The $600 special
#1
09-13-2015, 02:20 AM
The $600 special
Or, lets finally fix that thing I drug home 4 years ago...
I found this one 5 hours from home on kijiji, guy had had it posted for months for $1500 with one side on picture from about 75 feet back, so, I emailed him for some more pictures, specifically underneath the cab.
This is what he sent me:
He told me he didn't know much about it, had bought it for the M12000 that used to live in the front bumper, and he thought it needed a clutch.
I was headed to visit family 35 minutes away from it and taking my F250 anyway, so I drug the trailer along.
Got there and started looking at it, found the bellhousing was busted on the zf, and the frame was broken over the rear wheels. We ended up settling on $600, I figured worst case I could sell the 60, and I was dding a 7.3 at the time anyway.
The trip home was eventful... Blown trailer tire at 1 am only to discover the trailer spare missing... No idea why someone would steal a 14.5, but it had been cut loose...
Got it home and tore it apart, the ZF was a recent reman, but the case was very broken and missing pieces... I gutted what was left of the DMF so I could start it and see how it ran. GP's didn't work, and it had a pretty good shake to it, but I attributed that to the flywheel not exactly being balanced.
I started to mate the -47 with a -42 front half from a trans with no reverse, but ran into a road block I don't recall, maybe not having a puller that fit behind the bearing races so I could shim it. A Luk smf kit was purchased at that time as well.
Nice and stock under the hood, a thorough examination of the truck found it had many new/recent parts and a glovebox full of recipts, including brakes(with oem Ford park brake cables no less) balljoints, steering linkage, alternator, starter, shocks, springs, and shackles; every light on it functioned, and generally, other than the broken frame it looked like a truck which had spent it's life commercially registered and getting yearly safety inspections. It also started life bed delete and was upfitted with a service body.
The frame, well, the mid repair pictures speak for themselves:
They had very nearly broken it in two, from the holes and wear marks in the frame over the axle, I lean towards the cause being a gooseneck or 5th wheel trailer with a pin weight far exceeding the truck's capacity.
Shortly thereafter winter set in, and I got downsized. The truck got shoved out of the barn and into my buddy's field. I borrowed it's ecu 3 years ago for a rescue of a friend who was 4 hours from civilization camper in tow and only reached me by sat phone.
I finally retrieved it in the end of July...
4 years in a field didn't help it, but also didn't hurt it too badly.
As you can see, it clearly spent most of it's life sheltered from the hazards of road salt. This is a rust belt truck....
However...
This I did not know about, the windshield was leaking, and 4 years sitting did not help, the jute was still very soaked under the vynl, and made me a nice mess to fix.
Apart from some surface rust here and there, the rest of the cab is pretty clean
I found an old registration renewal from 2007 while I was pulling the interior, the truck has had 6000 miles since then.
Once cleaned up the drivers floor is both better and worse, most of it is solid, but the rotten stuff is very rotten, clearly it has been wet for years.
The same friend of mine who has my ECU(still, I'm running on the auto ecu from the 250, that came out of a 96 E350, my APCM is not happy about that) gave me a ZF from one of his parts trucks that was supposed to be good... Long story short I'm pretty sure it had been run without oil, which I found out after I put it in, it wasn't noisy until it was under load, then it was very unhappy... It was even worse than the one that died on me last year, and was the final straw that made me park my 250.
So, I went back to mating the -42 and -47, completed it, and put it in under strict supervision:
I also traded a parts truck I had gotten for free and already taken new wheels and tires off of for a set of 315's on rims in decent shape. They aren't new by any means, but they were also inside and not baking in the sun.
Some progress made; after my supervisor wandered off I got it all together, transmission worked perfectly, but it still ran goofy. Some parts started to come over from the old 250 as well, head unit and speakers, the amp and sub will go in when I put the interior back together.
I drug the 250 out of it's resting place to prepare it for becoming a donor last weekend, it had already donated it's smf and driveshafts to another friends 95 auto to manual conversion.
I yanked it's deck off this past week, swapped over the rear tank(broken bed sill punched through the one in the 350) put all the factory taillight and 7 pin plugins back on the 350, which had all been hacked off, from the splices, more than once.
