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Wednesday, September 6, 2017
After having the brakes fail, I took some time off to reset my plans. Up ‘till now, everything had been little jobs done on the driveway. Well, I was looking at a pretty large job of rebuilding the brakes. Also, the wiring under the dash really needed some attention. Occasionally I could see sparks through the various holes people had drilled. I needed a place to work out of the weather.
We had a garage but, when we moved in the house, we converted it into a playroom for the kids. It was full of 10 years worth of cra.. memories!
So Julie started a house hunt for a new place that had a shop.
While this is all going on I finally got the rebuilt heater core back. Getting that done was oddly difficult. The radiator guy kept not doing the job. Thinking it was too expensive or that I’d told him something else or whatever. In the end I kinda’ had to babysit the job making sure the poor guy kept on track.
The plan is to come up with some artwork for a logo. Then make a decal for the rectangle indent.
We’ll see..
Heater remounted. I’m not completely happy about how this was actually mounted. But I figured, its been in there for 30+ years, it’ll be fine.
Its not plumbed in or anything. That’s coming later. Also, there is a map board that slides in between the glove box and the heater. I ordered a new one, but it still needs to be trimmed a little to fit better.
After looking at some houses I went out to the truck and measured just how tall it really was. Then I measured the garage door.. “Huh, it actually will fit in here. By about one inch.”
Kids are all in college, time to clean 10 years of, err.. Memories out of the garage. That was really rough! More than just kid stuff. We all had stuff/dreams stored in there that we didn’t want to let go of. I had to tell myself, “if you end up needing these things again, you can buy new ones.” And I tossed it all out.
It also helped telling myself. “If this saves us from Julie buying a new house, we’ll be saving hundreds of thousands of dollars!”
And after a full weekend of cleaning. The machine actually fit! Franklin has a new home!
The black devils, Saba & Chaos, had to check out the new attraction in their garage.
Back at it. Bought a much bigger floor jack, more Jackstands and a torch for stubborn bolts.
Its nice working inside!
Bought better fittings, new hose and a valve for the cab heat plumbing. Much cleaner job than the original. And, with the valve, we’ll be able to turn the heat off.
The control cable for the valve needs to be figured out and installed.
Uh oh.. Zooming in, notice the water leaking out of the thermostat housing? After all the work to redo this, something’s wrong here.
I pulled the housing back off and found that the gasket had soaked up the water and fell apart. I’ve never seen anything like this happen before.
This time I made my own gasket.
Locating punch for the mounting holes.
Piece of the original gasket I was able to save for getting the inner radius correct.
Currently I’m waiting on a new set of wheel bearings. Once these are installed I can get the drums turned and the brake shoes radius matched (to the drums).
Then there’s this massive cleanup under the truck. Years of built up grease, grime and dirt. I kinda’ had to give up on any pretense of personal hygiene. I just laid down under the machine with a wire brush tipped drill and go at it for hours. Through all this I discovered that the rear hard brake lines were actually copper. Maybe if I was careful, oh no.. Already leaking. I ripped them all out. I need to do the same on the remaining hard lines in the front.
The theory I had was that the left front copper crush washers had been leaking again. That’s why the brakes failed. Something was leaking because that backing plate was a wet mess.
But looking closer with the drop light I could see this was not the case. The crush washers & nearby area was actually dry. Where’s all the liquid coming from? Seeping out of the metal?
I pulled the backing plate. And found oil running out of the bottom spindle bolt hole.
Oh man, there’s not supposed to be oil back there. The chamber behind the spindle bolts is for the CV joint. It’s supposed to be full of grease. The oil seal further in may have failed.. Ugh!
What to do now? Denial or repair?
I always complain about the absurd location of the brake fluid filler cap. I think this is the fix! Its a nifty remote reservoir for brake fluid that you mount on the firewall. There was already a bolt threaded in the firewall where I wanted to mount it, so its like a 10 minute job to install. Or, at least, would be if I hadn’t run out of teflon tape.
The can is mounted by the voltage regulator. The master cylinder is down below in the picture. If you look close you can see the master cylinder’s open top.
Kagi sells these little goodies for Dodges.