I took the truck out on the highway with the intention of driving it to Frederick last weekend, and found that I had an extremely strong vibration coming from the front end over 55mph, which I strongly suspect are the tires. So I turned around and swapped it for the Honda. Doing more research, I’ve come to the unfortunate realization that the 16″ steel wheels I’ve currently got on the truck do not accept anything currently available other than the trailer tires I have currently mounted. These are made with less care than normal tires, and thus aren’t balanced for everyday use. Given that I’m not road-tripping this thing to Illinois and back every day, that’s not a huge deal, but I intend to take it to Ohio in a couple of months and would like to have proper tires mounted. So now I’m on the hunt for a set of 15″ 4.5×5″ steel wheels that will accept original IH dish hubcaps.

In the meantime I’m going to move the rear tires up front and see if that smooths out the ride, which will then tell me which tires are good and which are bad, or if it’s an issue related to the suspension (which I strongly doubt). I also have new right and left tie rod ends sitting on my desk waiting to be installed this weekend, which should help tighten up the steering linkages.

The other job to finish will be installing the female side of the rear seatbelts, which my truck never came with. I’ve seen a couple of different stock installations, one where the mount is on the wheel arch and one where the mount is on the flat step in front of the arch.

I think, having crawled under this truck a million times, that I’d rather have it on the flat step with a big fat g8 bolt going through the structural part of the truck, and a backing plate underneath.

Oh yeah, and I’ve got to fix the damn fuel gauge.