Category: Repairs

Weekend Update

I got the driveshaft back for the Travelall on Thursday. They wound up completely rebuilding what I brought them: they put a new yoke on either side of a larger driveshaft and connected that to the original slip shaft from my truck. The old driveshaft was 2 1/2″ in diameter and this new one is 3″ so there’s some extra beef. I hit it with some self-etching primer and black paint on Friday afternoon and let it cure in the sunlight. Saturday morning, after running some errands, I crawled under the truck and put it back in. This was straightforward, and when it was done I took her for a run around the block. I wound her up as fast as I could close to the house and it looks and feels like the vibration is gone—which is excellent news. I felt so good about it, I took the truck out three times over the weekend to run errands.

Then I put the Scout up on jack stands and started tearing into the hub on the passenger side in order to swap the rotors. All of the videos that I have seen talk about taking the faceplate off, then pulling a snap ring out before removing the outer section of the housing. None of the videos show exactly where that snap ring is, and I don’t see it on my hub anywhere. I pulled the driver’s side off to see if I was missing something, but that looks exactly the same as the passenger side. My spare hub is a completely different design, so I can’t use that as a baseline. So I put the whole thing back together to cogitate on it a little longer.

Doing some organizing in the garage during the weekend, I went looking for some weatherstripping and stumbled on something I forgot I had: a used speedometer cable from the green truck. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to slap myself in the head, because it would only make sense that I would save something like this. Brand new, these cables are $60, so this was a great find. I cleaned the grease off it, filled it with silicon spray and put it in the truck. The needle hops around a bit, but it’s working, and the odometer spins, which is great news, because now I can track gas usage again.

Another quick thing I looked at were the locks on the lockbox under the rear seat in Darth. I’ve had these finger-tight since I put them in, and now that the truck is on the road I need some secure storage. Both sides have needed adjustment since I put them in. The driver’s side needs a new slot to be cut into the side of the box for proper alignment with the key, and the passenger side needs a longer catch made for the lock mechanism. I think I’m going to draw up a design and have SendCutSend cut me two new ones instead of trying to cut and fabricate one here. Along with that, I have two modifications to make to the C-series cupholder I designed—I want to increase the diameter of the cup cutouts by at least 1/2″ to allow for some rubber bumpers around the edge, add a little more height to the gusset at the bottom, and have them cut the two bolt holes for the seat hoop. So I’ll gang those two orders up and maybe save a little on shipping.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Weekend Update  |  Posted in Brakes, Repairs, Travelall

Wednesday Musings

Back at work, I’m sitting through some training sessions for new operations software and multitasking while they go through stuff I’ll never need to know, so I’ll list out some updates here while I’m thinking about them.

I dropped the driveshaft for Darth off at a shop in Baltimore on Monday. The quote to fix it is a bit more than I was expecting, but I’m not going to find one of these just laying around a junkyard, so you gotta do what you gotta do. The shop caters to the large trucks in this area and the guy I talked to was sitting in front of an industrial lathe the size of my car, which gave me a good vibe.

The next big thing I want to tackle are the front brakes on Peer Pressure. I can’t find a shop around here who will touch her— I keep hearing, “We don’t work on anything over 20 years old,” which makes me nervous for the 19-year-old CR-V in our driveway, but I digress: I’m gonna have to figure this out myself. There are YouTube videos, of course, in varying degrees of quality, for removal and installation, and I’ll have to study these for a while before attempting this myself. I think the only thing I’d really need is a large 2-1/16″ socket to take the big retainer nuts off, and I found one on Amazon for $14 which will be here Friday.

Something I’ve been curious about ever since I got the new PT Cruiser seats is a little switch on the driver’s side. I’ve never known what this thing could be, so I did a little sleuthing this morning and found that the seat height is adjustable.

Which makes me wonder if it’s locked in a higher position than normal. I’m gonna put 12 volts to the switch and see if it will go down at all.

 

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Wednesday Musings  |  Posted in Repairs, Seats

On Hold

Update Monday July 28: the second clutch I ordered is on its way, as per FedEx, and should be here by COB tomorrow evening. The first one is still stuck at the warehouse.

I’m currently waiting on two clutch kits from two different vendors which both happen to be shipping from the same warehouse in Kearny, NJ, where everyone seems to be smoking weed out back.

To recap: the transmission shop called me last Monday while I was in a car driving through Pennsylvania, and I used my phone to jump on RockAuto to find the proper 12″ clutch kit and order it. They promised me I’d have it by that Wednesday, which came and went. The FedEx tracking system said the label had been created but they hadn’t received the package yet—which is how it stands a week later. I got impatient on Saturday and figured I’d nudge the universe by going to a second vendor and ordering the same clutch kit to see who could deliver it first. But the joke was on me: both vendors use the same warehouse (both FedEx tracking updates point to the same location, and when I look at the inventory on RockAuto, it says there’s only one left, down from three last Monday.

It’s been too damn hot to do much of anything outside—we got back on Wednesday and I spent pretty much all weekend hiding out inside, apart from taking the Scout to the local Lowe’s for a sheet of plywood and sanding down a fresh skim of filler on each of the doors to cover the PO’s ham-fisted install of cheap mirrors.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on On Hold  |  Posted in Repairs, Travelall

Clutch Update

The transmission shop dropped the clutch this morning and found some very interesting things. At some point in the recent past, a new clutch was put in with new freeze plugs, pilot bearing, and (possibly) a flywheel. But the crank bolts weren’t sealed and apparently backed themselves out, smoking the clutch surface and possibly the flywheel. Jack sent me photos of the inside of the case and all of the parts, and it’s just puzzling. He gave me a disc diameter and a spline count, and I jumped on RockAuto to find the right replacement. Within five minutes I’d ordered it over the phone, to be delivered Wednesday.

