One of the things we love to see is a custom truck completely flat on the ground with a killer set of wheels that look literally sucked up into the fenders. The stance can be hard to achieve, with some trucks being more difficult to work on than others. The main issue in achieving that in-the-weeds look is the diameter of the wheels and tires chosen. Fitting fairly diminutive 20-inch or 22-inch wheels under a fullsize truck does not require anywhere near the amount of modifications that a 24-, 26- or even 28-inch wheel and tire combination would need to clear.

It's not always best to admit, but many of the lifted suspension installations we do in the magazine see more time on the road commuting and looking cool than they do getting tossed around in the dirt. Unfortunately, the form has taken the center stage with function merely a backup singer in the song. It's high time to change that. Many of you have trucks that get used for their designed purpose, and see just as much time on as off the road—basically, a true balance of work and play. We are turning the focus your way with this new project.

After making our 2000 Silverado project truck sit nice and low with the help of an airbagged suspension, the next step was to take the truck from Master Image Customs to Unrestricted Auto Trends in Lake Elsinore, California. Jake and Al Provoost, along with Angel Esqueleto were going to make the body as smooth as it was the day it rolled off the production line and look even better than the engineers could have ever imagined. This was a massive undertaking, as the truck was a former work truck and the body had seen better days. It hauled everything—concrete, rocks and wheelbarrows—from jobsite to jobsite with little care in the world as to what it looked like. With less than two months before its debut at the SEMA show, a lot of work still had to be done.

Last month we showed you the first of a series of articles on our latest buildup, a 2000 Silverado dubbed Project New Guy. Master Image Customs in Montclair, California, took care of the front suspension in a couple of hours, even installing new wheel hubs and SSBC rotors and calipers. With that complete, it was only a matter of tearing apart the rear suspension and bolting in the KP Components cantilevered four-link and Watt's link kit, along with the SSBC rear brake kit. For our 22-inch wheel and tire combo, the KP kit was a perfect choice to drop the rear nice and low. Follow along to see how easy it is to install a full rear suspension slamming your frame on the ground and making it ride like a Cadillac.

I was hired to work as the Associate Editor of Truckin’ in early September of 2010. For the first three months of working at the mag, I was truck-less. That was until I picked up the perfect project truck, a 2000 Chevy Silverado that had been used as a work vehicle, and for $3,000, I couldn’t beat it. It was in sad shape, which made the need to fix it up taste that much sweeter. After talking with Editor Dan Ward, I decided that I wanted to build a daily driveable ’bagged show vehicle.

Power is fun, sexy, and one of the first desires for all hot rodders and custom truck enthusiasts. It takes your breath away and it helps knock out the cobwebs in your head after a long 9-5. Power can also be dangerous, especially if you accelerate so fast that your brakes can’t slow you back down. Out of control with you holding on for dear life, your truck can easily be turned into a 5,000-pound missile if you don’t plan ahead. As a wise man once told me, “Plan ahead, it wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.” If you’ve been wondering how to make your truck safer, stop better, and keep yourself out of precarious situations, we have the solution for you—hydraboost.

It sounded impossible to anyone who enjoyed sleeping, seeing their families, or who didn’t enjoy donuts and energy drinks. What it consisted of was building a back half from scratch, installing an engine and transmission, wiring and plumbing said engine, installing the brakes along with the front suspension and hydraulic brake assist unit, and narrowing the rearend, cutting the bed and front fenders for clearance, running the truck on a chassis dyno and tuning the truck, and assembling pieces as they came in from paint and body. All of this needed to be accomplished in only six days so that Project Novakane could compete at THROWDOWN. Deadlines suck.

Say it with me, “Six speed.” Doesn’t it just roll off of your tongue? When you think of a performance car or truck, what are the first few things you think of? High-horsepower engine. Check. Impressive handling. Check. Manual transmission. Absolutely. We couldn’t possibly put on a skirt and opt out of a manual transmission when it came time for us to back our blown LSX376 engine with a tranny. That’s like calling a stock pickup a muscle truck just because you slapped some SS stickers on it. Project Novakane’s persona is that of unadulterated fun. Performance is the first and only thought, not afterthought, and for that reason, we contacted Hurst Driveline Conversions for one of its Tremec T-56 Magnum kits. Hurst Driveline Conversions is one of the nation’s top Tremec dealers and they have plug-and-play manual transmission kits for popular Chevy muscle cars and ’60-’72 Chevy C10s, custom setups for street rods, and basic kits containing the major components for a late-model truck like our ’04 GMC Sierra. Dozens of upgrades are available once the initial kit is decided upon and your project truck will have everything it needs once the order is placed with Hurst Driveline Conversions.

