Old Trucks Alive

A few weeks ago we decided to park Matty's Cavalier. When the throwout bearing slave cylinder went out, we pulled the engine, changed the clutch and slave cylinder. A few weeks later the transmission started leaking out the input shaft. With the mileage the car has on it, its most likely the input shaft has a grove worn in it. I cannot find a new input shaft and they don't make sleeve kits for it. A used transmission for the car is over $500.00, so he is currently looking for a new car.

In the meantime we brought the Silverado out of retirement. He has been driving it for a few weeks now and this morning when I went to run some errands I realized I had never take a picture of it with my new truck. It looks so small next to the GMC.

Some day I hope to get in a situation where I have a shop, I would like to do a mild restoration on it.

New Truck

My Cheyenne had a rough winter, its impeccable reliability has recently been tarnished by it occasionally not wanting to start on wet humid days. I've looked at various things but have no idea what is causing it. With its 23 years really starting to show I had debated tearing it apart this summer to fix some of the items. Without knowing for sure what I would encounter, my work schedule and needing it reliable again for winter I didn't think I would have time to finish it.

I had been looking at trucks for the last couple months, mostly 1-3 year old trucks and I couldn't really find anything I liked. I started looking at new two wheel drive base models, mostly Silverados, I wanted something similar to my old truck only in a extended cab. I quickly found out there was no such thing, its either standard, club or crew cabs. Having owned a standard for 23 years I wanted something bigger and the club cabs are ugly and pointless unless you have kids under 10. That put me into crew cabs and the non-existent world of base two wheel drive. I could get something along those lines if I had them bring one in or drove south 750 miles, neither of which would put me in a position to shop around or bargain.

Yesterday we were on a GMC lot and came across a SLT at a good price. I had narrowed my search to GMCs because as a 4wd I liked the front end, wheels and wheel well molding better than the Silverado. This truck met and exceeded all my requirements but one which was the color. Black wasn't a deal breaker but it also wasn't my first choice.

I took a picture of the green tag, one of the window sticker and another of the vin#. The dealer we were at had a lot of trucks but this one was the only close to what I was looking for. One thing I noticed that while it was a brand new truck it had a decal on the bottom of the tailgate for a different dealership about 25 miles away, so we headed there next.

When we pulled onto the lot of the other dealer this is the first truck we saw, it was actually parked away from all the others along with a beautiful Denali HD with a diesel and an almost 70k window sticker.

This one checked all the boxes in a manner that I didn't even look at any of the other trucks they had on the lot. We took it on a short test drive and went in the office to start my favorite part of buying a car, the liars club otherwise known as negotiation. This one went fairly quick though, I showed them the pictures I had taken of the other truck and told them they could either sell me theirs for that price or I would just drive back and buy the other truck. That led them to explain to me that the price was fake and they wouldn't be able to match it, so I called their bluff and 2 hours later they were within $300.00 of the other truck. I settled on that because this one actually had more options than the other truck.

Today we drove the Cheyenne to a friends house who has two large pole barns one of which is empty, I am not at a point yet that I will willingly sell it, I would like to still tear it down and restore it. I have a lot of history with the truck and being 23 years old it just turned over 130k miles. My current garage is just not the right place to do it, so I'll bide my time on that for now.

Blast Cabinet

Now that the garage is useable again I was able to finish some projects on the vehicles. The truck got a new water pump, lower radiator hose and a good clean out of the overflow tank. I also replaced all of the parking brake cables along with the 130k mile shocks. Along with the clutch I put in it a few months ago it should be good for the winter.

This let me park the corvette for the winter and get it ready for some mods. When I did the headers last spring I noticed that the EGR connection at the intake had split, it was something I had put together after I got the car to fix the original owners glued together solution. I don't know what the rubber elbow was from but it wasn't going to last long and wasn't a good solution.

A better solution was the braided toilet tank fill line I replaced it with, I'm sure when found out I will be banned for life from any corvette forum, club etc.

