By The Ford F-150 is the best selling truck in America. In fact, including all passenger vehicles, it’s the second-best selling thing on four wheels worldwide. Thus, it makes sense that there are a lot of aftermarket options for Ford F-series pickups of all kinds, from the King Ranch and Lariat to the Supercrew and the Raptor.
The Motoroso F-150 started life as a 2015 Ford F-150 XLT 4×4 Sport with the twin-turbo Ecoboost V6 engine. Yikes, that’s a lot of letters and numbers. The goal was to create an off-road capable project vehicle that would be worthy of the show floor at SEMA using nothing but bolt-on parts and doing all the installation ourselves. Why? Because trust us, if we can do it, you can do it. The build was started in October of 2016, and by November 1st of 2016 it was on the show floor at SEMA in the Ford Out Front booth. Since that time, it’s done 45,000 miles of important Motoroso shop duty, including towing trailers, hauling motorcycles to the race track, and hooning wildly out in the dunes. Despite the mileage, all the mods look, sound, and perform just like they did when we built it in the first place.
Any time you’re planning a build, you’re gonna want to think about your design theme and style. In this case, we went for stealth… on a full-size 4-door pickup truck. This ended up meaning a lot of black with minimal bling. The name of the grille we ended up using is fitting: the T-Rex X Metal Stealth Tactical Grille, which comes in matte black with black studs and a matching black wire mesh grille insert. The installation on the grille is pretty straightforward, using all the stock mounting tabs.
Surrounding the front grille, you can see the beginnings of the Air Design body kit we used. It includes a front bumper cover that allows you to retain the factory fog lights as well as the ZROADZ grille-mounted LED lights and vertical LED running lights for extra visibility at night. The kit also includes a front skid plate and a ram air intake scoop that gives the front of the truck a far more aggressive look than stock.
While that gave us some more accent lighting for the front, we picked up some heavy duty hardware for auxiliary lighting and headlights. For headlights we went with Anzo USA’s stock headlight replacements, which offer the same setup and output as the OEM units plus an additional LED strip around the edges, plus an extra dark backing that makes them look super stealthy with the lights off. Up top, we went with a ZROADZ high-output 50-inch curved light bar and their large vehicle mounting plates. This install was a little more severe, with a significant amount of cutting and drilling to make sure everything could mount snugly and securely. So, unlike us, make sure you look into the installation instructions on a part before trying to take on a project yourself.
We didn’t do many underhood performance mods, but of course we had to do the standard intake and exhaust. For these, we chose Banks Power. Banks Power makes a cold ram air intake that slots neatly into place after you remove the stock system. This offers better noise and increased fuel economy, and helps the turbochargers breathe a little easier and gets colder air into your engine, especially when combined with the Banks Power Monster Exhaust. This exhaust replaces the stock midpipe, muffler, and tailpipe to get you better flow and a lot more fun turbo whistle. In the future, we’re considering larger turbos to really wake up the 3.5L Ecoboost V6 and get us closer to a home-built version of Ford’s V6 Raptor.
The Air Design body kit continues along the side of the truck, including 2” fender flares in flat black. These flares sit over BF Goodrich all-terrain K02 Baja Champion 285/55R20 tires, wrapped around Icon 20×9” Alpha wheels sitting on a 2” spacer. Also along the side of the truck, we have Cord Automotive side step rocker bars in flat black. These rocker bars made their debut at Sema 2016 on our F-150. You may not recognize the Cord name immediately, but you’ve almost certainly either seen or driven something with a Cord parts on it: Cord has manufactured and supplied parts for Toyota Racing Development (TRD), Nissan, and Roush Industries for over 20 years.
Things didn’t get too crazy on the interior of our truck, settling for the simple option of Roadwire red leather seat covers. This was the one part of the install we didn’t do ourselves; instead, we rolled into a Roadwire dealer and back out with brand new fancy seat covers installed and ready to rock. We did make the ride a little comfier by seriously upping our suspension game, using the Icon Vehicle Dynamics Stage 4 complete suspension kit. Up front, that includes replacement coil over shocks with remote reservoirs, which offer additional cooling and control over shock valving. The valving on this suspension it is actually designed specifically for the new, aluminum-body F-150’s lighter weight. The front shocks bolt straight up into the stock towers as a direct replacement for the stock dampers. The kit also includes a replacement tubular upper control arm with Icon’s patented Delta joint, which gives better articulation and strength than the OEM ball joints. The rear setup is a replacement for the stock shock absorber with a piggyback reservoir, making it super simple to install. Both the front and rear shocks have adjustable preload, allowing you to change from stock ride height to about a 2.5” lift over stock. It’s not a huge lift, but it gives you significantly more wheel travel.
Lastly, way at the back of the truck, we installed a Pace Edwards power-retractable bed locker. This cover for the truck bed is power operated, and opens and closes with the click of a button on the included remote. This helps with fuel efficiency on the highway, and keeps tools and luggage safe when we take the truck out for events.
If you like what you see here, take a look at the Motoroso Marketplace! There you can find many of the parts we used to build our truck, alongside tons of other accessories and parts to make your vehicle yours.
