Destination Polaris is back at SuperATV again for a brand new Project X build. This time we made one badass lifted Ranger with Rear Steer, and we did the whole build in our new location in Shreveport, Louisiana.
This is one bovine you don’t want to grab by the horns. It’s packed with killer SuperATV parts and kits including a few that aren’t even for sale yet.
In fact, we built Full Steer with one goal in mind: to see how far you can push your UTV with only off-the-shelf parts. There’s no custom fabrication here, and you can get everything on it to make your own monster by walking into our Shreveport location (or, of course, by heading to SuperATV.com). Everything except bull horns, but those only make you go a little bit faster anyway.
Let’s see what makes this Full Steer buck.
We started with a brand new 2019 Polaris Ranger 1000. That gave us a baseline of 13 inches of ground clearance, a 62.5” width, and 27” tires. Those numbers will be bigger by the time we’re done with it.
We chose a Ranger XP 1000 because full-size Rangers are the most popular dual-use UTVs on the planet, and the 1000 leads the pack in terms of power and performance. If we’re going to get down and dirty with some southern mud, there’s no better option.
Step 1: Let’s get this thing lifted.
We wanted to make sure Full Steer could join the barrel club, so we gave it a SuperATV 6” Lift Kit and put that on top of a GDP 6” Portal Gear Lift.
That’s 12 inches of lift, plus we’ve increased the width by 15 inches (eight inches from portals, seven from the lift) for those of you keeping track. And the billet portal gear lift gives it a 45% gear reduction on top of the already low gear ratio the Ranger comes with from the factory.
You know what big gear reductions are good for? Turning big tires!
We put 38” Terminators on our 18” Healy Fast Series wheels. Our Terminators Tires love to chew through mud, but they have all-terrain features like a strong center lug for comfort and a segmented, angled lug for traction that make them fun to ride on the way to the mud hole too.
That 38” diameter is nothing to scoff at either. That’s a huge jump from the 27” stock and gives Full Steer an additional 5.5 inches of lift. That gets us up to 17.5 inches of lift total. We’re getting pretty tall now.
We’ve got big tires, so it’s time to beef up our axles.
We turn our monster tires with our top of the line X300 Axles. They use 300M alloy steel and high articulating CV joints. The advantage of 300M (and our secret sauce design) is that it can take a sudden torque load and flex instead of breaking at the CV. It flexes and then returns back to its normal position so Full Steer can keep on going.
Tough axles need a tough differential to go along with them. So we beefed up the stock Ranger diff with our billet aluminum case. We make it stronger by using steel helical inserts so that it stays mounted to the frame and doesn’t wallow out. We also thickened up the mounting locations and the rest of the housing in general. Not to mention, it’s made of billet aluminum—given the choice, we’ll pick billet over cast any day. It’s a diff that’s designed for the crazy action that Full Steer is built for.
Speaking of crazy action, even though we already lifted full steer by 17.5 inches, we were a bit worried that there might be some mud holes that were still too deep.
Enter SuperATV’s brand-spanking-new Depth Finder Snorkel Kit (it’s so new that it’s still “coming soon”). It channels the spirit of Depth Finder itself to get over 7 inches of extra clearance for air intake and output. Full Steer is ready to get buried up to its hood and keep kickin’.
Now let’s see where Full Steer gets its namesake.
The RIDE System Rear Steering kit is where it’s at. Full Steer’s turning radius was getting pretty hinky with that big lift, those big portals, and those 38” Terminators. With all that, it was just taking too long to turn around.
So, in classic SuperATV fashion, we built our very own rear steering kit to cut Full Steer’s turning radius almost in half. It’s a big monster of a vehicle that can turn on a dime.
You might have noticed that we don’t actually have a rear steer kit for sale yet, but it’s coming. Full Steer was rocking a prototype, but the finished product will be just as polished and feature-rich as everything else we sell.
For starters, the steering mechanism is controlled via a thumb-stick in the cab and has a toggle switch to switch between auto-centering and manual controls. Auto centering does just what it sounds like—it centers the steering when you let go of the stick, otherwise it stays right where you leave it.
It’s also got a dash-mounted LED display to let you know how hard you’re turned. That way you don’t have to keep staring at your rear wheels in your mirror.
To finish off this things smooth operation, we’ve included a system that will auto center the rear wheels if you’re over a certain speed. It makes transitioning from trail to road and back again easier and safer.
All that gives you (or in this case Tyler Greves, project lead and recurring face of SuperATV on Destination Polaris) control and maneuverability on big lifted and modified machines that is otherwise lost due to required steering stops, complicated suspension geometry, or both. That means riding on nastier trails and through deeper mud holes feels better than it ever has before.
We packed this thing with vehicle protection, bumpers, lights, jams, those horns, and custom graphics out the wazoo. It wouldn’t be a Project X build if it didn’t look the part after all.
We put SuperATV Front and Rear Bumpers with a 5000 lb Black Ops Winch in the front and 3500 lb Black Ops Winch on the rear. We stuck cube lights in the front and rear bumpers, too.
Speaking of lights, we had to put our LED whip lights on this thing. They’re app controlled to give you hundreds of flash patterns and millions of colors. You can never have too many lights (especially when you end up with mud covering most of them).
We traded the door nets for our aluminum doors and finished covering the cab with a rear windshield, a ProBox top with light bars, and a front flip windshield.
Finally we wrapped the whole thing and put the horns right up front.
It’s Full Steer with Rear Steer, and it’s rad. If you want to make your own Full Steer, just walk right into to our Shreveport, Louisiana store to get loaded up.
–The RIDE System Rear Steering Kit
-GDP 6” Portal Gear Lift with 45% gear reduction
–X300 Big Lift Kit Heavy-Duty Axles
-Heavy-Duty Front Differential Gear Case