 

Right now the most recent dyno was 415/414, my plans for the winter are a Spinmonster cam and possibly TFS heads I want a good solid 500 rwhp naturally aspirated.

In the garage this week I added a motor rated switch on the compressor, I wanted a light to indicate that it was on to basically tell me "hey dumbass turn me off" when I leave the garage. The switch works great the indicator light not so much it puts out all of .005 lumen. I need to figure out something brighter.

The big thing this weekend though was finding this on CL.

The cabinet has good glass and new gloves, the gun is in good condition and it came with three five gallon buckets of media and five new filters for the dust collector. The previous owner removed the motor from the dust collector, he said it had sucked up something that stopped the motor. While he had it off he rigged up the canister to work with a shop vac, but I got the original motor with the unit and it works fine so I will be putting it back.

Today I ran a new drop for the cabinet, physically it only sits 12 feet from the compressor but I tapped into a leg in the middle of the garage and added 16 feet to put it around 35 feet from the compressor.

Truck Seats Pt 9

I hit the local u-pull this weekend, they had 3 88-98's and over 20 f-150's in the same year range. Needless to say the OBS's were pretty picked over. I found some lighting in one of them that I had been wanting to get. The interior and under hood accessory lighting.

Because of how it is integrated into the cab harness I cut off the sockets and made my own harness that lights the foot wells, ashtray, and glove box.

I also drove 175 miles to look at this 91 Stepside 82k mile "creampuff" that was for sale at a dealership for 4599.00.

The add had numerous pics and I was excited at the prospect of finding a bone stock, fully loaded, low mile OBS I could use as a daily driver so I could tear mine apart.

Once I got close to it red flags went up with a really bad Earl Scheib type paint job that was flaking off everywhere. That was just the start of a wonderful test drive which included the worn out front end taking the truck where ever it wanted along with the hood deciding to release on its own and the glove box door falling off into my Tania's lap. This was going to be a bit more work than I wanted for Matty's first car.

When we got back I tried to close the hood and the passenger side headlight fell out. The sales dude then promptly says "that's why we have it marked down to 3999.00". I left my number with an offer of 3k including tax and by the time I got home the add was removed from CL.

Truck Lights

Today I put in some TYC lights and DDM HID's. I had quite a bit of trouble getting the passenger side light to fit correctly. Many of the pictures I see after people have replaced their lights show them sitting at angles in relationship to the opening in the grille, now I know why. After I modified the headlight bucket and made a spacer for the upper inboard mount it placed the headlight parallel to the grille opening. For some reason the factory buckets have a spacer molded into the plastic that does not exist on the buckets that came with the TYC lights.

The DDM HID's are very impressive for the cost, they took less than 10 minutes to hook up and 30 minutes for me to figure out I needed to plug the headlight connector into them backwards to make them work.

The amount of light they put out is pretty amazing. With all the lighting laws they have in this area of Arizona these will be great on all the streets that have no street lights.

Truck Seats Pt 8

This weekend I had a bit more luck at the 3 acre pick and pull, in the form of a 2000 Suburban. When I got there the professional junkyarders were in the process of destroying the interior to get the door locks and window motors. I did manage to get the overhead console and Temp/Compass mirror.

Unfortunately the yard itself cut off the front clip to pull the motor and the temp probe and harness were gone.

The console is in very good shape but once I got it home I notice that someone had disassembled the map light switches internally.

I decided today to mess with the passenger side mirror, it came off with a large screw driver and prying against the pivot point in the center of the mirror. Once it was off I found one of the pivot balls on the adjustment screw was broken off. Being a Sunday afternoon buying the part was out of the question and since it was already broken me trying anything to fix it would be no loss if I failed.

First I drilled out the center of the tiny pivot ball and the center of the screw itself with a #40 drill.

After it was drilled I filled the holes with epoxy and screwed in a wall hook to hold them together.

