'89 Stepside "Way Cool Jr."

[BruiserCruiser]

We had a junk yard here locally and old man owned. It was awesome! Technically it was a full service yard, but he knew my family and always told me just to go find what I was looking for... He since retired, but his grandson just opened it up. He had a TON of gmt400's out there, but I know they crushed a bunch of them... hopefully there are still some good parts out there.

 

[Erik the Awful]

The alternator, exhaust, and underhood box have been rectified. I tried fixing the power steering, but the relief valve in the new box failed and it blew out the seals above the pitman arm. The driver's visor was hanging low due to missing metal clips in the roof, and I robbed the clips off Roscoe to fix WCJr. Two steps forward, one step back.

 

[Erik the Awful]

I pulled the steering box back out and found the snap ring holding the sector shaft seal in wasn't fitting correctly. I went to the hardware store and got a new slightly larger snap ring. I pulled out the check valve (not a relief valve) under the pressure hose and swapped it for the check valve in the old box. I reinstalled it and the sector shaft seal immediately blew out again. Really frustrating. So I decided to order a Redhead box because I need a running truck and it's "only" $316.

$570 shipped. F*** me!

$316
$150 core charge
$41 shipping
$35 core return shipping
$28 taxes

It's getting harder to be a cheap basturd.

 

[Erik the Awful]

I installed the new Redhead box about a week ago, and the bleeding procedures were a bit more in depth than what I was doing. I think the steering box I rebuilt was fine but I wasn't working the steering wheel enough before finally going lock-to-lock. The Redhead box is in WCJr and my box will go in Roscoe. Interestingly, all three of the steering gearboxes I have appear to be identical.

The box itself feels nice and went in with no trouble. I was expecting the steering to be a lot closer to the tightness of my Mustang, but it's not. There's still a full inch or two of dead steering, but on the upside it doesn't pee power steering fluid everywhere.

The O2 sensor on WCJr's been dead for about a year, and the truck's been running fine in open loop. The Sniper O2 sensor is about $200, and it's just a Dodge Ram O2 sensor with a longer lead. The Sniper's end of the lead is already long enough, so I bought the Dodge O2 sensor a few months back and just haven't installed it until yesterday. It was quick and painless, but now that everything's a bit more permanent I want to make a bracket for holding the wiring next to the transmission. Currently it's zip tied alongside the transmission wiring harness.

My race team captain and I are towing the Hatsune Miku BMW to Road Atlanta for the season-ending 24 Hours of Lemons race. The trailer is currently here in OKC and the car is in Dallas, so it's up to me to tow the trailer down to Dallas. That has me a bit nervous. The temporary junkyard transmission in WCJr's starting to flake. I have the 4L60 that I rebuilt ready to install, but it's untested. My goal this weekend is to get it in so I can road test it a couple weeks before I have to make the tow to Dallas, but I'm already committed to do a head gasket repair on La Cucaracha (the 5x wrecked Nissan Altima that my son drove) on Saturday. On the upside, when I installed the junkyard transmission in WCJr it only took me three hours, working at a lazy pace.

I did spot where my oil leak is coming from - the oil pressure sending unit right behind the starter. I'll fix that while I have the starter and transmission out.

 

[Menissalt]

My race team captain and I are towing the Hatsune Miku BMW to Road Atlanta for the season-ending 24 Hours of Lemons race.

You do itapara? If you ever want to come to San Antonio I work for San Japan and we offer 2 badges to anyone who gets their car put into our itapara area.

 

[Erik the Awful]

I've never heard of itapara. I know what itasha ("painful car") is because of our car. We're not really into itasha culture, we just had a funny eBay/miscommunication accident that led us to run with a Hatsune Miku theme. People love our car because of the theme, and we typically run on track with the Miku version of the Ievan Polka playing.

 

[Menissalt]

Sorry, itapara is the local group here that does itasha

 

[Erik the Awful]

We'd been running an E36 with a "Cookie Warlord" theme. Then our car hit the wall at Houston and we had to find a new chassis.

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We weren't really into the Cookie Warlord theme because our car was very much not a Toyota Hliux. We got another E36, and we discovered that you can find obscure wraps dirt cheap on eBay. Our team captain found one and send what he thought was the link to another team member and asked him to order it.

The team member questioned and asked, "Are you sure this is what we want?"

"Yes, I'm sure. Order it."

A week before the next race they unrolled the wrap to stick it on the car.

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"What's this? This isn't what I asked you to order!"

"Yes it is. Here's the link you sent me."

"Oh. We better figure out what this is before my wife sees it and thinks I'm some kind of anime perv."

Then we discovered that Hatsune Miku was created to sell software that "sings" lyrics and music. For those of you who don't know, it's very popular in Japan - so much so that they have "concerts" where a 3D image of her is projected into fog and she sings and dances. We have a stereo system in our car with speakers facing outward and we play her most annoying songs on track. Every time we pass you, you get blasted with the Ievan Polka.

Earworm warning.

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[Erik the Awful]

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[Erik the Awful]

Latest updates on Way Cool Jr. I'm finally installing the transmission I rebuilt two years ago.

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