I’ve had some time to sneak out and fool with the new truck over the break and have learned a few new things about it. The first and biggest thing is that right now the engine is locked up. Having taken it out of gear and with a breaker bar on the crank bolt, the engine will not move. I pulled the spark plugs back out and dropped the bar scope down the cylinders and found they are pretty well full of gunk. So I dumped more Marvel mystery oil down each cylinder to hopefully so pass the rings. The only cylinder that was still holding liquid was number one, which may be the culprit, although I pulled the valve cover cover and found surface rust on the valve train above cylinders three and four.
It’s still too early to tell what’s going on, but a helping of patience and a whole lot of penetrating oil should get this thing moving again. I’m going to spring for a $25 bottle of Kroil because I’ve heard great things about it. Getting the valve cover off meant I had to move the heater hoses, so I took the heater core out of the loop completely. While I was in there, I scraped and vacuumed the dirt off the engine further to avoid getting crud in the valvetrain.
Meanwhile, I used the penetrating oil I did have to break the door mounting bolts free and hang both of the doors back on the truck for the first time in 20 years. When Dan took them off, he helpfully put the bolts back in either the A pillar or the doors, but sitting out in the elements fused those bolts in place. I used a handheld impact driver and a set of channel locks and got them all free enough to where I could hang the passenger door easily. The location of the truck made hanging the driver’s door a lot more difficult, because it was too close to the greenhouse to open wide enough. I put my snatch strap around the tree behind the truck and used a couple of ratchet straps to help me move it backwards. Then I got the door open wide enough to get two of the bolts on it.
Next I had to get both of the door access panels open to access the inner scissor mechanisms to help me get the windows up. The passenger door wasn’t that hard, but I had to break out the death wheel and a drill to remove the screws on that door. Once I was inside, I was able to get the windows up and hook them into the scissor mechanisms to keep them up. I also took the time to vacuum out the inside of the doors, which were full of dirt.
Then I pulled the dash panel off so that I could swap out the ignition barrel with one from my spares, and found that the wiring wasn’t in bad shape. And finally I moved the rearview mirror mount out of the way so I could drop the half cab onto the widnshield frame properly.
This truck is going to be a handful. It’s definitely the roughest of the three trucks I’ve bought. But I think it’s going to be the beater of the fleet, which means I’m not going to knock myself out ‘restoring’ it—I’m going to repair it and drive it, and most importantly, have fun with it.
But right now, I have to move my focus over to the Travelall, where I have to pull the rear springs to have them re-arched.