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Stopped by a local cruise in today. Got some ideas about a few things. Plan is starting after the new year to begin buying parts and to start the tear down next fall. For now I'm focusing on keeping it on the road and tweaking a few things to get it running and driving how I want. Things like a new throttle cable and kick down cable, valve body, floor shifter, off road kit for the carb, new fluids, brakes, things of that nature. Friday I'm going to order a car cover for it and then I'm going to take off the doors and top.
Got a new throttle cable installed and now I'm not doing leg presses to push it. Although it is about half an inch to long so I'll have to tweak that with a fishing weight tomorrow. Also got the brake fluid changed and that's when I discovered that the bleeders on the front calipers are clogged. Looking at the front brakes it's probably time for a brake job anyways so I'll just swap them out then. Got a car cover ordered for it so I can leave the doors and top off of it.
The front doors are trashed on it. Beyond the dents, they are rusted and stripped out. So I'm debating building half doors out of them. Something like this:
Got the car cover in. Not bad for $50 from eBay. Now I can finally pull the top and doors off and not worry so much about rain getting in.
Also dropped a set of vortec heads off to the machine shop to be cleaned up so I can slap them on this truck. The shop had a already machined 4 bolt block laying around a customer never picked up. Said if I give them my 2 bolt block and let them assemble the 4 bolt with my parts, they'll balance it and build it for $1200 out the door. Seems like a decent deal to me to have a balanced and built 4 bolt main engine.
Got a chance to tinker on it today. Installed the Edelbrock Offroad kit and a 1" phenolic spacer to try and help keep it from heat soaking when stopped. I also adjusted the floats from 1/4" space to 7/16" and blocked off the fuel passage between both bowls. This is to hopefully help keep the engine from stalling when I'm doing some crazy off camber climbing.
See the tiny spring that helps keep the needle seated? This is why you have these strainers. Found some trash that I had to blow out. Carb could use some cleaning. I'll do that when I get the vortec heads swapped on. Fuel hose blocking the passages. Awesome black spacer.
Weather is getting nice. Time for the doors to come off. Leaving the roof for now so I'll have some protection for my next rock crawl in a few weeks and then it'll come off.
Decided to go ahead and throw a cheapo tach in it.
O'Reilly gauge package. Oil pressure, water temp, alternator, and tach. My command center. Needle on the speedo is broke and the gearing on the cable is wrong so the Garmin functions as my speedo as well as it has the trails marked at the off road park. I was able to hack it and get the latest updates from July 2019 on it.
Was looking at my carb yesterday and something didn't look like it was routed quite right with the vac lines. Sure enough, the vac advance line was hooked to the ported side of the carb instead of manifold vac. Swapped that around and while it's never ran bad, it seems to have picked up some pep on the bottom end. Also took the kid for a spin with no doors.
Previous owner had 4 speakers hooked to 2 channels on a 4 channel amp because I guess he thought you could daisy chain these speakers. Only 1 speaker worked. So swapped in a new amp and added the additional rca cabling so all 4 channels worked. All of these speakers are blown. So I'm going to remove two of these speakers entirely, replace the other 2 with new speakers, and install new dash speakers powered by the amp.
He had the USB input from the head unit poking through the switch hole for the power rear window. So I pulled that out so I could replace the power rear window switch and install it in the factory location and then install a USB input plug in the dash for the input to the radio.
Since the speedo needle is broken and the gearing is all ****ed off, the guy included the Garmin GPS he used as a speedo. I hacked it and updated it to maps from July 2019 which also includes the off road park trails so I don't want to get rid of it. So I bought a hard wire kit for it so I didn't have to constantly plug the thing in and unplug it every time I drove it. I also bought a new windshield mount since the one on it is trashed.
So, the non computer vehicle I bought to get away from wiring and electronics, I'm spending a dumbass amount of money on wiring and electronics to get it set up right.
09-29-2019, 03:18 PM
