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Already put 40k miles on the Thunderers! They were decent for a cheap mud terrain, but as the tread got pretty low their rain/snow performance suffered. So its time for a new set of tires. Enter one set of Falken Wildpeak AT4ws!     With a 60k mileage rating, and 235k on the clock, if we get the advertised mileage out of these tires, we'll be pretty close to 300k miles by the time we need a new set. Time will tell! First up, had to remove the disintegrating rear window seal  New seal:  ...and installed!  Ok, back to the main project. 3rd patch panel made  ...tacked...  i was in the zone, so now its all welded, ground, and the first round of body filler applied  Just slapped some primer on it, so we'll see how it looks tomorrow, maybe ill be able to get some paint on it! Finally got paint, and some time to lay it down:
So this side is now done!
One last ting i wanted to do before turning it around, is replacing this very flat door seal  Ordered a set of door seals from Dennis Carpenter  Replaced the door seal, and then turned the bronco around in the garage. Went to put the tailgate down, and the upper glass door seal fell out! Turns out it was so old it turned to plastic and was crumbling in my hand. So now ive got rear window seals on order  But enough distractions. Weve got one more rough spot in the body to deal with:  All cut out and prepped:   Hopefully this week i can get this patch done, along with the rear window seals, and then i can finally move on to rebuilding that ZF i bought way back when! The first patch panel is now welded in  Moving to the other side of the wheel arch, we have to deal with this as well  Cut open to expose the typical corner rot  I cut that crusty piece out to expose nice clean steel for the main structure, so we caught it in time (pic missing) Bending up the next patch panel...  ...and its in!  Still waiting on paint, so im going to get these prepped and primed so once the paint shows up i can just paint em and move on to the other side of the bronco. Back at it  With the column in the 96 bronco fixed, we can now get back to the real reason we pulled the 90 into the garage...body work! First up weve got to fix this spot  The offending material  And the hole, cleaned and prepped for a patch panel
The little dude helped me set up the sheetmetal brake  ...and bent his first piece of steel!
Ok, back at it. Upper bearing replaced  Lower bearing replaced, shaft installed, and sleeve/spring/snapring installed  Tilt mechanism reassembled  Lower bearing housing:
and installed, along with the lower column mount & retainer  Column going back in...  ...and done!  So naturally, as soon as i finish a repair on one bronco, another desires attention  Felt a weird clunk when turning the other day, and i immediately knew what happened. One of the steering column bearings had failed. So the column is now out:  Just the process of getting to this point bearings have been falling out, so we caught it just in time, before the column got damaged too badly  The large tilt bearing has failed  With the shaft out you can see part of the bearing race was still on the shaft  Bearing has completely disintegrated  I had to drive it for a couple days after it happened, and you can already see wear on the inside of the housing  The small upper bearing looks ok, but its not
Looking at the other side, you can see the race is split  Unfortunately, the ujoint in the shaft is also worn out. Fortunately, i had a few spare columns in the shed  Picked the junkiest one and stripped it down for the shaft. Fortunately, this one has a ujoint that is nice and tight.  So i rummaged thru the cabinet, and found a full set of bearings, and an upper serdive kit as well! So we're good to on parts to rebuild this column  Lower bearing (also the same as the upper bearing)  Large tilt bearing  And then thsi is the upper bearing service kit, which includes a bearing (not pictured), tapered sleeve, bushing, spring & snap ring  Later in the week we'll get this thing slapped back together good as new! Weve got the '90 in the garage for some repairs  Troubleshooting the door locks, it seems the drive door lock switch has a burned contact. Took it apart and cleaned it but i cant get it to work any more. Did a search on line, and Dorman makes the power window switch, but not the door lock switch. Of course, they make them for the 92-97 trucks, but once again theres no love for the Bricknose trucks. So lets see what we can do. I dug out some spare parts; heres a spare driver door switch panel for a 87-91, and a passenger door switch panel for a 92-97:  At first glance, the 87-91 door lock switch has a very similar footprint to the 92+ switch. Even the alignment pin is the same. So this is promising.
It even plugs right into the socket! And the door locks work properly as well  It does look kind of dumb in the older door panel though  So i popped the covers off both switches and aside from the rocker theyre basically identical, which means we can swap the old squared-off rocker onto the newer switch body  ...and done!
So this was actually a pretty easy way to fix the door locks, and since you can get replacement switches for the 92+ trucks, now the next time i have a switch fail ill just grab a brand new 92+ switch and swap the rocker over, instead of trying to get the contacts in the old switch cleaned up and hoping itll work. |
