psykokid

Truck seemed to run well enough, considering it had just had open heart surgery... On the drive to the office it seemed to have a bit of a miss. Went out at lunch to give everything a once over since I had wrapped everything up at 3-4 AM that day. Checked the coolant, it was down a little but that's to be expected as any excess air works it's way out of the system. I start it up and let it come up to temp and I hear a sort of intermittent clicky sound. Start looking in the direction of the sound and I see one of the plug leads on the coil arcing between it and the bracket. Hrmm.. Shut it down and re-seat all the connectors on the coil pack. Start it back up and a min or two later it starts arcing again. This time I take note of which wire was arcing and trace it back to cyl #5. Pull the plug wire to check and re-seat, and the metal end that clips onto the spark plug is left behind.. Dam... Pull the wire from the boot, trim back about an inch and then re-strip the core exposing the conductor. Get the remnants of the wire out of the clip, open the crimp up and then re-crimp the wire. Boot back on, and back in action. Glad I had the presence of mind to throw my tools in the back of the truck before I left for work. During this whole plug wire fiasco I realize that I had a few of the connections on the coil swapped. That's what happens when you're buttoning up things at 3 AM.. And just as a "fu, thanks for letting me sit for 4 months" present the truck decided it didn't want to let go of the key. After much cursing and wiggling and shimmying I managed to get the key out. Got home yesterday evening and lubed the cylinder with copious amounts of powdered graphite left over from building pinewood derby cars. A few min of working the graphite in and the cylinder was operating smoother than ever.

It lives! Wrapped everything up around 3:15 am, and cycled the fuel pump a few times to make sure everything was kosher. Good thing I did as I had forgotten to tighten down the feed to the fuel rail. Snugged it up, washed the gas away and triple checked that everything was connected and no stray rags or tools were left in the engine bay. Fired on the second try. Drove a small loop and then went to the gas station and filled up the tank. While the tank was filling I washed 4 months of grime off the windows. Drove home, and got a couple of hours of sleep. Woke up, put all the tools away i had tossed in the back when I was done, dropped off the boy at school and then went to the quarter car wash and hosed down the under carriage and the rest of the truck to get rid of the aforementioned 4 months of accumulated dirt off the rest of the panels. Drove to work just fine, coolant temps never strayed over 185. I'm gonna pop the hood at lunch and check for leaks and make sure the coolant level is kosher.

Hrrmm.. Yesterday I pulled the drivers side head to see exactly where it was pissing coolant from. Gasket between the water jacket and the outside of the head failed externally (thankfully). Got the head 90% cleaned up tonight, just gotta scrub a little carbon off the valve dish. Going to change the drivers side engine mount while I have the head off since it's no small task to replace insitu, especially when using the bigger jag mounts. That's on tomorrows to do list, as well as vacuum out all the crud and get ready to put it all back together. Should hopefully have it moving under its own power by the end of the week. My slack-ation is over - head gasket let go about 4 months ago.

I stared at mine sitting in my parking spot as I left the house today with my wife on the way to the train station to take the Metro to work. Head gasket let go at the train station on Friday and started pissing coolant. On the bright side it's an external head gasket leak so no oil milkshake to deal with.. Small victories??

Saw the pic you posted on instgram. No wonder you had low oil pressure.

Changed out my radius arm bushings last night, they were quite dunski. Replaced them with the voided orange polybushes. Front end clunking is now gone

Thank you sir! 1754 miles later and we're back home with no issues other than the trucks temp getting a bit on the high side yesterday at the end of the leg from Crater Lake to my in laws place in Paradise. Temps were a bit warm on this trip. Camping up by Lassen/Almanor was great, hardly any bugs. Crater Lake was good, a bit too early in the season after this past winter though. Lots of stuff in the park was still closed. The campground in the park was full so we camped in a forestry campground just north of the park near Diamond Lake. Nice campground, but the mozzies were SUPER thick. Made sitting outside the tent in the evening and morning quite unpleasant.

Well, managed to get the heatshield off the CKPS so I could replace it with a new one I had and found this by the connector: yeah, that looks suspect. quality lucas wiring :/ So patched that up, replaced a leaking downpipe gasket and cleaned up the plugs and tightened the gap on them. Reset the adaptives in the ECU, drove to work and cleared any fault codes. Went and got a couple of gallons of 100 octane unleaded the night before, ran the tank near empty on the way to workand then put the 100 octane in on my lunch. Warmed the truck up and revved it to 2.5k a few times like they do during the smog test. No codes so looking good. Drove home from the office and all of the readiness monitors reset except for one on the way home. Good, no codes and the one monitor you are allowed to have not ready. Got up this morning and drove straight to the smog shop which is about a quarter of a mile from my house. Engine was pretty cold so that worked out since he let it idle for what seems like forever... Passed with flying colors! Now time to pack and get ready to make the long trip north through the State of Jefferson to my in-laws house in Paradise, then two nights up near Chester in Lassen NF just outside the park, and two more nights up at Crater Lake NP. Back to Paradise on Friday and home on Saturday.

$%!!! Went to go get the truck smogged this morning and every thing was looking good.. Readiness monitors set, checked for codes and all was good. Smog guy pulls it into the bay and was letting it idle and it popped a CEL before he hooked it up. Of course.. like I didn't have enough crap to worry about..

Changed injectors last night with a low mileage set I was given some time back. While I was in there I cleaned the throttle body, bypassed the throttle body heater, and changed a leaky drivers side valve cover gasket. Tonight I pulled the inspection cover on the trans and checked the reluctor tabs on the flex plate to make sure none were bent or otherwise looking worse for wear. Spacing was consistent and pretty close to spec of 4.5mm all throughout. Fixed passenger rear window regulator with a couple of fifty cent nylon washers. Need to replace my front motor mounts, again... hopefully the JAG V12 mounts I picked up will last a bit longer. And I might just have time to do my headliner and reinstall it before we lave to make the drive up to Lassen via Paradise this weekend.

Got off my ass and finally switched out my steel cable for the synthetic line I picked up from Don last summer at Coyote Flats. Removed the stock roof rails and put rubber plugs in their place. Did some maintenance ahead of my trip the first week of July to Lassen and Crater Lake. Still trying to trace down a miss on cylinder 3. Going to pop off the trans inspection plate and see if there is a bent reluctor tab on the flexplate. I've ruled out everything else other than an injector or a bent reluctor tab at this point..

The R&P are in ok shape, just the diff center has gone tits up. Like I said, I had a full third setup sitting in a bucket waiting to go in so no worries there.. My rear diff suffered the same fate so I agree with this being the inherit weakness with the two pin rover type diff. Shame that they didn't make more of the 4 pin diffs in the standard rover config instead of the P38 type..

The weekend before at Rover Rendezvous something let go in my front diff while going up the second waterfall on Gold Mountain. Ended up having to winch myself up the waterfall and past one more obstacle on the way out. Managed to limp the truck home with the CDL locked. Wasn't heartbroken as I had an ARB third sitting in a bucket in the garage waiting to install, so this provided the necessary motivation to install it. Yeah, I'd say the stock diff has seen better days..