah, man. Challenge accepted.
-Man, I love it. -[laughing]
[Rob] You know, Bill puts his time, his effort into everything.
He's letting his passion run loose, and I just love it.
I became a fan of his and I can't wait to see this truck, man,
when it's finished, and let him do his magic.
-Get you hooked up, man. -I appreciate you, Bill.
Yeah. Let's go make it official.
[Rob] Look out, world! It's not all about diesel. [laughs]
[instrumental hip-hop music]
[Bill] You know, I get really excited
when anybody talks about a black dually sitting on the ground.
I mean, that's just one of my favorite vehicles.
But, when Vanilla Ice comes to you
and talks to you about putting his black dually on the ground,
I mean, that's a high honor.
No matter how old you are, you've heard of Vanilla Ice.
His music is just iconic.
You know, long time ago,
building trucks under a carport, on the ground,
on this property, listening to the radio to Vanilla Ice,
I never would have thought I'd be actually building him a truck in the future.
I mean, that's pretty cool.
That definitely tells me we're on the right track
and doing something that people love to see.
A big dually sitting on the ground, big wheels,
that gets me excited.
You know, I can't wait to get this in the shop
and I can't wait for Rob to see exactly what we're gonna build for him.
[instrumental hip-hop music]
-Stop, collaborate and listen. -Yeah.
[all laughing]
-So, you obviously know whose truck it is. -Oh, yeah.
Isn't that real cool?
-Man. I can't believe it. -It's awesome.
A little piece of my childhood
-comes into play. -Yeah. Yeah, man.
"Rolling In The 5.0" I mean, jammed that until the tape was done.
[all laughing]
-Well, he's gonna be rolling in his 350. -There you go.
-Yes. -[all laughing]
So, what we got going on? What are we gonna do for him?
[instrumental rock music]
[Bill] You know, first things first,
we gotta get this truck low to the ground.
-But it's a four-wheel drive. -[Jamie] Oh.
[Bill] So, it's got a straight axle on this
and we're limited on how low we can go
-'cause the oil pan sits over that, right? -Yeah.
[Bill] So, we'll get as low as we can go.
Once that's determined, A big four-link in the back,
big bag so he can haul whatever trailer he wants,
this will handle it.
[Ryan] Man, that's great to hear, honestly,
because we're not gonna take the work truck aspect out of it,
-but it'll also look sick. -[Bill] Man for sure, man.
Not only we gotta make it low, we gotta put big wheels and tires on it, too.
-Right? -Of course.
[Bill] And another cool accent that he wants to do,
he wants everything that's chrome and gray, gold.
That's gonna be difficult.
[Bill] Yeah, you're working with all kind of different media,
plastic, polished aluminum, chromed plastic.
That's gonna be really, really difficult on something like this, so...
-Paint shop's got a lot ahead of them, man. -[Bill] Yeah. [laughs]
Yeah. For sure, man.
Not only that, we're gonna paint his logo on the hood,
but we're gonna have that light up.
-What? -Okay. I've seen some of that stuff online.
Man, that stuff pops. That's real cool. It's like...
Dude, I've never seen that.
So we're gonna have the LumiLor guy come out,
and he's gonna perform that process on the hood.
[instrumental hip-hop music]
You know, once all the color's done on it, he wants some more power, too.
We're gonna add a supercharger.
[Ryan] Man, that's gonna sound good, too.
-A little whine, a little whistle. -[Jamie] Mmm-hmm.
Ain't nothing like a dually leaving
-four black marks, right? -[Ryan] Yeah.
[Bill] This would get you excited to come to work, right?
-[Ryan] Yeah. -Y'all ready?
-[Ryan and Jamie] Yes. -Let's get it.
[instrumental rock music]
So, we have this F-350 here. What we're gonna do now,
pretty much, we're gonna tear down the whole grill, bumper, everything,
'cause we're changing the color.
All this that you see that's chrome in here,
pretty much everything is going to be taken apart...
Grilling. Grilling and chilling.
...'cause we're color-matching it black and gold.
[instrumental hip-hop music]
[drill whirring]
[Jamie] Let's go.
All right, go down. Start going down.
