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Great pics Wally. What is that tower above the camp shack?
zip line platform!!!
not. it was briefly topped with a wind turbine, but the bearings failed in it less than 2 years into it's use back in the mid-80s. father-in-law built it all, but decided not to dismantle the tower after the turbine failed. next year i might just climb it to see the sunrise or sunset.
woke up at 3 am in the camp, couldn't fall asleep again, so i got up at 4 am, started a fire, heated up my coffee and pop-tarts, then packed up and headed out. still dark at 5 am when i headed out. since i was getting such an early start, i decided to head north to set foot in the UP of michigan.
close to the UP, and happy halloween
crossing the Mackinac Bridge to the UP
first time in the UP. sunrise over lake huron and lake michigan.
time to start the 4 hour ride back to southern michigan
all told, put 2294 miles on the 4runner, used 123.14 gallons of gas, which averaged out to 18.6 mpg, and spent $478.64 on the gas. pretty happy with that, as the 4runner was freighted with the extra set of off-road tires/wheels, and the mpg includes nearly 200 miles of wheeling. for comparison, with the white '87 in august, doing the same route except for going to the Mackinac and no wheeling, i averaged 24 mpg.
after mulitple decades in new england winters, the license plate light assembly was pretty rotted, and one of the lights wasn't working (no surprise, since most of the metal housing for the bulb was rusted away - literally missing most of the housing). i am not a metal worker, but i can do fiberglass, and the plate light housings are not visible when mounted in the tailgate housing. i also used gorilla glue to repair the ABS tabs which the light housings mount to. but first, i needed to remove the assembly from the tailgate. this means the inner tailgate panels need to be removed, and the window then needs to be in the "up" position. i unplugged the wiring connector that is mounted behind the glass on the inner side of the tailgate skin, and removed the two 10mm nuts that secure the light housing/key operator to the tailgate. there is a third mounting point, at the mid-point along the housing, that needs to be released. this is done via a small set of pliers and gently squeezing the plastic tabs inward while lightly pushing down. the entire housing should now pop free.
i fished the end of the housing wiring harness out from the tailgate, and took the unit into my workshop. i completely disassembled the housing in order to repair cracked/broken ABS, to paint the metal mounting pins, etc. in order to do this, the keyswitch needs to be removed. there is a pin on the inner side of the tumbler to release, and the unit will separate into two pieces.
the "back" half of the tumbler, with the keyswitch portion already removed, showing the release pin access
keyswitch fits into this
keyswitch, showing release pin
release pin, and the part that operates the actual switch in that other half.
once the unit was stripped, i cleaned it and then repaired the broken tabs using gorilla glue (actually, i had 3 housings, and repaired all three).
repaired ABS tabs
repaired light housing, fiberglass shell using what remained of the original metal housing. about 1/2 of the metal was gone (all the parts have been sprayed with fluid film, which is the coating visible here - even coated the fiberglass. note the center mount lug (to the right) - the one that needs to be lightly squeezed to release it from the tailgate
although not visible, i used stainless screws to mount the light assembly to the tailgate trim housing.
Nov 7, 2022 | 05:09 AM
