Good deal! glad you're getting back to it!! Now you just need a build thread....

 

Well, got to tow the camper fully loaded this past weekend. Had a few snafu's, one of which is kind of dumbfounding. First, on the way down to Murphy NC from Cincinnati, I had to intercooler pipe blowoff events. First time it happened, I herd a very loud pop such that I thought I blew a tire. I was pushing up a grade at around 30PSI of turbo boost and BOOM! Looked in my mirrors and nothing flying around, so looked at my gauges and had 0 boost. Pulled off, popped the hood and blew a boot. Easy fix. From there, I limited my right foot to 25PSI and in a little while it happened again. From there, I limited the rest of the trip to 20 PSI and didn't have another issue. The pipe in question does not have a rolled bead on the end as normal intercooler pipes have, so I'll pull it off this weekend and weld a bead around the pipe and get it back together. That should fix it permanently until I go to compounds.

Second issue was super weird. Headed back home and got north of Knoxville and lost all electrical power. First the radio went, then almost immediately after I lost the entire dash, and AC controls. Windows also wouldn't roll down and no lights on the trailer or X. After about 10 minutes of driving and racking my brain, I lost enough power that the fuel shutoff solenoid which killed the motor. Got off the highway and started really scratching my head. Family behind us helped out by checking fuses and found that the ignition fuse was popped along with at least one more (can't remember which ones). While he was changing out fuses, I started to hear noises under the hood. Looking around, I noticed that I had a loose connection at one of the positive battery terminals where I had a 12V constant power connected. I have the battery cables with allen screws and vibration had caused that constant 12V wire to break enough to be loose. Stripped the wire back, removed the grid heater wires altogether, and gained full power back. However, still wouldn't crank over. So, removed that battery where the broken wire was and installed my camper battery in the place. Connected everything back up and she came back to life fully. Got back on the road and ran with no AC for a while and the radio kept going on and off by itself. So, got up to Berea KY and pulled off at a Walmart for two new batteries. The Everstart Maxx batteries I had were pushing 5 years old, and since they had died I figure that I had a catastrophic failure in one or both batteries during the drive. Not completely sure what exactly happened, but since the new batteries were installed, I was able to get home running the AC and radio and no real issues since. However, the radio connections were loose and I have at lease one gauge acting weird. So, over the 20K miles I've put on since the swap, I seem to have developed loose or intermittent electrical connections. I had ordered a pair of bus bars a while back with the intention of cleaning up the wiring under my dash with them, so I have those to use. I also ordered a pair of new battery cable ends with the ing nuts on them. Plan now is to run all wiring from under the dash to the firewall somewhere and connect all wires to the bus bars. I'll probably order another one so I have one for constant 12V power and one for switched 12V power. I also need to clean up the remainder of the PCM wiring that's just sort of hanging out under the hood, which is going to force me to get the AC working on the stock system instead of the switch I have wired into the relay. Which means I'll also have to grind the additional notch into the damper sooner rather than later.

So, I have a fair amount of electrical work to do and a bit of mechanical work to do. Also would like to get my rockers swapped out before winter hits so I can get the running boards mounted. More to come!!

 

Hair spray on those intercooler boots even after you bead roll them sir

 

Sould like you got a high current short somewhere, i had a starter cable short to a header intermittently and it caused the EXACT same sudden blackouts, but on that vehicle the engine would remain running oddly. But all power, gauges, lights, dead at once.

 

I've seen folks doing that...I'll give it a shot!

Thanks! I'll check out all the main cables while I'm in there digging around. I have quite the mess in that area from the build, so it's certainly time to get it all cleaned up.

 