Go up.
Yup.
Let's pop the springs out right there and set 'em, and take the pumps off.
[Bill] We're gonna be bagging this truck a little different than we normally do.
You know, most of the time,
we're bagging a car with independent front suspension
or we're building an independent front suspension.
This has a straight axle. It's a four-by-four truck.
So, here, we can only go so low and, then, it touches the oil pan
of the engine.
Hey, go down with it real quick.
Go slow.
So, we're gonna maintain the straight axle,
but we're gonna make it as low as we can go with the airbags.
[Ryan] That's it. That's it.
Yeah.
[Ryan] It's sitting on the crossmember now, Bill.
Let's go up with this. Pull the front wheels off.
Then, just put some stands under it.
And, then, we'll just let it down and make it easier to eyeball.
So, basically, all we gotta do here
is make upper and lower bag brackets,
replace the spring with the bag.
And, then, we'll use this top, put our bag in there.
[Bill] Build the bag.
Adjust the base up three inches, so it goes over this.
That length oughta be good, too.
Let's make some flat bar.
All right, so Bill and I got some measurements.
I did a little quick sketch.
I got my angle that I need.
I like good stuff, so we used this quarter-inch flat bar.
And, then, I got my angle already on this chip board
where I can bend it right here at this point.
Pop a hole.
[instrumental hip-hop music]
All right, now that I have the lower bag bracket tacked in place,
I can start boxing this thing in, gusseting it up.
We wanna leave an access hole in the back, back here,
to where we can get to our bolt hole
and, also, to where we can bolt in the bottom of our airbag as well.
I know I got two and a half inch flat bars,
so I'm just gonna box the bag,
make a cool little gusset for the side.
Get some weld on this thing.
[instrumental rock music]
And that will be our bottom bag.
I got one of two done,
and, then, I can start building my upper bag bracket now.
[instrumental hip-hop music]
No, there ain't nothing routine around here.
We've done a thousand air suspensions,
but every one is just a little different.
To get Rob's 2023 F-350 Platinum sitting low,
we're gonna put our bags where the springs usually sit.
So, we got our pipes cut. I got a couple of measurements.
Cut 'em 6.5.
Got a little doughnut here that Jesse cut out for me.
So, we'll go something like this here.
I think that's gonna work just fine.
[upbeat instrumental music]
So, we've got our upper bag bracket,
our pipe, and our little doughnut that you've seen earlier, right?
And, now, I can build off of this.
That way, nothing's welded to the truck.
I'll just make one bracket here, bolt it in.
This will connect it to the truck.
There's no need to weld anything if we can do it this way.
So, this is gonna be plenty strong.
It's not going anywhere. All the force is pushing up and down.
So, this is gonna be perfect for what we've got going on here.
Oh, yeah!
All right, so we got our tab in, bolts in.
It's all tapped, everything's good.
We'll get this tore apart, get it welded.
Then, we'll send it to powder.
[Shawn Mastrian] This curve isn't bad.
We do want to have that ridge there.
We wanna build around that, so that it's kind of flat.
-Right? -Yeah. Okay.
[Bill] The guys that work at the shop, myself included,
we're always looking at what's coming up next in the custom game.
I heard about a company that uses paint that actually lights up,
and I thought it'd be real cool
to light up Vanilla Ice's logo right on the hood.
There are gonna... these little 22-gauge wires, we're gonna fan 'em out.
So, we're gonna put a contact point.
We're gonna build around that so that it's kind of flat.
-Put some body filler, make it flat? -Yeah.
-Body filler, make it flat, yeah. -Yeah.
Okay, that works.
-Cool. -Let me go get some tape or something.
Yeah, and I can help as you need.
Bill gave me a call the other day.
He wanted to do something really cool for Ice's 350.
Basically, Ice wants his logo on the hood.
So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna put electroluminescent paint
on his logo and make this hood light up.
It's a four-layer paint system that is electrified
that, when you put electricity to the top and the bottom layers
it energizes the stuff in the middle and it produces light.
And we're actually gonna wire it underneath the hood here.
And, then, once we put the wires there
and connect it to the battery, it's going to be charged.
