Hope you all had a very happy and safe New Years celebration! I'm heading into a second year of restoration with a very high expectation. Things are really looking good and considering my limited resources and the extreme limitations of the space in which I work, I've avoided (so far) screwing things up!
I was optimistic last week when I thought some vacation time around the Christmas holiday would give me enough time to ready the engine for starting and running... Oh yeah!
Cooling System:
New hoses and clamps at the ready, I got most of the cooling lines installed. Turns out, I misjudged and ran out of clamps, and needed to reorder a bunch more, so the lines into the heaters will have to wait. I have the optional rear heater in this truck and there are several hard lines encased in foam that need to be cleaned up. Look for this in the next post. They clamps are coming from my left-coast supplier so we'll have to wait another week to complete.
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| Fan in place, ready for the radiator |
Electrical components:
Here are the dash switches and components all cleaned and ready for installation.
Wiring harness is in several pieces. Each section was cleaned and repaired with new tape and is ready to assemble. However, since the engine bay harnesses clamp to the fenders, I've decided to get the engine bay complete and the fenders on before plugging it all together.
A note about quality:
We've all become accustomed to things falling apart. Am I right? Some of you old timers (forgive me) have a story about some item your family handed down through the generations that works a good today as it did when it was new. Me, too.
As it relates to this restoration, I'm intent on reusing everything I can, including the wiring harness. I believe it's unlikely that there are new (other than NOS) that are of the quality that they used when this vehicle was manufactured. So, I'm intent on saving all the plastic and rubber parts that frankly look like they're ready for another 34 years. There is one rubber boot that exemplifies my point. It's the boot for the oil pressure sender mounted on the side of the oil cooler. It's safe to say that this baby is cooking at 200+ Fahrenheit all the time the engine is running and on top of this, consider that this truck spent much of its life in the desert where you could reasonably expect the low humidity to take it's toll. But take a look... the rubber is near perfect, with only a tiny amount of cracking where the wire enters the molded nipple. Honestly, does anyone think a replacement would hold up like this? It gets reused!
Idler Pulley?
Because this truck has power steering, there are two belts and the adjustment for the belt that drives the PS pump is made at the smog pump. Now since this truck was de-smogged long before I bought it, and the bearings in the old pump were toast when I got the vehicle, I had replaced the pump (long before thinking this through). And the new pump was bypassed, as it had no use.
Now, I had to make a decision about either replacing the pump with an idler of some kind or keeping a pump that I did not need. After some digging, I learned how to devane a pump, which I did, which essentially turns the pump into a fancy idler. I did not record the devaning process, but did take some pictures. Check out the captions for the discovery :-) And the plastic plugs? Yes, I had them! (It is possible that I already have one of everything)
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| Remove the hose barbs |
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| Are these... plumbing fixtures? |
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| Yup |
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| The vanes and the graphite wear bars - discarded. |
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| Yes these fit- Imagine having the exact plug I needed? |
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| Masked for paint (already painted the pulley) |
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| Finished with POR-15 (gray) and plugs |
Fuel line:
The fuel line was okay except for the fact that it has been cut short to accommodate the Weber carburetor before I bought the truck. The only issue was that therre no longer was the ridge to keep the hose in place, though that was never a major problem. But I went ahead and put a new ridge in place with the help of Orlando at Professional Car Zone:
Hope to install the harness and complete the cooling system next. Getting close! Stay tuned.
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