Dove into some wiring issues I had on the last camping trip this weekend finally. I had put on battery cables that had the holes in the end with allen set screws that secured the wires. With all the vibration of the engine compartment and a battery tray that has a bit of movement in it, the main hot wire for my ignition circuit broke most of the way though, and wrecked several fuses in the process. I've been wanting to clean up all the wiring in this area since finishing the build and certainly it needs it. Still needs it after fixing most of the issues. The project this weekend was strictly to get all wires connected to the battery directly cleaned up, secured, and properly connected. In the process, I decided to move my grid heater solenoids to a more secure location. I had used one bolt (they have 3 mounting points) and secured it to one of the old relay box mounts. It tended to flop around and get stuck agains the AC relay box, which I didn't like. The best place that I could come up with was the firewall. In the process (and before I removed the batteries), I noticed that the exciter wires for one of the solenoids was off. So, in the process of monkeying with it, the dang solenoids were actuating. Weird, I thought at the time. So, I disconnected all of it and mounted the firewall. I removed the wiper arm and cowl to access it better with a drill and secured two of the mounting points. the third would require a spacer due to the curvature of the firewall, so I left it off. I'll keep an eye on it and if necessary, I'll add it later. Seems pretty secure right now. I looked up the wiring diagram for it and wired the exciter wires properly. I didn't hook up the battery connections yet as I haven't determined exactly how I'm going to do it. I think what I'll end up doing is connect each of them to a single battery directly. I contemplated using the bus bar I installed, but it's a pretty hefty draw on the system when they're on, so not sure I want to do that. Later, after cutting a tree up for a family member, I noticed that the dang switch in the cab was on. And the more I think about it, the dang thing has been on for a while. Stupid. Hopefully the heater itself isn't burnt out, those grid heaters and expensive!

Anyhow, I also determined that the bet place to mount the bus bars was in front of the PCM and over the ABS module. Crimped on the ends required for all the connections, ran the wires in loom as best I could, and secured everything. Overall, this part of the job was pretty easy. Secure the bus bars with some screws (though I did have trouble finding appropriate screws in my bucket-o-screws), run the wires to ends, secure them, put the cover on. Put the batteries back in and secured them with a freshly painted strap and connected all the stuff. I ran a larger wire to the bus bars for both positive and negative, and connected all the larger stuff directly to the batteries.

Overall, I was able to clean up a whole host of things, and more importantly more secure connections. But, the larger picture is still a mess of wires. Once I get my AC working properly, I'll be able to de-pin the extra wires out of the PCM connectors. I also need to get the wires that I have through the firewall more secure both inside and outside the truck more secure and hopefully in loom. The area under the dash is a mess from hastily putting gauges in and the radio is still janky. Shut itself off several times on the way to work this morning and the ~$100 module I bought to run the steering wheel controls doesn't work any more. Also need to install my backup camera. More work to come for sure and I'd like to get it done before winter actually hits. The fall schedule is filling up fast.


Started with a complete mess

I'll not use these battery cable ends again as they crush stranded wire and breaks over time.

Grid heater solenoid floating around

These lights are still one of the best mods EVER!!

Grid heater solenoids secured. Still have to hook up the battery connections there at the top.

Eyeballing the positive bus bar placement. Ended up having to angle it.

Negative bus bar is up near the core support.

Positive bus bar secured in place.

Found this chafed wire harness that's rubbing on the battery tray corner

 

So, I found some chafed wires near the corner of the battery tray. Nothing but electrical tape worn through, so I put a piece of hard plastic I had left over from stripping the wore harness out during the Cummins swap on there and wrapped it in tape. Should take care of it.


Crappy picture, but the black loom is the ground feed to the bus bar.

Plastic cover for the chafed wire harness

This corner is where it's rubbing.

Here's a crimped wire terminal for direct connection to the battery. I actually ended up changing this one out, but you get the idea.

Positive bus bar connections started. You can see the mess of PCM wires that need de-pinned.

The positive wires fit nicely above the PCM along the fender

Positive cover in place

Negative wires all connected

Finished! Sort of....still needs a lot of work and almost looks like I didn't do anything!!

 

Looks better, and I like the buss bars.

 

I agree. Glad you got that worked out.

 

Removed the radio, upper dash, and lower dash and re-routed a bunch of wiring. I was able to get all the wires that come through the firewall into a loom and taped up, which keeps them from floating around under the dash. I then shortened any ground wire that I could and found a factory ground next to the "automatic air" tube that connects to the dash. Also removed the 4WD switch assembly as I don't need it anymore and plan on placing my new brake controller in it's place. I'll see if I can get a guy at the office to 3D print me a new insert to put in place of the old indicator above the switch and paint it to match the dash. I had a complete mess of wiring in the radio from when I added gauges and needed to fix up the illumination. So, I was able to clean up a lot of that, but turns out that now not one stitch of illumination wrks any more. Headlights work, but no dash lighting and no gauge lighting. So, now I get to chase that down sometime this week. I'll check fuses first as I find it very odd that the dash lighting is out. I can't imagine that removing the switch body for the 4WD switch would kill the whole thing either, but that's the only other thing I touched. Super weird. Only other thing I can think of is I somehow didn't hook the illumination back up properly after taking it apart at the radio but again, not sure why the dash wouldn't work in that case either. the other thing I fixed was the dual USB connection in place of the old cigarette lighter that never worked after I put it in. It had an inline fuse that was really small. Now it works and shows the battery voltage. I don't love that the display stays lit all the time showing the voltage. It showed like 10.1 this morning but everything fired right up with no issue. Not sure how these things work so if anyone has any input as to these I'd appreciate it.

