westafari
Sand Cruiser
So...last night was epic. Took my 80 over to my buddy's body shop to put an ARB front bumper and an OME 2.5" heavy lift on my truck. I showed up with beer and pizza to find my buddy, who had been working his a** off all day doing body work, in a (rightful) state of apprehension about our evening's project. Several of his body techs were still in the shop and gave us a good heckling about how we would be there all weekend which added to his doubts. To get in the groove we decided to start off with the bumper which went on like butter flipoff2: ARB!!). When the bumper was on before the heckling shop employees even left we started feeling more psyched, had another cold snack and started in on the suspension. Luckily, the PO had replaced the front shocks fairly recently so getting the DS shock loose was no problem at all and the front end went quickly. The level of stoke increased and my formerly nervous buddy, tired as he was, started feeling good about this operation. A couple more friends showed up with more beer and we set our sights on the rear end. Right about this time the lights in the shop flickered and then went dark. We walked outside and every building in the nearby area was dark. Goodbye air tools, lift, lights and tunes. Initially, the loss of Slayer blasting at max volume was more of a hit to morale than the actual darkness but we recovered quickly, grabbed hand tools, headlamps and whatever battery powered work lights we could find and went back at it. Soon we encountered the darkest times in our evening's work, both literally and figuratively, when 3 out of 4 of the rear sway bar bracket bolts broke off during removal. Note that these are the only bolts that I missed hitting with PB blaster in the previous week . Since we were still in total darkness and had no power tools except a 12V DeWalt cordless it took a while to drill out and tap the bolt holes but we got it done. Right about the time we finished breaking down the rear end the power came back on so we cranked Slayer back up to 11, cracked another PBR and got the rear springs and shocks installed in no time. By now it was late and we were all pretty damn tired so we put the wheels back on, dropped the lift and called it a night. Even without doing the steering stabilizer or caster correction the 80 rides SOOO MUCH BETTER. I hope to wrap up the control arms and stabilizer this week but for now I am pretty psyched. I LOVE THIS FREAKIN TRUCK!!!