Our WC53, “Franklin” Part II

This one is for Sascha.

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 18:15:47 -0800

This update is not a lot about the carryall. It’s mostly just to let you know what’s been going on and why there have been no blog updates for awhile. I’ve been told I should let people know. Sorry about that.

After getting the window fixed, I left the machine out in the rain to see how everything sealed up. The new window seems fine. There are leaks around the rear door, the passenger door and all the other windows. So it looks like, for now, I’m still going to need a tarp to keep the rain out.

Bother!

That was pretty discouraging and, I really needed a break. On top of all this, the truck, besides the leaking, is starting to act almost like a reliable vehicle. So I decided to to take a break and work on other things I’ve been meaning to get to for some time now.

Things causing trouble:

Fuel tank sender is now binary! Fix!
Rear differential seized up. Fix.
Carburetor is flooding all over! Fix.
It wont go anymore. Fix.
New differential is leaking oil like crazy. Fix.
Frame to bell housing grounding strap is falling apart. Fix.
Tie up the main power cable better under truck.
Fuel system looses prime. New fuel pump fixed this!
Headlight switch gets so hot it burned my finger. Look into this.
Roof leaks in the rain.
Passenger side wall leaks in the rain.
Strip out old window box.
Fabricate something to cover hole from missing window.
Spark plugs are cracked, replace ‘em.
Get rotted wall cut out.
Get rotted wall sand blasted.
Have new metal welded into rotted wall.
Prime & paint repaired wall.
Passenger window box has dissolved. Need solution to this.
Get window box fabricated.
Put the window back together.
Re-drill interior panel mount holes.
Replace gasket on oil pump.
Get gasket for oil pump.
Seal up cowl vent.
Get cowl vent gasket.
Window cranks. What to do?

Expedition upgrades:

Get a five gallon bucket for washing things.
Find the bucket, I lost it.
Some sort of awning for rain.

Thanksgiving! Big feasting day for Americans. Danny, our kid in college up in Bellingham, wanted the family to come up to his place to celebrate. Cool, I’ll bring up the girls in Franklin. Its about an hour drive in a modern car from our home.

As we’re packing I find this has been broadcast online by daughter Alex. (of WABDR Fame).

No faith, I tell ‘ya.

See? We made it. That’s Dan’s college house in the background. Think “Animal house” and you get a pretty good picture. He was the only one there for the holidays. So at least it wasn’t a giant college party. Just us.

Mmmm.. Turkey dinner...

Then Julie and I took Franklin for a trip to celebrate our 27th anniversary. The plan was to go to Port Townsend on the Ferry. But at about the time we got to the ferry landing, both ferries broke down. So much for that idea..

Plans were changed and we drove off to the southern end of Whidbey island. Found a really ritzy hotel. (Had a great time)

Came back from fancy seafood dinner to find someone had plugged Franklin into the Tesla charger. I wonder how well that worked out?

There was a round about way to get to Port Townsend and that was to take a ferry over to the Seattle/Everett area, then another further south back out to the islands, cross a bridge, head back north... Took all morning. But I’d picked out a really cool restaurant for lunch.

The restaurant was right across the street from the water. Next to the wooden boat building school. I was starving.

“We don’t serve lunch, sorry.”

So we went out to locate a hotel for the night. And that’s when things started coming a bit unglued..

After checking into the hotel, across the cove from the restaurant, we hopped back into the truck to go have dinner and.. Franklin was dead.

Oh lord! Is the battery dead? Is the generator broken? Fan belt too loose and it ran down? Or did the starter fail? How am I going to get this thing home from way out here?!

In the midst of me freaking out about the truck, Julie gets a text from Alex.

Shelby, our youngest, is in the hospital with a dislocated shoulder! Both Alex & Shelby live in Seattle. Shelby had tried a trapeze class and something had gone wrong.

So here we are, stuck out on the wrong side of the water with a broken truck and our kid’s in the hospital. I looked into getting the machine towed home, but was getting nowhere. Julie was like a caged animal. Rough night.

After a bunch of texting back and forth with Alex, we got the word that she’d gotten Shelby home to her dorm. Julie finally fell asleep. And as I was nodding off, it came to me what had to be wrong with the truck.

