The Lone Ranger – Kage’s ’94 X-Cab Leaf SAS and Bed Bob

[Kage]

Ben, I'm not having luck finding one of those 60's you have around here, can you keep your eye out for one and let me know if you spot one?? Thanks
SVT

I've been keeping an eye open for ya, though I haven't seen a late model E van in the bone yard in a while. I'll let you know if I come across one.

 

[Kage]

Tranny Mount Update


Not much excitement for this post. My ‘better’ tranny mount that was based off of a control arm bushing from a mustang finally gave up the ghost:

So I modified the member (again) to accept the stock ford tranny mount:

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I’m not real confident that this mount will last with the weight of the doubler hanging off the back. The ‘right answer here is probably to use a poly mount, but that means I’d need to redo my motor mounts, and the desire for that project isn’t there right now

 

[Kage]

HP Dana 60 Swap


I’d said more than once that I would rock the 44 until it gave me too many problems. After replacing ball joints, and killing the high steer, I’d finally had enough. So in came the ‘78 Dana 60:

I started tearing into it, and it quickly became apparent that I was in for a full rebuild of this axle. At least the gears/bearings were good in the carrier:

Broken bolts were the name of the game on this rusty dude:

Continued cleaning it up:

And then spent more money than I wanted too to get this thing going. Fun fact, there’s more money in this picture than what I tend to pay for my Daily Drivers:

Slapped the Spartan in:

Casper made up a diff cover for me:

Buttoned up:

And now, for another time when leaf springs shine. It took all of 2 hours to swap front ends out, and that was with me goofing off most of the time.
Out with the 44:

And in with the 60:

Hopefully, this will eliminate any future issues with the front end, as with the D60, I gained another 1,000 lbs of load capacity (4,500 vs 3,500 for the D44). Plus, no more Ball joints to worry about!​

 

[Kage]

Steering Update


So I’ll just start out by saying I was wrong. Heims for the street do in fact suck. After about 7k miles, there is noticeable slop in the heims I was using, and I’m pretty sure the little bit of mud I got into is what killed them. I’ve now gone with the GM TRE’s and I’m amazed that I didn’t notice how sloppy those hiems were getting sooner.

For the TRE’s, its just the typical GM Stuff with Ruff Stuff Tube inserts.


Tie Rod:
ES2027L
ES2026R


Drag Link:
ES2234R
ES2027L


The high steer arms themselves (shown in the D60 portion) are Parts Mike double hole springless arms.


For the pitman arm (no pics, d’oh) I just straightened out the stock arm some to make everything clear. Though it just barely does:

While I was freshening up things, I added a power steering cooler form a Grand Cherokee into the mix:

And an inline filter:

After I head out this weekend, we’ll see if the stock pump will keep up with my needs, or if I’ll need to step up to hydro assist/better PS pump.

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[Kage]

So that's how its sitting right now. I drove it to work today, and man that was a nice feeling after having let the thing sit for so long! My PS pump is still leaking a bit on the high pressure side, but otherwise everything else it good for now.

The next trip out is this coming weekend, so hopefully I won't break the dang thing again

 

[Bray D]

Awesome update. You've been busy!

 

[railman]

if you still have the factory tie-rod, would you care to measure it from center of TRE to center of TRE???

l8r, John

 

[Kage]

Awesome update. You've been busy!

Only for the past week or so. The first week, the damn thing just sat off to the side since I was too pissed to really even want to work on it. The second week, I ordered all the D60 Parts I needed. Week three (this week), was 'slap it all back together to try to make the run this weekend'. Apparently I need wheeling trips to motivate me to keep it going

if you still have the factory tie-rod, would you care to measure it from center of TRE to center of TRE???

l8r, John

I have whats left of a very scary tie rod (booger welds and all). It measures 56 3/4". When I measure the holes on the axle, it they measure right at 57" (with a 1/16" toe in).

Hope that helps.

 

[Kage]

I posted over in the steering forum (linky here) about what options there are for better pumps. I'd love to hear what people are currently running to try to help decide my future route.

 

[Kage]

5th Off-road trip, Washita 11-19-11​

My neighbor and I ran down to Washita this past Saturday and met up the SJIA group. Since the neighbor was along for the ride, I got a plethora of photos out of the deal. I won’t post them all in this thread, but this link has the rest (there’s about 300 photos or so):​

Link to all the photos here (click)​

Somehow I got elected to lead this group around the park again, so we wandered through A-4, up spotters alley, back around to B10, then down trail 4. All said and done we covered about 5 ¾ miles total:

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Photos form throughout the day (I’m sure they’re going to get out of order, but whatever):

Wound up having to replace a starter early in the day:

　

Modified my driveshaft’s here (spotters alley):

　
Videos (no particular order, click on the photo to watch the vid):​

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Lots of photos in that link up top.​

