The whole point here is to make the truck’s nose do real work. Instead of letting incoming air spill around the radiator support and underhood sheet metal, we want to seal the front of the truck so the air entering the grille is trapped, pressurized, and routed where it matters: through the cooling stack and into the intake system. That’s why we’re packaging two Big-Ass filters from the Banks Ram-Air Intake System into the front plenum. Mounted vertically in canisters, they let us pull a large volume of filtered outside air from the nose of the truck instead of hot underhood air. A radiused filter entry and smooth transition into the intake tubes help keep restriction down, and the layout is being shaped around tire clearance, hood clearance, and the supercharger inlet. We’re also building in water control. The inlet slot needs a rain shield so water doesn’t go straight into the filter housing, and the canisters need drain holes so anything that gets past the deflector can get out. This is the same basic Ram-Air thinking we’ve used on our race trucks for decades: capture more air at the nose, keep it from bleeding away, and feed the engine and cooling system with a cleaner, denser, more controlled air supply. That matters more as speed climbs, because ram pressure starts to become useful and the cooling load goes up fast.
The episode begins with the team preparing the cab so it can be lowered onto the chassis with the engine already in place. The goal is to remove as little original sheet metal as possible. A cut line is laid out below the drip rail so one inboard section can come out as a single piece, while the larger challenge is the transmission area. The cab does not have a true transmission tunnel, only a small hump, and the Allison transmission is large enough that substantial modification is required.
After discussing the layout, the team decides the cut will likely need to extend all the way toward the yoke area. Once work begins, the firewall is removed, and they make an additional change to the plan by cutting out the steering pass-through as well. That area is doubled up and would be more trouble than it is worth to preserve, especially since steering location is already largely established from the dash. With the firewall section out, attention turns to cutting the transmission tunnel and cleaning up the sharp edges so the cab can be safely test-fit.
Before setting the cab on the Roadster Shop chassis, the team decides to reuse the stock body-mount arrangement in principle, but with new components. They contact Energy Suspension and source Hyper-Flex C10 body mounts. This matters because the Roadster Shop chassis uses the same compression-style body mount arrangement as a C10, rather than the C20 shear-style mounts.
That distinction is important to the build. The C20 setup uses mounts loaded in shear for more cushion and travel, while the C10 compression-style arrangement uses the more familiar double-donut style mount. The team considers that a more proven method for this application and converts to it accordingly. The Hyper-Flex mounts are polyurethane, chosen to provide a rigid enough connection to the chassis while still offering enough compliance for a comfortable ride. After checking the instructions, they note that the front, core-support, and rear positions use different combinations of bushings and hardware. A side-by-side comparison with the old rubber mounts shows just how worn the original pieces were, reinforcing the decision to replace them.
With the cab cut and the new mounts prepared, the team lowers the cab onto the chassis. They leave themselves room to roll the chassis as the cab comes down and proceed slowly to keep alignment under control. The fitment turns out better than expected.
Clearance at the intercooler is extremely tight but workable, and inside the cab the Allison transmission does intrude significantly, yet the rough cutting estimates prove to be close enough for the first fit. The front body mounts line up with bolts installed, while the rear mounts are only partially assembled at this stage, with the top portions in place but no bolts yet. Even so, the major milestone is achieved: the cab is now sitting on the chassis with the engine in place, confirming that the cutting strategy was fundamentally correct.
Once the cab is on, the team makes what they expect will be the last necessary cut to the inner fenders. That allows them to move on to mocking up the inner fenders, outer fenders, grille, and corner supports. The chassis is set on jack stands so they can inspect low clearances, especially around the oil pan, while also evaluating how the front sheet metal will fit around the engine package.
Even after trimming the stock inner fenders, it appears the suspension will still need to be drooped to get everything into place for mock-up. The team knows the truck will go through repeated cycles of assembly and disassembly over the next few weeks. In addition to the front sheet metal, they still need to resolve the exhaust, oil pan, and steering. With only a short time before the truck leaves for Empire, the immediate objective is to get enough of the body mocked up to establish where all major systems will live.
Gale then lays out the intake-system concept by referencing the Banks Sidewinder Type-R road race truck. On that truck, the air filters were mounted in the front plenum so that all air entering the nose was trapped in a sealed volume. That incoming air was then directed through the engine radiator, through the charge-air coolers, and into the engine through filtered inlets under pressure. As vehicle speed increased, the nose generated ram pressure, which is the basis of the Ram-Air approach Banks has used on race vehicles since 1960.
He wants to apply the same philosophy here: seal the nose so incoming air cannot bleed off around the sides or over the top, and route that captured air only where it is useful. In this truck, that means feeding both the cooling package and the engine intake. The proposed filters are large cylindrical elements with a 9-inch outside diameter at the sealing flange and a 6-inch inside diameter outlet. Gale describes them as very large filters capable of flowing substantial air with minimal restriction. He also emphasizes the importance of a generous inlet radius at the filter housing, noting that even a modest-looking radius can significantly improve flow.
