Update
Wow, where do I start. Been working on quite a few things like the yard and then I got side-tracked with my brother's car with a tranny change (outsourced), fuel system maintenance, main and rod bearings, head job, water pump and timing belt. Yeah that one sucked a few days down. Still need to work on the squeal coming from my other car. Help a fellow cruiser with his diesel swap. Throw in some sick days, a vacation down to CA and general small kid mayhem and there goes a few months.
For cruiser stuff I worked out a group buy for the Optishift tranny controller made by Baumann. I had asked my wife why she didn't like driving the cruiser like she did the last truck (not even close to the same arena as this Landcruiser) and it was due to all the operatorness with too many things to have to pay attention too when driving. I asked a loaded question about if she would like driving it more if it shifted on it's own and she said yeah. Shortly thereafter funding was approved to get that controller and with the group buy we where able to get $100 knocked off the price. Personally I wasn't happy with the shift quality from my last manual set up and with the tunability of this controller I'd be able to set it up for my tastes and for this combination of engine and drivetrain. I bought the controller with a pre-made harness for my tranny as part of the deal and that made it pretty easy to hook up.
The required fab was to adapt a TPS for one of the inputs the controller needs. The other is the speed sensor on the tranny itself. Conveniently I had toyed with the idea of running the force motor (controls line pressure which affects shift quality) from a TPS on my first manual control project but was happy enough with the vacuum control so I dropped it. What that meant was that I already had a TPS I could now use and a way to hook it up to my throttle linkage so that wasn't a hurtle I'd have to jump over. I've forgotten to get pics of that and some will probably want to see that so I'll get some and put them up later.
The Optishift allows a manual control that I'm going to activated by push buttons. I routed those wires up to the steering wheel for the future. I'll come back to getting them on my steering wheel at a later time.
It also allows you to store and access two different tables, in my case a econo program and a towing program. Once upon a time I had a switch on my gear selector hump that I ran my t.converter lock up from. I brought that back and am now using that to select between my two tables. Since it's tranny related I thought that was a good spot to associate with. When the switch is off it's on econo, when it's "on" (it's actually just grounded per the instructions) its on towing.
With everything hooked up and the 4L80E diesel program that came on the installation CD loaded into the controller I fired it up to take it for a spin. I expected the program to be a baseline to tune from but the tranny was not shifting right at all. After trying a few things since there is some tunability on the box itself by using the menu options with the selector knob I came across the speed reading and it was way off. I pulled the controller and hooked it up to the computer to make sure my tire size and gear ratio setting were right. Everything checked out but still no dice. I ended up using the manual function on the controller to shift my tranny with the selector knob that work week. I called up Kevin with Baumann and got some testing ideas for the wiring (in case it got kinked somewhere) and the speed sensor to try on my next set of days off. As it turns out I had no reluctor ring inside my tranny to get the 40 pulses it was looking for as a speed input so the controller didn't know when to shift my tranny. I knew this was a potential problem but figured since I had a 2wd case that I swapped the rear output for a 4wd that I was fine. Well, when I swapped the rear output I swapped the chunk and not just the shaft and my 4wd chunk did not have a reluctor ring on it.
In 4wd 4L80s rebuilders sometimes leave the reluctor ring off because they are brittle and break and because the rear speed sensor on the tranny is not used, the one in the tcase is. So I was faced with the proposition of tearing the tranny completely apart just to put that ring in. I went back to my other tranny I bought last winter and sure enough it had a ring on it. As I was tapping it off it cracked on me. New rings can be sourced for $30-40 but then I'd still have to yank the tranny and install it, not something I was looking forward to doing again during the winter time.
Since the ring was cracked anyways I figured I could try and mount it outside somewhere on the spinning drivetrain. That's exactly what I did in a crude backyard fabricator kind of way. I cut out a plate and drilled holes as centered as I could to mount it to my tcase flange. It's not spot on but it turned out pretty good.
I made some funky mounting bracket for the speed sensor that I grabbed from the other tranny. The sensor is held on by a hose clamp because I wanted to be able to adjust the gap and I wasn't sure what the run-out on the ring was going to be. I have a .040 gap on it with the ring run-out about .030 and it picks up the speed just fine. Speed has been verified by GPS so it's good. To test the run-out I put the rear on stands to get the wheels off the ground and put it in gear idling so it would spin. I also found at this time that the rear tires are out of round, not the rims, but the tires.