This brings us to today, I finally decided to dig into why it runs weird and put some glows in it, as I assumed they were all dead, I haven't had it near a proper scan tool yet, so it was diagnose the hard way time...
I yanked the valve covers, noticed #8 has a newer injector and found all the glows unplugged. ALL of them. All but one were Beru's, and all were good, I replaced the one oddball bosch one with a beru and plugged them all in, that solved the starting problem.
My low tech manual contribution test(unplug the injectors one at a time) revealed that #5 wasn't doing diddly, the solenoid was clicking away, but no oil was coming out of the injector. I assumed the worst and yanked the one injector out of the 250 that the computer said was ok last time I tried to do a contribution test on it.
This is what I found when I pulled the injector:
Top one is the one that wasn't running, new O-Rings only help if you put them all in... Of course Ford didn't have a kit in stock, so I will get that Tuesday, I fired the injector in out of the old truck bad O-rings and all for now just to make sure that the cylinder was ok, which it is. I swapped over the 6637 from the old truck as well
Then it was on to making it into a truck again, and not just a cab and chassis.
Don't mind the Cummins, it is only still alive and not an engine donor because it has a v-plow that isn't easily transferred to anything else. It does come in handy for stuff like this though.
This is where we sit as of right now:
Deck is on, bolted down, cleaned up and ready for a new coat of paint, just need to do the floor and put the interior back together, and change the drivers side fender so I can put it on the road, finally... Even the park brake survived being parked without seizing.
I intend on doing a full exhaust, gauges and a chip yet, but, that will come in time. My biggest concern right now is how low the nose sits, it barely clears the 35's as well as my 250 did, the springs are pretty new, but I think they are gasser springs. I am thinking srk with u codes.
More stuff needs to come over from the 250, it is an XLT and pretty much loaded, while this crew is about as bare bones as it comes. A/C is probably the most important one of those things, unfortunately the 250's system is not complete thanks to the previous owner's bouncing it rather enthusiasticly off of some trees..
I found this one 5 hours from home on kijiji, guy had had it posted for months for $1500 with one side on picture from about 75 feet back, so, I emailed him for some more pictures, specifically underneath the cab.
This is what he sent me:
He told me he didn't know much about it, had bought it for the M12000 that used to live in the front bumper, and he thought it needed a clutch.
I was headed to visit family 35 minutes away from it and taking my F250 anyway, so I drug the trailer along.
Got there and started looking at it, found the bellhousing was busted on the zf, and the frame was broken over the rear wheels. We ended up settling on $600, I figured worst case I could sell the 60, and I was dding a 7.3 at the time anyway.
The trip home was eventful... Blown trailer tire at 1 am only to discover the trailer spare missing... No idea why someone would steal a 14.5, but it had been cut loose...
Got it home and tore it apart, the ZF was a recent reman, but the case was very broken and missing pieces... I gutted what was left of the DMF so I could start it and see how it ran. GP's didn't work, and it had a pretty good shake to it, but I attributed that to the flywheel not exactly being balanced.
I started to mate the -47 with a -42 front half from a trans with no reverse, but ran into a road block I don't recall, maybe not having a puller that fit behind the bearing races so I could shim it. A Luk smf kit was purchased at that time as well.
Nice and stock under the hood, a thorough examination of the truck found it had many new/recent parts and a glovebox full of recipts, including brakes(with oem Ford park brake cables no less) balljoints, steering linkage, alternator, starter, shocks, springs, and shackles; every light on it functioned, and generally, other than the broken frame it looked like a truck which had spent it's life commercially registered and getting yearly safety inspections. It also started life bed delete and was upfitted with a service body.
The frame, well, the mid repair pictures speak for themselves:
They had very nearly broken it in two, from the holes and wear marks in the frame over the axle, I lean towards the cause being a gooseneck or 5th wheel trailer with a pin weight far exceeding the truck's capacity.
Shortly thereafter winter set in, and I got downsized. The truck got shoved out of the barn and into my buddy's field. I borrowed it's ecu 3 years ago for a rescue of a friend who was 4 hours from civilization camper in tow and only reached me by sat phone.
I finally retrieved it in the end of July...
4 years in a field didn't help it, but also didn't hurt it too badly.