First thing next morning I opened up the battery box and sure enough. The battery cable had come loose. 3 minute fix and we were back on the road.

As we were traveling I’d been working on parts of my next project. I’d decided to build my own cell phone.

Its not as hard as it sounds. You see, when companies set out to make cell phones, they buy pre-made cell phone chips. Basically all they do is make up a case and tie everything together with some software.

I’d already bought two pieces of hardware that had the cell phone chips on them along with a Arduino type processors.

This is my setup for testing the hardware. In the plastic can hanging out the window on the mirror arm is the cellphone hardware. This is tied in to my laptop bungie corded to the map board in Franklin. Using this setup Julie and I were able to text back and forth to the kiddies. Now all I needed was a case and some code.. No problem!

3D printed case with all the phone guts installed and wired in.

Ok what are we looking at here?

On the far left the big blue board with the silver thing at the top is the touchscreen. The silver thing is a SD card slot. (SD card = Hard drive)

On the far right, the brownish board with the white square on top is the cell phone hardware. Actually the cell phone is the white square with the red stripe on top. This would be the chip that cell phone companies would buy and build their phones around. The rest of the board is a pack of supporting goodies one needs to build cellphones. Power supply, battery charger, microphone amplifier, speaker drivers etc.

But the cell phone board only has 2k of RAM. Not enough to do much, especially trying to run a touch screen. So I added the little middle board. This has 64K of RAM so it ends up being the controller of everything and the one interacting with Mr user.

Above the boards is the antenna, speaker and underneath that a little rechargeable LiPo battery.

Since thanksgiving or so I’ve been writing code for this thing. 95% is going into the little processor to run the user interface. The phone works, its just really tough to get it to work like you’d expect a phone to work.

During the holidays I did make a wreath for Franklin. Julie shot a short clip of it here.

Home screen. Notice the cool icons along the bottom? I stole those off the internet. They were so much cooler looking than the original ones I made myself.

Phone, Text, Contacts, Calculator, Question game & Breakout game.

I already written the calculator & Breakout game some time ago. I set this machine up to host multiple programs, just like a real phone.

Phone dialing screen. This part really works. You can call people and actually have conversations with them.

Contact list. You can add contacts, delete them, call them. You can’t text them and you can only have four because I’m not finished writing scrolling or sorting of them. That’s what I’m working on now.

What I thought would be a quick diversion, is turning into a massive code writing extravaganza. I’ve been at it for three months without a break. Now that I’m “rolling my own” I’m amazed at the complexity of what ties all your contacts, messages, call logs and everything else together. And, using our smart phones, we all take it for granted.

My calculator. About four years ago, the origin of this project began when I got tired of looking for a calculator and just wrote my own. It was a originally a Mac application. Then I ported it to one of these little processors with a touch screen.

Now I‘ve rolled it into my phone.

The question game. This was a test application for the file handling code that the contact list is built on. I polished it up some and added it in as well.

Basically tries to guess what your thinking of by asking yes/no questions.

Breakout! Another game I wrote some time ago. Nasty reflexion on the screen there, sorry. The other picture was worse.

This was originally written for a tiny 1.5”x1.5” screen with a control knob. I’m using this as a test bed for scrolling stuff.

Scrolling stuff that I’m not working on tonight because I’m writing this.

But yesterday...

You truck people still reading this?

That geeky bit was probably pretty boring & painful. A bit of a rough patch there.

Yesterday was bright and sunny, so Julie drug me and my truck out to test out our new portable BBQ.

It looks kinda’ like a lunch box that folds out into a BBQ.

Trying to set it up.

This was before we realized the legs weren’t folded out yet.

We were actually successful in that we got it going (using charcoal). We cooked two cheeseburgers on it. Then figured out the burner box had legs too. That would have been much better.

But it worked, we’ll do better next time, and the truck made it home unassisted. Yay!

Anything else? No.. that about covers it. Sorry to be so light on the wrenching, but that’s how it goes sometimes. Franklin is having a spot of reliability. I’ve been running him as my daily driver for awhile now.

