Ball joints

The first time this truck was on the road-it wandered a LOT and I thought "what have I done?"
Then I added front bumper, hood, bed and a little more weight and the wandering subsided from raging drunk to slightly tipsy but I knew the balljoints were a priority. BTW-I went over the scale the other day and was over 4,000# -yowzers! thats over 200# more than my panel!
BJ's Offroad supplied me with quality parts at a great price.
gte901m at IFSJA did the best writeup regarding the ball joint swap.
I saw this when it was up on the muffler shop rack

Yesterday I tackled it and had the front end torn apart by the time UPS showed up.
I replaced every wear part from the axle tube-out. Ball joints, wheel/spindle bearings, U-joints, seals and so forth.

The inner bearing would not go on without an extraordinary amount of effort so I set the hub out in the sun and put this bag of icewater on the spindle to expand the one and shrink the other. It worked very well and the hub slid right on with only minor effort.

The one on the left is the old upper-when you shake it-it rattles like a castanet!

This was at the end of the day today-unfinished as I am waiting for a special tool to tighten the upper balljoint sleeve.

Air compressor and exhaust

The exhaust shop does a GREAT job! It sounds nice and quiet which is excellent. It does have a tiny little bit of rumble at a very specific RPM but otherwise very super nice. No drag car noise for me! Until I get my dump bed operational-those straps on my spare are to keep it stable as there is no underbody for it to press against.



This is the copper line out of the air compressor to withstand the heat of the compressed air. The filtered intake is on the left.

MPG

Well I finally sat down and did the math on my gas mileage so far.
The speedometer reads wrong. I think it is fast which means my MPG is actually LESS than the calculated 15.2 =(
But my driving style has been very very aggressive as far as throttle control. I floor it everywhere. My carb has some minor tuning issues so it is acting as a governor.
Also my body is MUCH higher than stock and I am without hood which is a significant increase in wind resistance.
Even with all that-getting around 15mpg is a great improvement over my last tow rig which was 11. the one before that was 10. My 52 GMC got over 15 but it was lowered a LOT and only 2wd. I am willing to take those sacrifices to have a 4x4 work truck.

Doing truck work!

So I got to use my truck as a truck the first time the other day.
Doing some yard work and removing sapling trees that sprout on their own. Could not pull by hand so wrapped a chain and pulled.
It pulled so easy that I thought chain slipped off.
Yeah-its a little tree only 3" diameter but sure beats trying to hook up to the CRX or digging out with shovel!

Dump bed mockup

Well, I finally got the dump bed working.

It has zero load capacity until I make the frame for under the bed and load supporting things but I can get it to go up/down on its own. I did this to find out what works/doesn't work and to start on positioning.

I have no idea why I thought 45 degrees was mandatory for dump angle. I got 36 degrees out of it and its real obvious that unless I'm transporting slug goo-anything i put in it will fall out!

So now I have figured that I am going to keep the HF ram and setup. Especially after I saw pump pricing at over $300 and then $200 ram and then hose and back to the reason I wanted the HF one. (this is halfway down)


I also uploaded some vids to YouTube that are a little out of date but still pretty cool.
Fireup vid
Open headers
Dump bed link if the embedded video does not work.

Dump ram

See how easy it is to adjust/tighten belt without radiator in place?! The tensioner still screams like crazy. Alignment issue that I didn't want to make time for now.

Nothing like the third time for the radiator to be worked on. Sprung a leak when i went too fast on a super bumpy dirt road... and I made modifications and painted the shroud-fan was 'touching' and wouldn't "clearance" itself. LOL

This is my dump bed ram.

BUT... I may take it back and go with a different system. I still will have air over hyd as I believe air only isn't strong enough... I don't like the way this ram works-it goes up just fine... but coming down-I have to reach under there and open a valve.
If they make a remote valve-I will do that but I believe this is just a needle/seat setup to let the oil back down.
Hmmm....

Off to KAN in Redding.

Squealer

I really like the serpentine tensioner I installed but I had thought it was the problem when I had a HORRIBLE squeal coming from front drive area.
I tried "lathing" the flange off the edge in hopes it was rubbing but that wasn't it.
If we dumped water on belt-noise went away and that should have been the first clue.
I spent an hour this morning removing tensioner(5 min) and then using the alternator and PS pump to tension the belt(55 min)

Squeal still there. =(

With the tensioner gone I could tell the noise was coming from the area around my air compressor so I engaged it thinking the load might give me an indication-no change. But the air it was putting out was IMPRESSIVE!!! It is rated 10cfm and its obvious why.

So just on a whim, I (engine running) took some sandpaper and rubbed the grooves on the air pulley-noise changed. So I got more aggressive and wiggled my hand down under the spinning belt and held paper there till it was hot. All of a sudden-the noise went away. !!! So now I am going to put the tensioner BACK on the system since I really love how easy it is to do any accessory or belt changes with that setup.

It was rainy today but I drove it everywhere for my errands and my machinist said not to baby it but not to lug or over-rev it and so I opened it up a little more and it was nice-I have some carb work to do to dial it in but its working for now.

Exhaust shop said $400 for the single exhaust so for now my wreck yard special will have to do. $400!!! They do TERRIFIC work but they charged me less for the full dual system on my camper!

I am naming it "Three"

Apparently the third time is the charm. If these pictures are any indication-the tranny works correctly. There are minor adjustments to be made but its working properly now.
Now on to the nit-picky things like manual choke, new unburnt headlight, horns, air helpers in the rear, air system, dump bed and so forth.

Those are earmuffs on my head as the exhaust system is not done till Tuesday.(=LOUD!)
The hardest part is going the next 500 miles without drag-racing it!

Mystery revealed.

So after a super busy week last week and 4 days of a super long working weekend out of town, I managed to hook up with my tranny guy this evening.

Earlier I had managed to get the transfer case out by myself and got the crossmember out and the engine supported and all but 4 bolts out. Tranny guy came over around 6ish to lend a hand with his cool tranny jack. We got it out in just a few minutes and ran it over to his shop.

Turns out that he neglected to tighten all the bolts holding the pump to the front part of the tranny.

That lets virtually all the pressure the pump generates go squirting out into useless space inside the tranny instead of providing pressure to make things spin and drive the truck forward… apparently I was pretty lucky just to get it rolling out of the garage.

So 20-30 minutes at the shop cleaning and putting parts back together and less than an hour of him really going the extra mile(he did not do initial installation into my truck) by helping me put driveshaft back up and crossmember and transfer case… etc…

I'm real busy tomorrow but Saturday might see me spend that last 2 hours double checking everything and getting that pesky LR wheel stud installed and misc things and get this rig back on the road!

Very excited…!