I cut off the end of the hook and put the everything back together, the mirror works fine and is probably stronger than it was new.

I test wired up the rear-view mirror and the compass appears to work correctly. Tonight I am ordering the temp probe and connector, tomorrow I will run the wiring and put the mirror in.

Truck Seats Pt 7

This weekend I got the doors on the truck gutted and applied some more Peel N Seal inside.

Transferring everything from the 97 doors was fairly simple. I was surprised by how different the doors actually were. Had I tried to put the 93 panels in 97 doors it would have been much more of a problem due to the indentation at the top of the door that housed a grab handle on the older trucks.

I took the Delco speakers and cut the centers out to use as retaining rings to hold my Pro Series Bostons in the door. The cutouts were too big in diameter to screw the speakers into the panel.

Before I installed the new door panels I had some body panel mylar tape that I cut into .5" strips and stuck around the edge of the door where the door panel comes into contact. I hate the squeaking sound that plastic panels make when they rub against something.

The wire hookup went well and the difference between this and the work truck interior is night and day. I am still debating on the dash and what I am going to do, my next plans are for the carputer and that will dictate what I decide on the dash. I would like to put a touch screen where the stock radio control panel was. I currently have a wide screen GPS there and like its location and usability.

The last thing I need to figure out with the doors is the passenger side mirror, its not connected along its horizontal axis and basically flopping around. I've never messed with power mirrors and have no idea how it comes apart.

Truck Seats Pt 6

While it would be really cool to try and adapt this as my new gauge cluster, I wasn't able to convince my wife it would be.

Her car like every other GM plastic interior had some creaks and rattles I worked on this weekend, one was the cluster itself. The rattles have gotten much worse since the dealership replaced the HUD, when I tore into it I found a few screws that were loose but the main rattle still existed.

The culprit was the lower left corner of the dash which has no supporting structure, I fabbed up a small bracket tying it to structure just above the emergency brake. This appears to have eliminated all the dash rattles.

On the truck I spent most of the weekend working on the harness for the doors. It was cut in five places when I bought the doors and needed the seat, airbag and courtesy light wiring removed. I spent a few hours trying to find wiring diagrams for a 97 with no luck until went to Alldata's website and found the "Try the demo" vehicle was a 98 chevy truck. I was able to download all the wiring diagrams for the harness and doors.

After a little testing with the fluke I found my truck has the needed wiring from the fuse box to the "courtesy center" so the only thing I have left is to get some small connector ends. The harness I have is from a 97 and uses one plug, the 93 courtesy center has all singles.

I was able to hook up some jumper leads and test the door locks, windows and mirrors. Everything worked but the window control on the passenger door. A couple shots of contact cleaner into the switch and it started working fine.

Next weekend I plan to start moving everything over to my truck.

Truck Seats Pt 5

I was in a golf tournament Saturday and I did not have a lot of time to work on the truck, so I decided I would try and tackle the seat belts.

I got some belts from a 97 extended cab two weeks ago when I bought the doors. The problem is extended cabs used quite a bit different seat belts than the standard cabs. They mounted in much taller pods next to the "B" pillar so they would not be in the way when people tried to get in the back.

My options were to wait until I could find some grey ones for my truck or move the extended cab belt webs into my retractors. After a good soak in some oxyclean the webbing looked nearly new.

The hardest part of this was having the right twists in the right spots on the belts and putting all the retractor mechanisms back together correctly.

The ends of the retractor reels are staked, they were fairly easy to get apart and a little harder to restake.

This reel on the passenger side has a splined shaft which drives a mechanism which appears to lock the reel once it is extended to a certain point, I am no expert on this sort of thing but it appears to me that it is designed to allow the use of a car seat on the passenger side.

The finished belts look much better with the grey seats, Matty helped me paint the retractor covers.

I also got the "A" pillar covers, kick panels, and the close out panels aft of the seat belts painted.

