I haven't posted much on it for awhile and haven't done anything to it for even longer.
Anywho for this year my goals are:
Fix the front driveshaft situation
Swap heads
Front winch/grille guard (not as big of a deal as the other two)
Since the great 5 speed swap of 2019 I have had interferance issues with the front driveshaft and exhaust. It fits, and it runs but I can't run a boot on it and it does rub on the exhaust with the suspension compressed.
While at work I noticed a 5.2/5.9 Dakota y pipe has a neat little kink for driveshaft clearance. So I run upfront and grab my caliper, 2" same as mine. Cool, I can nab that to clear the driveshaft. Ball socket to mount to the header like what I need, I think one way or another I can cut out what I need to make it work.
Which leaves the problem of the boot... been searching high and low looking for an OEM driveshaft with single u-joints like my original axle had. Heck, even been looking for a slip yoke front output like my factory driveshaft had to no avail. So eventually I just searched "driveshaft" on marketplace and browsed. Found one for a squarebody S-10 in Kansas, single joints. Head to rock auto... sure enough it has 1310 crosses... cool. Dad just scrapped grandpa's '89 S-10 about a year ago so that is slightly painful. I need to find one of those.
So the exhaust pipe should clear the driveshaft. Single u-joints and mounting the driveshaft backwards with the boot to the back should keep the boot from melting down.
Head are ready. I have intake gaskets and header gaskets. I think all I need is headgaskets and spark plugs and time to do it.
And I started doodling my grille guard last weekend. I have the factory headlight guards... but my current grille guard side plates are outside of the frame. The factory grille guard mounts to the inside so they would stick out like 3" too far on both sides. I pretty much have the top drawn up to be the correct width to match the headlight guard hoops. I need to rough in the receiver/winch plate/winch and then I can work on the contour of the grille guard side plates.