Oh wait! One other thing. Julie is liking the camping so much, she made me buy her a rooftop tent for her 4Runner!

The world changes..

Show them the money!

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 11:56:18 -0800

Last week I’d started ripping into the leaking window and rotted truck side issue. This, like all projects, snowballed beyond anything I could ever foresee. Also this time, instead of buying a bunch of tools and struggling for weeks to learn how to use them.. I threw money at the project. I, gasp, hired some professional help. Here’s the story.

Things causing trouble:

Fuel tank sender is now binary! Fix!
Rear differential seized up. Fix.
Carburetor is flooding all over! Fix.
It wont go anymore. Fix.
New differential is leaking oil like crazy. Fix.
Frame to bell housing grounding strap is falling apart. Fix.
Tie up the main power cable better under truck.
Fuel system looses prime. New fuel pump fixed this!
Headlight switch gets so hot it burned my finger. Look into this.
Roof leaks in the rain.
Passenger side wall leaks in the rain.
Strip out old window box.
Fabricate something to cover hole from missing window.
Spark plugs are cracked, replace ‘em.
Get rotted wall cut out.
Get rotted wall sand blasted.
Have new metal welded into rotted wall.
Prime & paint repaired wall.
Passenger window box has dissolved. Need solution to this.
Get window box fabricated.
Put the window back together.
Re-drill interior panel mount holes.
Replace gasket on oil pump.
Get gasket for oil pump.
Seal up cowl vent.
Get cowl vent gasket.
Window cranks. What to do?

Expedition upgrades:

Get a five gallon bucket for washing things.
Find the bucket, I lost it.
Some sort of awning for rain.

Out comes the window box. They are/were held in by a couple welds on the top edges, about half way up the window opening, and tack welded along the lower window lip.

The bottom of the box is held up by two sheet metal angle brackets welded to the wall. Most of this was missing. Luckily the brackets were still there and they helped for showing how things should be lined up later for reassembly.

I grabbed the air grinders and cut it out.

Tom and I cut a piece of thin plywood, gave it a coat of Army Olive paint and clamped it in place of the missing window. Now we can at least still use the truck as things are being worked on.

This is Chris of Extreme Metal and Paint here in Anacortes, WA. The locals pointed me to him as the guy that could handle a repair like this.

The original plan was to chop out this little piece of rotted metal, get the area sand blasted bring the truck back and have a patch welded in the hole.

Patch repair : $500 - estimate
Sand blasting? $200 - guess
Fabricate box : $200 - guess

$900? Ok, figure about a grand? Ok, lets do this!

I mean, its not all that big of a repair. Not a big deal..

I even supplied a donor body piece to get the metal from. I got this when bought the truck.

Although the lower shape that we need was correct. Chris noticed that the window cutout edge didn’t match up correctly. Body lines up there were wrong. There’s an extra body line that’s not on the truck.

In the sand blasting booth, ready for blasting. We had it done at Skagit Powdercoating. This is a really popular shop with the locals. They were somewhat reluctant to sandblast the truck because they knew sand would go just everywhere inside, no matter what measures they tried to mask it. I told them that I understood and do it anyway.

And they did it, both inside and out. It was a mess inside, but not the end of the world.

Sandblasting : $350

$1050.. Still ok.

While showing off the truck at the sand blaster, they’ve done a lot of stuff for this project but this was the first time seeing the machine, we noticed I had a cracked spark plug.

I guess its time for a set of new spark plugs. I wonder what cracked that one?

Anyway, after sand blasting, I ran the truck down to the body shop on Friday. Lets hope it doesn’t sit there for months like I’ve seen happen at other custom shops.

Find out they are on it Saturday morning. Cool!

I get there to take pictures to find the entire section being replaced.

What the? Where did you find that big shiny new piece of carryall wall to weld in there?

And why?

A peek inside.

Turns out the damage was a lot more extensive that what was showing originally. Actually, not terribly surprising.

Well, that covers the “why”. Now where did the metal come from?

Here’s how.

Using the piece of donor body panel, Chris made up a set of dies for this machine. Turn it on, push through a strip of sheet metal and it gives you yards of carryall body panel. How cool is that?