In a perfect world, you add a few vital bolt-ons to your engine and it says “thank you” by way of producing more horsepower, more torque, and improved mileage. Welcome to the perfect world. Last month, we showed you the complete engine assembly of our GM Performance Parts LSX376 crate engine, complete with MagnaCharger TVS2300 supercharger, American Racing Headers long-tube headers, Lingenfelter heavy-duty tensioner with billet pulleys, and ATI Racing 8-rib pulley conversion. With the engine ready to rock and roll, we loaded it up and drove over to Westech Performance, in Mira Loma, California, to see just how much power our Gen IV small-block would muster.

Project Novakane suffered a temporary lock down after the birth of my son. Life got in the way of going fast, and that’s why you haven’t seen any updates in a few months. But now we’re back on schedule and ready to assemble the heart of our beast. A quick recap is in order; you’ll remember us pulling out the worn-out factory 4.8L and ordering a boost-friendly GM Performance Parts LSX376 crate engine. That 6.2L LSX engine is going to be fitted with a MagnaCharger TVS 2300 supercharger, American Racing Headers long-tube headers, an ATI Racing 8-rib pulley setup, LS7 throttle body, complete ARP bolt kit, and new sensors/OE parts from Summit Racing. In the last Novakane installment, we showed you the necessary parts to make your GM truck engine swap go more smoothly and what parts we recommend upgrading for optimum performance. In this issue, we’ll show you how everything goes together in preparation for our break-in and engine dyno appointment in next month’s issue. For photography and illustration purposes, we’re going to show you the engine’s assembly on an engine stand, this way you’ll be able to get a clear idea of what our new engine will look like before we drop it in our ’04 GMC Sierra. If going fast gives you tingles and jingles, check out our LSX376 engine buildup and don’t miss next month where we’ll see just how much power our combo makes.

Apair of roller skates without the wheels is just an ugly pair of shoes and similarly, we couldn’t exactly call our ’09 Suzuki Equator "Project Drift King" if it didn’t have a stellar suspension that could withstand the beatings we had planned. Thankfully, a creative plan was devised to turn the not-so-easy-to-lower Equator/Frontier platform into a real beast of a midsized pickup. Back when phantom dualies were all the rage in the early’90s, coilovers were booming because of the Pro Street roots many of those custom trucks shared. Coilovers are a great upgrade to most suspensions because they allow proper fine-tuning and can be easily adjusted to meet different driving/track conditions. For Drift King, we called up QA1 and ordered a set of their trick double-adjustable shocks along with the proper length and rate coil springs. This combo would allow us to manipulate the Equator’s ride height and handling characteristics for picture-perfect drifts.

They Call It Powdercoating, But What Is It?
Powdercoating media is a thermosetting powder substance that is made up of polyester epoxy and acrylic resin, combined with various cross-linking compounds. What all that fancy terminology means is a durable, show-ready coating that protects all types of metals. The powder particles are so fine they resemble talcum powder. The spray application uses a fluidized bed as a feed hopper to hold the powder and fluidize it so that it can be pumped to the tip of the spray gun using compressed air to transport it from the feed hopper. The spray gun is designed to create an electrostatic charge known as corona charging, or by frictional contact with the inside of the gun barrel, called tribo charging. Positively charged particles are then attracted to the negative ground metallic parts causing static cling. Grounded powdercoat parts are then put into a baking oven to heat the powder particles causing them to transform into liquid form and then cure.

We like to be the custom truck guinea pig for you. Whether it be making mistakes during an install, getting so close to finishing a project only to need extra parts, or even buying the wrong parts when we thought they would work, we like to help you know the ins and outs of an install before you crack open the toolbox. When it came time to drop in the GM Performance Parts LSX376 engine into our Project Novakane '04 GMC Sierra, we quickly learned that swapping a high-performance engine where a factory 4.8L once resided wasn't as easy as just bolting it in place.

When it came time to pull the worn-out, 150,000+ miles 4.8L V-8 out of the '04 GMC Sierra we nicknamed Project Novakane, we didn't want a little more power, we wanted monster power. Thankfully, making big power out of a relatively small engine is as easy as intelligently choosing the right combination of engine, power adder, drivetrain, and also understanding the limits to which you can push your combo. This part of the buildup was the most intense, most heavily researched, and most exciting, after all, the engine is the heart and soul of a performance truck.

Part V It's as addicting as Rock Band, Facebook, and texting, combined. Horsepower-once it gets into your veins, there is no turning back. After doing several basic modifications (including Banks air intake, headers, exhaust, and programmer) to our '04 GMC Sierra, dubbed Novakane, and seeing immediate results, the desire to go faster never relinquished its stronghold. Knowing our tired 4.8L, with 150,000 miles on the odometer, wouldn't hold up much longer to the extreme abuse we were putting it through, we opted to make the most of its last days by bolting on the same parts you may be considering for your truck. Rather than pull the engine, we left it in place, and we also didn't remove the factory aluminum heads thinking the average Joe wouldn't want to pull them either. For the shade tree mechanic, all of these installs could be done in your garage and depending on your engine's history and modifications, you could expect similar horsepower increases.

