Shirley's Thread

[FishTown]

It’s been a while since my last update. Not that anyone follows this, but I’ll write an one for my own sake.

We had our second second son in April, so I took a break from working on the truck. Here’s a few of Townes Douglas Coxwell.

 

[FishTown]

Over the last couple weeks I fixed a few things that were long overdue. My rear view mirror as been really loose pretty much since the day I got it. For almost a year now, it’s been absolutely useless. It would point down unless you held it up. I didn’t want to dish out $130 for a new one, and figured another used one is bound to have the same issue eventually. Figured I’d try to take it apart and see if it’s fixable. And it really wasn’t hard. I heated up the plastic by running hot water over it, popped the glass out (I was worried it would break, but it’s a thick piece of glass), tightened the set screw and added a tiny bit of grease to the ball. That’s it. While I had it off, I thought I’d do something about the plastic on the back side of the mirror. As most of these do, the plastic was deteriorating from the sun exposure to the point that the top layer of plastic would just turn to powder when you touched it. I lightly sanded it down so it wouldn’t look terrible. I just did a light hand sand with 120-200 grit. It could stand to be cleaned up more or painted, but it was enough of an upgrade to me, so I just put it back that way.

 

[FishTown]

The chrome on my grill and headlight doors was peeling pretty bad, so I attempted to chemically strip the chrome with bleach. And I failed. I sanded it down as even as I could get it, and painted them using Rustoleum Flat Soft Iron (thanks @FARMAN33)I’m not big on the black out look, but this was a decent alternative. My original emblem was in bad shape too - really faded and cracked, so I painted it black just to see how I felt about it. I’m not a fan of it, but @CaptClose has a clean emblem for me to replace it.

The gray is darker than I would like, but it’ll do for now. I’ll probably go back to the chrome eventually. It just looks right on these old trucks.

 

[FishTown]

I also fixed my parking brake. The release button broke nearly a year ago and I lost the spring sometime between then and now. Tried getting just the button and the spring from several people parting out, but it wasn’t worth anyone’s time. I was able to find the part numbers for the button and spring for 3rd gen 4Runners and ordered those. $12 and two weeks later, my parking brake works again! I’ll add pics later.

Now I can go get my inspection done and do something about that registration sticker...

 

[CaptClose]

Hey man... I follow this thread. Looks great. Love the blacked out front.