I’m so glad I didn’t continue trying to mess with it in the driveway; I never would have sorted this out myself.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   1 Comment on Clutch Update  |  Posted in Repairs, Travelall  |  Tagged

Win Some, Lose Some

Saturday morning I farted around a little with Darth; I verified that the clutch slave is working when I press the pedal and that it’s got a full range of motion. So I didn’t bother bleeding it again. I also put a short hose and filter on the end of the gas tank breather line to keep moisture out of the tank, something I should have done months ago. Finally, I ran it up to temperature again and recorded a data log for future tinkering.

With things at a standstill there, I turned to the Scout to-do list. The number one issue there was fixing the re-awakened exhaust leak on the passenger side, which has been plaguing me for several years now. I put the truck up on jacks, pulled the tire off, and poked my head into the wheel well.

At first I was having an issue finding the leak itself until I found a suggestion online which involved taping the hose on a shop-vac with the blower reversed to the tailpipe. This quickly showed the donut around the heat riser valve was bad, which is what I suspected. I pulled the assembly apart and went through my box of spares to find the old riser assembly without the flapper (this valve is designed to stay closed to heat up the engine quicker, then open and allow exhaust gases to pass through to the muffler normally) and several spare insulating donuts.

The offending valve/joint is in the center of the photo.

After using pliers to straighten out the mounting flange, I put the old valve on, then tried a combination of different donuts to see which one would close up the leak the best. This was mostly successful, but the leak came back after a test drive. The issue is that the mounting flange on the downpipe has been bent enough times that it’s not providing a strong enough seal to the donut, and no amount of bending it back will fix the issue. So I have to think on that one.

I also bought a set of rotors for the front brakes. The ones on the truck have been warped for several years and are rubbing during normal driving, which heats up the hubs and bearings. I was all ready to swap them on Saturday afternoon when I realized this process involves removing the hub assembly completely—something I’m not prepared to do. So I’ve got to find someone who can do a brake job on the Scout for me.

A beautiful morning for a drive over the bridge.

Then I loaded it up with tools and drove 70 miles over the bridge to Easton to do some work at Karean’s house. The truck ran flawlessly; other than the rotors heating up the front hubs, she ran cool and calm even through 45 minutes of stop and go bridge traffic. I was completely heat-soaked; even though the sun was down, the residual heat and humidity plus the mobile oven underneath me made that traffic a miserable experience. Luckily I was able to do 40mph over the bridge and that cooled things down quickly.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Win Some, Lose Some  |  Posted in Repairs

Crossed Wires

The good news is that I installed a brand new starter on the Travelall this weekend. The bad news is that the battery might be screwed. Let me explain:

I’ve known the starter that came with the truck was going to need to be replaced since I bought the truck. It’s made a funny noise at the end of the start cycle the entire time I’ve had it, and lately it’s been showing its damage by heating up the battery cables after just a few uses. So I bought a new one on RockAuto and made plans to swap it out. I put the canopy over the front of the truck,  jacked it up onto stands, and started the difficult task of removing the old one. It’s in an impossible location: between the frame rail and the engine, and directly over both the front axle and Y-pipe from the manifold.

Once I’d gotten that out, I bench-tested the new one to verify it was working correctly, then hefted it up into place to bolt it up to the truck. When that was done and I was reasonably sure I had all the connections correct, I moved forward, pulled the mechanical fuel pump off the truck, and replaced it with a steel block-off plate I made last weekend. There’s no reason to have a useless pump  leaking oil everywhere.

I had to mess with the electrical connections a couple of times to get the truck to wake up, and I got it to start quickly and easily twice before trying to bump the transmission free, with no success. But then the truck refused to start—the electrical system refused to do anything at all, actually. I went out and found that the battery was hot to the touch, so I pulled it out and set it on the ground. It remained hot for hours afterwards, which leads me to believe I crossed wires on the starter somehow.

Update: verified. I pulled the battery out of the Scout, dropped it in place, hooked up the ground, and touched the hot lead to the battery: the starter immediately tried to engage, which means something is screwed up with the wiring. I did verify that the two extra wires are going to the right poles on the solenoid: the 12-12 wire goes to the R terminal, and the 14-12 wire goes to the S terminal. So I’ll have to get back under the truck, take the wires off, verify they’re all clean and not shorting on each other, and re-install.

Bench-testing the old starter confirmed my suspicions: it still works, but there’s a terrible noise at the end of the cycle when the gear retracts back into place—it sounds like the unit is grinding as it spins down.

In better news, I sprayed the two hubcaps I got at Nats with oven cleaner to remove the red paint; as it turns out there was a layer of red over black over white, but it all came off easily, and with a detailed scrub with some OOO steel wool I got both of them sparkling again. They look so good I’m kicking myself for not having bought four.

Finally, I took advantage of a coupon code and bought an EFI tuner training course so that I can properly tune the Sniper on the Travelall. I asked the IT guys at work if they had any decommissioned laptops I could buy, and they just gave me one they were going to e-cycle. It’s a 2021 Dell that’s got plenty of horsepower to run the Sniper software; it was gratifying to load the config file and see it in full color on the machine. From what I’ve seen in the videos so far, I’m probably going to have to spring for an extra cable to connect the laptop directly to the carb in order to make tweaks in real time.

Posted on   |   by bill   |   Leave a Comment on Crossed Wires  |  Posted in Electrical, Fuel Injection, Repairs, Travelall