Stamping out an example piece. That machine was really impressive. He has dies for all sorts of common body parts that rust out. A couple examples were for 1970s pickup truck windshield gutters.

Having it be easy to just stamp out different shapes makes fixing body rot so much easier. When in doubt, cut it out.

I never thought that this could be an approach to take. Everywhere else I’ve seen body panels painstakingly fabricated by hand.

Then he chopped out all the rot, and did a little more sand blasting to clean up what was exposed.

Actually, not all the rot was chopped out. To get at it all we would have had to pull out the rear window as well. I hadn’t done that because it wasn’t leaking and I was trying to limit the size of the project.

Futile, I know.

Weldable primer going in. This was a really poor design to begin with, with nothing put in to seal out water. No wonder so many carryalls are missing this part of their bodies.

New body wall, ready to weld in.

New panel being tacked in. It was really neat seeing how all this was accomplished.

Once everything was tacked together he welded up the seams. Then, using the grinders, erased them.

It was shocking how fast he could replace body panel parts.

Seam erased. Inside now sealed with body sealant.

Then I got lazy and told him I’d like it ready for paint.

Smoothed out, body filler added and block sanded.

Primer going on..

Primer on, ready for paint.

Its just AMAZING how much custom work you get around here for just $500. Mostly done over the weekend as well. I was able to pick up the machine all completed that Monday morning.

I think we probably went past the $500 mark some time ago though..

Bodywork : $1600 and change.

Ok, not what I budgeted for. But wow! They did such a great job! Because, some times I just cringe at what I’ve seen body shops do to cars.

$2150, this is starting to hurt..

Took the truck home. Window plug back in. Sprayed some Olive drab over the repair to make things less obvious. I don’t know when, if ever, I’ll get around to painting the rest of the body.

This’ll be fine for now.

Now remember I found a 1934 Perry Mason Novel inside the body panels? I discovered that you could get these for your Kindle (Digital book viewer) And bought one. And got completely hooked on them.

I’m reading my 20th Perry mason novel as I type.

Oh boy..

Meanwhile, back in the garage, I’ve been looking into the possibility of having, at least this window, complete with the ability to roll up and down. I was completely surprised to find the rolling mechanicals were in great shape. Except, that they had been bashed at some point and the pinion gear on the crank had been shattered.

And parts were not available.

But Midwest had a replacement for $150. Ok, fine. Bring it on. I thought it was going to be a reproduction, but it turned out to be NOS part, so it needed some cleanup.

$2,300 Woo hoo!

I wanted to replace the old cracking seal between the window frame and the glass. In order to get the frame apart I needed to clean up where the two bottom screws attached to top and bottom frame pieces together.

Mask and sand blast.

Cleaned up nice, but it didn’t help any. I still had to grid these out of the frames.

Then I felt bad. I really need to clean these up while I’m here. Also, I couldn’t get the frames apart.

I took it to the body shop, they pulled it apart and sand blasted the parts for me.

I painted the frames and took everything to the local auto glass shop. Same guy that put in my rear windows. He took one look at the frames and said “Old Dodge huh?” That made me feel better.

I had him put in new glass seal and assembly. $75

$2,375

I’d been waiting for the window box being fabricated by Superior Systems. My usual guy was out on vacation and it seemed they were pretty loaded down with work. So it took longer than I expected. Typically these guys are pretty speedy quick.

But its ready for installation now. Here it is at the body shop getting its primer coat.

Box fabrication : $400

$2,575

Another Saturday and Chris is test fitting the box.

Now there had to be a lot of guess work on all of this. We had most but not all of the original box. So we weren’t positive about the size. The angle brackets were still on the wall but in pretty bad shape. There were quite a few compromises and “splitting of differences” in the final assembly of all this.

Hours of work, trimming, welding..

Assembling the new window to the crank panel.

The mounting brackets for the crank panel hadn’t been attached so Chris had to figure out where they were supposed to go. These are critical because it locates the window glass into the window.

