Thoughts?

Yeah, I think that you should listen to the guys here and on RDC that are trying to tell you that you need to relax a little.

25" WHAT? Travel? you are going to build a trophy truck out of an Xterra? Did you not see what I wrote about wheelbase? 600HP? Why? You don't know what you need. You don't know what you want. You don't know what you are talking about. When you go on a racers site and talk about your skinny pedal being your own limitation and how you are used to driving fast in the desert you look like an idiot.

You have no clue what fast in the desert is to those guys.

I'll try this again since you are young and have a tendancy not to listen. You want to build a tube chassis 600HP 25inches of travel race car that's fine. Don't start with a stock Xterra. I have one of those two "kits" on the market. You will run into limitations with a "stock" vehicle. ESPECIALLY since we are likely talking about your daily driver.

Let's get this straight: you ARE talking about racing your daily driver right? Great. Now stop. It's your transportation. Once you cage and tube it, and link it (you will have to to keep up with the monster 25" front end you want) you will have to cut the rear body, cut the rear of the frame, install a fuell cell, and eliminate all of the creature conforts of a streetable vehicle to make it raceworthy.

Race trucks don't have AC or power windows after all. I really was trying to be delicate for you but you don't get it. Start small. I understand that at 20 you know everything and you managed something for what I'm sure was a great career. Just slow down. Learn about suspension. Learn about scrub,camber change, and ackerman angle.

Are you planning on drawing up everything in solidworks and then just cutting and welding it together? Do you have a bender? Are you planning on MIG or TIG welding it? How well do you weld?What kind of metal are you planning on using? 4130? DOM? Cromolly? Mild steel? Do you know the properties of metals when it comes to building a truck and protecting your head?

How much do you know about cage design?

My point is that you don't take a stock truck and turn it into a racecar overnight. It takes an eduaciton, skill and an understanding of a great number of skills before you just slap a number to the side of a car and enter a race. It's not that easy.

And the worst thing you can do is take the car that gets you from home to school and to work and back and start cutting it up without knowing what you are doing just because you got a hair up your ass from seeing something cool on the internet.



Oh yeah. Since you seem to think that I don't know what I'm talking about here's mine:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=nfB-RvmVaTU