The packaging study centers on placing the filters vertically in the front corners of the nose, while avoiding interference with the front tires at full compression and full lock. The current CAD mock-up uses 5-inch tubing on the outlet side, and the team agrees that 5 inches appears workable, though it is beginning to get tight. The filter canisters would likely be straight-walled aluminum cylinders sized to the filter diameter, with a lip that supports the element so it protrudes uniformly from the housing.
Air would enter each canister through a vertical slot in the front bulkhead area. Gale wants the slot sized for the required area, but also wants a rain shield incorporated so water entering through the slot is deflected rather than sent directly into the filter. Drain holes at the bottom of the aluminum housing would allow any collected water to escape instead of pooling and risking hydraulic damage to the blower or engine. From the filter outlet, the ducting would transition from the 6-inch filter outlet down to a 5-inch tube and then route toward the supercharger inlet. The bend radius must be kept as large and smooth as possible to avoid hurting flow.
The geometry is constrained by the hood, the blower drive, and the engine angle. Gale estimates roughly 20 degrees of outlet slope and notes that the centerline of the filter sits in a region where there is about 9 inches of vertical clearance near the front seating surface and about 9.75 inches farther back. That gives the team useful room to work with, but the tubes will likely pass through the hood. Gale prefers a layout where the angle is handled cleanly and the visible section remains straight for the best appearance. The final result is expected to feature two symmetrical intake tubes emerging through the hood, while still clearing the belt drive and other front-engine hardware.
After the intake discussion, Gale turns to the cooling package. A cardboard mock-up is being used to represent the radiator, sized from a stock reference but with the thickness increased by roughly 25 percent as an initial estimate. He cautions that thicker cores require more pressure differential or airflow velocity to move air through them, and this truck will generate heat quickly once power is turned up. Because the vehicle will accelerate hard and reach high speed rapidly, the cooling system must be able to absorb heat spikes and then recover quickly when the driver lifts.
Gale suggests that a radiator around 3 inches thick may be close to what is needed, though final row count and construction still need to be confirmed with the heat-exchanger supplier. Ahead of that radiator, the truck still needs an air-to-water charge-air cooler heat exchanger and an air-conditioning condenser, which adds stack depth and packaging difficulty. He references the narrower condenser used on the Banks 4-liter Jeep intercooled turbo kit as a possible model for a tighter package.
Fan placement is a major unresolved issue because the front pulley system consumes valuable space behind the radiator. Gale notes that this truck will need serious airflow, not a pair of small low-capacity fans. One possible solution is to place fans against or near the core and shroud them so they pull through the available area on each side of the pulley obstruction. The team discusses drawing air through the front heat exchangers and then forcing it through the radiator, but all of that depends on the final scanned geometry and CAD packaging.
A key part of the overall strategy is sealing the front end so captured air is forced through the cooling stack and intake system instead of escaping. The team identifies the headlight support area as a likely location for the vertical intake slots feeding the two filters. Baffles will be needed to prevent air from bleeding sideways, and the upper structure must also be sealed to the hood so air does not simply spill over the top of the cooling package.
They examine factory deflector pieces and consider reusing or adapting them, but the main requirement is functional sealing rather than preserving stock parts. Looking lower in the nose, they also discuss whether to modify the bumper and valence area to admit more air. Gale is open to trimming or reshaping those parts, possibly adding styled openings rather than simple round holes, because any additional captured air becomes more valuable as speed rises. At 50, 60, and 70 mph, ram-air effects become increasingly important, reducing dependence on fans just when the engine is producing the most heat.
The next practical step is to 3D-scan the front end, engine, radiator space, and tire envelope at full compression and full lock. Once those hard points are in CAD, the team can begin laying out the intake canisters, ducting, cooling stack, fan package, and surrounding sheet metal with confidence. Gale points out that this is the same process Banks used on the road race truck, where the entire vehicle, from firewall forward, was modeled in CAD and built around a tightly integrated chassis and aero package.
That comparison also reinforces the seriousness of the current build. Gale describes the truck as something that may look like an old farm truck on the outside, but underneath is being engineered like a race vehicle. He mentions broader ambitions, including Pikes Peak, and references lessons learned from the road race truck, particularly transmission durability and shifting control under aggressive throttle and deceleration transients. For this truck, the immediate focus remains the front-end packaging, but the engineering mindset is clearly the same: treat the vehicle as a serious high-performance machine, solve the airflow and cooling problems properly, and build the systems around measured geometry rather than guesswork.
The episode closes with that direction established. The cab is on the chassis, the front sheet metal is being mocked up, and the intake and cooling concepts are now defined well enough for scanning and fabrication to begin.