Crappy pictures and they don't show a lot, but I'll get some better ones as I work through the illumination issues.

Gigantic mess of wire

Really terrible picture, but you can guess what the rest of it looked like.

Getting an idea of the fitment of the new Redarc brake controller

Location that I mounted the brake controller box. Easily drilled the frame and secured with screws.

Found these very convenient ground posts that I used.

I don't generally like crimp connections. Used heat shrink on all of them.

Loom for all the wire that come through the firewall.

 

I only use crimp connectors anymore if I can use the hydraulic crimper on them. Those go together really nice especially on big wire. On small wires, I pull off the little plastic boot where you crimp them, put them on the wire and squeeze or crimp them on, then solder them with the soldering gun or the iron if its all the way up. As you do, I heat shrink everything. I've had plenty of quick fixes work with crimps, but eventually, the wires corrode or pull out or break off. Solder and heat shrink solve most those issues.

 

Well, finally solved a problem I've been having, only it didn't turn out to be what I thought i was, AND way less expensive! Woo!

I've had this transmission vibration since I built the truck. It's noisy, and if I run over say 73mph, sounds like it's gonna come apart. Not good for sure, but I don't generally drive that fast, so I didn't worry about it. And I got used to the "normal" vibration and noise in the shifter, chalking it up to the G56 transmission. They are certainly noisy beasts with a fair amount of rollover noise at idle with your foot off the clutch. So, I figured at some point this spring I was gonna get a rebuilt kit, pull the trans, rebuild it, and put it back in during a weekend. Now, that's a lot of work to do in essentially 2 days time by myself. But, with a trip out west with the camper and the whole family coming in July, I figured I needed to get it done. Never dawned on me that I might have another issue because ALL other parts of the drivetrain were new when I put them in. Well, except for gears in the differentials, but those looked great. Literally, almost every bolt and part was replaced when I built the truck. Or at least inspected for serviceability and replaced when necessary.

So, this weekend, I went to the local yard to help my dad get a tailgate for his Jeep, which he slide down his driveway backwards in and smacked a tree in last week. Drove there, then back home, about a half hour each way. Then got the call to go take a look at the in-laws new to them RV (which is awesome BTW), and the short ride on the highway presented a MASSIVE vibration in the drivetrain somewhere. UGH! And it was freaking cold here this past weekend. Not something I want to deal with laying on the cold ground outside. Though, I did have a sneaking suspicion that I had somehow lost a u-joint. Got back to the house and sure enough, front joint on the rear shaft was toast. Weird, as this driveshaft was built by a local shop with a great reputation and spicer parts and it only has around 23K on it. Changed it out with a greasable Moog joint I had purchased prior to the shop doing the work. Everything came out of the truck with little issue and the joint went back in pretty easy too, though it's a bit tigher than I like it to be, even after tapping the clips several times in each direction following install. Hopefully it lasts.

Now the good news. I have almost ZERO vibration in the transmission now. It's better than its ever been since building the truck, which tells me the joint was bad from the factory, or at least got messed up in the original install. All the way up to 75 mph with almost nothing. And now when I let off the throttle at speed, I don't get a nasty noise either. It's not perfect, but it's WAY better than what it was. I didn't replace the rear, but I did notice that the grease seal was working itself out on one of the caps. So, I went ahead and pushed that back in and hopefully it at least holds until spring. It's flipping COLD around here this week and I do not want to be changing another one. I'm too old to be laying on the ground in 12 degrees. On to the pics!

You can see the grease and the seal is out and the play in it.



Rear joint seal coming out, but no grease leaking....yet.

Cleaned these up a bit.

Hit the insides with a bit of emery cloth.

 

Well, Clifford is parked for the week. I'll be driving the old beater that one of the kiddos left behind while away at school.

