2013 Ford F-250 - Project Super Dirty: Part 4

For the Ultimate Adventure this year we have been building a Ford F-250 at Shaffer’s Off Road in Alameda, California. The goal is a big tough truck to lead our group of four-wheelers over a weeklong off-road trip, the Ultimate Adventure. The F-250 is a great platform because it is a body-on-frame construction, and it has solid axles front and rear and a big diesel engine. Our regular cab longbed truck is a base model with no frills, and we decided to shorten it up into a shortbed to make it more agile off-road. We also opted to keep the stock axles but upgrade them with locking differentials and portal gearboxes. These upgrades will send power to all four wheels when selected and offer 5 inches of additional ground clearance as well as 1 1⁄2 times the axle gearing, perfect for big 40-inch tires.

These upgrades will send power to all four wheels

Though we don’t usually know where Editor-in-Chief Rick Péwé is taking our troop for the UA (our job is to build the truck, he decides where we’re going), we did gamble that this year’s trip may see excessive mud when he mentioned we would want 3-foot-high vent hoses, maybe higher. With deep mud on the mind, we decided portal gearboxes would be a great addition to the Super Dirty. The added ground clearance under the differentials not only helps in rocks but also allows the tires to get down in ruts without plowing the diffs into dirt and muck. This month we’ll show you the axles we built front and rear.

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