Builds Over the Hills, and Far Away

[Combat Wombat]

Sundowner, I really enjoy reading your posts and all the details and effort you put into your 73. It helps motivate me to get my but into gear too!
Words is hard for alot of us. Your narrative style and process is great.

 

[Sundowner]

Sundowner, I really enjoy reading your posts and all the details and effort you put into your 73. It helps motivate me to get my but into gear too!
Words is hard for alot of us. Your narrative style and process is great.

I feel like I need to put a lot more effort into her; she deserves it. She also deserves a bath at the current moment, because ick. And I should probably get around to giving her a name, someday...but the right one hasn't shown up, yet. But that's all beside the point: thank you, and I'm truly glad that you're enjoying the ride.

 

[Sundowner]

And then, there was suddenly more...

The Great Seat Bracket Debacle: Part 2
- or -
Doing it Wronger-er
​

Remember, like, way back in the day when I said something about missing a measurement, upon which I chose to kind of knock off for the day and give up on the seat bracket for the better part of 11.67 hours and ponder my life choices over the last 89% of a bottle of bourbon?



Okay, so, maybe I didn't use those exact words, but that's basically what happened...give or take 11%. And, as is patently semi-obvious from the teaser picture in Post #216, I somehow managed to overcome that challenge...and I did so by realizing that if literally every single knifemaker on YouTube can grind a flawless bevel into a blade without even breaking a sweat, then I can also do it. I mean, they make it look pretty easy; it takes, like, thirty seconds, tops. I know that because that's how long those sections of the videos are, unless I watch them in slow motion; when I do that, it usually takes them a bit longer. Thus, I chose to do my bevel grinding at normal speed...and I when I did so, I learned Yet Another Very Important Thing:

Pictured: This s*** is way harder than it looks on YouTube.

It's admittedly hard to see, but that's a pretty straight and even bevel. I didn't grab a shot of it while in the raw state where the lines were sharper; yet again, I got obsessed with making file noises and forgot to document anything...but trust me when I tell you that even at normal speed, it took WAY longer than thirty seconds to lay it out and grind it it. Once that piece was done, I made a few sanity checks for the measurements, took both the inner and outer rails - I'm not sure what to call them so now they're "rails"- over to the drill press, and proceeded to perforate them in ways that would be exceedingly difficult to repair.

Pictured: Swiss-cheesery noises and gratuitous foreshadowing intensify.

A quick anecdote: I'm always absolutely floored at how fast you can drill a hole with a drill press. With a fresh, sharp bit and a dash of oil, that hole was done in less time than it's taking me to write this sentence; the same went for the other seven...and after all of those were done, an M8 tap solved the rapidly-approaching problems that naturally arise when one attempts to bolt two very thin pieces of steel together while sandwiching a third, much-thicker piece between them.

Pictured: Threaded holes: Gooooood! Zinc-plated hardware: Baaaaaad!

Full disclosure: I rather enjoy tapping holes, but I don't like doing it for things like this...and that's not the fault of the hole or the fastener, but rather the fault of the designer. Out of the eight total fasteners that are required to install this bracket, it's the innermost four bolts that have to go into the threaded holes...and those four bolts are both invisible and unreachable once the bracket and sliders are fully in place, because each pair of sliders literally shrouds the inner fasteners for the other pair once both sets are installed...and yes: that means there's a definite order of operations for how everything has to be put together. On that note: I'll be using a toothed washer and some kind of threadlocker when it's time for final assembly, and I'll also be cutting the four inner bolts to a zero-projection length...because - again - there's literally no room for a fastener to project, because a slider has to mount directly against the threaded hole. So, that means even a 10mm-long M8 is exactly 4mm too long, as shown here.

Pictured: "Missed it by *that* much."

Another note: that zinc-plated stuff won't be used for the final install, but it's good enough for sanity checks to make sure that all of the holes are lining up...and the good news is that all of the holes did line up, and both the inner and outer bracket rails fitted onto the factory sliders perfectly. The bad news is that once I bolted them on and threw a level across them to make sure everything was lined up and nicely flat before measuring for the crossing braces that were about to be cut and welded in place, I found that I'd slightly overlooked something.

Pictured: Wait....what?

I'll make this explanation as short as is possible: the factory sliders in my rig aren't level. At all. Both inner and outer were tilted downwards on their outer edges by somewhere around 9 degrees...and not only is that actually done intentionally, but it's brilliant. And here's why:

Ever notice that the suspension seat sliders are bolted to the lower seat frame by bolts that are almost vertical? That somewhat-curious arrangement isn't just easy to access for assembly at the plant: it creates an axis of rotation around which the slider can pivot, which allows the mounting points for the seat to selectively widen or narrow by varying amounts on each side, depending on exactly where the press-formed mounting holes for the seat happen to be located on that particular seat. By doing this, manufacturing variances within the seat frame can be easily negated, and - ...wait for it... - since the factory sliders are decoupled from each other, there's a much wider degree of misalignment possible within the positions of each slider, relative to each other...so when I introduced the need for a flat, rigid, horizontal bracket, I basically wrecked everything about a beautiful piece of engineering and replaced it with some Neolithic-level idiocy. Because of course I did...and that's why I don't work for Toyota.