As you can see, it clearly spent most of it's life sheltered from the hazards of road salt. This is a rust belt truck....
However...
This I did not know about, the windshield was leaking, and 4 years sitting did not help, the jute was still very soaked under the vynl, and made me a nice mess to fix.
Apart from some surface rust here and there, the rest of the cab is pretty clean
I found an old registration renewal from 2007 while I was pulling the interior, the truck has had 6000 miles since then.
Once cleaned up the drivers floor is both better and worse, most of it is solid, but the rotten stuff is very rotten, clearly it has been wet for years.
The same friend of mine who has my ECU(still, I'm running on the auto ecu from the 250, that came out of a 96 E350, my APCM is not happy about that) gave me a ZF from one of his parts trucks that was supposed to be good... Long story short I'm pretty sure it had been run without oil, which I found out after I put it in, it wasn't noisy until it was under load, then it was very unhappy... It was even worse than the one that died on me last year, and was the final straw that made me park my 250.
So, I went back to mating the -42 and -47, completed it, and put it in under strict supervision:
I also traded a parts truck I had gotten for free and already taken new wheels and tires off of for a set of 315's on rims in decent shape. They aren't new by any means, but they were also inside and not baking in the sun.
Some progress made; after my supervisor wandered off I got it all together, transmission worked perfectly, but it still ran goofy. Some parts started to come over from the old 250 as well, head unit and speakers, the amp and sub will go in when I put the interior back together.
I drug the 250 out of it's resting place to prepare it for becoming a donor last weekend, it had already donated it's smf and driveshafts to another friends 95 auto to manual conversion.
I yanked it's deck off this past week, swapped over the rear tank(broken bed sill punched through the one in the 350) put all the factory taillight and 7 pin plugins back on the 350, which had all been hacked off, from the splices, more than once.
This brings us to today, I finally decided to dig into why it runs weird and put some glows in it, as I assumed they were all dead, I haven't had it near a proper scan tool yet, so it was diagnose the hard way time...
I yanked the valve covers, noticed #8 has a newer injector and found all the glows unplugged. ALL of them. All but one were Beru's, and all were good, I replaced the one oddball bosch one with a beru and plugged them all in, that solved the starting problem.
My low tech manual contribution test(unplug the injectors one at a time) revealed that #5 wasn't doing diddly, the solenoid was clicking away, but no oil was coming out of the injector. I assumed the worst and yanked the one injector out of the 250 that the computer said was ok last time I tried to do a contribution test on it.
This is what I found when I pulled the injector:
Top one is the one that wasn't running, new O-Rings only help if you put them all in... Of course Ford didn't have a kit in stock, so I will get that Tuesday, I fired the injector in out of the old truck bad O-rings and all for now just to make sure that the cylinder was ok, which it is. I swapped over the 6637 from the old truck as well
Then it was on to making it into a truck again, and not just a cab and chassis.
Don't mind the Cummins, it is only still alive and not an engine donor because it has a v-plow that isn't easily transferred to anything else. It does come in handy for stuff like this though.
This is where we sit as of right now:
Deck is on, bolted down, cleaned up and ready for a new coat of paint, just need to do the floor and put the interior back together, and change the drivers side fender so I can put it on the road, finally... Even the park brake survived being parked without seizing.
I intend on doing a full exhaust, gauges and a chip yet, but, that will come in time. My biggest concern right now is how low the nose sits, it barely clears the 35's as well as my 250 did, the springs are pretty new, but I think they are gasser springs. I am thinking srk with u codes.
More stuff needs to come over from the 250, it is an XLT and pretty much loaded, while this crew is about as bare bones as it comes. A/C is probably the most important one of those things, unfortunately the 250's system is not complete thanks to the previous owner's bouncing it rather enthusiasticly off of some trees..
#4
09-13-2015, 01:29 PM
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#5
09-13-2015, 01:41 PM
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#6
09-13-2015, 01:44 PM
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#7
09-13-2015, 02:26 PM
I have absolutley no concerns with the frame or it's repair, not my first rodeo when it comes to frame repair or modifictions.