So it's gonna be a really cool effect,
and we're pretty excited to deliver this for Ice.
[instrumental hip-hop music]
So, Juan got the top side of this scuffed up real nice,
so it's gonna be able to accept the paint now.
Now, we gotta get this thing in the booth,
put that conductive paint on, and we'll be ready to go.
We're gonna need the logos now.
The masks, yeah.
So, the first thing we're gonna do is lay down the the negative mask.
So, that has the logo in there,
and we're gonna spray it so that the logo itself gets the Backplane.
-[Juan] Yeah, right there. -[Shawn] So, it's straight.
-So, now we know where we need it to be. -[Juan] Yeah.
-Yeah. That looks straight now. -Let's lock it in.
[Juan] All right.
[Shawn] So, basically, when we put conductive paint in this area,
that's the area that's going to light up.
[instrumental hip-hop music]
All right, so let's start painting this thing.
So, basically, we're gonna start with our Backplane material.
Now, we're gonna mask off everything else,
so we don't get any of this Backplane material outside of our target zone here.
Then, we're gonna be able to shoot this
and, hopefully, we're gonna have a nice, conductive field here.
This is our conductive paint.
It's kind of like those stripes you see on your back glass
that defrost your glass. That's kind of what it is.
I mean, this is different for me. I've never done this before.
I'm really excited about it.
I love to learn something new every day,
and I think this is going to be a really good experience
learning how to spray this paint.
[Shawn] Juan did a really nice job spraying this conductive layer down,
and I just wanna check the resistance of it
to make sure that we've got it exactly where we want.
So, I'll hit that and we're at six, which is fantastic.
Let's go across the angel here.
6.5. That's perfect.
So, basically, what we're looking for in the ohmmeter
is that there's enough conductivity in the film
to allow the current to flood there without resistance.
The lower the resistance, the lower the ohms,
the less impedance of the current through the film.
And that'll produce a nice, even bright coating,
and we'll be able to power that
with the electronics that we have.
So, the ohmmeter tested out everything great.
Juan did a fantastic job on this.
We're ready to go to the next step.
It's a nice fit. It, like, fills that thing up so perfect.
So, let's just make it the same then.
We got our new 26-inch wheels and tires on
to give us some measurements where to start with.
Once all the inner and the outer new wheels goes on,
we have 100 inches from outside to outside.
We just measured the bed, and what we need is 95 inches.
So, we're gonna have to narrow the rear end two inches on each side
to get those wheels tucked up underneath the bed so it matches the front.
Let it go.
Thank you.
[Ryan] You don't have to do that,
but the wheels would stick out that far off each side of the bed. It'll look funny.
So, what are we gonna do is pull the rear end out.
We're gonna slick it all off,
take the factory brackets off of it, so it's completely slick tubes.
And, then, we're gonna cut out two inches on each side.
All right, so I got the rear end all slicked up.
Everything cleaned up off of here.
All the brackets cut out.
Now it's time to cut this thing.
I wanna get two inches out of each side,
so I'm gonna make a whole bunch of marks, scribe some lines.
First, I'm gonna pull all this apart, though.
I wanna pull my axles out.
I wanna pull these off the end.
It's really important that we pull the axles out before cutting the housing,
'cause if you cut through the housing into your axle, then you're in a bind.
So, we'll send these off.
They'll do with whatever. They'll send us new axles
for our new measurements that we give them.
I'm gonna take out this whole center chunk right here
and, then, we can make our cuts
without getting a whole bunch of grime and dust inside these gears.
Getting any of that inside these gears
will really mess this rear end up
and cause a big problem in the future, you know what I mean? So...
I've had many problems with rear ends.
I hate these things. I always take extra precaution now
because I've had to pay for them before.
And they're not cheap, you know?
I learned my lesson.
Whenever we put it back together,
we want this to be as straight as possible and true, right?
So, I'll just take this guy here,
scribe a line.
All the way across.
You just line those scribe lines back up together.
You can't mess that up.
Trying to get this right back where it is right now is...
That's the moneymaker right there.
You want that to be as close to perfect as possible.
I need to take two inches out, So I've got some chipboard.