Now, in some respects this 9-degree tilt wasn't a huge issue, because the axis of rotation created by the factory slider bolts means that the sliders can rotate into a flat, level plane and bolt right up to my flat, level bracket without any difficulty...and that would have been a two-minute fix, had I not already screwed everything up. But I had screwed everything up, because rotating the factory sliders into a flat plane moved their mounting holes closer together...and although this had absolutely no impact on either my bracket rails or the four mounting holes that tied them to the factory sliders, it meant that the other four holes I'd already drilled - the ones that would eventually locate the upper, auxiliary pair of sliders - were now too close together, and thus the seat would no longer fit.

Because of course it wouldn't.

I took an hour to try and think around the problem, but in the end I realized that I really had no options: rotating the factory sliders had caused something around a 1/8" (3mm) narrowing of the upper mounting holes, and the only way to fix it would be to un-perforate the perforations that I had so enjoyably and rapidly installed via drill press. And that's how I ended up drilling the threading back out of the upper-slider mounting holes, cleaning everything within an inch of its life, backing all four of the holes with a strip of copper and fill welding them with the MIG, and - finally - holding a torch onto the welds to slow down the cooling and keep the welded steel soft and malleable enough to drill and re-tap.

Pictured: This would be so much easier if I actually knew what I was doing.

Amazingly, I didn't have too many issues with the fill welds; one of them was a bit porous, but since I was removing the vast majority of the weld by re-drilling, I didn't worry too much about it. The other three drilled almost as well as the surrounding mild steel, but I could feel a difference in how the tap was cutting those particular holes; the metal was definitely harder, so I probably just managed to throw a bit of temper into the mix rather than keeping the steel in an semi-annealed state. Regardless, at that point it was time to actually both pairs of sliders together and get a look at what the cross-braces were going to look like.

Pictured: Progress, and dog hair. Mostly dog hair.

For those that have been having trouble envisioning the end result of this Rube-Goldbergery, that picture should help out quite a bit; it basically shows where everything is going to end up once it's installed...with the slight exception of the factory slider being in its forward-most position. Also, for those that don't quite yet grasp the concept of how tight things really are under the seat...

Pictured: This should clear things up.

That gap above the suspension lock spring is about 1.5mm; that's what the bracket has to pass over, every time it moves...and it might be the one thing I measured correctly in this build. That's all for this post; I think have some pictures of actual welding taking place that I can post in the next installment...and if I don't, it's probably because I yet again got obsessed with using the file in order to make all of the corners nice and rounded and smooth and at least a little bit factory-looking. Stay tuned.

 

[Sundowner]

...and after WAY too many issues trying to get this post done, including losing two hours of work after two different platform/browser issues decided to erase my in-progress drafts, I present to you:

The Great Seat Bracket Debacle: Part 5,287
- or -
Just Get It Over With, Already!
​

Remember, like, way back in the day when I said that I had some in-progress welding pictures? Yeah...as it turns out, that was actually a complete and total lie.

What I do have is a slight retrospective and corollary to the above post, because 1) I was writing the previous post somewhat late at night and therefore wanted to be done writing it more than I wanted to be accurate in doing so, and B) I found a couple of pictures that still show absolutely zero in-progress welds, but which are still worth including because they have pretty colors.

Pictured: Pretty colors.

You can probably already guess that the lovely smattering of blues is from the flame-tempering, but just in case you can't see the rest: that's an un-perforated hole immediately before re-drilling and re-tapping...and I'm including it because I'm actually rather proud of it. If you know exactly where to look you can see the weld filling the hole, but that repair is otherwise very, very hard to detect. Since I'm not a legit weldor and since I don't do this for a living every day and therefore don't knock out perfect hole repairs between my real jobs, I think I will allow myself a rare moment of credit: I definitely could have done a worse job in fixing the holes that I did a bad job of locating in the first place because I did a bad job of Fab-Thoughting. I also could have done a better job of planning, and had I done so I might have been able to put the bracket together on a legit welding table, instead of a cast-off extension wing for a table saw that I soon turned into a very Art-Deco-inspired pot rack for my kitchen.

Pictured: Also, I have no idea where that drill chuck came from...or where it went afterwards, for that matter.

Believe it or not, that hodgepodge of washers, plates, shims, scrap bits of steel, cut-away sections of framing squares and wandering machinery widgets held the bracket parts well enough to get everything fitted nice and square. I used 1"/25mm-wide flat stock for the cross-braces, and I ground a very heavy bevel into the ends and cleaned it all before I started the metal-gluing. Despite the prep, I had issues with the welds: I don't know what causes it, but every once in awhile I'll have an entire series of welds that just don't want to go in easily...or at all. The result looks for all the world like a totally unshielded weld, there's so much soot on the outside. I know it's not the welder - I've done every check that I can think of, and it always seems to be doing fine - so it's either 1) the material, B) the idiot running the machine, or 3) a gremlin. If I didn't know better, I would have said that Option 1 was the cause here; the 1" flat stock that I used were two different pieces entirely (both scraps) and on one of them, the welds were absolutely awful. On the other piece, they were weld-porn beautiful...and of course I didn't get a picture of that, because I was already busy grinding out the bad ones, re-cleaning and re-prepping them, and then re-welding them, and I was doing all of that while hoping that nothing moved too badly. So, all of that being said: this could have turned out much, much worse than it did.

