I organized a workday with my local truck buds while Jen was down at her Dad’s house on Saturday, and I think we did really well with the projects we wanted to tackle. Because of scheduling and timing, I offered up my driveway for the event, which meant we broke the local record for number of Internationals in one place at one time. Bennett pulled up in Heavy D with a plan to drop the driver’s side gas tank, which has been peeing Peer-Pressure style for the last couple of months. David drove his ’68 pickup over—the longest he’s driven it on the road so far—with a loose plan to tackle a couple of different projects. My intention was to swap a new power steering pump into Peer Pressure to try to fix a constant leak.

After our customary shoot-the-breeze over donuts, we all got to work. Bennett got me started on the pump and then moved to Heavy D, while David started cutting metal to fabricate a set of tank straps. I was able to get the pump out pretty easily (save one mount, which uses a bushing to surround the bolt) and used a $20 Amazon tool to get the pulley off the old pump and press it on to the new one. With that done, it was simple to re-install, fill the reservoir, prime, and do a test run. There were no leaks, and I called it good.

Meanwhile, Bennett had to pull his driver-side fender off to get to a couple of the bolts to his tank, but once that was done, dropping it went quickly—so fast that I didn’t get the chance to help him out. He and I then hooked up my timing tools to David’s pickup and using his ears, the RPM meter, and a vacuum gauge, he was able to smooth out the idle and make the engine run much better.

We had a little less luck on Darth Haul; without a timing light (I have purchased two from H-F and they have both died quickly) it’s hard to get the idle correct, but we used the same combination of vacuum and RPM to try to smooth out and lower the idle speed. I’m getting a lot of dieseling at shutdown, and I suspect that maybe the plugs are too hot, which will be the next thing I check.

Bennett had to take off at that point, so David and I ran to get a slice of pizza, and then I got him set up with my MIG welder to assemble his tank straps. I gave him the basic instructions and put the first one together, then handed him the welder. He was really psyched to get some practice after I had the settings dialed in, and when he finished, we ground the welds down to make the metal as smooth as possible.

By that point it was a little before 5PM, so I loaded some tools into Darth and followed him back to his house, just to make sure he got there OK. I also got some half-decent footage of two red Internationals on the road together, which was pretty cool.