Put it in the sheer, got me a perfect cut all the way around.
That's a perfect straight line on both sides.
So, now, all I gotta do is just take my marker,
mark where I want it to go,
cut that out.
We're good to go.
[instrumental rock music]
So, we got our two inches cut out, both sides.
So, we're gonna go ahead and bevel this edge now.
We'll bevel that edge.
It's usually about 30 degrees or so.
You know, you want half the thickness of your metal, is perfect.
You know, getting that root in there
and getting all that weld in there.
And, then, grinding the top. You have all that weld in there.
You have all that integrity. You don't ever wanna just butt that up like that
'cause that's not gonna do anything for you.
In a matter of hours, this thing will snap off
and you're in a world of trouble.
So, cool. We got our two inches out. Everything's beveled.
All we gotta do is just get this thing mated and we're good to go.
[machinery whirring]
[Bill] You know, the most important part about narrowing
two inches off each side of the rear end,
that's making sure it all goes back together true and straight.
If you don't, it's gonna create a ton of problems.
So, we had an alignment tool made to make it 100% true and perfect.
So, I got a window here, I can see my scribe line.
I can see the scribe line on that one. We can still line it up good.
How this works is basically like a little jig, right?
Then, I got these window cutouts
where I can get my gun in there and get four good tacks on there.
Double, triple-check my work.
All right, I'm ready to tack.
[instrumental hip-hop music]
I wanna tack on the outside and not inside.
Oh, Bill would call that a bridge tack.
I got a pipe welder background, so I did this for a very long time.
So, that's the way it's done in the oil field,
that's the way we're gonna do it here.
I used to be able to do root-filling cap on a four-inch joint
in, like, 27 minutes.
We would do, like, 11 or 12 joints a day.
Anything under that, they'd can your ass.
You know, this is a good way to check your work here.
You put this guy here.
We know that this is straight, right? It's a ruler.
You draw all your straight lines out of this, so.
Put it here, if you see no gaps and no inconsistencies,
then you know it's true all the way through, right?
[upbeat music playing]
We're ready to throw a MIG root in there.
So the root is your first initial weld, right?
That's going to mate the two together.
Once you stop, you grind the end of the root.
You see that in there?
You see how it's blue?
It's paper thin and you want to tie into that root.
You overlap it and you keep it going.
You gonna start up, that heat is established,
and then, once you get through,
it's just gonna fuse through a burn-through.
We go about a quarter inch past that,
and that's how you do a tie-in.
And now, we crank our machine up.
A little bit more wire.
Jamie! Need your assistance.
I'm going to start here and roll it as far as I can that way.
And then once, once I hand it out to you, just keep on rolling.
I'm not going to stop.
[upbeat instrumental rock music playing]
[Ryan] It's just gonna fill this valley up.
Well, that's all we're gonna do now.
[Jamie] Well, that's just that speed right there.
[Ryan] And I want this to be flush right now,
and that way it's less grinding on me afterwards.
You see that?
Not bad.
[Jamie] I'm gonna weld this side before I grind.
That way, I just grind both of them at the same time.
So you have to grind that start and stop there,
and then we'll come back.
We'll start here and then we'll go over
and then we can stop here and grind our start and stop,
and then we'll be ready to do our cap.
All right. You ready?
[upbeat music playing]
[Ryan] That's it, buddy. Thank you so much.
All right. Cool. So that's our cap.
We're all done. We'll let it cool down for a little bit
and we'll get the grinders out.
Slick this thing up with a belt sander,
make sure it's all smooth, looks pretty.
Then we can slide it up underneath the truck
and start building our four-link.
Those four inches we took out will just be our little secret.
[upbeat music playing]
Let's take the masking off,
uh, and then we'll get to the next step.
[Bill] There's nothing typical about electro-luminescent paint.
It's a multi-step process, about as close to a science experiment
as you can get.
[Shawn] I'm really happy with the way this came out.
So we're going to now put the insulated layer on top of it.
It's dielectric.
And what this is going to do is hold the charge
that we now have that's going to flood
into this angel area.
So we want to make sure we get a good heavy coat
over the electrified areas
because that will prevent burning through.
