Torture Device

Got bored this morning and started poking around on Wikipedia. Stumbled across the entry for "treadmill". According to that fine institute of knowledge, treadmills were first created as sources of power for mills, grinders, and other industrial needs. Then (and this is where it gets relevant), treadmills were used as instruments of punishment. That's right, prisoners used to be forced to walk on treadmills..... As this fat man runs on a treadmill this morning, it seems that nothing has changed - except I don't have a bushel of crushed grain when I finish my time on this thing....

Horrible Mess

Through the never-ending Winter, the garage has become an area to work (daily to keep the truck rolling) and a catch-all for just about every piece of junk imaginable. It's been far too cold to tidy up - now that Spring is arriving, it's time for a deep cleaning....

Paint It?

The idea to repaint the old truck has always been in the back of my mind. I don't like the mildew that grows on the current white paint, and the black wheels annoy the crap out of me. Looking through old photos on the internet, I found this one with a paint job I kinda like....

Of course, after last month's fiasco - in which the truck died and left me stranded - treating that truck to a paint job seems like a super-low priority.

(I'll be sure to post some photos and the story behind the breakdown at a later time - the story is good enough to preserve for posterity!)

Smooth Starting

Anybody know what that little curly thing is?

It's a "Choke Thermostat Spring", and that one is broken.

When the weather turned cold, the slow-starting truck turned into a no-starting truck. At any temperature under 20, I had to spray starting fluid into the carb just to get the engine to fire up. As you might guess, in Northern Vermont, the temperature stays below 20 a whole lot during Winter. I've been through two bottles of starting fluid in a month and a half. 

A little investigative sleuthing found two problems: the choke linkage was incorrectly assembled, and the choke spring was broken. The linkage was a free fix. The spring - which was used on just about every vehicle for decades - was only a few dollars, but took a week to arrive at the parts store. No doubt that such a rare part had to be special ordered in from Outer Mongolia....

Now, the truck fires up with just three taps on the gas pedal and a twist of the key. No starting fluid needed, in any weather. (Except that -22 morning. That took a whole lot of cranking...)

I like the cheap fixes.....

Lock the Doors? You Must Be Kidding...

I never lock the doors on the truck. Not because we live in an idyllic neighborhood with no crime, but because the lock cylinders won't turn. I'm not even sure I have the correct key. So, the doors never get locked, and I will never be able to say that I got locked out of this truck. Great, right? It's great unless you find yourself wanting to go some place like work or a store where you don't want to carry all of your possessions inside with you. If your vehicle doesn't lock, you kind of have to carry everything with you or risk theft (the easy kind, where the thief doesn't even have to work at it by smashing a window).

I think I've come up with a good solution. I found a small gun safe on sale at Tractor Supply and bolted that thing under the seat (and through the floorboards of the truck). Cover it with a old rag, and you'd never know it was there.

Covered up.

Ready for code entry.

Now, I've got a fairly safe place to store a phone, some cash, or anything else I need to secure.

How Fast Are We Going?

 

So, the old truck is on the road. Legally. In fact, it's my daily driver - the Prizm is unregistered and uninspected (and has been so for months). The truck gets me around just fine, and is generally fun to drive. However, there are some challenges to driving a 42-year-old vehicle as one's daily transportation...

 

The instrument panel lighting does not work. The really important things work; the turn signal indicators and the alternator warning light. The little bulbs that are supposed to illuminate the speedometer? They're there, but they don't show up for work. I've had the cluster out on the bench and cleaned up the electrical circuits and fiddled with the bulbs, but they just don't want to glow much at all.

 

With the morning commute being performed in total darkness, and the evening commute happening in (you guessed it) near total darkness, it's hard to see the numbers on the speedometer when you have no dash lights. Now, one might suppose that a speedo isn't necessary when driving an old, old truck. There's not much chance of getting a speeding ticket when you have low gears and a wheezy six-cylinder. True that is, but the main concern I have is making sure I'm actually going fast enough. Some times, I'm trundling down the road at a comfortable clip, totally enjoying the trip, when I realize that there is a fairly long line of cars stacking up behind me. Oops...got caught driving ten mph below the speed limit again.(People don't particularly like that.) (Especially when they're in one of those fancy modern cars with heaters and electronic suspension and projector-beam headlights.)