Pictured: "That's what you've been building for three days? Like, for seriously?"

That's my first test-fitment of the whole thing after the weld-grind-prep-weld series on the rear crossbrace, and despite all of that heating and rework, it actually fit like a glove with no real post-weld shaping or repairs needed. I honestly expected a fair amount of distortion after the second set of re-welds went in, not least of all because I cranked the amperage on my baby welder up to 11 and those beads went in HOT...but the warpage was not meant to be, chérie. She went in flat and solid, and the only thing I really don't like about the result is that despite all of my work in shaping and contouring the metal, it's never really going to look factory. Even with a coat of matching paint the bracket will still be somewhat visible...and I guess I'm going to have to be okay with that.

After that test-fit, I pulled it back out and flipped it over and started working on shaping the bottom...and yes, I know that literally nobody will ever see the bottom of this bracket, but I would have known that a bunch of garbagey-looking work was hiding down there and I would have lost sleep over it.

Pictured: And let me tell you: I love my sleep.

Yet again, I did more shaping and sanding after I took this picture (in the previous one I'd already done the top surface, so this is kind of what that one looked like before I started on it). Also, if you look very carefully, you can see the offset in the re-drilled and re-tapped holes. It's most visible in the pair on the right-hand side of the image; if you look at the forward (left) hole of that pair, you can see that it's just a millimeter or three closer to the edge of the bracket than the one on the extreme right. That's the result of having to square up the factory slider, and it's definitely very high on my list of All-Time Gotchas. Once the rough shaping and sanding was completed, I got everything assembled and bolted the seat back into place, and that's when I found out that I'd gotten very close to my goal of 74" of clearance; thus, the teaser shot of the tape measure...and this one as well, showing the behind-seat room that I now have.

Pictured: It's making my head spin, how many activities we can do! We can do step class...

Now, the careful observer will note that there's something missing in that picture: namely, the operating lever for the upper sliders. I didn't actually have it installed at that point, and it didn't occur to me to put it in place for the picture...and it also didn't occur to me to actually take a picture of the finished installation from the rear, so I just went out and took one a few moments ago.

Pictured: Surprisingly low-profile. Also Pictured: Oxidation.

Since we don't really use the behind-the-driver access or seating position, the few inches that the lever sticks out aren't in the way at all. Also, Fun Fact: those last two images are shot over three weeks apart. Twenty-four days, to be exact...and in that time, yeah, a little film of surface rust formed. Now, it's not gonna be difficult at all to remove said rust - 90% of it will wipe off and the rest will come away in paint prep - but it begs the question of why I left this piece unfinished and unpainted after taking so many efforts to shape and finish it out nicely. Well, there's a surprisingly simple answer to that question: I didn't paint it because I didn't have anything to paint it with.

Again: some explanation may be in order.

About halfway through this project, I started working on some under-hood odds and ends, and I realized that I really wasn't okay with using basic box-store spray paint as a finish to these projects. Now, I'm not knocking the stuff: it definitely has a place...but that place doesn't need to be in my 73 unless I have no other options...and I have other options. If I had finished my air compressor's line-cooler-and-water-trap project before starting this one, finishing would be simple: grab a cheap Hobo Freight gun and some decent paint, catalyze correctly, hang up some partition panels and spray my troubles away. But because Past Me has even worse planning skills than Present Me, none of that happened...so I ordered a couple of cans of 2K primer and satin-ish black color-coat from SprayMax, and after two weeks of transit they're finally here. I've used SprayMax once or twice in the past and liked the results, so hopefully it'll do equally well on this bracket...and on some other parts, too.

And that, right there - the "other parts" part - is why I haven't painted the bracket yet: I don't have all of the other parts ready, and I don't want to use half of $60 worth of paint and scrap the rest just because I wasn't ready to use all of it when I started painting, because that would be a real Past-Me move. So, having gotten the driver's seat back in place and begun to work on those other things - [foreshadowing intensifies] - I decided to start figuring out the hardware for the seat, because literally all of it has to be somehow customized out of what I can buy from the local fastener people. And that's why these rather large and weighty piles of zinc-plated steel are sitting in containers of vinegar, which is slowly destroying said coating while simultaneously compromising the safety of my garage.

Pictured: Skytanic, here we come.

Also, here's a tip: don't leave your fasteners in the vinegar for too long, because if you do, you will accidentally create a beverage that can only be consumed by the multi-eyed and tentacled horrors that are imprisoned at the edge of the Universe.

Pictured: Still probably better than an Oleato, though.

Likewise, I had weird results when I took the mostly-raw-steel fasteners - seen in the left-hand container, above - and ran them through a rinse after cold-bluing them. I'm not sure if it was something in our tap water or what, but I've never had that process create a large quantity of rabbit pee...and since I have an eleven-pound bunny skittering around my feet as I sit and type this, you can believe that I know exactly what a large quantity of rabbit pee looks like.