We're creating a capacitor there with the two plates.
We want to make sure that they don't touch each other.
So this is the thing that protects the paint job.
So that will be a nice base for our color layer,
which we're putting down right now.
So we're gonna do this under the black light.
And the black light will tell us that we have just enough material down
so that we get a smooth and even color.
We don't want to be too heavy with this layer,
or else it will block light.
We want to make sure we get it down even and consistent.
Good coverage all throughout, but as thin as possible.
So we're going to be able to know that we get a good, consistent coverage.
Get a good, even color when it lights up.
That looks fantastic.
Good job.
So now that that's dry, we need to put the transparent conductor on.
But in order to do that, we actually need to put a bus bar around it first.
What a bus bar is,
is it allows the current to flow evenly around
the entire perimeter of the object.
So we're going to make sure we're going to put this conductive paint
right on the perimeter of this,
spray it out, feather it to the outside.
We're gonna check our connectivity
just like we did for the back plane.
Once that's done, and dry,
then we can light this thing up.
[upbeat music playing]
-[Shawn] I think this looks good. -[man] Cool.
It's dried for about three or four hours.
Uh, let's take it off, take the masking off
and light this baby up.
Let's see what we got.
Contact points look real nice.
So we're gonna spray this with our conductive top coat,
with our transparent conductor, a nice, thin film on it.
But before we do that, we have to check continuity.
Make sure that there's no continuity
between the back plane and the bus bar.
We do, that means we have a short circuit
and there's a problem and we have to fix that.
-Zero. -All good?
We're good.
Second thing we have to do is we have to wire up these connection points,
and then we'll be able to then wire this thing under power.
Spray it and when we hit it with the heat lamp,
then it's gonna light up and it's gonna be spectacular.
All right. You want to do edges first, okay?
So go around the perimeter of this
and then cross coats in the center.
Okay.
I'll-- I'll cure it right now.
-[Shawn] There you go! Now it's... -[man] Oh, yeah. There it is.
We'll let this sit overnight, and then, uh, tomorrow morning,
we'll clear over it, protect it,
and it will be bulletproof from that point forward.
All right, cool cool.
-All right. -All right.
-Good deal. -All right, man. Thanks.
[upbeat music playing]
We got the rear end narrowed on the 2023 F-350 Platinum
and put the axle housing back under the truck.
Now, we can start building that suspension.
[Ryan] Usually, what we'll do is we'll make our hangars
and then I'll run to the rear end, right?
But since we have all this extra going on
and we can utilize this,
we're going to use this for our upper
and that hanger for our lower.
It will be a little bit different than most cases.
It won't be parallel.
There will be one in the front and then one in the rear.
And then we'll have our airbag in here somewhere.
So with that being said, these holes are all metric and it's all oversized.
It doesn't fit what we usually use.
Our bolts are for five-eights.
This is just a hair over five-eight.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna drill this out big enough to put
our DOM in here.
The cool thing about DOM
is it's super, super strong, right?
It starts off as a solid chunk,
and then they'll send something through them
and then it pokes that hole in it.
Pushes it out.
This is a heavy wall, five-eighths DOM piece right here.
Doing this is ideal for everything else that's yet to come.
We'll cut this whole bottom side of the pocket out.
That way, whenever it articulates and we get that travel down,
it's not binding up on this hump right here.
This is exactly where it's going to be.
This is where we want it to be.
Right in line with the rear end right here.
So I get my welder, put a couple of tacks on here.
I'm gonna do the exact same thing in the front.
In order to get it perfectly centered up,
I'm gonna take my washer and put it on the backside here.
I put my misalignment and heims.
Now that it's tight,
that bolt's all the way straight through,
there's no way for this to be out of line.
And then we'll be ready to start building our link bars.
We'll center it over the rear end here.
So now, take a quick measurement.
Let's go cut some link bars.
I slide it over our bond
and you know, if I need a little bit of adjustment,
I got it right there.
I can go in and out as far as I want.
The way I like to do this is split the difference in the shank.
So you don't ever want it to be spun all the way out
because that's what's holding all the pressure and holding all the weight.