 

So, in order to see the speedometer (and keep other drivers happy), I've come up with a temporary solution to get by until I can fix those little light bulbs: a $2 LED flashlight.

 

 

This little flashlight has a clip that hooks onto the tachometer mount, and a goose-neck that allows the light to be bent and aimed to just the proper spot. It works great, and might just help me keep revved up to the speed limit!

 

 

 



Fuel System

Really nice new filler pipe setup.

Getting pretty good at bending line. (The really pretty offset 45 "S" bends are all too hidden to get photos)

Roll the truck out and find a whole lot of clean-up to do....

Range Time

There's a family two towns over that has built a shooting range on their farm and opened it to the public. There is a skeet range, two pistol ranges, a black-powder range, and the rifle range. It's operated on a donation basis, and aside from a few common-sense rules, you're left alone.

 

A few friends/co-workers were headed down to shoot after work on Friday, and since I had some free time, I decided to join them. A quick stop at home to grab the 20 gauge and the .22, and it was on my way to the gun shop for ammo. It was easy enough to get the shotgun shells, but .22 ammo is scarce. I've been looking for months for .22, and have always missed the shipments at sporting good stores and gun shops. Finding it online hasn't been successful either.

 

I found some at one of the local gun shops, but they were limiting sales to one box per family. ONE box of 50 rounds was selling for seven dollars. Somebody needs to get cracking and make up a whole bunch of .22 ammo, and soon. (And get it back down to three bucks for 100 rounds, too!)

 

It was a beautiful evening to be shooting and the range was fairly empty. Got to shooting the rifle and noticed that I was hitting four feet to the right of where I was aiming. Went to adjust the windage, and the whole knob broke off from the scope tube. That sucks. I ended up taking the scope and rings off the rails and shooting with the iron sights. Dead on at fifty yards. Turns out that I can't even see the target  any farther away than that without a scope!

 

As I was plinking away with the dinky little .22, there was a guy next to me booming away with his brand-new AR in 5.56 and my friends a little further down shooting a bolt-action .308 and a semi-auto 7.62. It's been a while since I was at a rifle range, and I'd forgotten what a big shock wave was produced when those things are lit off. Still pretty cool...

 

 

We went up to the shotgun range where I got to fire a lot of shells at tiny little flying clay targets, and I learned two things. First is that a single-shot break action is not the gun of choice to break clays. Second is that I really suck at hitting moving targets!

 

When the other guys started breaking out their handguns at the pistol range, I realized that I need to get myself one of those too. (Slim chance in this household, but I did see a really nice and inexpensive 9mm Glock at the gun shop when I was buying ammo. I also saw a nice S&W, and a totally reasonable Springfield XD......)

 

 

Pretty cool to have an awesome range so close to home...

 

 

 



Progress

The weather isn't freezing cold anymore, and work is progressing on the truck.

 

The fuel tank is securely hung in the proper location. The fuel filler neck that was ordered to go from the side of the truck bed to the fuel tank turned out to be too short....by two feet. Several hours of shopping on the internet didn't turn up any suitable hoses, so it was on to Plan B: create a filler neck from scratch using pre-formed sections of muffler pipe, hose clamps, and rubber fuel hose.

 

The pipe and hose clamps were easy to source. The 2" fuel-rated rubber hose was a surprisingly difficult item to find. It took several trips to the parts store, a special order, and robbing a Brink's truck to get some - this stuff costs $1.53 per inch. I needed two six-inch sections - a total of $18.36 for one foot of rubber hose!

 

 

Once the filler neck is complete and in place, it should be a short job to plumb the metal line from the tank to the carb - and then the beast can go to the muffler shop for a new exhaust! Yay!!

 

 



Ugh!

So cold. No fuel system plumbing going on around here.

Pop Quiz

 

Okay, class: Who knows what this is?

Could I Get a Milk Crate?

Spent the day cleaning up: moving the bicycles out of the garage, the canning jars to the basement, and all of the random clutter got new homes. Swept up all the dead bugs and vacuumed up the spider webs and even wiped some of the mildew off the paint.

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When it was all spiffy, squared away, and ship-shape, we got some real work done. The fuel sender, pickup filter, and gasket/lock rings arrived in the mail today, so they were installed into the tank. Awaiting the filler hoses and hanger strap, and then the fuel system starts to get plumbed in.

