Radarsonwheels

Let some juice out thru the front calipers. Pedal feels good. Probably test it out later tonite we have a little heatwave today in the 90°s and I’d rather run errands in air conditioning.

I filled the brake light switch body with brake fluid to hopefully avoid a pesky air pocket and screwed it in. I’m not sure which circuit feeds the switch with pressure- the aftermarket prop block also handles splitting duties for the front brake lines. Maybe any air trapped behind the switch can make its way back up to the MC with a little time and tapping? I am going to gravity bleed the front system a bit and see if the pedal feels good. I don’t know if wrapping the switch in a blanket will help much- it’s not reflected heat from being near the headers I’m worried about- more like the oven temps of the engine bay in general. If this one fails in another 500mi I’ll have to look into either a mechanical switch on the pedal arm or re-locating an electric pressure switch to somewhere cooler. I am hoping the original was just poor quality. Here’s the new one installed with new spade connectors to replace the mushroom style slide on clip.

Thanks man the full manual valvebody helps I can always downshift to fender bender speeds but yeah nobody feels great when the big pedal goes to the metal

Probably throw a fiberglass & silver reflective blanket on the new one when it’s in. Maybe there’s a reason the oldschool hotrodders put louvers all over everything...

Oh man I lost brakes this morning with my kid in the truck with me! Ain’t that a B! I only had to pump up one stop on a main road and was a mile from home and crept thru the neighborhoods in 1st gear so no damage or white knuckling but what the heck man I built this thing right to be safe and reliable! When we got home I found dot3 puddled on my rubber mudflap inner fender/a-arm cover under the MC. Ok that’s easy time to feel around and hunt down the leak. Turned out it was the brake pressure switch body that leaked! Dunno if it was just chinee quality or if I cooked the plastic in my oven of an engine bay. Grabbed a replacement at my buddy’s indie motorcycle shop on the way to work. “Made in poland” by drag specialties. Gotta switch from the push on mushroom terminals to regular spades but that’s easy. Not sure if this will require bleeding the whole system or if I can drip some fluid into the switch body and let it flood and leak the air out as I pull the little plug I put in there and swap in the new switch. I pulled the old broken one out to match it up when I bought the new one and threw a plastic plug in so the still full MC didn’t drain all day.

I just towed a u-haul 12’ two axle open trailer to get a motorcycle an hour away with my 1986 ramcharger. I rebuilt the 318 engine last year with an rv cam, small headers, aluminum intake, & edelbrock 650. Sort of a home brewed tow package. It did fine but I was definitely the guy doing 55-60 on the 70mph turnpike and man did that truck feel like a sports car after I dropped off the trailer. Trying to say- another vote for a 360

Howdy CO Yep I’m good. Last year I was cranking on the truck build so hard it was a little much but I knew it was such a big project that it wouldn’t get done if I didn’t get a little obsessed. Now that it’s more of a hot loud gas guzzling daily driver I have just been mostly enjoying it! I do still check in here a couple times a week to read some ‘car stories’, learn some stuff, have a laugh, and once in a while help somebody out with some misguided advice. Last thing I did on the truck was the passenger side ‘stage 8’ locking collector bolts. The passenger downpipe had lost all 3 nuts and started falling off and leaking badly twice. I didn’t do the driver side because it hadn’t been self-loosening- yet! I took my mom for a ride last week. She loved the interior and the fuel injected reliability but was terrified and actually screaming after a quick half throttle holeshot up to about 30 mph from a slow roll. It was hilarious but I’m not a sadist so I didn’t mat the gas and bang second at redline- just cruised around a little more and went home. When I cranked up to take her out I noticed a new rattly sound so I hadn’t been driving it this week till I had time to check it out. Yup it was the driver’s side collector. One out of three collector nuts had backed off and vibrated all the way off, leaving just the bolt. I replaced that one with a fancy locking bolt at the cost of much forearm cramping, cursing, and a bunch of skin rubbed off my first thumb knuckle. Man who decided to put a big block in this tiny engine bay ? Sooner or later I’ll have to do the last two fancy locking bolts on the driver’s collector. I’m going to wait until the skin grows back on my hand that I rubbed of doing the first one. The Driver’s side has the O2 sensor in it that runs the EFI computer so I can’t have it leaking. Which reminds me- once you have a good tune in your holley self learning fuel map it’s possible to set/limit the AFR correction to a small amount. That way you can still have it correct for altitude temperature and and humidity but not go totally haywire if a sensor goes bad. I should probably do that soon. I have about 400 miles on it so far. Next up is replacing the dakota steering rack, pump, lines, and tie rods, along with a trip to re-set the toe afterward. It’s pretty much the only Dak part I didn’t replace (re-used the denso alternator too knock wood) and now it’s leaking. Parts are super cheap so I’m just gonna do all new. My buddy is a chevy dealership mechanic so he’s gonna throw the parts on and re-align at work. It’s only a few bolts and hoses but with a rack and a lift it’s a cake job and he wants to barter for a tattoo. Other than that I have a nuisance vibration in the dashboard just off idle and I think I want to back off the aggressiveness on my shock settings some. Also my headlights are aimed too low and the driver’s side sealed beam has a droopy bulb inside that is a little dim and doesn’t hit the reflectors right to throw a good pattern. So I’ll swap em both soon. The amount of rain that comes in is still significant but much better and I am confident all the metal is sealed up really well so it’s also just a nuisance I can deal with until I decide to get crazy and do a new windshield. Oh and my fuel lift pump hangs way too low out back- I gotta raise the mount by 4-5” and make a new hard line to the surge tank. Just like everything else it’s ok for now. I’m really enjoying the fall weather- in the 70°s or even low 80°s the truck runs nice and cool instead of the mid 190°s it runs in summer rush hour. I’ve also turned some of my attention to getting my ‘73 swinger back on the road from paint shop purgatory (free extended storage at the lazy painter/buddy’s garage waiting on him). So there’s a nice big chunk of mopar rambling! I hope everybody is also enjoying the fall weather and burning some gas! Radar

