Every high-profile company needs to have a vehicle stuffed with its product line to roll out to shows and demonstrate exactly what the company is made of. For MTX, its latest project in a long line of special weapons that the company has chosen to hook up in this '03 S-10 Xtreme. With the help of the company's Show Vehicle Operations Team, the truck was torn apart within the walls of MTX's Monroe, Wisconsin, facility and transformed into a devastating combination of sound and style.
Todd Broge started off by removing the lower control arms up front and replacing them with Air Ride Technologies' tubular A-arms along with a new set of shocks to dampen the ride. The factory coils were also removed and replaced with CoolRide 'bags and plumbed with 1/2-inch line. To set the rear of the truck down, the entire back half was cut and replaced with Air Ride's RoadGRATER wishbone suspension. The new Air Ride suspension allowed the truck to lay out on 20-inch KMC Venoms with Spin-Tek Stunner spinners that were shod in 35-series BFGoodrich G-force rubber.
A few modifications were necessary to accommodate the rear suspension travel as well as the planned blow-through box. The center of the floor was measured and cut for the rear axle, and the factory wheelwells were cut out so they could be replaced with tubs. Beneath the bed, the stock gas tank was removed and replaced with a custom rack made to hold the nine SVR 80 deep-cycle batteries that would power the system. A smaller gas tank was fabricated and mounted below the bed with just enough capacity to get the truck in and out of shows. At the front of the bed, some more measurements were taken, a few lines were marked, and then a 51x14-inch hole was cut for the blow-through.
From there, Jason Planck and Craig Marsh began tackling the custom audio and video system that would envelop the truck. The first order of business was to completely rip out the interior so that each panel could be covered using Dynamat Xtreme. Before the sound-dampening material was placed over the back wall of the cab, though, a matching hole was cut out for the blow-through sub enclosure. Craig went to work constructing fiberglass panels for the doors, while Jason took care of the fiberglass baffle for the four 10-inch MTX Thunder 9500 subs. The passenger-side airbag was removed and replaced with a fiberglass panel to support the Alpine DVD head unit.
Next, the duo focused its attention on the bed of the truck. Jason began construction on the sub enclosure and, keeping in mind the styling that the rest of the truck would receive, formed a fiberglass structure that wrapped around the subs and then sealed it with a plexiglass window. Craig followed suit and created a complete fiberglass tub that houses the 15-inch ICON-TV monitor and accented it using diamond plate. An arc-shaped amp rack was formed to perfectly support four MTX Thunder 801D amps, and a fiberglass piece was shaped over the tailgate to house two 8-inch ICON-TV monitors. The final fiberglass task was producing a cover for the bed with tribals cut into the front that would allow audiences to see all the hard work they had accomplished.