Ingredients: Raspberries, water, sugar, dextrose, rabbit pee, ascorbic acid (preservative).

Also, side question: why does it have sugar and dextrose? Isn't that like saying that my rig is cooled with coolant and ethylene glycol?

Regardless, I had good results from the bluing...but if it seems like I blued way too many fasteners for the grand, combined total of eight that I'll actually be using in this project, that's only because I blued way too many fasteners for the grand, combined total of eight that I'll be using in this project.

Pictured: Well, it'll actually be twenty if you count the washers and locknuts that I'll end up using...but whatevs. Nobody's counting. Obviously.

So, did anyone catch the fact that I've said "locknuts" twice within the last four sentences? Well, I did...and that's because I belatedly discovered - read: "after I got everything installed and could actually comprehend what I'd built" - that four of the eight holes that I drilled and tapped don't actually have to be tapped; I have space on the opposite side of the fastener for a nut or locknut to be installed...so I tapped four holes for nothing. But, that's okay; I'll simply ream those threads out and actually generate some working space in the assembly, and make my life a lot easier. I'll also pre-fit, trim and re-thread the four cut-to-an-absurdly-small-length fasteners that still need to access the central, threaded holes in the bracket, and then re-blue them...and once all of that is done, I'll actually be able to paint the bracket and install it for good. And then, at great length, the foundational work for my sleeping-platform project will actually be done, and I'll be able to move on to the hard stuff...and all because I just wanted to avoid sleeping in a tent.

And that's it: that's the end.

...

...

...except for the part where, right in the middle of doing all of this bracket-fab, I totally rebuilt my battery cables and tie-down clamps because I just couldn't bear to keep living with them as they were. So, yeah: stay tuned.

 

[Sundowner]

So, right in the middle of the seat bracket build, I realized that I have a slight problem...and for once, the problem is not the fact that Pyr-hair seems to get everywhere, as can be seen in each and every picture of my truck's interior in the previous three posts. I mean, Pyr-hair contamination is definitely a problem as well, but the slight problem to which I now refer is the unsightly and unstable 14mm gap that was unintentionally caused by my having installed new batteries last year.

Pictured: I have literally been awake ever since that day, and SERIOUSLY?? DOG HAIR ON THE BATTERY?? HOW???

Honestly, I have no idea how she gets so. much. hair. everywhere...but that's a problem for another time (or for a leaf blower). Regarding the strap-gap: I realized that I'd never fixed it when I opened the hood to disconnect the batteries, which was itself done on the off-chance of any in-vehicle welding being required for the seat-bracket project...and for once, I feel like I'm actually not being pedantic: because of that gap in the top strap of the battery hold-down, the batteries like to shift around a little bit when the road gets irritable. Sure, you can crank down on the tension rod that holds the top strap, but because of the way the strap is designed you'll just end up bending that little tab out on the end without really putting too much more pressure on the battery. Thus, a few modifications are in order...and that means cutting certain things apart.

Pictured: Specifically, this certain thing.

...and that's me, getting ahead of myself again. But: that's also not a staged shot, because I really did take a hacksaw to the stud on a battery that cost US$500, or $286,535 Somali shillings. And here's how all of that happened...

Pictured: I should learn to leave "good enough" alone.

Okay, so, those are the stock battery straps, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with them aside from the fact that they absolutely do not fit the new batteries: the tops of the new 27 cases are about 14mm narrower, as stated, but the cases are also about 6mm taller. Thus, a a pair of fitment issues arise:

1. The forward battery strap - on the left, with the flat/flat mount arrangement - now sits 6mm too high to bolt back into the fender.
2. The rear battery strap - on the right, with the angled/flat mounts - still fits into the correct location, but its mounting hole is now so far off-center that the mounting bolt will no longer work.

Of those two issues, the first is the easiest to fix: all we really need is a spacer...so that's what I made.

Pictured: Behold the marvelousness of my 3D printing skills!

And that's about as much as I can do with 3D printing, at current; I'm still learning how literally all of it works. However, I already know that it's one of my most valuable tools: in situations like this, I can go from necessity to having functional part inside of a half-hour, and that saves me an immense amount of time and effort. I've actually made a ton of stuff like this from PETG, but I'm starting to work with ABS for things that go under the hood, and that's been a ride...but small projects like this one are the ones that teach me the most.

Modifying the rear bracket was actually a lot of fun, but that's probably because I'm weird and I like doing things that most people seem to find irksome...and for some reason, "filing holes into pleasant, oblong slots" falls into that category. I, myself, used to hate doing it because I could never get the newly-created slot to look nice and neat and straight, but once I started using two different files to create the shape, it got a lot easier. I start with a tiny, round keyfile and create an indexing slot...

Pictured: ...as thusly...

...and then I continue it downwards, checking the fit against the threaded hole until I'm all warm and fuzzy and feeling good about myself.

Pictured: Or, at least until I'm afraid that if I go further, I'll screw it up.

