I have 98 ram 1500 ext cab. 4 doors, but not 4wd. I like the way 2wd trucks perform, rather than 4wd. I'm interested in transforming my nice , drive to work everyday, into a beast of a rally truck.
the truck is mostly stock,still. I've added 31in Dayton Timberlines, good tires for hwy but not sure how much I can push them off road, Flowmaster duals, and a K/N cold air kit.
I'm not much interested in mud, but I'm not one to go around! Iwould like to race on dirt trails and launch my beast into the air.
I've a 5.9L w/130000 miles and I've just had the tranny rebuilt.
I'm looking for some suggestions on what direction to go in with the engine, suspension, And my terrible sounding rearend.
I would like to do as much as I can myself. I'm in school now for automotive tech, but I recently started and the courses are mainly geared toward stock not performance building.
Any suggestions will be appreciated.

 

If you want to rally with it, you're defintiely going to need some different axles...especially with that kind of mileage on your originals [&:]

 

Its gona cost a decent amount of cash to do all of this. As said axels...really really good suspension setup....some motor work....tires....I would put a cage and different belts in it if your really gona get serious or be doin alot of speeding and jumping......you will break alot of stock stuff that I cant even think of, especially with the miles on the truck as it is.

 

Any suggestion on the axles/

 

dana 70 with 4.56's would be really good.. or 4.10's.. and if you were gonna go really nuts.. coil over rear conversion might help that flex out .. and you would be able to adjust and perfect the preload and suspension rate for it..

 

The hardcore guys run IFS for Prerunners/Rally's. Probably a Dana 44 or 50 IFS would work, its all custom too, it'd be bad *** but take lots of fabing stuff cause if you half *** it the first time she sees airs you'll be breaking lots of things.

You gotta consider things like stronger motor mounts, trans mounts, rediculas amounts of suspension articulation, ect.

 

a good starting place to figure out where to begin on your truck, is to go pick up a few offroading mags. there are alot of nice prerunners in there, and you can see the amount and type of custom work necessary to get nice jumping truck.

 

IFS = independent FRONT suspension.

Show some pics when you break it the first time out. I'm a crew chief for an off-road rally team and 3500 pound cars tend to have issues with bending/breaking stuff, I can't imagine what a full sized truck will do to itself without a tube frame and lots of $$ in suspension and reinforcement.