Interesting day today. The first milestone of the day was meeting up with
@GreatBigFat to handoff the 4 Sequoia wheels he posted on the classifieds. Super cool dude and full of positive energy. We talked projects and went for a ride in Lexi Jo, my LS swapped 80 named after my buddy's first born. Good chat and good company. After that, I had planned to have a banger day in the garage hammering away on the frame mods for the intercooler mounting, as well as set the engine for the first time, but an early call from a buddy in need flushed that all away. A good friend called in need of help after having a traffic accident and he was the highest priority from there. You gotta take care of your tribe. The efforts to aid the situation ate up a good portion of the day, but nothing that I have any heartburn over. Happy to have helped. When I made it back to the house, I got stuck into reorganizing my thoughts and finding tasks that were both immediately actionable, as well as properly sized for completion before evening or exhaustion set in. While doing so, the mailman rocked up and had a package from CruiserTeq. I was pumped! It was my low range gears and HF2AV rebuild kit. I didn't expect them until Monday, but I ain't complaining. That gives me all the parts I need for the T-case. I am going away from the stock 1:1 high range and 2.78:1 low range and swapping in a .9:1 high range and 3.22:1 low range, both from Sumo. This combo will give me the equivalent of ~3.73 axle ratio in high, and ~4.56 in low. The diesel powered 80s in other parts of the world all got 3.73 axle ratios to better match the RPM and power range of the 1HZ and 1HD powerplants. The Cummins 12V will have PLENTY of grunt, what it doesn't have is high revs. The .9 gears will help keep them just a bit lower on the highway. On the flip side, the 3.11 low range gears are going to be that extra bit of deep reduction that is going to make using a manual that much easier in the real techy stuff. The added control of the low gears on break over and long descents makes a big difference. If you ever get a chance to drive an 80 with a factory 1HZ/1HD engine and the H150/H155 manual, you will notice that super low 1st gear. While on the Australian vacation that spawned my desire to do this build, I drove a manual HZJ80 and was blown away at how low first was. You can descend very steep hills and it will never overrun the engine. You have gobs of engine braking in that combo.
All in I will have a 71.5:1 crawl ration when done. Put that behind an engine making mountains of torque right off idle and it should be quite the beast.
Here are the projected speeds with 315/75-16 BFG KO2s. If I find that ~35s are not quite enough to get a reasonable rollout to keep highway revs low enough, I can always bump to 37s and sacrifice some low range speed.
I will post some pics of the gear soon. I just didn't take any today.