Two interesting things in that photo:

1. The factory hole is already a press-punched - punch-pressed? - oblong slot...it's just not a very big one.
2. The bracket was SO close to still fitting without any modification.

I probably could have bent the thing into the correct shape, but that would have been the chimpy way to do this...and I seriously hate chimps; no idea why that is, but it's a thing with me. Chimps, monkeys, macaques, lemurs, baboons, you name it; for no particular reason, I just seem to unreasonably despise them to the point of using "chimp" as an epithet. That being said: I like a gorilla, and I'm actually a big fan of the orangutan, but I hate a monkey. Anyway...

After I file indexing slots, I just go back in with a larger double-cut round file and take out everything that needs to be taken out; as long as the indexing cut is even remotely straight, the larger and coarser round file tends to follow that path. Also, the heavy cut itself seems to help; it doesn't clog up or wander like a second-cut file, and that makes the entire process fast and accurate. I've cut inch-long slots this way and they've stayed extremely straight; I usually go back over the edges and true them up, regardless, but even the rough result is usually pretty good. Once that slot is done I go back with the round keyfile and recreate the punched edge as closely as possible, which is evidently of supreme importance even on the back side of the strap that literally cannot be seen without removing two bolts and then taking a macro shot of the strap itself.

Pictured: No wonder it takes me so long to get anything done.

After that was done and the basic height issues were resolved, I went on to the Point of No Return: cutting the spot welds out of the angled bits on each top strap, repositioning them, and then re-welding them at the correct locations for the new batteries...and holy f***, does Toyota use some serious-duty spot welds. I tried a basic weld cutter and it couldn't really do much with them; I think I removed more of the surrounding metal than I did the weld itself, so I literally threw that cutter into the trash and just pulled out a conventional drill bit and popped it through...and even though that worked a treat, it meant I created two different holes and then had to do a bit of welding from two different sides, which meant that there was some extra filing and grinding required before actually putting in the new spot weld. The result, however, wasn't too bad.

Pictured: I think I'm okay with it.

Pictured: Yeah, I can live with that.

And that's the rear-battery strap, sorted...but for anyone that's interested in doing this, I have a word of warning: look very carefully at the above image. Specifically, look at the angle-widget-clippy-dinguses: they are NOT perfectly perpendicular to the long axis of the strap. There's a definite angle to the orientation, and that angle could have a deleterious effect if you're fitting things to the same millimeter-ish tolerance that I'm using. It's a subtle difference, but it's there...so I suggest careful layout in this area; I almost screwed this up, myself, but I happened to catch it because I noticed that both of my top straps have slight, intentional bends along their length.

Also, regarding the amount of clearance that I've left: I reduced the gap between the vertical parts of the angle-widget-clippy-dingus-pieces from 14-ish mil to about 2; that's just enough room for a piece of adhesive felt to be stuck into place, which should be all that I need to keep everything nice and secure and finished-off-looking. I wouldn't suggest going any tighter than that, because even though my batteries are supposedly identical, there's about a millimeter of difference in their case widths at the top; it would suck to do all this work and then have things not fit.

Anyway, that's all for now; more coverage at 11:00.

 

[Sundowner]

While we're not on the subject, I have two fuel tank questions for anyone with some solid insight.

1. Can I cram a larger-capacity tank for a 76-series into my 73?
2. If so, what do I need to do it, aside from the tank?

To clarify: I may pick up the 140L Exel tank that @ddub has for sale. We're figuring out the shipping and packaging, but we're struggling a bit with solid data on whether or not that particular tank will actually fit a 73-series. From what both of us can tell, it should work, but we're sort of playing the Transitive Property Game: "A is basically the same thing as B, and even though the dingus was designed for A it definitely fits in B, and since C is effectively the same as B there shouldn't be an issue...and besides: A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H are all the same letter, anyway." At current, we're working with these pieces of data:

• The 76 and the 77 are (for the most part) dimensionally identical in the gas tank area, so a 76 tank should also fit a 77.
• @Loober has fitted the 140L Exel tank into a 77 and says it's a direct bolt-in (mostly).
• The 77 and 73 share the same part number for the gas tank, per @Guyute
• Supposedly, all of the 7x series share the same main tank, so none of this speculation matters in the first place; it should fit.

This being said: I've now been looking around for a day or two, and I've seen several posts that say the tanks are all the same across the entire 7x series...but I've also seen a list of different part numbers for different 70s and several posts here and there that countermand cross-compatibility...so I don't feel like I have a solid answer on the fitment question.

The second question is one borne of my admitted ignorance: I simply don't know what all is involved in a tank swap, either methodologically or functionally. If this was a Jeep I'd just run the tank dry, grab two cam straps, drop the tank and swap in a new filler neck while I was up there...but that's because I've done six or eight of them and I already know exactly what to do. Here, not so much.

Anyway: thoughts, insight and knowledge would be much appreciated.

 

[Sundowner]

Okay, time to make some batteries better by battering them. Or something like that.

After I got the rear strap completed I started on the front one; initially I thought that the rear would be easier because I just had to move one of the angle-widget-clippy-dingus-pieces, but it turned out to be easier to do the front strap because I was free to position both of the AWCDP's as needed...and that made things a lot simpler to line up. So I zapped the outboard one into place from the top...