However, the deck is not of my design, and over attached if anything. It is bolted to stock holes at the rear of the frame with 3 1/2" bolts through the side of the rail on each side, and has a strip that runs 18" forward on each side on the bottom of the rail and is secured with 3 bolts per side. It sits on the frame in 5 locations forward of the rear attachment, and is u-bolted in 3, overkill is putting it mildly, and it might as well be part of the chassis, the main stringers that run legnthwise on the frame are 1/4 wall 2" box, deck sills are 3" c-channel, it stiffens thr truck up significantly.
And, no, I wont be selling it, I drive things until they are dead, and then recycle...
However, the deck is not of my design, and over attached if anything. It is bolted to stock holes at the rear of the frame with 3 1/2" bolts through the side of the rail on each side, and has a strip that runs 18" forward on each side on the bottom of the rail and is secured with 3 bolts per side. It sits on the frame in 5 locations forward of the rear attachment, and is u-bolted in 3, overkill is putting it mildly, and it might as well be part of the chassis, the main stringers that run legnthwise on the frame are 1/4 wall 2" box, deck sills are 3" c-channel, it stiffens thr truck up significantly.
And, no, I wont be selling it, I drive things until they are dead, and then recycle...
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#9
09-13-2015, 04:48 PM
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#10
09-13-2015, 05:05 PM
The pictures of the frame don't show the complete repair, the vertical section is doubled from the kick up under the cab back with another frame with the horizontal sections of the c trimmed off so it fits inside the cc and bolted in place. I think Diesel Brad did his ccsb similarly.
Like I said, I am not worried about it at all. You should see the butcher job I did on my now wheeling rig back in 02 when I shortened the frame to a reg cab, its a straight butt weld with no reenforcement, and before it was an off road machine it even saw abuse on the roads you see on ice road truckers. I stopped worrying about it a very long time ago.
Like I said, I am not worried about it at all. You should see the butcher job I did on my now wheeling rig back in 02 when I shortened the frame to a reg cab, its a straight butt weld with no reenforcement, and before it was an off road machine it even saw abuse on the roads you see on ice road truckers. I stopped worrying about it a very long time ago.
#11
09-13-2015, 05:28 PM
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#12
04-13-2016, 11:44 PM
Guess what... Got laid off again in October.. Ugh...
Finally got it in the shop and Bud and I have been hard at it for the last week
Swapped some injectors around, did o-rings on them etc. It now runs on all 8 and starts without ether even below zero but I am still chasing a long crank and it has a vibration at all rpm's. It passes a contribution test, drives good and power is decent so I'm hoping for something stupid like a bent fan, but at the same time I have to wonder if there isn't something more serious afoot that is related to the DMF having failed as spectacularly as it did.
Been taking care of the more mundane stuff as well, had to build a good shift boot out of two, mounted my 2 way, brake controller, re mounted the APCM, interior trim has been re-installed etc, all the boring time consuming stuff.
The bag I put the rear seat bolts in seeems to have grown legs on me however.
I picked up some front fenders for $100 a couple weeks back, they are offshore junk, but they are new so I'll deal with them for now. Going to try and get them on tomorrow.
Finally got it in the shop and Bud and I have been hard at it for the last week
Swapped some injectors around, did o-rings on them etc. It now runs on all 8 and starts without ether even below zero but I am still chasing a long crank and it has a vibration at all rpm's. It passes a contribution test, drives good and power is decent so I'm hoping for something stupid like a bent fan, but at the same time I have to wonder if there isn't something more serious afoot that is related to the DMF having failed as spectacularly as it did.
Been taking care of the more mundane stuff as well, had to build a good shift boot out of two, mounted my 2 way, brake controller, re mounted the APCM, interior trim has been re-installed etc, all the boring time consuming stuff.
The bag I put the rear seat bolts in seeems to have grown legs on me however.
I picked up some front fenders for $100 a couple weeks back, they are offshore junk, but they are new so I'll deal with them for now. Going to try and get them on tomorrow.
#14
04-29-2016, 12:54 AM
Well my vibration is not belt drive related, and it does get a bit better once it warms up but this sucker has one hell of a shake. Strangely power is good, it passes a contribution test with no issues, and blowby is not excessive. Going to have to dig deeper for sure.
Might have to swap it out for my spare or one of the other engines I have around.
Might have to swap it out for my spare or one of the other engines I have around.
