Currently, the garage is ABSOLUTELY full; there’s barely any room to walk in there right now. Part of this coming weekend is going to be consumed by pulling all of the parts out, re-organizing them, and finding different homes for some of the bulkier things. The hood from the Green truck is going to have to go out behind the garage, and my plan was to do a local search to see who had wooden pallets they wanted to sell within a 5-mile radius of the house.
Cut to this morning, on the way to drop Finn off at school, I noticed a pallet leaning up against the telephone pole two doors down from our house, where our neighbor will often leave things for free pickup. I got back home, parked the car, and hustled over there to grab it before it disappeared. Sometimes, providence smiles on us.
Two of the Scout doors are also going to go outside until Bennett can make some room for them, or I sell them elsewhere. I’ve got just enough room under one of the shelves to tuck all four Travelall doors away, and then I’ve got to find a better solution for some of the bins. I’ve currently got two Scout II rear benches, so one of those will go on Marketplace, to Nationals, or to the dump. Other than the axles, I’m about 95% done with getting the passenger side quarter panel off in one piece.
I got the lineset ticket for the Green truck on Monday evening, which was nice; I’d ordered it weeks ago but the Wisconsin Historical Society is pretty swamped, I guess. Looking through the list of options offered no real surprises: the engine and transmission are still the same, the fancy interior package is there, as is the upgraded heater. One thing did catch my eye, though, and that had me going back to the Red truck’s LST to compare: the Green truck has 3.54 gears while the Red truck has 4.10’s. What this means, roughly, is that the Green truck is set up better for highway cruising than the Red: a shorter gear will offer lower MPG and top speed. For example, I have a 3:54 rear in Peer Pressure, which allows that great hulking beast to do 70 MPH on the freeway with no real trouble, other than the fact that it’s as aerodynamic as a brick and the suspension is made for hauling gravel. If my plan for the Red truck is to make it a comfortable highway cruiser, I want tall gears to take advantage of the engine.
So, I started thinking about pulling the axle out of the Green truck before it leaves. It’s the same basic RA15 unit in both trucks, but the axle shafts are different (the Green truck ends with a 5×5.5 bolt pattern while the Red truck is 5×4.5) so a straight-up swap is out of the question at this point. I’d love to just yank it and then call the scrapper, but they generally want a vehicle to have two axles to easily drag onto a flatbed or hook up to a tow-behind. I’ve called around to a couple of scrappers in the area but they’re kind of dodgy on taking something without wheels. I’m going to keep calling and hopefully find someone up for the challenge.
I’ve had a standing store credit with IHPA after I returned some stuff last year, and now that the window is safely tucked away I figured I’d order some new rubber for it as well as the doors. When it gets a little reliably warmer outside I’m going to call the glass installer back and ask for the guy who put my replacements in last summer. Having new gaskets in both of the rear glass will go a long way to keeping things water-tight back there. The door rubber is another whole project, but once that’s in I won’t have to worry about leaks in the rest of the cabin.