Pictured: Imagine that some bacon-frying noises just happened.

...and then flipped it over to work on the bottom section. This one weld was a bit trickier than the others because the holes significantly overlapped each other and I decided to try to fill them in without completely flattening one piece before tacking the other to it - that would have been a LOT of extra work - or without simply replacing the angle-widget-clippy-dingus-piece...and since I didn't have any stock that was even remotely similar to the factory Toyota metal, that latter idea wasn't an option anyway.

Pictured: Imagine that some bacon-frying noises are about to happen.

It turned out okay in the end, but working on metal this thin is really difficult because the wire speed was incredibly hard to figure out. Too little and the metal vaporizes without being fully replaced; too much and it piles up and looks like a cold weld...and all of that was mostly because - again - I never have any real idea of what I'm doing. I did some practice welds on similar scrap stock, but even the small differences in thickness caused a variance in the final result on the factory metal...but after a quick coat of paint, both straps looked fine.

Pictured: Thing 1.

Pictured: Thing 2.

A quick word on that paint: it's not staying. For battery-top usage - especially over sealed AGM cells - I think it would be fine, but I really want to use better finishes on some of these projects...so these are some of the parts to which I alluded in Post #225 when I was talking about painting things. Along with these and the seat bracket, I'm thinking about adding in the floor trim strips from the rear door area, and the sheetmetal cover plates on the rear of the suspension seat bases. Those factory parts could use a bit of a refresh, and even though the rear door trim pieces aren't painted, mine are in bad shape and I don't mind refinishing them; I may be able to get a replacement set in the future. So I think I'll scuff the factory stuff to get a decent surface on it, strip the paint on the batter straps with...eh, something or other...and then use up the primer and satin black SprayMax that I ordered.

After I got the straps in place, I decided that I was just going to go ahead and do a quick cable rebuild on this corner of the electrical bus...and by "quick" I actually mean "multi-day project involving way too many parts and pieces, because nothing is ever as easy as it should be." And that project started off in spectacular fashion when I started test-fitting a set of military terminals and realized that between the extra height of the new battery cases and the addition of the secondary threaded top posts, something very bad had almost happened.

Pictured: "Missed it by *that* much..."

That piece of aluminum is where the outside of the hood passes over the threaded stud of the battery...and it's only about 14mm away; that's just about 9/16" of one Muricameter, and not only is that way closer than it needs to be, but somehow I literally never noticed it before...and that's how I poked a hole in my hood liner with a battery stud.



I'm still pretty mad about this, which is why I'm not showing anyone a picture of my stupidity...but yeah: there's totally a hole in the hood liner, now. And it's not a pretty, clean hole that looks like it should be there; it's just a ragged, irregular tear that looks like a moron didn't check the clearances when he changed something...because that's exactly what happened. So now, when I go to pull the hood in a few months to have it painted... [foreshadowing intensifies] ...I get to order a new hood liner to go with it, because I got exactly one night of sleep between having fixed the battery strap gap that had kept me awake for fourteen months straight and realizing that if I'd never changed anything in the first place, literally none of this would have happened.

And that's why I sliced the battery post off with a hacksaw, and then did my best to clean up the surgery.

Pictured: Still tight, but no longer causing damage.

Just in case anyone's wondering why the OEM clamp lug didn't cause any issues: the profile of both the hood and the liner are taller directly over the clamp lug...so between that and the 6mm-shorter case on the old batteries, nothing was close to hitting. But the hood drops to the level of the fenders directly over the top stud, so the clearance drops accordingly. Also, this is a negative terminal, so in the event of accidental contact the worst that would have happened would have been a weird, intermittent, redundant hood ground...but thankfully I left the insulating post covers in place so there was no danger of a full-blown short between the stud and the hood metal. All the same: this tight-clearance issue changed my plans a bit regarding which cables were going to be routed where, and it also caused me to take a second look at the batteries themselves...and that's when I discovered something else that I didn't know.

Pictured: These things are mounted at different levels. Huh.

I checked with all three sides of that scale...and they're definitely different, and although this observation is completely irrelevant in the larger scheme of things, it does throw a bit of a cramp into the cotillion because I'd planned on using a set of heavy-gauge lugs and a piece of scrap cable for the connector between my batteries, and there's now just enough height difference to cause me to wonder whether or not that piece of cable and/or the battery lugs will actually bend far enough to snug down without breaking something. And when I say "heavy-gauge" I actually mean "somewhat absurd."

Pictured: Will someone please do an ampacity calculation on this?

Full Disclosure: 24-volt math is like, hard, and stuff...and when I tried to figure out how many amps this cable would hold, I used an online calculator and got to somewhere around 2200 before the calculator gave me a message that said "I'm sorry, but I can't calculate any higher than that"...and I find this absolutely hilarious.

