Rolling On
For the wheels, we have a lot of love for the stuff KMC makes, and the XD series is one of their most popular options. Specifically, we went with some 20x10 XD829 HOSS 2 wheels in gloss black. It’s a fantastic-looking wheel with just the right amount of visual pop, without being too flashy. Big thanks to Ron’s Tire and Motorsports in Idaho Falls, ID, for mounting and balancing the tires and wheels, and to Adrenaline Performance in Shelley, ID, for installing the lift and traction bars.
We may not be getting crazy with the power upgrades on Project Dirt Toy, but we did need a little bit of help. To that end, we installed a Bully Dog GT Platinum tuner. The GT has a ton of great features, but the one we really dig is the shift-on-the-fly tuning. Simply push a button while driving and adjust your tuning as needed. The only issue we ran into is that 6.0s are extremely cold-blooded, and the engine needs to have warmed up to a certain temperature before you can start changing the tuning. We’re talking a good 10 to 15 minutes of idling/driving before it was ready to shake things up.
Next on the list was a cold air intake from S&B. We knew we wanted the truck to breathe a little better, and S&B makes some of the best intakes out there. For this model year there’s only one option and it is a huge improvement over the stock intake. The tubes are much bigger and the ease with which you can replace the air filter is leaps and bounds ahead of the stock option. The old filter was a little hard to un-stick from the rest of the apparatus, but once that was out of the way, installing the S&B setup couldn’t have been easier. Overall, it maybe took an hour in our garage.
At the same time, we replaced the truck’s old batteries with a pair of D6500s from XS Power. XS specializes in AGM batteries, which stands for absorbed glass mat. What does that mean? An ultra-thin fiberglass mat is saturated to 95 percent capacity with battery acid then gets stacked between plates. Everything gets compressed then welded or soldered together. This process makes them almost completely immune to vibration, which is perfect for going off-road.