 

The passenger door has been hanging out of whack and grinding on the door frame for a long time - today, we realized that the top hinge was missing two mounting bolts. As Levi asked, "Who in the world takes the doors off and doesn't put the bolts back in there?!" Well, Levi, I could tell you, but it might lower your opinion of Uncle J.....    There are now two shiny new bolts holding the door level.

 

The seat has been annoying me since I first sat on it. It's a little flat. Unsupportive. Sunken.

It's not too cool to have a big ol' pickup truck and try to drive it with a seat that makes you look like a little old grandma trying to see over the dashboard.... took the seat out to get a better look at what I need to order from the upholstery place - and to make it easier to lay up under the dash and remove "extra" wiring. So far, I've removed about thirty feet of wires that don't need to be there (it's slow work because you have to trace each wire to make sure that it really isn't needed).

 

Levi loves having the seat out!

 

 

 

 

Parking Lot Find

Went to the Champlain Valley Fair, played some games, rode some rides, ate junky food, saw tons of strange people. Yada, yada, yada....

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Forget all that fair stuff - lookit what was in the parking lot!

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A brand-new Mercedes-Benz Unimog!

 

There are very few vehicles that can stop me in my tracks like a Unimog. They are legendary off-road vehicles. Right after early 80s Jeep CJ-7s, I list Unimogs as my dream vehicles.

 

Cool sighting!

 

 



Back on Track

There's been little progress on getting the truck back out of the garage. Mostly, it's been a hesitation to spend money on it. Somehow, it doesn't seem right to spend money on "non-essential" things like a 41-year-old truck. The turning point(s) have been the realization that that old truck is almost in better condition than the Prizm, there's a lot of stuff that needs hauling (that won't fit in the Prizm), and I really want to start parking in the garage again.

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Last winter, I came up with a rough estimate of what it would cost to get the truck to pass inspection (and brake upgrades to make it safer). Four hundred for the fuel system, eight hundred for the brake conversion, and one seventy for the exhaust. Add ten percent for cost over-runs and bits and pieces, and the bill would be $1500.

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$1500 - that is far less than it would cost to buy another vehicle or repair the Prizm to a newer state. Even doubling that figure, it's less than buying another car.

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After letting that sink in for a few weeks, I started ordering parts. Fuel tank is here, filler hoses are backordered (but on the way soon), straps are being ordered tomorrow, and the hard lines and fittings are available locally. There should be a new fuel system installed in a month or two.(It's cross-country season, so everything depends on Levi cooperating while I watch him after school...)

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Here's hoping that it won't be another ten months before the next update....

 



Let There Be Light!

Back 'round May or so, the lights went out on the Prizm. No low beams, no high beams. Parking lights, tail lights, and brake lights all worked fine. Checked a few things, couldn't find the problem, kept driving. It's spring and summer - who needs lights? (Okay, I need lights sometimes - got caught by darkness after a baseball game and chose to drive twelve miles in a pitch-black thunderstorm by tailgating the wife's vehicle. Rolling down the interstate and back roads with no ability to see is quite the adventure...) (never again)

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Prizm's inspection was up at the end of the month, and the truck is not on the road yet, so it was deadline time: fix the car or buy another one. Too cheap to start shopping for a different car; fix the Prizm it is...

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With the five-year-old's help, it took five days to check all the fuses, replace the relays, and finally break down and buy the replacement Daytime Running Light module (known to have burned out three or more years ago) (it's $160 - ouch!). Everything in the headlight circuits is new or tests good. Flip the switch - no headlights.

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It took several intense hours of studying the wiring diagram and sussing out the workings of that expensive computer module to finally wire in a new ground in the proper location. That got all done late Thursday night (along with safety-wiring the lens back onto that bashed parking lamp), and by 8am Friday, we squeaked past inspection. Squeaked by - the front tire was something like 1/64" from failing, the check engine light was nice enough to stay off for ten minutes, and the driver's rear brake light required a nice hefty smack by the inspector to light up. I don't care if it passed by a mile or by a hair - the car is legal for another year!

 

 

 

 

Ice Jam

 

The picture isn't great (had to take it while moving along a busy road), but this is a river near the house - slightly blocked by an ice jam. Big blocks of ice - some refrigerator and car-sized.

