Tilden Motorsports

I am Kevin Stearns, pilot of the 4502 car for BDS Suspension to L You don't say action. You don't say action. No, you have one of those little clappy things that. . . Action! No? No. You don't say action. No, you don't say action. I need you to say action. Action. You don't mean it though. Say action. So we started building this car in a very tight timeframe. We gave ourselves 90 days to build this car from a design that my shop foreman Jason Howard had put together. He designed it in CAD and we had a few very specific criteria that we wanted to follow when we built this car. Seeing as Howard had a car that was once a daily driver in a trail truck turned into a race car. We wanted to eliminate some of the issues, add serviceability and safety being real important to us. When we designed this car went ahead and used two inch tubing throughout the whole car. It might be a little bit heavier but it'super durable and it'safe and that's what we're looking for. The design is something kind of unique and it's in its own class, in the 4500 class. It's low. It's got a real modular belly underneath. We used a four link in the front instead of a three link track bar. Went that route because no matter what you do with a three link track bar, at speed through the whoops you're sawing up the wheel, non-stop. It's easy and an endurance race and it isn't very confidence inspiring. I spent hundreds of hours on my last on a rate playing with track bar angles and steering pickup points and this and that. In this class we have to have mechanical steering as one of the rules amongst some other rules. To accomplish a true four link and keep mechanical steering is kind of a challenge. Again, Jason and some really close friends of mine, we came together and Incad designed the steering system on this car which is unique because the steering box is located underneath the floor of the car right under my legs in fact. It's a rod that comes right off the pit in the arm, down to the steering arm and the pickup points are exactly on center with the pivot points of the front suspension. What that netted us was in straight travel down a whooped out road or race course to see in travel where we have zero b It's very confidence inspiring. We use a full hydraulic style ram on the front but it'still mechanically driven from the steering box under the seat and the linkages and that really gives you a positive feel in the desert too and at speed that's un As I work through the car I'll point out some of the sponsors and their products and we actually race with a sell and we believe on showing and producing a product ourselves and utilizing and racing for our R&D to site these other companies. I'll start with the front of the car and I'll work to the back. We've got the best in the business, a Warn Winch, it's a 9. 0, it's a comp winch, it's lightweight, it'small, powerful, fast, reliable. It's always going to be there for us so Warn's n Right behind the Warn winch we have a CVR heat exchanger for the transmission in the normal radiator location of a truck It's a LS-based V8, it's actually LS2 with A of our heads, our Tilt-N-Motor Sports Cam package, our Tilt-N-Motor Sports oil p We kind of took the approach with this again that we want to stay conservative, it makes maybe 600 horsepower at the flywheel, maybe a hair more, but it keeps the plane tilt of this class focused on being a driver's class and that's what we really want to showcase with the vehicles, being a driver's class and not overpowering the car. Bolted to it in the midship of the car is a 4L80. Again this is a little bit different, I don't know, too many people in our class running a 4L80. We have maxim That guy builds the best in the industry, he builds a lot of truck to truck trans, a lot of all-terrain guys trans and if you want to get trans that's a good guy to pick up with. That fourth gear is kind of a critical thing for us because we want to run axle bearing that gives us a broad range and we can actually stay in 2-1 on some of the courses and some of the sections and shift all the way through fourth and use that over drive gear to kind of stretch our ability to go fast in 2-1. And then when we hit the rocks, 2-1 and 5-13 and 37's doesn't always give you the crawl ratio you want so we teamed up with Off-Rate Designs, we married one of the magnet boxes up to the back of that 4L80 bolted right up, put our 205 on the back of that so basic 205 rebuild from Off-Rate Designs, those guys know exactly what to do to those things, twin stick it so we can do front digs, rear digs, it's a bulletproof setup that the magnet box has a giant input shaft and it's not going to break so that's kind of a bulletproof drive that we can do on our Tilden Motorsports engine through the maxim From there our power is split off via self-made drive lines that built us some 1350CV shafts. Real fortunate in the way the car kind of laid out our front shaft and rear shaft are within a half inch of each other so we only have to carry one spare on the car, they're both full CV 1350 shafts, to get that we have a carrier bearing on the front drive shaft, the double set it back so we have spares of those but we don't carry that on the car, we'll carry a couple extra e-juilines and stuff during the race and so far we've been real fortunate with that. Those drive shafts run into our axles so again we want a bulletproof 10. 5 inch ring gear stuff is great but for the money, for us and the durability and ease of getting parts went ahead and used the Torx Super 14 bolt differential. We utilize an ARB airlocker and in the rear we go full spool. The 14 bolt I think is a super economical way to get max strength per dollar. Connecting those Super 14 thirds are our CV axle shafts. We have 300M both in the front and the rear, there are hubs, drive flanges, everything. Connected to those axles are some trail gear 17 inch bead locks. We use those bead locks to clamp on the best tires in Ultra 4 right now and I think probably on the market which is the Nitto Grappler. All the Nitto brands and products are great products but we really thought to be recognizing and get on Team Nitto because we knew that this tire is going to be the tire that we want to run and we want to get on flat and we want maxim Block shocks, 5 inch body coilover and a 2. 5 inch body bypass and what that's going to give you is our class rule of a diameter and it's a 14 inch travel shock so the shock can only travel 14 inches. Again per the world we got real creative with the way we mounted them, they can't be mounted on the arms, they have to be mounted on the axles to limit the travel but were still able to net about 15 inches of travel out of the front and a solid 16 out of the rear. Wayne at Fox did some awesome tuning for us right before the Texas race and really dialed them and we couldn't be more happy with those as well. We built a really cooling module, containment and toolbox which kind of sounds Over the years I've lost my fair share of tool bags at the King of the Hammers and I decided this year we're going to have something built into the car that holds the tools so that toolbox holds not only our core containers but our safety gear, our recovery gear and our tools so everything's kind of compacted with that one box and secure. No lost parts. We use only the best Mac tie downs for our spare tires system where we'll ratchet the strap down quickly if you need to spare it's quick to come off and go back on. We hold 32 gallons of fuel in the car so we're always trying to stretch our pits out as long as possible and we never want to stop but we never want to carry and have the car's weight change with any more fuel than that. In a nutshell that's kind of the car. We'real pleased with it and we're looking forward to the next race which is going to be Stampede in Northern California. It's kind of our home track so we'll be looking to see out there.