Truck Seats Pt 4

My ACC Carpet from stockinteriors came in Wednesday, I purchased their base carpet with a mass back upgrade. I think the shorter nap carpet will be easier to keep clean than the plush.

Saturday I finished the peel & stick in the footwells, and put in the new carpet. The installation was painless, the molded backing made placing the carpet in the correct spot very easy.

The only complaint I had over the carpet was the amount of oil or oil residue that came off of the mass backing.

A few months ago I found a tool at Lowes that was very similar to a cutter Makita sold years ago only at 5x the price. It was a Skill Powercutter and for projects like this it works awesome, they can be bought for under 30 dollars and cut through carpet like butter. They are also great for cutting those annoying blister packages.

Today I got the items I needed for the next part of my project from a forum member. Some loaded doors with power windows, locks and mirrors off a 97, along with some of the seat belts and trim.

Next weekend I plan to go through the harness for the doors and start moving everything into the passenger door.

Truck Seats Pt 3

I had some surgery done to my left foot so was unable to work on this the last two weeks.

I was able to finish up the fabrication of the seat brackets just before my surgery, I put a couple of coats of POR15 on it and it has sat for the last two weeks.

Last weekend I did some reading on sound deadening and came across some threads where people had used "Peel N Seal" as a cheap alternative to the name brand sound deadeners. Its designed to be used for roof flashing. The only negative posts I found on this product was some people complained about it not being sticky enough. I had no issues at all getting it to stick, you actually better get it in the right spot the first time.


Because my foot is still very sore, I only covered what was necessary to get the brackets I made installed back in the truck. I will finish up the foot well areas next weekend along with the lower door skins.

Coverage of this amount took just under two rolls at 16.95 each, I should be able to finish the front and doors with another two rolls.

Friday I got some carpet samples from stockinteriors and hopefully the carpet I ordered will be here by next weekend.

Here is a shot of it with the seats installed and the jump seat with the six inch section taken out.

I still have not decided what I am going to do with the seat belts as far as their color, the belts coming out of the seats are from the jump seats in an extended cab. With a small amount of modification to their attachment plate I was able to bolt them up to the factory location inside the seat bottom.

Tania and I took it for a drive just a few hours ago, it has a Gibbons style catback with a 40 series flowmaster exiting just in front of the passenger side rear tire. This type of system is very loud and tends to drone in the cab. It was immediately noticeable how much quieter the truck was. This was with the front not being done and the carpet not installed, I am looking forward to how much more it will help with the rest of it being complete.

Truck Seats Pt 2

I took some days off last week and my Dad / Stepmom came out for the week. I have not seen my Dad in seven years and spending the week with him was awesome. We did a few things in and around Tucson and spent the rest of the time around the house. He helped me change the hinge pins and bushings on my truck doors as well as the detent roller on the drivers door.

Right after he left I pulled the seats and floormat out of the truck and started measuring for the adapters I was going to make for the new seats. While laying on the floor in the truck I noticed quite a few spots that had small blisters in the paint. Digging into one I found surface rust from the factory spot welds, the welds burned off the galvanizing allowing the metal to rust, so I decided to sand down the floor and clean up the spots before they actually got bad.

The drivers door sill was the worst, some of it was due to snow melting from my shoes and running into the sill under a wire guiide. It was all surface rust but took a couple hours to clean up because of all the nooks.

The rest of the floor took a couple hours to take out the bad spots and rough up what was left.

After I wiped it down with some grease remover, Tania helped me paint it with POR15.

I had a pint that I had bought 15 years ago and never used because it was gloss. I emailed the company that makes it and they said it should be fine because it had never been opened. This paint is perfect for this type of thing and as you can see even brushed on it flows very smooth with no brush strokes visible.  In Indiana this would have taken close to two days to dry due to the humidity, here I could sit back on the floor in just over an hour.  After it had dried I also changed both door seals, now the doors feel like they did when the truck was brand new.

I had not planned on doing this to the floor so I ran out of time last weekend and had no choice but to toss in the original bench seat so I could drive the truck to work.

