Friday night I replaced the idler pulley and belt. It is quiet as a mouse now!
Spent the weekend installing a 3" BL....or I should say tried to install it. The cab went pretty good except the E brake. That thing fought me for 2 hours. All the time I kept eyeballing the bolt cutters hanging on the wall. But, I finally got it unhooked without resorting to cutting. Got the cab bolted down and reinstalled everything. Found out that the grill and filler panel are bust up pretty good. I fabed up some sheet metal brackets and epoxied the tabs back on. I'll get a new grill, lights and filler panel later on.
The bed however was a different animal altogether. started out snapping off 4 of the 8 mounting bolts. Two of them directly above the forward spring hangers!!! So I decided to pull the bed off, which created a whole different set of issues, but I got it off.
Here it is after a couple of hours of using the wire brush on the angle grinder. Surprisingly, under all the rust, mud and crud, the frame had a layer if undercoating on it. most of it was worn off, but it did its job and protected the frame.
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Next up, filled up the garden sprayer with Metal Prep and sprayed it down pretty good. Following the directions, I let it set for a bit then rinsed it off and pressure washed everything down real good. After everything was dry, set about fixing and raising the cobbled up exhaust. It was broken in a couple places and what wasn't broken, hung down way to low to look right with the BL.
I set about taking the rear wheels so I could spray prime the frame. The wheels hadn't been off in YEARS resulting in them corroding themselves to the rear drums....grrrrr! Finally got them off.
I started the process of spraying a thin coat of Rustoleum rusty metal primer. A few hours later, I sprayed a final thicker coat. I primed everything from the forward cab mounts back. In between coats of primer, I cleaned up the back of the wheels and coated them with Fluid Film.
Here is where we are as of this afternoon. I'll let the primer cure for a few days before I paint everything black. Tomorrow, I'll tackle drilling out the broken bed bolts and see what else I find to spend time and money on.
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. So far I have enjoyed bringing it back to what it should be.
