(engine cranking)
Freiburger here.
It always freaks me out when people ask on social media
about vehicles that I don't even know
how they know that I own,
and one of those is this truck right here
which is my 99 Dodge V10 four by four.
And enough people have asked me
about what's going on with that thing
that I figured I'd do an extra telling you
a little bit about it
because there it is in all its derelict goodness.
So, to begin with, as I said, it's a 99 model.
It's a V10, 488 cubic inch eight liter motor.
It's a five speed.
It's four wheel drive.
I custom ordered this truck
and bought it brand new
which happened right when Robert E. Petersen sold
the publishing company that I was working for,
that I still work for.
And a lot of us who had been working there for a while
were fully vested and we got a cash buyout,
and I used the money that I got from that
to walk straight into the Dodge dealership
and hand them cash and buy this truck.
Probably the stupidest thing I've ever done.
I should have invested it or saved it,
but I bought the thing and it was cheap.
With my special good-guy deal,
I think it was like 22 grand.
And like, you can't even buy a new truck
for that these days.
Have you noticed how every new big full-size truck
is like 50 grand up?
Well, for that reason, I'm going to have
to revive this thing cause it's really good.
It's been sitting here derelict and broken for a while,
but let me take you on a quick tour of it.
It's still only has about 100,000 miles on it
cause it sat for a long time in my driveway.
There was a time when I was four wheeling really fast
down a dirt road, and I hit a rock
with the left front tire and twisted the sector shaft
in the steering box.
And I hobbled the thing home
and it sat for like five or six years
and I never got around to fixing it.
And then, most recently, it sat here
for three or four years because I went
to install an aftermarket front Panhard bar,
and the kit was wrong and it didn't fit
and I had to custom fabricate one
and I only just last week got around
to actually fixing that.
So, it's got a Can-Back top on it
which I put on for my honeymoon.
My wife and I took this on our honeymoon
and camped in the back of it.
Can-Back, unfortunately,
was already out of business at the time
that Fred Williams, from Four Wheel and Off Road
and Dirt Everyday, got me hooked up with a guy
and I was able to buy one of his very last ones.
This thing is super-cool,
but after what is now 11 years
of sitting out in the sun,
you can see that it is completely destroyed.
I don't know if I'm going to be able
to find somebody who can make a new fabric for this or not,
but I really like this better than a camper shell.
There's some good Road Kill trivia sitting in the back here.
This engine is a 400 cubic inch big block Chrysler
that was in the 73 Plymouth Fury
that we ran in the 24 Hours of Lemons Race
and that we then parted out on the episode
when we built the General Mayhem 68 Charger
and actually that transmission is a leftover
from that too.
I think that's the blown up transmission
that we took out of General Mayhem
when we installed the one that was in the Fury,
so that's how long this has been sitting there.
When did we do that episode?
Like three or four years ago?
The engine sat around in my buddy Rob's back yard
for a couple years then he made me come get it,
so it's still there because I haven't had
time to deal with it, that's how my life goes.
The first mod I ever made to this thing
was it's got Magnaflow diesel exhaust on it.
David Kennedy was the editor of,
no, he was working as a staffer on Four Wheel
and Off Road Magazine at the time,
and he needed a truck to do a Magnaflow story with
to see if exhaust made power, and all they had
was the diesel exhaust for this truck,
which they put on this thing, and it's really loud,
really really loud, but it picked up like one mile
per gallon, it gets like 11, and so that was pretty good.
It has, what size tires on it?
This thing is stock in the back.
It's got no suspension mod.
This tire is a 315 7017 on a 17 by eight
Cragar soft eight wheel.
I always put progressively taller tires on this thing.
These ones I actually traded to Rick Payway
for a flat Thunder Jeep body that I had.
That's how I got these tires, and that's a BFG all terrain.
I had to custom order it, partially because
it's really really hard to find one of these things
at the time, in 99, with a factory five speed.
It's an NV4500 New Venture transmission
with a really low first gear and a overdrive fifth gear,
and I really wanted that for towing and stuff like that,
so that's part of the reason I custom ordered it.
The other is to get this camel colored interior.
All the ones that were on the lot had the gray interior
that I didn't really want.
But take a close look at the dashboard,
and unfortunately one of the big problems
with these trucks is that the dashes shatter.
This whole top 10 part of the dash there
rotted in the sun and crumbled inside and fell apart.
There's this company that makes this plastic overlay
that you can put on it that's a little cheesy,
but it looks way better than it did before,
but unfortunately, when you drive the truck,
you can hear all sorts of plastic
falling down behind the dash all the time.
It's the worst thing about this era of Dodge truck,
and you can see my instrument cluster's also cracked there
and I've got to get around to fixing that.
Up front, I ended up putting in,
what is it, it's not a super lift,
sky jacker coil spring in the front
that was supposed to be a leveling spring
but that actually picked it up two inches in the front,
which was about an inch more than it really needed,
but that was one of the best things I did to this truck
because it was at the point where it was just bottoming out
even on speed bumps, just straight to the bump stop,
and it was horrible.
That spring made a huge difference.
The thing that really took it over the top, though,
was I put this Bilstein shock on it,
and the Bilstein made night and day difference in this truck
versus both the stock shock and an Edelbrock shock
that I had on it after that.
I mean it was miserable to drive before
and now it's actually really really good,
but the truck is still sitting here and rotting.
I did just fix that Panhard bar situation
up under the front end, and I'm going
to get this thing going again,
start using it in my regular life
because I need to start towing my Jeep around
and doing some more four wheeling.
So maybe you didn't ask, but now you have the answer
about my own 99 Dodge truck four by four.