While we were struggling with all this, I’d been thinking about how Chris could weld like a madman with his electric MIG welder. Never having tried one of these modern machines, I wanted to try it. So I asked him, “While your on the clock, could you let me try a little bit of welding on that machine of yours?” He was all,

“Sure!”

He hopped out and set me up to play around with the welder. Showed me a bunch of stuff on how to weld sheetmetal. Do’s and don’ts. It was a lot of fun.

WAY easier than the old stick welding I used to attempt back in the day.

Sunday morning the window and all the interior is in and working. There are some screw holes that need re-drilling and I agreed to take care of that. Along with the drain plumbing.

Back at home, center punching for the new screw holes.

Finishing and imstalling window box, reinstalling the window and interior bits $1,100.

$3,675 And I’m sure there were other bits I missed.

The truck sits on level ground with a few degrees of nose down rake. Ok, fine. But they put the drains at the rear of the window boxes.

Really?

Also, as carryall owners pretty much all know, they just dump the water between the body panels and let it find its own way out.

Really?

And where it ends up is still on Julie’s pillow!

So I had them put drains in both ends of the box, just in case. Last night I decided to just use the front one. A handy body rot hole allowed me to run the hose out the bottom of the body to drain completely away.

So, I needed to plug the rear drain hole. Tired and out of clever ideas, I came up with this. Its a piece of double flared steel tubing with a chunk of sheet steel soldered to the end of it.

Look at them dirty hands!

Painted to slow down rusting..

The flared part is between the hose clamps.

All together, sealed up with working winder and drains. As they say in Project Binky,

Sorted!

Actually, I’ve been working on the window cranks but haven’t gotten anywhere with them yet.

So in conclusion. Paying to get stuff done? It costs a LOT. No matter where you go, it’ll cost a lot. I’m lucky because I live in an area that has people with mad skills. If I had taken it to some Bozo, this would have been a disaster.

Also, I had to deal with guilt the entire time. Paying to push my hobby forward? Is this right? What am I doing?

I justified it by telling myself that it was about tools and skill-set that I don’t have. But the real reason was, I needed it done to use the truck. As it turns out, my hobby is shifting from working on the truck, to using the truck.

Camping in the rain.

Mon, 8 Oct 2018 18:49:29 -0700

Clutch fixed and suddenly we have a seemingly reliable machine, finally. Above we’re picking up a local batch of dumplings for lunch. Tasty! So now that the machine is running again, its time to rebuild our confidence in it.

Things causing trouble:

Fuel tank sender is now binary! Fix!
Rear differential seized up. Fix.
Carburetor is flooding all over! Fix.
It wont go anymore. Fix.
New differential is leaking oil like crazy. Fix.
Frame to bell housing grounding strap is falling apart. Fix.
Tie up the main power cable better under truck.
Fuel system looses prime. New fuel pump fixed this!
Headlight switch gets so hot it burned my finger. Look into this.
Roof leaks in the rain.
Passenger side wall leaks in the rain.
Passenger window box has dissolved. Need solution to this.
Put the window back together.

Expedition upgrades:

Get a five gallon bucket for washing things.
Find the bucket, I lost it.
Some sort of awning for rain.

Oldest daughter, Alex, wanted to learn how to drive a “crash box”. Here she is getting her driving lesson. She drove us all the way across the island and back to buy a couple crabs for lunch.

Pretty impressive.

”What? Allie got a driving lesson? Where’s my driving lesson?” So, not to be out done, youngest daughter gets her crash box driving lesson.

Julie’s next in line..

Then Julie and I ran the truck up the coast for an afternoon picnic. Everything seemed to work fine, except the headlight switch. The headlight switch gets hot enough to burn your fingers. Something amiss in there.

Headlight switch pulled out of the dash, hanging on its wires. I thought it was the fuse getting hot, but it was the connector to the fuse that was overheating.

The rivet that holds the fuse connector to the power switch had worked loose. This caused a high resistance and all the heat. I could possibly fix it, maybe..

I just bought a replacement. I needed to get this working so as to be able to drive at night because..

Side note: There was always this annoying buzzing, scraping sound coming out of the generator. I was told that this was “Just the way they were”. So I tried to ignore it. Ever since I swapped out this switch, the noise is gone!

