Category: Friends

It’s about time for an update! And yes, I’m starting this off with another bridge picture:

When last we left off, the welder couldn’t meet up with us, so we got a bunch of welds cleaned up, drilled holes for seatbelt mounts, and other smaller tasks accomplished. This Sunday I made it over the river by 10:15 and we were backing up to his shop by 11.

The first task was to mount up the swingarm. We clamped some plate to the top of the bumper, moved things back and forth and up and down, and finally found the right spot. He fired up the welder and got to work.

Once that was in place, we greased and assembled the swingarm cups and bearings, pressed them in with a socket, and set it onto the spindle. Not bad!

There’s a droop of maybe 1/2″ on the far side of the hinge, and even after torquing the castle nut down just a hair of vertical play in the arm.

I wasn’t concerned about the droop all that much, because the next part was welding a receiver to the other side. After lots of consultation, we decided to cut a flat plate and weld that to the face of the bumper, and then weld a section of angle iron to that to act as the shelf it sits on:

While that was cooling down, I had him weld my seatbelt bungs into the rollbar, the spare tire plate onto the standoff, the bolts for the Hi-Lift to the bumper, and the bolts for the spare.

Then, we pulled the whole bumper off to weld two plates of angle iron in behind the outer bumper mounting holes–one side to the frame and the other to the flat plate across the back of the frame. This should provide support for the weight of the tire and bumper.

Once that was all done, we threw everything into the back of the truck, paid the man, and headed back to Brian’s place. There we drilled out the mounting holes for the bumper, put that back in, mounted the swingarm, and tested the height of the receiver on the tailgate: too high! We had to chop about 1″ off the top of the receiver to clear the tailgate as it came down all the way, but there’s still plenty of backstop left to keep the arm from hitting the back of the truck. The last thing we did was drill a hole for a receiver pin; by then it was 6PM and time for a swim in the river.

When I get home this evening I’ll shoot some pictures of the swingarm open and add them here for reference.

So, next steps are:

• Pull everything back apart and clean up all the welds.
• Bondo up any holes and sand everything smooth.
• Etching primer on everything (POR-15 on the frame welds)
• Some kind of black high-impact paint to finish everything off
• Find a lock solution for the jack
• Pick up some lug nuts for the spare
• Find some kind of mounting solution for the license plate
• Run wiring to the license plate for lighting
• Mount it all back up and go!

Today I headed back to Chestertown for more bumper work with Brian. One new wrinkle in the fuel system saga is that filling the tank with more than 8 gallons of gas produces a mystery leak somewhere from the top (!?!?) out of sight. So when the tank gets dropped, I’ll have to sort that out as well.

The assemblies are back from the welder, and they look great. Only a few minor spots of burn-through here and there, stuff that can be fixed with a small amount of bondo and some sandpaper.

We pulled the stock bumper off, put the new one on, and did some test-fitting for the jack mounts. With some silicon padding down on the cradles, we marked off holes for mounting bolts and drilled them through. Then we revisited the spare tire mount, drilling holes for mounting bolts on the plate, then mocking up the arm and re-measuring vertical distance. Both sets of bolts I’d bought from Fastenal were too long, so we had to hit the local True Value to find stock in the proper length.

Once that was sorted out, we noticed the standoff was 2″ too long, so that got chopped down to size. Then the plate was marked and tacked onto the standoff, and we tacked mounting bolts in place on everything.

After lunch, we were still waiting for the welder to get back to us, so we busted out the grinders and cleaned up the welds a bit. Once I smooth it out with a flap wheel it’ll be ready for bondo, and then some etching primer.

The welder was AWOL until the late afternoon, which screwed up our timetable, so we dicked around with some other stuff before calling it a day. First up was drilling holes for seatbelt bungs, which look real pretty and will be even prettier when they’re welded and painted.

Then we thought about tracing the power lead from the fuel sender back to the dashboard, and got as far as pulling the dashboard valance panel off and mucking around with the gauge when I came to my senses and realized I needed to be on the road in an hour. This job can wait.

So, after a quick ride in Chewbacca, I packed up my gear and hit the road for home. As I was approaching the bridge, I hit the first in a series of rainshowers and found the wipers were dead, to my great dismay. They have been working reliably up until now, so maybe our wiggling the BHC made them angry or something. I stopped in to the local K-Mart and found some Rain-X, applied that liberally to the windshield, and continued home. That shit is awesome.