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The Manche 4600 Build (Carried over from Pirate)

tribal4krawler

tribal4krawler

DKA Motorsports
Joined
Jun 1, 2020
Member Number
1745
Messages
485
I toyed with the idea of building a 4600 for quite some time, and 2 years campaigned a 4900 UTV in Ultra4 and Dirt Riot with some success. The long term goal is to build a 4800 car but the budget for something like that isn’t there yet. My KOH Co-driver Lance Kirk and myself decided to see what was out for for 4600 cars already built but after some searching decided to just build one that we could know was done right and hadn’t been beat by years of racing.

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We ended up picking up this 1991 Jeep Comanche with a pretty sweet vintage paint job on it, and thrashed on it for a few months to get it ready in time for KOH2020. Unfortunately we got knocked out by electrical gremlins very very early (RM 6). At Teardown in TN we were able to keep the truck together for the first lap, then broke the motor mounts and pulled some sensors out of the motor and trashed the tcase, but still limped it around enough to finish and got 2nd place. At Nationals we were plagued by electrical gremlins again and did not complete the B loop. We also did 2 Renegades races, and we finished both of those (AOP and West VA). Basically what we have is a BJ Dana 60/Sterling 10.25 with 5.38 gears, Yukon Grizzly Lockers, hydro assist, Clayton 3 link, JKS ACOS Pro bumpstops, King 12" Reservoir Shocks, Rusty's leaf springs, 35x12.50r17 Maxxis Razr MTs with 17x9 Method MR105 beadlocks, full interior cage, etc. Now that we're at the end of season #1 with this truck, we're going to be replacing the very tired stock 4.0 with a 4.7 stroker, rebuilding the AW4 transmission, and hopefully re-doing the electrical system to get rid of all the electrical gremlins we keep having. Here's some pics from our year of racing.

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So for the 2021 season, we have two primary upgrades that I'm still trying to work out.

1. Electrical system - I'd love to have a barebones Jeep 4.0 harness that is simple to diagnose, and clearly marked fuses/relays. The truck is currently OBD2 (converted by the previous owner) but i'm considering converting it back to OBD1 just for simplicity. All we literally need is for the motor to run, everything in the cab is run off an SPOD. Do yall have any suggestions or comments on how to achieve this?

2. Fuel system - We currently have a 22 gallon Jaz cell with a homebuilt TJ fuel pump setup (similar to Genright) but we keep having problems with the fuel pump falling apart inside the tank. Now i'm thinking of running something like dual Bosch 044's that are direct wired and can be run as primary/backup. I'm thinking we should run these pumps inside the tank to keep them cool, with hydramat or walbro pickups in all 4 corners of the cell. Any pics or suggestions on how exactly we should do this would be greatly appreciated!
 
Thanks guys. We love it too, and are really hoping to have a more reliable race truck for the 2021 season. Jumping the table top at Crossbar was pretty sweet, I really didn't think the ole motor had enough guts to do it.

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So today I worked on getting the front fascia off, and to get things ready to pull the motor.

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I'm not sure when we'll be getting the new motor in yet, but i'm hoping in the next week or two. So today i started thinking, and I actually have a parts comanche out back that is I believe a 1987 Renix. I've heard people say in the past that renix injection is pretty simple, and easy to chop down (which is one of my major goals, to reduce the wiring harness and make it easier to diagnose issues. Do you guys think it'd be pretty crazy to go from OBD2, which is what this currently is (but hacked up and really needs a new harness) or should i pull the harness and ECU out of the parts manche and run Renix injection? Thoughts?
 
Awesome man! I think the pictures turned out great. Do you mind if I reshare these on our Instagram? I could tag you (or irate4x4) and give credit
 
Got the old drivetrain out of the Manche last night. Pretty wild how scorched the whole side of the transmission and underbody was from the ATF fire at Nationals. The new ATK 4.7 stroker arrives sometime today, we still need to take the AW4 to a transmission shop and have them freshen it up but otherwise looking pretty good.