Today I was able to fab up the brackets for the drivers side seat.  I did not want to drill any holes in the floor pan to mount them and they were wider than the buckets that were in the truck.  I was able to use the original mount holes in the lower bracket and tie the upper bracket into the seatbelt mount. This will work well for running brackets over the center hump for the jump seat.  When its all done all three seats will be mounted to one bracket.

The seat fits well for someone my size to move it any further back I will need to do something with the grab handle on the back of the seat.  I also purchased new armrests for the door panels to replace the originals which were shot.  I have not decided what I am going to do with the door panels yet.  I will most likely change some of the interior pieces to grey to tie the seats in. I am still deciding which pieces and how much.  I am ordering some dark grey carpet and will put it in after I am finished with the seat adapters.

Headliner

In my last post I had pictures of the new seats I had bought for my truck. The interior in my truck right now is shades of blue so I have decided to tie the grey of the new seats into it. There are many ways to do this that I will post on in the coming weeks, the first of which is going to be the headliner.

The headliner in the truck was coming loose from the cardboard base and starting to sag in numerous areas. The original headliner was white with blue sun visors and my plans to tie in the dark grey seats were to cover the headliner and sun visors with a lighter grey felt.

Last weekend Tania and I went to a fabric store and found some felt of suitable thickness for $3.99 a yard, cheap enough to buy plenty extra for any mistakes.

After pulling it out of the truck the vinyl pretty much fell off of it, leaving a thin layer of deteriorating foam which was relatively easy to remove from the cardboard just time consuming. This sort of work is much like painting, the more time you spend and the better job you do in prep the better the end result. Removing the foam and cleaning up the surface took me about an hour to do.

I wasn't able to get a good "before" shot because of the vinyl falling off but here is a shot of what the original perforated vinyl covering looked like.

Here is a shot of the finished headliner, it took a bit longer than I thought it would and I made a few errors with it. I pressed out the felt on the floor after gluing it down with 3M contact adhesive this de-arched the headliner a bit and I didn't realize it until it was too late.

Overall though it came out very nice, I was able to dye the trim around the dome light and found some grey trim retainers at the local NAPA. The biggest cost was the 3M contact adhesive at $15.00 a can.

Tomorrow I am going to work on the sun visors, they will be a bit more challenging but I think I have a good plan for how to make them work.

Truck Seats

A few weeks before we moved from Indy, I found some seats for sale on Craigslist for my pickup. I had been looking for quite a while and then gave up for a few weeks. One night I got home from work and boom the first listing that came up was for some blue seats out of a 94 Z71 in "new condition". I was skeptical about 16 year old pickup seats being in new condition but was pleasantly surprised when they did actually look new.

125.00 later I had them in the back of the truck with all sorts of plans for my interior going through my head. Because 88-94 trucks basically use the same seat they were more or less a bolt in for the truck and a huge improvement over my wore out bench seat. It was just recently that I found out the seats I had bought were very undesirable because the covering on them is actually glued to the foam. This process makes the pleating in the seats look very nice for a long time and also prevents them from ever being recovered. The other minus to them is that it made my truck a two seater.

Today I was driving home from work and part of my drive home is past little garage sale setups along the side of the road. Most of it is normally fruit, leather saddles and harnesses or junk from Mexico. Today a jump seat caught my eye. I had been looking for one to add a third seat back to my truck but they seem to be very desireable and regularly sell for 175-225 dollars on Ebay.

Catching it out of the corner of my eye I made a U-turn and went back to see if it was in fact a jump seat.