Worth it for sheetmetal patch panels and door parts but man wotta heap! what’s up with the 8 hole piece in the nose?

I will go ahead and chime in with some advice. I think bench seats look right in our trucks, plus then your sweety can sneak over for a snuggle. Second best look is a low back no headrest bucket like from an a-100 van. Here’s the thing though- to me the point of a bucket is to grab your butt so when you corner hard you don’t have to hold the steering wheel for dear life while your passenger flies out the window or into your lap. If you are making your car handle that well you should look into some real racing buckets with side bolsters etc. If you just like the look of a bucket and want comfort don’t be afraid to start haunting craigslist for used luxury car leather buckets. Sometimes you can get them for a great price out of a wreck or whatever and hook up 12v for full power adjustability. I have fiat spyder seats in my 73 swinger they look great and are comfy but I miss the bench a little. It was ragged out though so whatever. good luck! radar

That’s good news man! And never hook your pepperoni directly up to the coil- at least that’s what I ‘heard from a friend’

Awesome truck! Do you have a plan or vision for what you want out of it?

I had a set of the blue monroes on my 54 when it had the stock 3/4 ton chassis. Dunno the p/n they were spec’d for my truck off rockauto and cheap like $15 a corner. They were fine. I also had a set in my handmade/dakota setup. The thing is that these trucks have bench seats with big old springs in them and fairly stiff suspensions. You can’t really corner hard enough to need really great shocks without flying around the cab holding on to the wheel for dear life. And bumps get soaked up a lot just by the seat springs. So as long as your shocks keep a bump to one bounce and don’t let your springs keep bouncing up and down a bunch of times after the first hit they will be fine and you won’t think about them again. I think if you spend a little more money you can get a shock with a little more fancy valving inside that will be softer on rough roads and smooth out small imperfections while still having enough stiffness to help corner flatter. Of course comfort is important but really a lot of the shock’s job is keeping the tires planted on the ground too... but if they cost $60 for four of them what do you have to lose? Try them out. Any shock should control the bounce of the springs and keep it from oscillating. The real test will be turning a loose or bumpy corner at speed- do the tires unload and make it sketchy? If so you need to drive slower or spend more money! good luck radar

Have you tried simple green? I think mine had seventy years of grease and human skin on it. Maybe brakleen on a rag for starters to cut the worst?

I would replace that wire for sure. I don’t think the coil cares where the voltage goes when the field collapses but I’m not an electrical engineer. I would test a plug laid on the block and see how hot the spark looks.