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Making steady progress, the rebuilt transmission and ATK 4.7 are stabbed back in and we should be firing this thing up this week. Just waiting on new injectors to arrive on Monday. We also are upgrading our steering from Redneck Ram to PSC big bore. Other than that I’ve been inspecting welds and everything looks good. There’s a couple spots that I’ll probably clean up and weld again but nothing crazy.
 
Motor is running, and working on buttoning everything back up this weekend. The goal is to do the breakin and get a test drive in, and then we’ll start focusing on packing and figuring out spare parts storage in the bed.

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Forgot to mention PSC lied and didn’t have our stuff in stock so looks like we won’t be upgrading our steering afterall. Pretty big bummer.
 






Feel free to follow me on Youtube if you want, we'll have all kinds of stuff going forward from UTV racing to Ultra4 4600 and rock crawling our buggies.
 
Haven’t updated this in a while, but we lost the trans at KOH which resulted in me driving in reverse and coasting forward for about 30 miles to complete lap 1. Afterwards I decided to take a break on the truck and focus on the wife and kids UTVs that race in the TexPlex UTV Series. Last weekend we finally pulled the truck out and put the spare aw4 trans that I had in, but it’s still acting a little weird. I need to spend some more time driving it and see if it’ll work or if I need to start hunting for another AW4. Here’s a pic of the Manche with our race Polaris RS1 and Rzr Turbo that my wife and daughter race.
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So, not really anything to add in the past couple months, but I have come to a decision. I'm done racing 4600 Class. While there's some truly awesome guys in the class, and building this truck for 4600 was insane, fun, frustrating, and a lot of memories, it's just not fun for me to race in this class. This is mainly due to my prior experience of racing Ultra4 with UTV's and literally every time I've raced a course with the truck that I previously raced with an UTV, I was like "dang, I'm going SO slow compared to the last time I ran this". Sure, I could have probably tried to drive faster, but with these limited shocks, it seriously beats the crap out of you. So, what am I going to do? First of all, we're going to semi-retire the Comanche, and focus on UTV racing for the next couple of years. During that period, I'm going to transition the Manche from a 4600 into a 4500 truck. So we'll be working with real suspension, real air bumps, a real motor that actually makes power, etc etc.

If you're not familiar with the 4500 class, the basic gist of it is that it's an "factory appearing Unlimited" car with unlimited suspension, motor, trans, tcase, axles, etc. The limitations are that it must have a "Factory Style" frame from engine mounts to driver seat, the body needs to look like what it originally was (IE not all chopped up into something unrecognizable) the steering must have a mechanical linkage IE Steering box, and 37" DOT Tires. My goal is to keep this truck physically appearing pretty much exactly like it is, backhalfed with a 4link. I have some plans on how I'm going to basically redo the Unibody with a "boxed design with minimum dimensions of 1.5” x 3” x 0.120” ." as per the Ultra4 rulebook. Motor will most likely be a built LS3 with a TH400 and Atlas. The good thing is that we way, way overbuilt the cage when we originally built the truck, so I think we'll be able to retain alot of the cage during this rebuild. I think the motor swap will be interesting, because I plan on having the motor as far back as humanly possible both for balance as well as providing clearance upwards for the front axle. I expect ride height to stay about the same, but if anything I think it'll look even better on the 37s. Also now with being able to cut the floors for suspension components, we'll be able to improve the 3 link upper frame mount quite a bit. Should be interesting!
 
I read those first two lines and thought that the man he would soon be available 😳 …. Which would be sweet to have, it’s an awesome rig

I’m glad to see your building it and moving up! Can’t wait to see the build and it racing again. Be sure to get me parts lists!:beer:
 
Austin said:
I read those first two lines and thought that the man he would soon be available 😳 …. Which would be sweet to have, it’s an awesome rig

I’m glad to see your building it and moving up! Can’t wait to see the build and it racing again. Be sure to get me parts lists!:beer:
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Thanks for the support Austin and will do. There’s a chance that it gets done a lot sooner than I’m planning, as that’s usually how I roll but we’ll see.
 
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