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Summer's coming soon, right?

Abusing the Prizm

That poor old car will haul just about anything. You've seen the picture of the extension ladder tied on top. There've been feed bags stacked inside, and once, I carried home an old metal gaylord that was so heavy it required the help of one of the forklifts at work to put the box up on the roof. There was the pair of 4' x 4' steel plates that I snaked behind the front seats to carry home (3/16" thick and very heavy!) Today it was the plywood strips to make the sideboards for our hockey rink. The back seat and trunk are stuffed full of plywood pieces, too.

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Almost hate to see the truck get on the road, because then I won't have to challenge the car to haul anymore. Almost......

New Year

Finally, the holiday season is over. While enjoyable, what with family and food and lights and stuff, the time between Thanksgiving and New Year's is so busy that there ended up being no time for the truck.

 

There was a little bit of free time today: I got the bills paid, the chores mostly done, and spent my time constructing LEGO trucks, building pirate ships, and playing board games. Little Man jetted off to hot tub with some friends (nice little playboy life he lives, huh?), and I had time to work in the garage....

 

It still looks like this outside:

It's 17 degrees with a slight breeze blowing - not warm enough to be working on the axles or anything big and metal and cold. I did manage to complete and cross off two of the items on the checklist. They were minor things, but still: it's progress.

 

The propane heater helps a little - mainly in thawing my hands after working with ice-cold tools.



Hurry up, Spring time!

Milestone

Wow! The project is now in the garage! It's actually been in there for about a week (note the cushions from the patio chairs being stored on top of the cab - it's going to be a challenge for me to keep my dear truck clean of "storage" items), but posting to the blog has taken some time.

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I wasn't planning on putting the truck into the garage that Thursday, but I had just gotten tired of not making any progress on the truck, and came home angry about it that day. I decided that, ready or not, the truck was moving into the garage that afternoon. Got home, pawned the attention-hogging child off on his mother, and told them I was going out to move the truck. On my way out the door, my loving wife was saying something about the garage smelling like gasoline. As I stepped out and closed the door, I was thinking, "Huh? Why's it gonna smell like gasoline?"  Oh yeah, the hole in the fuel tank. Dammit - I'm not going to let that stop me, I'll just drain the tank after I get it into the garage.

 

I got the battery installed, finally got the engine to crank, and backed into the garage. I thought that I'd be slick about it and just run the engine until the gas tank was empty. I opened all the doors and windows, turned on a fan, and waited outside for the tank to run dry. After a while, I thought that I'd check the mileage record and found that there was just under twelve gallons of gas in the tank. It's going to take hours to empty the tank!

 

Plan number two was to drain the tank via the fuel lines. It seemed like a good idea, until I found that there was no way to crack a line open except for the fittings up by the fuel pump. I pulled the clamps and the gas started to flow out of the line. Well, not really flow...more like a pathetic trickle. Without the pump pulling fuel through the line, this idea wasn't going to work.

 

On to the plan number three: I'm going to stick a hose down the filler neck and start a siphon out to my portable gas cans. Great idea, except I don't have a hose long enough to do the job.

 

Plan number four: Drop the tank. Easy. Just remove the rusty nuts from the hangers, gently lower a nearly full tank, and all's good. Did I mention the time limit? At this point, I've been working with the truck for thirty minutes. I'm really supposed to be inside cooking dinner. (Special thanks to lovey wife Cari for finishing dinner and handling Levi's bath that night!) Some crazy voice in my head told me that it was no problem, I'd have the tank removed in a half hour, tops.

 

I had the tank removed in seventy minutes. Not too shabby, considering that the hangers and hardware are near impossible to get a good hold on with the wrenches needed. I patiently held the hanger rod with one wrench and turned the nut off with another wrench - one agonizingly slow eighth of a turn at a time. Hopes ran high as the nuts reached the end of the rods and the tank was almost free.