I took it for a spin after this and the tranny shifts, t.converter comes in where I set it and generally works like an automatic. The diesel program was a good place to start and I'm tweaking it. The tuning is making more sense but having a laptop would really speed things up since I could hook it up, see how it's following my tables and make adjustments on the spot. I can make some real time tuning adjustments from the tuning menu on the control box itself but there is better control with the software. Right now I have to unhook it and bring it in the house to get to a computer. I have an old laptop that I haven't been able to get going so that progress has been slowed down. I was going to try and do that down in CA while in the country but it ended up being a busy trip. So far I'm really liking it and the control I still have over it.
So that's the big change on the tranny.
While in Cali I brought my welder for some Dad projects and my car care stuff for a detail job. I clay-bar'd, compounded, polished and sealed everything but the roof. Dora's never been so shiney and smooth. No issues on the trip. We were going to tow a boat back up but the weather suggested we try again later. It would only be another project I don't have time for right now anyways.
I did some more work on the front bumper. I fabbed up a winch plate and got that welded on. It's just a piece from the stepvan frame. On my square crossmember I needed to notch it to make room for the bolt holes and access was limited so it was a little tricky to cut it out and fit some pieces in there to close up the notches.
I plan to gusset the sides and tie the front piece into the tube above it. Next I'll mount the winch and slide the bumper in to see where I'll need to clearance the valance and maybe the grill.
I finished off the side pieces, cut and capped the bottom tube.
I was staring at my 14bolt and before I knew it tools were on the ground and parts where removed. Next will be cutting off the perches and shock mounts and then measuring for cutting to swap the axles side to side so the diff is offset.
Last week I noticed extra clunking after letting off the brakes and transitioning to the go pedal at stop lights. I check the lugnuts, the shocks, shock crossmember, ubolts, driveshaft, Ujoints, caliper bolts, leaf springs and finally when I was staring at it underneath I found this:
I pulled it off to inspect better and found that the bottom break had rust on it so this must have been happening for a while and over time it's finally opened up to where the wrap bar was hinging.
The top part of the break was clean metal so this must have opened further last week.
My design puts the stress at this point and it eventually failed. No problem, it just needs a little more beef. Cut out some .250 plate and drilled some speed holes for a couple more hp.
While I had the flapper disk on the grinder I beveled the edge of the axle side bushings to make it easier to slide into the bracket. It helped.
I decided to slap on the old tires to see if it would make any difference in my vibs. I washed them off, checked the sidewalls and mounted them up. My trip over to Dirtgypy's yesterday was a smoother experience even with the spare bogger up front so I'm planning to run these until I do the 14bolt swap and then I'll convert to 8lugs.
I've been running with a bum TRE which hasn't helped the steering any. I decided that I wanted to convert to heims and picked up some stuff from Ruffstuff. 3/4 RH Heims, adapters, 1 1/2 .250 wall DOM cut to 48". It came in two shippments but all got here by yesterday. So after leaving Dirtgypsy's isuzu swap in the afternoon I came home and started on my stuff.
Measured and cut the DOM, drilled my steering arms (busted my 3/4 drill bit luckily at the end), and inserted the adapters. The adapters did not slide it at all so I chamfered the DOM ID edge and then used some heat to expand the DOM which allowed me to hammer in the adapters. Because of this I didn't bother with drilling a hole and rosebuding the adapter. I am only doing the tierod right now. I'll have to see if I have clearance for a heim attached to the steering arm to not touch my leaf pack when flexing on the draglink.
I know double sheer is much more desirable so the next time I pull off the steering arms I'll set that up, for now it'll just be a 3/4" grade 8 bolt. I would have rather run fine thread but they didn't have any at the local hardware store that big so I ran with course. I'm glad I bought some machine bushings (washers) just in case I needed to space the heim off the arm because I ended up needing them to clear the jam nut and also raise the tierod from dragging on the springs on full turn. This is the order with the space being where the arm goes.
I liked having the ram mount on a clamp so I could fine tune the alignment but that was with TREs and those aren't the easiest things to remove. The heim setup will be much easier to remove so when I decided to run right-hand threads to only have to carry one spare that made a clamp on ram mount unnecessary so I welded on the ram mount. To get it's location I mounted the tierod, did an alignment (1/8-3/16" tow-in) and made sure I had 3" of shaft showing on the ram. I marked it, pulled it off and spread some metal on it.
It was dark, getting late, and raining by now so everything got some tightening fury and Dora got parked back in the carport. Drove it to work today and even with the mismatched tires it could be a one-hander. I say could because it was raining hard this morning and I wanted to use two hands.
I'm sure I'm missing something but that's what I've been doing to Dora lately.
Right now I'm working on some changes with my tranny and will share once I got it squared away.
The type of upgrades you do just amazes me. Makes me feel like the trials and tribulations of my little project should be no big deal! 