Now that we have this tacked in,
I'm gonna go ahead and weld this stuff, cap it.
All right, so I got my fillers for my axle brackets.
These are gonna go on the outside, box them all in,
and then we can also build our back brackets off of this.
All right, so we've got everything installed.
Our four-link is good.
We're going to cycle the suspension,
make sure our pinion doesn't drop or rise too much,
and make sure everything is good.
If we need to make any adjustments,
we can now, with everything just tacked into place.
But I mean, we've done this a couple of times,
so I'm pretty sure it'll be all right.
[upbeat music playing]
[Bill] We're gonna wake up this truck by de-chroming it.
We're going with the black and gold candy paint.
Right now, we're gonna start mixing up our gold paint
for Vanilla Ice's truck.
Most of the time, people want to cut and match their trim to match the truck,
with the color of the truck.
In this instance, we're gonna turn
all the chrome that's in the truck into gold.
So the first thing we're gonna do,
we're gonna start mixing up our Lemonade Candy
with eight ounces of concentrated Lemonade dye.
We're gonna drop in another eight ounces,
which will make 16.
And in this case, we're gonna use
a two-hour direct to metal clear
which is going to be a very important key to this project
to make the Candy stick to these chrome and aluminum wheels.
So Rob wants a twist on this gold.
He doesn't actually want a shiny gold.
He wants a satin look to it.
The satin look's not a real common request
for a gold-plated effect.
But that's what's gonna make this truck
look different from any, any other truck out there.
We got all of this mixed up.
We're gonna start loading it up on the gun
and start shooting all these chrome
and all the wheels and get it done.
[upbeat music playing]
So we just shot our first tack coat.
The reason we shot a light dusting tack coat
is to lock in all the materials without over-wetting in.
We're gonna hit it with two more coats of Candy.
Build up a tone eventually where we want it.
Just making sure we don't get it too dark.
Rob wants a satin finish to this gold.
We're gonna hit it with two coats of satin clear.
It goes on like a shiny clear.
As it's drying, it starts toning out to a satin finish.
We're gonna let it cure.
And that's it for that.
[upbeat music playing]
Twelve and a half.
So I need 18 inches for my wheel,
whenever it's laid out.
Yeah, so I just need to come in three inches on both sides.
[Bill] There's always a trickle down on these decisions we make.
We finished the rear suspension on the F-350
with narrowed axles, four-link and bigger wheels.
Now we need to widen the fenders to make that bed
look like it came from the factory that way.
I can see with all my lines drawn here,
we're gonna cut this guy here,
that'll give us that little lip
to be able to weld to instead of welding straight to the side of the bed here.
And then this is what we're gonna take out.
So that'll be gone.
This will move over this line.
We'll meet this line here.
We can weld that seam, and then we can add our 3-inch strip of aluminum
and fill that void.
I'm ready to start fitting my inner fender walls back onto the bed.
So, put this guy here.
You can grab both pieces of the sheet metal
and then you just use this little wing nut to tighten it up.
I can throw a tack on there,
do the same to the passenger side over here.
And once I get everything tacked
and looking good, then I can start making my filter pieces here.
Wow, those are like within a 30 second,
which is unbelievable.
Now, I'm ready to go get a piece of aluminum.
I'm gonna make it a little big.
We'll get that situated each side,
and then I can come in and I can tack it.
I get all that tacked, weld everything out,
grind it all, clean it all up, reshoot some bed liner on this thing.
It'll look like we've never messed with it.
[upbeat music playing]
So we got Vanilla Ice's F-350.
It was a special order with the Godzilla motor.
So the engine that's in it now puts down somewhere mid-400 horsepower.
We're going to go ahead and add a supercharger on it,
which we're expecting to get 350 horsepower gain.
So we'll be somewhere in the 7s with this on it.
It's definitely going to be a huge, noticeable upgrade for this Godzilla.
We're gonna go ahead and start disassembling everything that's in the way,
all the slow parts, so we can make room for all the go fast stuff.
So once we get this installed and tuned,
this thing will definitely compete with the diesel engines.
We'll go ahead and manhandle this thing up to the truck.
