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.

Bed Cover

I've been looking at bed covers for quite a while now, not really finding one that I liked. They all have pros and cons, the biggest con being the expense of them.

Trifold / Rollup Covers:

• Pros 
• Cheap
• Light weight 
• Cons
• Cheap
• Longevity 
• Security
• Water intrusion

Hard Covers (Under Rail)

• Pros
• Security
• Can open tailgate with cover closed
• Cons
• Heavy / difficult to remove (most)
• Water intrusion

Hard Covers (Over Rail)

• Pros
• Best Security 
• Best Water Intrusion Protection
• Cons
• Heavy /difficult to remove (most)
• Limits cargo height when installed

Canister (Roll Up) Covers

• Pros
• Hard cover security with roll up cover cargo heights
• Versatility
• Cons
• Cost
• Complexity
• Loss of bed space for canister

There are literally dozens of bed covers on the market, some of which fall in between what I have categorized. For example Paragon makes a hard cover that fits under rail and folds up against the front of the bed. It was the cover I was looking at the closest. The fact that it required drilling to install was why I didn't buy it.

The cover I did choose was an Undercover Elite. The reason I chose it was, I like over rail hard covers. They offer the best security, water protection and I like how they look. This particular cover went on sale for black Friday so that sealed the deal for me, even though it was still very expensive. The benefits of this versus others on the market are one its very light weight, it weighs less than 60lbs and is quick release removable. Its blow molded plastic and very strong, it will support over 600 lbs. I has a lifetime warranty including the paint. It also has a very nice feature where the lock is programmable to the vehicle ignition key. Lastly and one of the biggest selling points for me is it required no drilling to install, and actually only took about 20 minutes to install by myself.

The steel brackets were heavy gauge and appeared to be powder coated.

The struts have quick releases on the ends and clips on the cover where they can be stowed. The cover came with wall brackets which allow you to easily hang the cover on a wall when you have it removed. It has a removable LED light with magnets and a hook so you can use it in other areas. The rod with the red handle detaches and is used as a grab hook for pulling anything that has slid forward in the bed.

The paint match is very impressive.

More Lighting

The new truck has a mix of incandescent and LED lights, for example the tail lights are LED but the backup lights are incandescent. LED's are not by default brighter but you can obtain brighter versions of a particular bulb along with different kelvin ratings.

I ordered some 6000k LED bulbs to replace the backup lights, the bed lights on the back of the cab and the license plate lights. The backup lights will help with visibility at night looking through the backup camera. The bed lights help some when backing up but are more to make the bed more visible. The license plate lights are to get rid of the only 3000k lights left on the back of the truck.

The lights I ordered for the backup and bed are 1000 lumen each, which is equal to a very powerful tactical flashlight. Another modification I did while changing these was to wire the backup lights to the bed lights. When the truck is unlocked with the remote at night, the backup lights, puddle lights, headlights all turn on. If you want the bed lights to turn on you have to go in the cab and hit the switch on the center console, now they come on with the remote. The only downside is when you put the truck in reverse the bed lights come on, I'll live with that trade off any day of the week.

I forgot to take a picture of the truck with the incandescent backup and bed lights, but here is one with the LED's in place. They overwhelm the camera sensor on my Iphone.

Awesome Light Pods

I had this week off and decided to do a small project with the GMC. In GM's infinite wisdom they decided in 2014 to stop lighting the foot well areas in their trucks. Now if you drop a something small at night on the floor it is a lot more fun to find than having a simple light to see it. I also like how foot well lighting looks when your getting in the vehicle. I had bought some LED strip lights last year for this project but the first roll was cheap Chinese and had cold solider joints causing the lights to randomly shut off or flicker. The second roll I bought was from a US distributor and had some of the same issues so this time I decided to use LED pods.

I bought this LED kit for $13.99, it had enough modules to do the interior and the bed. I'm very impressed with the quality for the cost of these modules. The modules are UL listed, waterproof and pre-wired. The kit came with a harness, additional wire, real 3M adhesive pads, and screws if you chose to hard mount the modules. This allow me to use some existing screws in the truck to securely mount the pods.

This is one under the glove box lighting the passenger side foot-well.

The light is 5000k, and looks to me just slightly yellow to the factory interior lights although that might just be the surface its shining on, its very close. For the rear seats I was able to wrap a zip tie around the seat frame tube and secure the pod just at the back of the front seat.

I used 1 module at each seat and put the remaining 8 modules in the bed in addition to the factory bed lights. The bed has areas under the rail where the steel is stamped at an angle that made a perfect spot to mount these lights.

Deer + GMC = Better

After weeks at the dealership and four additional trips back for parking sensor issues, I have my truck back.

The damage was limited to the bumpers and the seat belt tensioners. I also had its first service completed while it was there. I did have them install Denali bumpers on the truck since they were being replaced anyway. Its funny that painted bumpers cost me almost 1k over having the chrome ones put back on. I prefer the look of the painted bumpers and it helped me over the whole wrecking the truck thing.

Before:

After:

Deer + GMC = Bad

Friday nights Tania, Matty, Savannah and I generally go out to eat together. This Friday our supper was delayed because I didn't see a deer standing in the road until it was too late.

I caught the deer with the front passenger side bumper at 50 mph and ended up in the ditch on the other side of the road narrowly missing a tree and a telephone pole.

When we hit the deer it activated the seat belt tension devices filling the cab with smoke to the point I couldn't see out the windows. This set off the emergency flashers that were impossible to turn off and OnStar calling me while I'm trying to figure out what happened and why the truck was full of smoke.

We were only a couple of miles from the house, so after I got the truck out of the ditch and the police did their thing I limped the truck home and we took the ATS to supper.

I was not really in the mood to take pictures of the damage to the truck, even though it was relatively minor, its still a 55k vehicle with less than 5k miles on it that got smashed. All of that is material and can be replaced, thankfully no one was hurt in the slightest or well no one except the deer...

P0601 Updates and Running Boards?

I spent last weekend tracing all the grounds on the Corvette and checking them for resistance. After that and some other small troubleshooting I couldn't find anything wrong with the Corvette. I drove it to Mike Norris Motorsports Friday and he confirmed that the ECU was the problem. I found an online service that repairs ECU's for $125.00 and if it is beyond repair they charge $75.00 for the diagnosis. The advantage to this is confirmation it is the ECU and if it is I wont need to have it reprogrammed with the default parameters and then with the dyno tune.

In researching this I found out I cannot buy a new ECU for the car pre-programmed. It can only be done by the dealer and must be installed in the car to learn the clutch pedal and I believe crank trigger. So today I cleaned up the car  and removed the ECU to send out tomorrow.

Last week I also removed the running boards from the Sierra, I hated how they looked and hated even more all the crap that would end up on top of them. Two weeks ago it rained and the following day there were dead dried worms stuck all over the top of them. The truck is a bit harder to get in and out of now but it looks much better to me. I put them up on Craigslist yesterday and they sold in about an hour for $300.00 which is about what they are each.

I wasn't trying to stage a photo but after working on the Corvette and cleaning out the garage I realized I had them all lined up so I took a quick picture.

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.