As a grown man, I can't explain it, but the sound and smell of a burnout makes me smile. It's a phenomenon we're sure you can relate to. With that said, nothing is worse than trying to do a burnout, only to suffer the "one-wheel-peel" shame. Most 1/2-ton trucks leave the assembly plant with an open differential sending power only to the passenger-side rear wheel and tire. If you're lucky, or if you checked off the options box at the dealer, your truck may have a posi or locking differential and your truck benefits from sure-footed traction. If not, don't sweat it because this month's installment of our Project Novakane '04 GMC Sierra buildup is for you.

Going fast is sexy. The smell of tire smoke, sounds of a chest-thumping V-8 roar, and the smile you get when you leave an inferior car at a stoplight-it's a beautiful thing. Power will, however, rarely save your life. Whereas we don't spend as much time talking about safety as we do adding more ponies, when it comes time for our own daily drivers and projects alike, we don't skimp on brakes. When researching brakes for our '04 GMC Sierra, dubbed Novakane, engineering, reliability, and street/track performance were key areas of concern. With our plans to autocross and road race this truck, the brake system upgrade had to bring our 4,300-pound truck to a neck-snapping halt.

Ever thought you could make that fun turn by your house going a little faster than normal, only to realize you've just pushed your truck past its limits? You get that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, your knuckles get white, and usually that turn ends up not being very fun at all. If you can relate to that story, this tech article is for you. Our used and abused '04 Sierra felt more like a school bus trying to turn at speed and with a worn-out stock suspension, puny 16-inch wheels and 275/60R16 donuts, along with no rear sway bar, the truck wasn't raising any hairs on the back of our necks. To get to the bottom of our stock misery, we rented a runway at a private airport and strapped on Racepak's latest GPS data acquisition gear, the G2X, for incredible real-world performance information. This way, we'll know exactly what our stock 0-60 mph, slalom, 1/4-mile, and 80-0 braking figures look like. Once the testing was complete, the data told us what we suspected; our truck was slow, handled like a barge, and was a real buzz kill. No worries, we had a plan.

Are you in the same category as many of us-holding onto your truck and waiting to see what happens with this crazy economy? With truck owners holding onto their pride and joys longer than ever before, we wanted to address this increase in ownership time by providing you a tech section every issue dedicated to monthly maintenance. Maintenance is key to a long term, good-running truck and it may surprise you to find out how many aftermarket companies cater to the maintenance side, in addition to the performance side. We purchased our '04 GMC Sierra dubbed Project Novakane to be a street-driven performance truck and with 144,000 miles and without knowing much about the previous owners' maintenance schedule, we didn't want to drive another mile with old, worn-out parts and fluids.

No More Vent Windows
Mike's truck build is reminiscent of the '69 Penske TransAm Camaro, which if you know anything about the F-body cars, lost their vent windows in '68. Unfortunately, GM decided to leave the vent windows in the trucks until '87, so we had a small design conflict. Luckily for us, our sixth stop on the tour was to One Piece Products in Whittier, California, to have Ben Tapia, designer of the kit, fill our new doors with solid side glass.

Buildin' An Ice Box
One of the last major mods we made to the Brown Bomber before we really hit the superheated roads of the southwest was to install an A/C system. From the outset, we made a firm decision not to drive through middle-America in August with no A/C. We're hardcore, but we aren't stupid. Our trip was going to take us through the 115-degree heat of Arizona and the 90-percent humidity of Louisiana, and merely driving faster with the windows down wasn't going to cut it. Luckily for us, Vintage Air is in the business of building heating and cooling systems for just about anything under the sun, including Mike's '73 Chevy C10, which will save us a ton of time tracking down factory stuff.

The Essentials
After getting the stance nailed and the truck handling properly, it was time to turn our attention to the cosmetics and creature comforts of the '73 Chevy C10. Part of the reason Mike originally bought this truck was because it was cheap, which meant that it was trashed. That's to be expected when you pay a thousand bucks for a 37-year-old truck. When dealing with an older truck, there are certain things that will either take too long to bring back to its original state or that just can't be fixed. Rubber seals dry rot, sheetmetal rusts, parts get lost etc. Lucky for us gearheads there is Classic Industries. Classic Industries has been offering restoration parts for cars and trucks for as long as we can remember.

Premium Pivots = Better Handling
Last month we showed you how to lower your '73-'87 Chevy/GMC truck with new suspension products. A quality suspension is vital to a daily driver, but I quickly realized that since my '73 had a better stance and suspension parts, I needed to get it aligned so that it would steer straight and handle properly in all driving situations. The problem was that the original rubber suspension bushings were so worn out that they were no longer round. The truck couldn't be aligned properly until I replaced them, so the next place I took the Brown Bomber to was Energy Suspension's corporate headquarters located in San Clemente, California. The company's R&D facility was the perfect spot to learn the merits of Energy Suspensions' Hyper-Flex polyurethane bushing technology and get the truck on track for miles and miles of great driving experiences.