First of all, I wanna thank
@ol'Jeeps for trusting me with the shop while he was out rolling his jeep over at Windrock. Takes some trust for a man to just leave this newbie alone in his fab shop all weekend. Thanks Scott!
I have made another over night trip to Metalwerx. Got there Sat. around noon and started torching out ALL of the old spring mounts and installed the new mounts. There's just something about white, molting, metal lava spewing onto the ground that makes me feel manly. Any ways, thats alot of rivets to burn out so It took me a while.
Spent from noon Sat till 8 am Sunday doing the following (yes I'm slow...but learning!)
Torched out a bunch of rivets
Installed new mounts for rear leaves.
removed the rear axle and springs
removed overload spring
made new spring center pins
Had to torch out all of the old spring bushings and install the new ones
re attached the leaves to the axle and bolted it back under the truck.
on to the front end sometime around 2 am Sunday
Took damn near 30 mins..just to get the front tires off. (They were seized to the rotor/bearing unit thing)
Removed the old radius arms and ttb's
again..torching out old bushings in ttb's ( getting sick of blowin' out bushings at this point)
Removed the clapped out coils springs
Installed the new radius arms and bushings
I think I painted some stuff with black spray paint at some point.
Swept up more rust dust...
It was now 7am Sunday...time for waffle house again.
Pulled out the sleeping bag and cot and turned off the shop lights around 8:30am and fell asleep.
Friggin 9am Jim calls and tells me that Tony Stewart is a murder..so I spend the next hour on the you-tubes checking into that.
Fall back asleep at 10 and then at 12 the shop doors rolled open again.
Ended up heading to Advance auto for new stuff.
New front calipers,pads,unit hub rotors and bearings.
Packed the bearings and Jim,Scott and Chris helped me cause I was struggling to get the radius arms and ttb's to all line up so I could get the center pin bolt back in it.
Anyways..got the front end back together and it was rollable again before I left Sunday Evening.
May not seem like a lot was accomplished, but this is really my first time taking on this kind of project. Working alone mostly with Shane B not far away in case i have a question or 10.( He's pulling late nighters trying to get his buggy rolling.)
Most of this work could be avoided if my truck was not so rusty. So I feel like I am sorta going backwards with time and money for now.
But the future looks bright. Hopefully we can start taking more steps forward on the build at this point
