Many thanks to Cascades for the tip on the cab vent rubber replacements. Ran to Home Depot early, picked up some gasket material and got them replaced.

 

Also finished the brake lines up to the engine compartment and removed some PO wiring additions and reaped parts of the wiring harness that were kind of sketchy. Should be able to anchor the harness to the frame tomorrow and then POR-15 the rear axle since it’ll be 50 degrees. And then hopefully put the bed on.

Meanwhile my super wife has volunteered to clean parts so the fuel tank filler hoses and the skirting that goes around the wheel wells under the bed got cleaned very nicely.

 

That is the way!

 

The bed is back on the truck and off the floor of my tiny garage. Much nicer.


Also tonight the brown delivery van dropped off a twin tube Smittybilt rear bumper.

 

The story behind the Smittybilt bumper is pretty simple. Apparently Smittybilt just builds twin tube bumpers for Jeeps these days. After a little research I was able to find a twin tube bumper for the 1997-2006 Wrangler. The mounting holes on the bumpers built for Wranglers are exactly the same distance apart (about 41” as I recall) as the frame rails on our Toyotas. Since the Jeep bumpers are inexpensive ($135, free freight, no tax) and the twin tube bumpers built for Toyota that look like Smittybilt aren’t (5-600) I ordered up the Jeep bumper pictured in my last post. I used my hoist to hold the bumper at the elevation I wanted and mocked up a pair of brackets out of plywood as a test. Here’s one of the brackets.


After that I cut two brackets out of 1/4” plate and drilled 1/2” holes at each attachment point. I then sprayed the brackets with some Rustoleum textured paint I had sitting around. The color and texture match is perfect between the bumper and brackets. Here they are bolted up.


And here’s the bumper.

The bumper pic isn’t too good since the sun is just coming up. I’ll try to get a better picture later. As a bonus to the whole deal I ended up with a couple stout brackets designed to bolt a bumper to a Jeep.

The Smittybilt bumper for the Wrangler is 62” wide. I think the perfect width for me would’ve been around 60” or a fraction longer but overall I’m happy with the end result. If the 62” length bothers me I’ll take a sawzall and chop the ends off and reinsert the plastic plugs. One other note is my brackets are pretty close to the valance panel under the tailgate. For my driving style they’ll work but if I were into crawling or off road a lot I’d cut deeper notches in the brackets or just utilize the bottom two holes on the bumper bracket.

 

One more pic showing how far the bumper projects beyond the sides.

 

After reattaching the bed to the frame I replaced the cab to frame rubber with a set from Energy Suspension in red of course. The OEM rubber did good for forty years.

 

Not sure if it’s always been hard to find bumper stays but after a month or so of looking I decided to fabricate my own. I’m more of a grinder than a welder and I forgot to take pictures as I worked but here the bumper stay is. The PO got into some type of collision so the truck was missing headlight trims, bumper, valance, stays, etc and had two crunched fenders.

 

While installing new brakes and brake lines recently with both rear wheels off the truck and no driveline attached I decided to mark a wheel and the pinion yoke and see what the current gear ratio was. By my crude measuring methods the truck has 3.73 gears or something close to that. In view of the fact it now has 33” tires I thought it best to re gear so I called East Coast Gear Supply and ordered 4.88 third member assemblies. The front diff assembly is open and the rear has ARB air lockers. ETA two weeks. Seemed like real nice folks on the phone.

 

Lots of pictures today fellow true truck fans. I erroneously ordered a valance panel for a two wheel drive truck thinking the 4WD valance and 2WD valance were identical. At the time I figured no big deal I’ll just get the proper one when it got re stocked. After weeks of looking I decided to modify the 2WD valance to fit the 4WD. The 4WD valance is actually about 2 1/2” longer than the 2 X valance so I ordered a second valance to be sure I had enough steel. I ended up building a three piece valance using the middle section of one of my two 2WD valances and cutting extra long end sections out of the extra valance. Here is a pic of the three pieces welded up.
In the second picture the remnant numbered 3091 is how the two wheel drive valance bolts up so I cut those bolt holes off and drilled holes through the face of the valance to accommodate the 4WD setup. Then I spot welded some bolts to the valance face and backside and ground the bolt heads down somewhat smooth.
The last picture shows everything ground down with our Golden Enzothehound keeping a sharp eye on it.

 

I’ve been anxious to get new parts on the front end of the truck to assess how extensive the damage was from the PO’s fender bender incident. The truck has one wheel off so I didn’t move it back to get real good pics but fortunately the damage doesn’t appear to have been too bad. The fenders and grill fastened fine. The bumper looks like it will work once I get some carriage bolts and the valance went on nice. Hooray!

 

When I installed new brakes recently the passenger side rotor had serious ruts in it so I put it in the vice and hopefully will be able to separate the hub and rotor so I can get the rotor turned down.

 

Last but not least my wonderful wife presented me with my birthday present from Twisted Shifterz to go along with the recently installed five speed. Note; thumb is strategically placed to avoid violating any forum etiquette 😎. The red button on the side when depressed sends temporary power to the device of your choice (nitrous, etc.)

 

One more shot.

 

Red button should be used for rocket-propelled passenger ejection seat!

 

Now that’s funny Punjab! Haven’t done much on the truck the last few days. With the weather getting nicer I’m on the cusp of firing up my one man landscaping business for another year so getting equipment ready to work has been occupying a lot of time.
I noticed several plastic nutserts missing to attach the grille and headlight buckets so I went on clips and fasteners site and ordered up what I needed.

Also got the small sections of wiring harness installed on each side that illuminate the license plate.


At the very beginning of this project I printed out Kawa636’s Desmog Tutorial and desmogged my 22R before taking it all apart. The desmogging resulted in the abandonment of the hard vapor line from the tank to the charcoal canister. The short piece of 1/4” tubing was still hooked up to the tank so I bought a fuel tank vent (pictured below) and installed it on the vapor line.

And then zip tied the vent to a bed support at as high a level as possible. Zip tie is visible in this pic but the vent is not.

 

Presents from UPS!

 

Did a little work on straightening the tailgate this weekend and finally figured out the latch catch mechanism necessary to adapt a 1981 tailgate to a 1982 bed. Here’s a pic of what I started with on the bed.

And after cutting a piece out of 1/8” flat stock and bending it.

and then mounted to the bed.

The tailgate handles were readily available from a variety of sources for $8-10 so I bolted a couple of those on and latched the gate. I’ve only done the left side so far but the next one will be a piece of cake.

The tailgate sits a little higher than the bed I’ll have to see if there’s any adjustment on the mounting bolts.

 

Received the ARB onboard compressor today. Extremely small but good CFMs for its size.

 

^ Very nice! Are you planning to mount a tank? I need to figure out a better on-board-air setup for my truck.