Nearly a trouble free trip for me (yea!), but I did have some minor damage:
-Finally managed to kill my drivers side mirror (that one should have been dead awhile ago)
- Goobered up my drive shafts some, the rear shaft had a vibe an needed to have the slip yoke swapped (bent the ears, but managed not to kill the joint somehow).
- All of my skids are very thoroughly bent. The belly skid will need to be reworked at some point as it sacrificed itself to save the tranny (did a good job too! That sucker is bent up a good 1.5" easy!).​

That’s all! Other than the drive line vibe, it drove back home just fine.​

Though I will be changing up a few things here soon:​

-I’ve had it with the LSD, so a 14 bolt is in the works (soon!).​

- The steering could be better. There were very few times that I couldn’t steer off-road. My biggest complaint was that the steering wheel can be ripped out of my hand pretty easily (even at a slow speed). So Hydro assist is definitely in the future (probably early next year).​

-The .mil tires worked really well at 6psi, but I lost quite a bit of ground clearance going down that low, so I still need to play with the pressure some more.​

-I’m digging the Spartan locker in the front over the Detroit. The Spartan seems to lock up sooner which is how I like it. The down side is that It likes to stay locked all the time which makes it a little harder to turn. Not impossible to manage though.​

- I may have fixed my trail overheating problem. I noticed when I was putting on my power steering cooler that a large portion of the foam that surrounds the radiator was missing. This was allowing air to bypass the radiator. It seemed to run cooler, but it was hard to tell since it never got above 50°f on Saturday.​

 

[4.0B2]

If you need to move more air... Taurus 3.8 v6 electric fan! 2 speed fan, pretty thins design, and moves ALOT of air! And you can go junkyard hunting.

 

[Kage]

If you need to move more air... Taurus 3.8 v6 electric fan! 2 speed fan, pretty thins design, and moves ALOT of air! And you can go junkyard hunting.

Yup, I've allready got the fan and the stuff to wire it up. I'm just don't want to give up the mechanical fan until I have to. I like simple things

 

[crawlin91]

How did you straighten the steering arm?

 

[Kage]

How did you straighten the steering arm?

With Fire of course!

With a torch, I heated a section about half way between the TRE end and the spined end to a dull red, and beat on it with a hammer. Let it air cool when you're done forging.

I kept the heat away from the splines to make sure I didn't temper it down too much (make it softer). After I altered it, I checked the hardness in the area I heated, and the spilined area, nothing had changed (about 32 HRC both checks).

Hope that helps.

 

[Kage]

14 Bolts of Fun!

I’ve been complaining about the limited slip long enough, now its time to do something about it! When looking at options to lock up the Dana 60u I had under the truck, there wasn’t anything cheap out there (besides welding it, and I don’t really want a spool). It came down to either drop a grand an go 35 spine in the rear, or drop a grand and go 30 spline. Obviously 35 spline would have been the way to do it right, but that’s expensive!

So I went the cheaper route and grabbed a pig to stick in the rear, 4:10 open SRW out of a 1987 suburban:

Thankfully everything looked awesome in here which was a nice change of pace from the other rear axles I’ve bought in the past.

Now that I had the axle in hand, I dumped some money over at Ruff stuff and Complete offroad:

I went with the Yukon locker hoping it would live a little longer than the Detroit, not that I think I’ll be popping axles on a regular enough basis that I think it’ll be a problem. The locker install is stupid easy, and the ‘adjusting collars’ in the 14 bolt is slick too!

I then moved on to getting rid of those drums, which turned out to be quite nice inside (new shoes, and hardware in there). I did the typical 14 bolt disc brake swap using parts from a ’77 Chevy K20 for the rotors, pads, calipers, and brake lines. The brackets themselves are from Ruff Stuff. It’s a pretty straight forward process, you take these:

Place them on the floor and beat the studs out:

Clean up the mating areas, slap the studs back in with your new rotor, mount everything up correctly and you’ll get something that looks like this:

I opted for a bit of armor when doing this swap, and picked up Ruff Stuffs diff cover (which I added a drain plug guard):

I also added a pinion guard, which rounded out the package:

Then out comes the D60u:

And in goes the 14 bolt:

Yeah, I lost some ground clearance there, but I’m sure it’ll self clearance just fine over time.

I did drive it around some tonight and it feels a bit different. I’ve run spools in the rear of my other vehicles so this was different having a locker back there. Being able to adjust how much you turn (on long swooping turns) by throttle application is different, and it make you pay attention a bit more as well. I’m sure that the rear tires being a little different in diameter isn’t helping things out at all. Its worth it to have the rear locked up.

As it sits right now, I need to extend my drive shaft some, and possibly grind on that lip some to give me a little more ground clearance. Otherwise, its time to wheel!

Oh yeah, anyone want to buy a 44/60 combo? I'm running out of room in my garage