We're gonna go ahead and get our throttle body
spacer and throttle body mounted.
So just holding it up here, I can already see
we have no room to run our charge pipe to our air filters
because we've got the fan shroud and the radiator in the way,
and we're gonna have to find
a different route to take
to get all this to fit in here.
Well, like I said, we can chop the fan blade.
It'll work once.
[chuckles]
So what I'm thinking is we're gonna get this pipe mounted to this flange.
And as you can see, we definitely have our clearance
from our fan shroud and our fan.
Now we just need to get our throttle body mounted out here.
So we'll go ahead and build a couple of flanges for it,
get them welded up and mounted on.
[upbeat instrumental rock music playing]
So as you can see, it's all done.
Welded out, and I'll walk over to Matt.
Look at that. Fits like it was made to.
Well, it looks good. It wasn't the original plan, but we got it to work.
Our clearance issues are taken care of.
Now we're gonna go ahead and get the rest of our...
inlet pipe with our filter on it.
We just got our air cleaner done.
So now we're gonna move on to the next step,
which will be our heat exchanger.
No mounting spots near it.
So I'm gonna have to figure out something to get this thing mounted.
Cool. Now we've got everything bolted up, our heat exchanger mounted.
We've got our supercharger on.
We've got our intake pipe made,
with our throttle body mounted.
Now we're going to go ahead and blow it all apart
and get everything painted.
And be ready for the tune.
[upbeat music playing]
One of the things Rob wanted to do
is he wanted to incorporate his logo into the inside of the truck.
He wanted it inverted on the back seat, and on the armrest.
Got it all worked out.
Everything looks good.
So get it on the truck and get it out of here.
We're almost done with Rob's F-350 Platinum.
Reinstalled all those dechromed parts.
Reassembled the suspension, ran the lines,
new wheels and tires.
You know, I remember back in the early days of Ekstensive
just jammin' Vanilla Ice
while building some of my first builds.
It's been really cool to build this truck for him.
[Shawn] I've always been a car guy.
I've always been attracted to what people do to cars,
especially paint jobs.
I love a good paint job.
The cool thing about what we have
is anything that you can do with paint,
you can do with light now.
So we can take all that great style
that has been developed over the centuries,
and make it light up.
We want life for the sake of art,
and we want to create an artistic effect
with this technology
that pays homage to all of the predecessors
of the automotive customization industry
that have done so much work in creating the styles and...
that we're all familiar with in, in classic vehicle customization.
So I have a chemical engineering degree from MIT.
And my, my friend Andy, when he invented this,
he called me up and said, "Hey, Shawn, I got a...
I got an idea that I could make paint light up."
The minute I saw it,
the, the first prototype was the prism from The Dark Side of the Moon
Pink Floyd album.
And it was rough and just a little bit of light came out of it
because we still had a long way to go with the technology.
But I knew at that moment that we had something special.
You know, one of my favorite trucks is a big black dually on the ground.
And today, that truck is finished.
I've been marinating in Florida,
just waiting and anticipating,
you know, to see my truck.
He said, "It's done. Come get it."
I've-- I booked my flight right away.
I can't wait to see it.
Hey! What's up, Bill?
-How you doing, bud? -What's up, Rob?
-You good? -Man. I am.
-It's a good day today. -I'm excited, man.
It is a great day!
Man, I'm ready to show it to you, man.
-I'm excited too. -Come on, man.
I'm a kid in a candy store.
-Let's see it. -Let's check it out.
Check out some candy.
[Rob gasps]
Oh!
[exclaiming]
My God!
What!
Dude! Dude! Dude! Dude! Dude!
Look! Yes!
I can pull this up for any car show.
You can go to a truck show.
You can go to a lowrider show.
You can go to a four by four show.
It-- it qualifies for everything.
And I can pull my boat down the street.
Come on, man.
-We do all right? -God!
-Bro, this is amazing! Look at it! -[chuckles]
Damn!
[Bill] You wanted something real nice,
-cool truck that you could... -[Rob] Yeah.
-...still use at the job site, right? -Yeah.
[upbeat instrumental rock music playing]
[Bill] So the first thing we did was tore out all the suspension.