When I got out of the truck I noticed a matching grey leather seat sitting a ways off from the jump seat. I asked the guy standing there how much for the jump seat and he told me it was part of a set. I though well if I can get it cheap enough I can just dump the oddball bucket seat. I also thought I should be able to get a good deal on this who would want just one bucket seat. I finally got out of the guy he wanted 300.00 for the set, I told him it was too much for one bucket and a jump seat and he said "no Senior the other bucket is in the back of my truck". He went on to explain that he had taken them out of his 2010 Tahoe because he was putting racks or something in the back. Thats when I realized these were the second row seats not the front. This started to make more sense to me because most front row seats wont fold down completely flat and they normally have the shoulder belts built into the seats making them a pain to put in older vehicles.

I took 200.00 out of my pocket, dangled it in front of his face and he said OK.

Because they are second row seats they have quick release tracks on them. I think I should be able to make rails for them fairly easy. The price was definately right its just going to be a matter of the time involved in making the rails. The fact that they are basically brand new along with the addition of the jump seat will make the effort in getting them installed in the truck more than worth it.

Headlights

Sahuarita has a “Outdoor Lighting Code” which is to help prevent light pollution. Without going into details on it, there is basically a certain lumen output per acre allowed in residential areas which is so low it disallows the use of street lights. In residential areas at night you might as well be 50 miles out of town, its very dark.

Even though I grew up in the country, when you drove down a country road there weren’t cars parked up and down the sides or people walking around. Driving here at night seems odd, like there is a blackout or something. It doesn’t help that the composite headlight housings on my pickup are hazed and yellow.

A few weeks ago when my brother in law was here, he brought me a 3M headlight polish kit. He had tried it and liked it so well he bought a master kit for his shop. I was a bit skeptical on it working because I had tried using a Dico wheel and some plastic rouge, it appeared to clear the lense up some but I felt the yellowing was not limited to the surface.

Friday night I was doing some reading on headlight housings to see if there was any clear opinion on who made the best clear aftermarket housings when I came across a thread on GM Fullsize Forums about polishing composite headlights. One of the people posting mentioned he had after washing the lenses, wiped them down with lacquer thinner. This not only removed the yellowing from the lenses it melts the surface repairing the thousands of small pits and surface cracks in the lens.

Sunday I decided to work on a few things I had been wanting to do. The stereo in my truck had a whine from the alternator, the most common cause for that is a bad ground. I moved the ground from the factory harness to a good chassis ground under the dash which cleared up the whine. The alarm that I had installed when the truck was new wasn’t working properly and the range of the transmitters was down to a few feet from the truck. I checked the connections to the system and found no problems, changed the batteries in the remotes, no fix. I pulled out the main unit from under the dash where they had mounted it and could smell a faint burnt capacitor smell, so I removed the system.

I had some extra time so I decided to tackle the headlights. I removed the grille because I was not familiar with the headlight removal and didn’t want to mess up the aim. Once it was off, I removed the driver side housing and was able to see how easy it was to pull the pins that mount the housings. I wiped the drivers side housing down with a clean white rag and some lacquer thinner which turned the rag a dark yellow, it looked like I had cleaned off the inside of a car window that had been owned by a smoker for 20 years.

Once the composite lens dried it turned a hazy white but was still relatively smooth. I went over it with my DA sander and some 360 grit paper. I then used the 3M kit and quickly hit it with 500 then 800 grit paper. The kit then stated to use a thin pad that was probably somewhere in the 1000 to 1200 grit range. The last step was to use a sponge pad and compound that I replaced with some mirror glaze. As you can see from the pictures the difference between the polished and un-polished is quite obvious. The park lamps are made out of a different material and did not polish out to a glass finish like the headlamps.


When I finished the drivers side lights it was starting to get dark so I decided to install the grill while I could still see. The garage was occupied by my wife’s project which involves stripping the dining room table / chairs and refinishing them. We were also sharing the DA sander between the two projects. At one point the smelly kid that lives upstairs even came down and helped her for a while. As you can see it looks quite fun, It had just started to cool down for the day and were already acclimated, but you really can’t complain about 60 degree weather at the end of November.

Installing the grille was a mistake, I finished polishing the park light on the passenger side and started to take out the headlamp, the first pin came out easily the second is froze in the nylon insert it screws into. Next weekend I will pull the grille back off and get the light out.