 

The floor jack that I was using to lower the tank slowly to the floor turned out to be not so helpful. It held the weight all right, but the tank wouldn't clear the frame while on the jack. The jack came out, and the tank started to move clear - until it hung on the filler hose. Did I mention that I smell gas? There's a hole in the tank, the nearly full tank is hanging at an angle from the filler hose, and gasoline is starting to drip down my arm. That crazy voice in my head (the one that was so confident earlier) started to hum. The hum slowly built into a buzz that shortly exploded into a shrill scream of AAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGHHHHAAAAAAAAA as it tried to tell the rational part of my brain about the explosive properties of gasoline vapor. HURRY! GET THE FILLER HOSE DISCONNECTED! I SMELL GAS! IT'S GONNA GO BOOM! DON'T DROP THAT WRENCH! OH NO, THE TROUBLE LIGHT IS A HOT BARE BULB REALLY CLOSE TO THE LEAKING TANK!   Damn, that voice in my head really freaks out sometimes. I think I'll just keep moving quickly but carefully towards disconnecting the filler and vent hoses...

After a few (remarkably long) minutes, I got the tank free and out of the garage - out to the open air, where an explosion would be a little bit easier to deal with (right?!).

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This counts as major progress towards goal number one! The truck is in the garage and the fuel tank is dropped. I'm making a list of the parts I need to replace the tank and re-plumb the fuel system; once I price that out, we'll move forward on making this thing a daily driver.

 

 

Safe inside for the winter (along with the snowblower).

The nice big empty spot where the fuel tank used to be...

Little Things

Progress on the truck has been slow. The main goal for the past few weeks has been to get the truck into the garage. The obstacles to meeting this goal have been many, and they've all been little things. Interconnected little things. To get the truck into the garage, the car has to come out. To get the car out of the garage, the no-start condition must be corrected. To fix the starter, it must be trouble-shot. To troubleshoot, the garage needs to be cleaned. It goes on and on.

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The starting problem on the car was annoying and getting worse by the day. A few months ago, the starter wouldn't turn on the first turn of the key. Switch the key on and back a few times and the car would start - not too bad a problem to live with. After a few weeks of that, during a torrential rain storm, the switchy trick stopped working. It took forty minutes of turning the key (no way that I'm doing any repair/diagnostics in a storm when I'm running late to pick up at preschool - just cuss and turn the key-repeatedly) for the starter to spin. In the days following, the starter would take up to ten minutes to decide to turn. Not too inconvenient; just leave for work early and remember to not turn off the engine when picking up at preschool (I don't need thirty little kids watching and waiting for the car to start...).

 

Eventually, I decided that something needed to be done. If I was going to keep driving the car throughout the winter, the starter needed to work regularly. If I was going to park outside (because the truck was in the garage), the weak start needed to improve (it's only going to get colder and harder to crank the engine). I started researching options. A new starter for the Prizm was over $100. The starter solenoid that piggybacks onto the starter is over $100. I thought that the relay might be the problem with the key not working, and the starter might be why it cranked so slowly. This was going to be an expensive fix. I decided to only replace the solenoid and to preheat the engine block with a plug-in block heater (to make it easier for the weak starter to spin the engine).

 

Now, being that I'm cheap - or mainly just not willing to spend money on something that I think isn't worth it - I decided to dig a little deeper. I saw a posting somewhere on the internet about the possibility of rebuilding the contacts on the solenoid for cheap. I thought that might be the way to go, so I started looking for the solenoid on my engine. It's tricky to find. The starter is high on the front of the engine, tucked under the exhaust manifold. It looked like a whole bunch of work to get that thing out of it's home, but I figured that if it saved a lot of cash, I'd be willing to do the work. I set aside some time, and got to digging the solenoid/starter combo out of the engine bay.

 

I managed to twist off 70% of the rusty bolts holding the plastic engine shields under the car. By twisting off, I mean that when I was done, only 30% of the original fasteners were left to secure the panels. That's not a good start. When pulling the panels and reaching to remove the starter, one of the things you run into is the terminal for the positive cable from the battery. It's that thingy below...

 

As I was nursing some wounds and planning the next move, I had the thought to check the battery wire connections. There was a little bit of corrosion on the battery terminals themselves, so I cleaned it off. Under that little flippy cover on the solenoid terminal, there was a wire connection with a lot of corrosion. I scraped that off and made the metal all shiny, then reassembled the starter circuit. To my complete astonishment, the starter worked on the first turn of the key (at full strength/speed, too!). That one little terminal was the reason the car wasn't starting....

 

Sometimes it's the little things that get to you....