I also find a completely different kind of hilarity in the number of different terminals that I ended up buying in order to make exactly three cables and put new ends on two more: I think it was a grand total of 32. I wasn't really sure what gauge cables I was going to end up using - I have a small stash of odd lengths that I've collected when I found them on clearance at the local shops - or even which terminals I was going to use for the connections, so I just got a good assortment and later returned the unused ones. Thankfully the lug crimper that I got last year for my 12-volt drop/trailer light project had dies for up to 2/0 heavy-wall lugs, so making a 5"-long 1/0-gauge battery cable wasn't an issue.

Pictured: Unintentional beer-can-for-scale.

Pictured: And done.

Also, yes: those lugs are sized for two different studs. One is 5/16" and the other is 3/8", because...actually, I don't know why positive and negative studs are different sizes. I used to think that it was so you couldn't hook up the cables backwards, but unless the cable terminals are sized to exactly match the lugs on both ends, that doesn't hold up. So, I'm sure there's a reason, but I just don't know what it is. Either way, I realized something annoying in the middle of all of this: standard-threaded studs probably have standard-threaded nuts that go with them...and I don't want to carry a pair of standard wrenches for the battery connections on an entirely metric vechicle.

Also, this post is getting really long, so I'm going to call it here and pick it up in a later installment. Stay tuned.

 

[Sundowner]

Also, Stuff I'm Looking For:

• Passenger side seat slider, outer, for a suspension base; mine is missing an interior roller-guide.
• Blower motor assembly, or just the blend door for fresh air/recirculating; the door on mine is is bad shape, but I think I have to replace the entire assembly.
• FRP top seals.
• Windshield cowl seal.
• Door seals.

Anyone bought or found any of this stuff, recently? I know I can go to a few of the vendors for the seals, but that door/assembly and the seat slider are kind of hard to locate. I also need to start sorting out a few small issues that I have going on with the rig, right now:

• I'm getting an intermittent fuel issue of some sort; at times, on startup, I'm getting a lot of white smoke/unburnt fuel going through the system. As soon as she warms up - and often sooner - it goes away, and it doesn't happen constantly; it seems to occur more regularly after I fill up at a couple of certain stations in the area, so I'm starting to wonder if the 1HZ just doesn't like those particular diesel blends. I've noticed that when it gets really bad, I can throw a bit of Stanadyne into the tank and it vanishes almost immediately...so I'm wondering if it's a stuck injector.
• I have a very faint clicking/chirp from somewhere in the right front; I almost thought it was a tiny rock stuck in the tire for awhile, but I couldn't find one...so I threw her in 4-high for a few miles and drove around, and I noticed that the pattern of the noise had changed, afterwards. Possibly a dry hub or something? I'm not familiar enough with these assemblies to make educated guesses, but I've heard that kind of noise from hubs before. It didn't notice it changing when turning so I'm thinking its not in the Birfield, but - again - lack of familiarity is hindering me.

Any thoughts on any of that would be much appreciated.

 

[Sundowner]

Last stupid question, I promise: why can't I tuck the chrome JDM sidewalk of a front bumper into a more Euro-style orientation? Is it just a bracket issue, or are the mounts entirely different?

 

[Sundowner]

I think I'm going to have to go back to doing all of my own chassis/drivetrain lube.



When we moved, things like "huge-arse floor jack" and "a bunch of grease guns that I absolutely smurfin' hate" didn't make the container...so I've been letting the best of the local shops handle that stuff when I do tire rotations. But I had a thought just now:

Do you think they knew to grease the Birfields?

Honestly, I bet they didn't...and that means I'm finally going to have to break down and get a grease gun that I don't absolutely smurfin' hate, and as best I know: there's no such thing.

 

[LDRF]

Also, Stuff I'm Looking For:
FRP top seals.

• Windshield cowl seal.
• Door seals.

Anyone bought or found any of this stuff, recently? I know I can go to a few of the vendors for the seals

I ordered the FRP Top seals earlier this summer. Part numbers here:
Post in thread 'Good Times - 1992 HZJ73'
Good Times - 1992 HZJ73 - https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/good-times-1992-hzj73.1324843/post-15550118

 

[Sundowner]

I ordered the FRP Top seals earlier this summer. Part numbers here:
Post in thread 'Good Times - 1992 HZJ73'

Thank you! I'll check out that link here in a bit.

 

[FortKnox98]

I'm finally going to have to break down and get a grease gun that I don't absolutely smurfin' hate, and as best I know: there's no such thing.

Taking close notes as I, too, am interested in finding the mythical grease gun that I don't absolutely smurfin' hate.

 

[Sundowner]

Taking close notes as I, too, am interested in finding the mythical grease gun that I don't absolutely smurfin' hate.

Well, I bought something, and I'm not sure how I'm going to feel about it...and that had a lot to do with why I bought it. I ended up with a pneumatic gun from Lock 'n Lube, because:

1. It was less expensive than the battery options from Milwaukee, which is actually pronounced "Mill-e-wah-que" which is Algonquin for "the good land."
2. It was double-minus-un-expensive because it was on sale for $99.
3. It comes with a (supposedly) decent hose and a known-good coupler...and that coupler is about $30 by itself on any given day. That makes the gun itself about a $50-60 investment, which is (again) less expensive than any other commonly-available pneumatic option.
4. It looks to be the exact. same. gun. as the supposedly-Aussie-made MacNaught K58-02...so either it's an incredibly good copy with only two small changes that I can find, or the gun bodies come from the same factory. Look 'em up.
5. It's yellow, so it's hard to lose.
6. It'll be here tomorrow, so as long as I can find some Mystik JT-6 or something similar, I'll be in good shape.