THe difference in the lights performance is amazing, since only the drivers side is polished it over powers the passenger side so much that while driving it appears to be burned out or not connected correctly. Once I have it polished I plan to order a HID kit for the low beams, I found one that has good reviews for 49.00 with a lifetime warranty.

More Leakage

After finding the rear wheel brake cylinders leaking on my truck I decided to look it over a bit more. I had noticed some oil spots on the ground where I park at work and really didn’t want to look at that because Chevy motors and manual transmissions are notorious for having rear main seal leaks. At first glance that’s where mine was leaking from.

Knowing that it wont fix itself and will only get worse I looked a lot closer.

I have changed the oil on my truck myself all but maybe six or seven times. I’ve seen the oil cooler adapter (item 7) where the spin-on filter normally mounts but never really thought much about it. Now I’m looking at it as being the obvious source of my oil leak but not really understanding why its even there. My truck doesn’t have any of the cooler lines, it never has, so why does it have this adapter that serves no other obvious purpose.

Saturday I made a couple calls to some parts stores hoping to get whatever gaskets or o-rings there were to fix the leak, no one I spoke with knew what I was talking about. So I drove into Tucson and went to five different parts stores. Even the old standby NAPA didn’t have the o-ring kit to fix the leak. I stopped off at a self serve car wash and washed down the underside of the truck to determine if that was in fact what was leaking and if there were any other leaks. Once I got home there was oil on the adapter and with the truck needing an oil change I took it off to see if I could determine what was wrong or even fix it. There was one paper gasket (item 5), and an o-ring (item 6). The o-ring was as hard as a rock and cracked, being the obvious problem. I made a new gasket and covered the o-ring with RTV. This of course changed the leak from a random drip to a constant stream.

After cleaning up my mess I logged into rockauto.com and found a Felpro number for a rebuild kit for 2.69. Armed with the part number it was much easier to find the kit locally. The following day after work I was able to pick it up from a small NAPA that was closed Sunday and had the leak fixed in 15 minutes.

Weekend Not So Fun

This weekend I spent working on the truck.

Last Monday on my way home from the airport, my brakes felt a bit strange. When I got home I popped open the hood and found the fluid level in the master cylinder to be about 1/8th of an inch. A quick check around the truck led to some fluid on the driver side aft wheel. I parked the truck and Friday morning tore into the back brakes.

The last time I had the drums off the rear axle was 13-14 years ago so of course it took about 1.5 hours each just to get them off. The original brake linings were not even close to being worn out but the drivers side was soaked with fluid and the passenger side had just started to leak. Two hours and 150.00 later I had new cylinders, shoes, hardware kits and drums, the original drums had quite a few heat cracks and I was having a hard time finding somewhere that would turn them so I just bought new ones.

Putting them back together was fairly uneventful, they were more complex than any other drum brake I had ever replaced and the springs were a total pain. I bled 3 bottles of fluid through the system before I was satisfied with the pedal, I will probably end up bleeding out some more this coming weekend. I can’t really complain much 103k miles on brakes is pretty good, they would have probably gone 140k if the cylinders had not gone out.

The sad part in all of this is the state of my truck. When I bought the truck in 93 it was everything that I wanted and I had intended up till this weekend to keep the truck forever. The time I spent on it this weekend revealed just how hard Indiana was on it, there is corrosion everywhere. It’s not like it has huge spots rusting out through the body its more that every single piece on the truck has some form of corrosion. Eventually it will rust out through the body panels and other than completely disassembling it and having every single item media blasted and repainted there is nothing I can do to stop it from happening. I already have one project vehicle and don’t really need to take on another of that magnitude, so my current plan is to fix a couple minor things on it and put it up for sale. I can buy a newer truck that has spent its entire life in Arizona for a fraction of the cost it would be to prevent mine from turning into red powder and blowing away.