Go figure!

We were heading out camping again! This time it was to Kayak point near Stanwood, WA. The weather was iffy and there was a good chance of rain. Also, a good chance of having to drive in the dark. Hence the new headlight switch.

The first night I figured it might rain and that it would probably come at us from the rear. So we used the rainfly from the old tent to cover that end. Looked pretty tacky. But, it was successful and there was no leaking.

Camping in the rain with no shelter but the truck was horrible. So we packed up and ran into town to the local Cabelas camping store. There we found this cool awning. This took rainy camping all the way from misery to enjoyable!

Two thumbs up!

A closer shot of the awning. We’d just got it assembled for the first time. The cooking gear hadn’t been loaded in or setup yet.

Of course, with this new awning, we got cocky and the next night, near morning, it really rained.

And we found that the truck does leak.

We got up before light because we were getting wetter and wetter inside the truck. Made a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon with coffee. Then jammed everything back in the truck and..

Headed home. Look, blue skies!

This was the first time taking the machine off island camping that it made it home under its own power!

WTG Franklin!

Saw a car that was so hungry, it was eating its own bumper!

There are three leaks. Two are from roof seams that I didn’t seal up last time. So I taped off the rest of the roof seams and went to town with the sealer. This is not so much of a repair as just a stabilization.

These two hit exactly over where I stashed my pants and right in the middle of our sleeping bags about two thirds of the way down.

Blek!

This one is a little bit scarier. Sadly this is behind all the window hardware and interior bits.

This leak fills up the area where Julie’s pillow sits. So I can’t just ignore it.

I almost put duct tape over it. Now I kinda’ wish I had.

The water runs out from under this forward window. Time to dig in..

As I begin to rip into this area I find the design is to let the water run down the sides of the window into this “window box”. From there, I assume, it drains out somewhere.

But the bottom of this box is completely missing. The outer side, or what remains of it, is that rusted strip hanging there.

The outer plate that I removed holds the cranking mechanism. All of the weather stripping came out as dust and fluff.

Above the windows were rats’ nests. The rear window’s nest was the bigger of the two.

The interesting bit was when I started to clean out these nests I found they were actually chewed up books!

The rear one was a Perry Mason novel.

I looked up Perry Mason novels.

The Perry Mason novels and short stories by Erle Stanley Gardner, published from 1933 to 1973.

The front one seems to be some old book on baseball.

Knowing nothing about sports, I looked up John McGraw

John Joseph McGraw, nicknamed "Little Napoleon" and "Mugsy", was a Major League Baseball player and manager of the New York Giants. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937. While primarily a third baseman throughout his career, he also played shortstop and the outfield in the major leagues.

This stuff could have been hidden in here at the factory! I wonder if someone stole somebody else’s books and stashed them in here?

But the real deal now is. How in the world am I going to...
Get the remains of the window box out to get at the holes in the wall?
Fix the holes in the wall?
Get/Build a new window box?
Put all this back together?

It was the clutch..

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 21:52:28 -0700

Again Franklin is in the garage for rest and repair. The first order of business is to figure out what broke in the driveline to cause it to not be able to move. I suspect there has been a clutch failure of some sort. The parking brake still works so everything is fine from the gearbox back. I didn’t hear a big bang sound that would typically occur if the main shaft in the gearbox snapped. We’ll have a look at the clutch first.

Things causing trouble:

Fuel tank sender is now binary! Fix!
Rear differential seized up. Fix.
Carburetor is flooding all over! Fix.
It wont go anymore. Fix.
New differential is leaking oil like crazy. Fix.
Frame to bell housing grounding strap is falling apart. Fix.
Tie up the main power cable better under truck.
Fuel system looses prime. New fuel pump fixed this!
Headlight switch gets so hot it burned my finger. Look into this. 

Expedition upgrades:

Get a five gallon bucket for washing things.
Find the bucket, I lost it.
Some sort of awning for rain.

I pulled off the bottom flywheel cover plate and had a look. Sure enough, I could spin the driveshaft (rear wheels lifted off the ground) and the input shaft of the gearbox would spin inside the clutch. But the clutch plate would not move.