I think on #2 he’s talking about getting the caster right- you will need the UCAs to be in the same position on your frame as they were on the donor which might not be as simple as both frames level and weld it up. Can’t hurt to throw an angle finder on the UCAs and get them in the ballpark . Don’t over think it though it’s not rocket science and the front end is all adjustable anyway to a certain extent. A 32nd” one way or the other won’t matter. I don’t know about triangulating anything. If I did another I would probably block up my old truck level, remove the front wheels, use a plumb bob and mark the floor under the wheel arches for center and mark their outside edges too. Verify they are the same and not warped from crashes or whatever and if so fudge the marks or fix them. Then when you pull your front sheetmetal off you will still know exactly where your new front tires need to end up. You will need to deal with the funky wasp waist area in the old frame and you will also need to chop off some of the front of the new frame and make a new rad support crossmember. Again- drop marks with a plumb bob to the floor and note the height measurement, then leave a little extra room for rubber or poly or washers so you can shim it perfect later. If you want to learn from my mistakes the best advice I can give is to measure the dak ride height (frame to floor) before you pull the driveline. Also don’t over think the attachment point where your frames meet. You could tack them up with 3/8” round rod or whatever and adjust the fit until you are happy before sleeving and boxing them together with plate steel. Oh and this is dumb but totally a big one- for suspension rebuilding use a torch to heat the upper ball joint sockets in the UCAs and unscrew them with a proper square drive BJ socket in a breaker bar stuck in the longest super strong steel tube you have. And do this with the UCAs still attached to the car, and the motor still in, rear wheels on the ground. Mine needed ox/a torching until the grease was sizzling and dripping out and I was leaning on a six foot breaker bar extension hard like a football practice sled and they both fought me most of the way out. If I tried that in my pipe vice I would have just moved my 300lb work table across the garage and bent the control arm. That’s all I can think of right now but good luck and keep asking questions. Don’t forget that these things go through an awkward puberty phase while you’re building them and if you keep plugging away it will get done. Radar

I used a 3’ piece of pipe on a craftsman 1/2” ratchet with a 6 point socket. And I got it rippin hot with a torch first. It was definitely abusive to the tool but hey- lifetime guarantee! I could only get a few degrees of clicks on each pull since I can only get the truck so high on jackstands. So an actual breaker bar wouldn’t have worked. Propane is good but a good warmup with ox/a will do a better quicker job. Radar

Yeah 3.55 is a good gear. I re-read your original post sorry I must have skimmed the 1st time- I think if there is a residual pressure valve in the MC it will happily push past a 2psi valve in the proportioning valve. I usually do an adjustable prop valve to make sure the rears don’t lock up first. I have a ‘corvette style’ small diameter dual diaphragm booster and disc/disc MC in mine. It works ok but there is room for improvement.

All the fuel pumps and lines I ever messed with were done with a double flare. Often they have NPT ports with adapters screwed in to take the flared tube and nuts.

Im not familiar with that MC but usually the difference between disc and drum is reservoir size which isnt a big deal and sometimes drum will have a residual pressure valve to keep 5 psi in the line so the drums dont retract

Hey Bambam I did not intend to criticize you or your grammar, spelling, communication skills, anything like that. Please accept my apology- I am not better than anybody and I couldn’t care less how they spell- agreed that this is a place for old cars and fun not a meeting of picky english teachers. I am usually typing on here with my thumbs on my phone- I am sure I’ve misspelled plenty. I was not trying to put you down, or correct you. Anybody that has had to dump the rust out of that thick little shot glass with the thumbscrew knew exactly what you were talking about including me. I understand that it’s hard to read tone on a forum post but c’mon man if trucks had a sentiment bowl that got clogged mine would be full of anger and frustration at times for sure- busted knuckles, stripped bolt heads, and problems that refuse to be fixed. Which struck me as a hilarious idea. Also I probably shouldn’t have poked the bear- I know you are currently dealing with a frustrating problem and I’m totally rooting for you to find a solution and might not have been in the mood for a wiseacre. Radar

Oh I forgot I have a funny story about my 6v starter on 12v- one day it just stopped working at all. I didn’t know if it could be rebuilt or where to get a new one and I was getting tired from trying to pop start the truck unsuccessfully- push, jump in, 2nd gear, sidestep the clutch, no luck. I ended up hosing down the starter through the button stalk hole and anywhere I could get into the case from the outside with wd40- which is mostly solvent and a little oil. After that it worked like a charm for another five or seven years until I swapped out the flatty. I suspect the contacts were dirty but who knows maybe the brushes or armature or whatever were gummed up. Funny story and maybe it the retelling could help somebody out!

Oh man I don’t wanna be a spelling stickler and I’m not here to correct anybody but the ‘sentiment’ bowl is cracking me up! I thought it was a sediment bowl to collect junk and dirt but maybe it’s just holding on to bad feelings ?

If GGdad brought his it would have been! I think it was a roots blown chevy you could eat off of

My first time taking the truck to a car show was today. There was a lot of really nice stuff there- led-sleads, perfect stock restored model As, muscle cars, even drag race stuff and bikes. My truck was definitely not built as a show poodle but I figured it’d be fun to park in the exhibition area instead of with all the toyotas. I was surprised to win a large trophy- 2nd place for best engine!

I had aluminum line on a hotrod. The new gas would strip out the aluminum and deposit it in my carburetor- it looked like dried elmers glue. It pissed me off constantly and would clog my needle and seat making the float bowls dump into the intake at idle. Braided stainless rubber lines fixed it. Now I use steel line with pico clamps and make bubble flares at the ends to secure fuel injection hose and clamps. The EFI hose is a little more $ but holds up better and doesn’t collapse over time.