Actually, I should look up the factory spec grease for the birfies and see if I can get that.

 

[OGBeno]

Actually, I should look up the factory spec grease for the birfies and see if I can get that.

Here you go. **not cheap**.

 

[Sundowner]

Here you go. **not cheap**

You know, I have to give Toyota points on that can: if I was faced with limited amounts of container-surface real estate and I had to choose between 1) including a part number or 2) maintaining the flawless integrity of a circa-1974 graphic design, I also would have chosen the latter. I mean, who needs to know anything about grease specs when there's that. much. brown. on the can? Makes me want to build a rumpus room.

Also, if this grease gun isn't identical to a MacNaught K58-02, then I'll claim relation to my sister's simian offspring.

Pictured: Even the sticker and the stamping are identical.

To be clear: this is the LNL262. I've been looking through the literature and other bits to see what I can find, and although the hose is clearly Italian production and of decent quality...

Pictured: Può andare.

...and the coupler and swivel are both marked as South African...

Pictured: [insert South African phrase denoting acceptability here]

Pictured: Hey, free rebuild kit! Bonus!

... there's no indication of county-of-origin for the gun itself. But: look up the the MacNaught K58-02 and compare it to the LNL262 and the differences will be very hard to spot; couple that with the two-year warranty that MacNaught places on that gun - not their standard ten-year offering - and there are two conclusions:

1. LNL buys bodies from MacNaught.
2. LNL and MacNaught both buy the same body from a third party.

I seriously doubt it's the first of those options; MacNaught has no reason to do that...and since this is the only pneumatic gun that either company offers, I think it's reasonable to suspect that they're simply responding to a customer demand that they offer a pneumatic option. That puts me back to Point 3, above: it's about a $60 gun with a few valuable parts thrown into the box...and I'm okay with that.

I'm also now off to Hobo Freight, because they evidently have CRC Moly-Graph on sale for $7 per tube, and that's not only a palatable price to me, but decidedly less brown than Toyota's Nebulous Brown Bucket of Financial Despair.

 

[Sundowner]

Grease procured...and I guess I should be happy about getting it at a good price, but I honestly hate greasing things. No matter what I do, it seems like the stuff always gets everywhere, and you can never truly get rid of all of it once you've gotten it on something.

Pictured: The glitter of the mechanical world.

Also, I'm gonna go ahead and say that these fill plugs haven't been removed in quite a long time.

Pictured: And that's why we can't have nice things.

Neither of the birfies actually seemed that dry inside when I checked them, and that kind of tracks because they were totally pulled apart before I left NC... wow, eighteen months ago. It's been longer than I thought. Regardless, I added two seconds worth of grease on the "continuous" setting, but that didn't seem to make much difference after a two-minute test drive just now. So, I guess I'll just follow the age old wisdom of "when in doubt, use more lube" at the next oil change...and I'll be doing that work myself because holy f***: I think the guys at the local shop have been getting more grease on the suspension and steering bits than they've gotten inside the necessary areas. Because of course they have. Anyways, it was really hard to tell the grease level on both sides; I tried using a zip tie as a makeshift dipstick, but that didn't really give me much info. I guess I could just shoot grease into the inside until it barfs out the top, but somehow that doesn't really seem like the right thing to do. More thought may be required.

Also, I have an initial report on the LNL grease gun: as the French say, "it's not so terrible. I'm somewhat endeared to it because the continuous setting sounds like the airsoft version of an MG42, but aside from that: it's a pneumatic grease gun. It seems well-made, and even though it had the same priming issues as literally ever other grease gun I've ever used, it did a decent job. The locking coupler is nice, but it's not the pornstar-level sexiness that people make it out to be; it clicks on, stays on, and still leaves a bunch of extra grease everywhere...but I can wipe that off, unlike the guys at the local shop.

And that's why I've been wiping things for about an hour, now. But I'll be done, soon; not because I'll actually be finished, but because I'll have run out of paper towels. And that's why I really do hate chimps.

 

[Sundowner]

Pictured: Proof that I actually get my hands dirty from time to time.

Personally, I think that's pretty impressive: I had gloves on and I still managed to get covered in old grease, because I'm THAT inept. And - again - that s*** is like glitter, except worse.

Also, while we're not talking about it: can I solicit a group opinion on corrosion-inhibiting sprays?

 

[Admiral Snackbar]

Love seeing the progress , also I just wanted to say "rumpus".

The room would require wood paneling and orange shag

 

[Sundowner]

Love seeing the progress , also I just wanted to say "rumpus".

I mean, that can be a thing from now on. We can rumpus the f*** out of this thread.

Also, I really hate having to censor things; I'd like to think that we've evolved past Puritanism, but no...no, we really haven't.

The room would require wood paneling and orange shag