First order of business this time was to make up some alignment studs for pulling and reinstalling the gearbox. The WWII manual said to chop the heads off a couple 1 1/2”? I can’t remember the size now, but a couple bolts.

Second step was to cut a slot in the top for using a large screwdriver on them.

The plan, from the manual, is to replace the two top bolts that hold in the gearbox with these studs. This gives something to hold the gearbox in alignment when sliding it in and out of position.

As per my usual, I pulled out the intermediate shaft and the caps came off spilling needle bearings everywhere. Then it was a hunt to find them all. Clean them all up and reinstall the bits.

Don’t get upset, just deal with it.

Cleaned up, reassemble.

Didn’t get any pix of pulling the gearbox.

I had to pull off the spare tire and unbolt the spare tire arm crossmember. Luckily you don’t actually have to remove the crossmember, only slide it back out of the way.

The other fortunate thing is that you don’t need to pull off the forward driver’s side bracket. This bracket holds the clutch return spring and its nearly impossible to take on and off. And, by not removing it, this leaves a couple bolts holding the spare tire arm. Removing that includes removing the driver’s running board. This would take hours and a second person to help with the arm. That arm weighs a ton!

The studs worked and seem to be pretty helpful.

And this picture? Its an internal chunk of the clutch disk that fell out when everything was pulled apart.

The gap between the plates is where the piece above was supposed to be.

The new clutch plate arrives. This took some time to track down. 10” disk, 1” shaft, 10 flute. It was really common back in the day. There seems to be none left in the “normal” world. Not even cores to be rebuilt. Luckily for us, DC Truck parts had a bunch made. So I was able to get a shiny new one from them.

I saved the old input shaft from the gearbox rebuild for doing clutch alignments like this.

After the new clutch and throwout bearing was reassembled, I grabbed Steve for the big gearbox install. The new alignment studs actually helped quite a bit for getting this back in.

I found the ground strap was falling off as the end had split. So I fabricated a new end and soldered it on.

Quick test ride. Everything seems to work.

But now, checking over things, it turns out the new differential is leaking quite a bit of oil out of its pinion seal.

I’m getting really tired of replacing major driveline parts. So I’m going to fix this before taking this machine anywhere.

First roadblock. Someone mashed the nut over the cotter-pin ends. Both sides too!

Vandalism!

Took a day or so to figure out how to get the bloody nut off. Had to grind away a bunch of metal with my handy dandy die grinder.

Next roadblock. The yoke is not coming off the shaft. At all.

First attempt after trying by hand. Bashing chisel between the shaft and a cross shaft held by the U-Joint retainers.

This didn’t work. Also, I felt really bad about bashing this sideways like this.

Then I realized I had a bearing puller setup that I bought when I was doing the front axle rebuild.

And, everything fit together great. Now I’m in business.

Not in business for long..

The cross member bent and the nut and washer pulled through it. The yoke didn’t budge.

I was able to borrow some puller parts from the local auto parts store.

Adding this to the clamp that I already had, I was able to make up a strong enough puller to actually get the yoke off.

I tested this setup on the old differential to make sure it worked before climbing under the truck.

And this netted me two yokes to choose from. The old differential had almost no miles on it, so there was not much wear on it.

But it was pitted a bunch. Again the local parts shop to the rescue. They had a sleeve I could use to cover the pitted section.

Next obstacle, how to pull out the old seal? The online boys tend to like drilling out a couple holes and using them to attach a cross plate. I didn’t want to go that way. Seemed like a lot of work and metal chips to me.

Then I found I could force my two arm puller into the seal and I was able to pop it right out. Again, using the old differential as a test case was really helpful.

What to use as a drift to install the new seal? Turns out the 8 sided socket I use for the wheel bearings was a perfect fit.

Then, of course, I had to bash the yoke back on again.

Sigh..

Topped off the oil, found it about a pint low. Good thing I fixed this. I only had about 100 miles on it.

Anyway, ran the truck 30+ miles with no leaks. So I guess for now its fixed.

Sorry about the boring update. Lets hope the next one’s more interesting.