By Brock Lewis
I was 17 years old when I bought this truck, a 2002 Mazda b4000 with 4×4 and a stick shift. It was formerly owned by an elderly gentleman, an employee of UBCO if some merchandise left in the glove box is to be believed. He used it to carry his canoe to paddle around the Okanagan’s mountain lakes. He passed away sometime in the mid 2010s and after it sat for a few years his wife sold it to me. It had an issue with its rear timing chain tensioner. I found a local shop willing to pull the motor, replace the tensioner and timing chain, and put it back together for $500. After three months, an attempted catalytic converter theft, and some unhelpful calls with that shop, I owed $3000 and they were putting a new motor in it. This would be the last time I ever allowed someone else to work on one of my vehicles. Once I got the truck back I started learning how to weld and built a roof rack and front bumper for it, and like many other highschoolers before me; I had to put in a 14″ subwoofer and the cheapest Bluetooth head unit I could find.
It was surprisingly capable off road, pretty bad on gas, hauled my bikes well enough, and the stereo was a whole lot of fun. I loved driving this truck and did so for the next year. Then the rear timing chain started to rattle.
It is admittedly my fault, I assumed the oil changes worked like my dr350s, change the oil filter every second interval. Its a real dumb mistake to make, but I didn’t have anyone to show me how to maintain a vehicle so I got to learn from experience. The cologne v6 is an interesting thing, three timing chains and a jackshaft allow the timing sets to nest neatly in the space leftover from the offset of the pistons. This compact design allowed ford to shoehorn this motor into nearly every vehicle they made at the time. It also makes replacing the timing set very expensive. I was in my first year at UBCO when this issue came up so I didn’t have the money or time to fix it. I drove the truck like this for a couple months until the motor spontaneously disassembled itself on the side of the highway.
I decided that the cologne v6 was not going back into this truck, its underpowered, bad on gas, and unreliable. I chose the 302 small block v8 as the ideal candidate for a swap. These motors are underpowered, bad on gas, but very reliable. I found a donor truck for scrap metal prices in Princeton and hauled it home. It was on this drive home that my buddy who came along for the ride asked if I could swap the twin traction beam front suspension over along with the motor, this comment is where the snowballing began.
Turns out there was a reason it was so cheap. While I was told that it had ran recently, the motor was full of water and completely seized. However, the chassis was good, the suspension was good, and the transmission was good, so I decided to do the dumbest but most entertaining thing possible. By the power of four guys and a can do attitude the chassis swap began. I also had to move garage. The rest of this build happened in my mothers garage. I will forever be grateful to her for allowing me space to undertake this project.
Now, I don’t have any photos or video for about eight months after this point. In this time I found a freshly rebuilt 300 cid for a good price, cut out a good chunk of the firewall, installed the motor, fabricated front body mounts, mounted the radiator, and did enough wiring to get the motor running.
This is the first start of the new motor. This was a very good day. A benefit of using an 80s motor is it just needs a 12v source and some gas to run. Not a lot of power, but very easy to repair.
Due to lack of funds, the next six months or so were very slow on progress. I built the new firewall, installed some gauges in a makeshift dashboard for testing purposes, and did a couple test drives.
Then my metal supplier brought in a bulk shipment of 1×2″ steel square tube for a good price, and with that I started the flatbed build.
Progress slowed to a crawl for about the next year as I was working full time as a field technician and doing a full course load, I managed to do a bit of wiring but that’s about it. The next bit of progress I have documented is the beginning of the shifter linkage build. A first draft certainly, this did work as a proof of concept for the shifter design that’s currently in the truck. Mainly it moves the shifter to a comfortable position for me, but it also shortens the throw a bit.
Again, time passes without much photographed progress. I did most of the wiring, built a body controller around an Arduino mega, reinstalled the stock dashboard. It was at this time that I got my first engineering job that lasted until November of 2024, some business shenanigans left my last paycheck in the form of a magneto X 3d printer. I had a few ender 3s before this but the larger build volume allowed me to start printing bigger projects.
This is one of those bigger projects. I designed the fenders in Fusion360, printed the first in PETG, covered it in fibreglass and resin, and learned something. I designed each part of the fender to be printed using the spiralized outer contour function common in most slicers. This method is great for minimizing material usage, but is prone to warpage for these large and relatively flat panels. The second fender was printed in ABS because it was cheaper, it warped even more. I used body filler and silica thickened epoxy to get the panels relatively flat. When I remake these panels I’ll print them out of glass fiber reinforced ABS and modify the model to increase the number of ribs on the flat panels.
In June of 2025 I was set to graduate from UBCO, I decided that I would drive this truck to the event. It needed bumpers, working gauges, and mudflaps to be legal. The rear bumper was fabricated from directional drilling rods I had collected while working on a drilling crew, the front bumper was the tubular bumper teenage me had built years ago, and mudflaps were mounted with some angle iron brackets in the rear and self tappers in the front. I ran the truck like this for a while, went on a couple camping trips, and generally enjoyed having my truck back on the road.
And that’s pretty much where the truck is today, I have done lots of maintenance items, moved my partner and I down to Vancouver with a trailer made from the original bed and chassis, built a spare tire mount, mounted an OEM front bumper. I have plans for air suspension, underbelly rock protection, active shock absorbers and lots of interior work. There is much more to come for this build, I’ll be doing some more detailed writing on further work as it gets done. Thanks for reading!