-[Rob] Mm! -[Bill] And we got it down
all the way as far as we could.
Put some big, big air bags in it
so you can haul whatever you want.
Took out the leaf springs and replaced it with a huge four-link.
Ah! That's how you got it to drop like that.
-Nice! -[Bill] Yeah, my boy Ryan got after it.
[Ryan] We had to take four inches out of the rear end
because the wheels were so wide,
they hung out outside of the bedsides.
-You had to cut the axle? -Yeah.
-Whoa! -Took two inches out of each side.
We even went as far as going into the bed.
-Had to. -Bringing in the inner fender wells on the bed,
re-bed lining the whole thing.
Looks like we never even touched it.
-Whoa! -[Ryan] Yeah.
And it's still four-wheel drive truck.
I got it all show and it will go.
-I love it, man. -[Bill] That's it.
I'm the king of the construction site right here.
That's it, man.
[Rob] Everything looks factory and so clean.
And to do that, it takes a lot of passion
to, to really make it look like that.
One of the biggest statements is getting rid of all that
polished aluminum, chrome and replacing it with that gold.
[Rob] It looks like it's almost glowing.
-[Bill] That is a satin gold. -[Ryan] Satin gold.
[Bill] It's brushed. I sprayed the transparent Candy gold over it.
-And then flat clear over that. -[Rob] Mm!
And it really sets it off.
I mean, this thing looks like Smokey and the Bandit coming down, you know?
[Bill] And then you see those 26-inch wheels and tires, man.
[Rob] Well, you see those.
[all laughing]
[Bill] And, man, you see, we had to top it off with them center caps.
[Rob] Boy, that's some icing on the cake right there, man. Look at that.
That's butter.
Rob, I know you wanted that logo on the inside, too.
So check this out.
[Rob] Ooh! Even matches the stitching on the seats. Phew!
-Man, if you like your logo in here? -Yeah?
We got something up front for you.
There's more? Yeah?
Look at that grille.
[Bill] It's the first thing you see, man, that sets the whole attitude, boom.
I mean the headlights too, man.
[Rob] So you even painted inside the lights here?
[Bill] We sent the headlights off to Oracle
and they did a little a surprise for you too, man.
They, they etched your logo down
-into the lens itself. -Oh, snap!
I like all the little details, like every little thing that just makes you go,
"Wow!" That's why I brought my truck here, man.
These guys are innovative.
They come up with really cool ideas.
This is a one of a kind by far.
Man, Rob, you wanted your logo a couple of spots, man.
We had to hook you up at the hood.
Unbelievable.
[Bill] That is not just paint, Rob.
That's a... a light-up paint.
-That's a-- -So it is true.
-Yeah. -I saw something on TikTok.
I didn't know if I should believe it or not, man.
I was like, "That ain't real."
-I know. -A couple of guys from MIT
come up with this paint process
where you actually electrify it and it lights up.
[Rob] So it's actually hooked up to the 12 volt?
-[Bill] Yep. -[Rob] Man, you got some space technology up in there.
[Rob] Come on now, that's crazy.
Hey, turn off the lights and it glows.
I'm from the 90s, bro.
You got to do that.
We got one more thing for you.
One more?
[exclaims]
Whoa!
Now you're talking my language.
[Bill] You wanted more power, so we had to throw a supercharger
on the top of this thing.
-[Rob] Ooh! -[Bill] I know that Godzilla puts out about 450,
-something like that. -[Rob] Uh-huh.
[Bill] So you should be getting kind of close to 800 now.
I'm gonna clean the streets. Look out!
[Bill] Rob, I can't wait to see and hear
about you rolling in your 350 down on Beachfront Avenue.
Everybody likes a truck like this.
I'd just like to thank all the guys at the shop
for once again coming through for me.
-So Rob, man, you're liking it? -I'm loving it, man.
Ain't no liking, bro.
Come on. You guys are awesome, man.
I love what you do.
-Ryan, thank you, man. Hey! -That's good.
Thank you for putting your passion into it.
Hey, man, I appreciate you having the trust in us
and bringing it all the way to Houston.
I wouldn't trust anyone else, man.