I've been having clutch and shifting issues since I replaced the bad u-joint. Well, it's been getting worse than it ever was. Tough to get into 2nd at a stoplight, 5th has a hitch in it, and most recently (and what prompted me to really dive into it) was that it wanted to move in 3rd at a stoplight last week. Pulled up, down shifting, got to 3rd (hard to get in), and by the time I came to a stop, I could feel the clutch still trying to engage. So, my original thought (because it had always had a bit of an issue going into 2nd) was that my pedal wasn't fully engaging the master. So, I made up a longer linkage between the pedal and the master using two (instead of the one I had) 1 1/8" thread all nuts welded together. I ended up cutting 1/4" off of that assembly because the pedal was too high. No fix. In fact, it got worse. So, after all the kids left back to school this weekend, I removed the slave from the bell housing to find quite a lot of very fine dust and a loose shift fork. As in, it was not on the ball on the other end. Got that back on the ball (I think), and snaked up a small camera into the hole. From what I can see, I've had a throw out bearing failure. It appears that over time, and fro reasons yet unknown, that the bearing failed and now the shift fork is not centered or running center. I got it back on the ball and the slave back in place as best I could so I'll be able to drive it out to my folks house next weekend to pull the trans and see what the heck is going on in there. Not looking forward to pulling the trans because it's stuffed in there pretty good. Not sure how I'll have to get it out, but it's likely that I'll have to loosen my motor mounts and tilt everything down. I know that I'll have to at least drop it down a bit to get to the bolts on top of the bell housing connection to the flywheel housing. I'm going to attempt to not remove the transfer case in the process as well. If all goes right, I'll be able to drop the trans and leave it under the X, remove the old parts, replace, and set it back up. I ordered a new shift fork, timken throw out bearing, ball, retaining sprint, trans front bearing retainer, and I'll order a new pilot bearing today just in case.

My thought is that with all the vibration from the bad u-joint, that it translated through the transmission and cause the shift fork to dislodge and start running wonky, which cause the bearing failure (if in fact that's what it is). I'll be sure to take a bunch of pictures and post up what I find!

 

After a week of sitting and driving the old beater back and forth all week, I was able to tackle the clutch issue this weekend. I had "fixed" the shift fork and intended to drive out to my folks house where I could get a helping hand from my dad. So, I got up early, went to start the X, and wen I pushed the clutch in, I heard it come back apart. UGH. While I have tools, I didn't have the transmission jack at the house as it was still at my folks house. It's a good old jack, but didn't help me being an hour's drive away. So, my dad said he'd make the trip up and help out.

So, I didn't get as many pictures on this one as I like to normally get, but I got a few. You'll see the major issues below. When I originally built the truck, I didn't pay much attention to the shift fork orientation as I should have. I think this error was half of the reason that the issue happened. The other half was most likely the bad u-joint from the driveline shop that I changed just a week or two ago. It appears from the failure that the shift fork was pushed over to one side such that the throwout bearing was scraping/riding on the transmission bearing retainer (nose cone) and turning all the time on the pressure plate (or at least some of the time). This may have happened after the little clip failed that holds the shift fork on the ball, I don't exactly know. In any case, the nose cone, throwout bearing, and shift fork were FUBAR. I also had ordered a HD pilot bearing for this project in case I needed one. Turns out my pilot bearing was also ruined. Likely the cause of that would have been the vibration from the u-joint. So, added to the project was removal and installation of the clutch and flywheel. And, to add insult to injury, I could't find my alignment tool for the clutch. Another issue I ran into was the front seal on the trans was seeping. Not a bad leak, but since I was in there I wanted it changed. Autozone was no joy (and couldn't even order one), and O'Reilly's took two orders to get the right one. Nice thing was they got both of them within 2 hours and they're close to the house. While under there, I noticed that the oil pan and crossmember were pretty close, again. those motor mounts are wearing me out. Unfortunately, in order to change them, I'd basically have to be up for rebuilding all the mounts and possible the driveshafts. So, began the process of doing all this:

Loosened the motor mounts, got a bottle jack under the front of the oil pan to jack the motor because I needed to drop the back down to clear the floor pan with the bellhousing. Removed all the accessories: driveshafts, reverse wiring, 4WD shift linkage, bell housing bolts removed with a few left, exhaust removed from turbo and loosened all the way back, slave removed, intercooler pipe and intake removed, and strapped the trans jack to the underside with some wood blocking. I left the transfer case attached to the trans. Dropped the trans while jacking the front up to make sure everything cleared. once I was sure everything was gonna clear, I removed the remaining bolts and pulled the trans off of the clutch. Lowered the trans to find a complete mess. Nose cone destroyed, shift fork and throwout bearing severely worn, and the front seal seeping. Also, the pilot bearing was SUPER gritty, so I removed the clutch and flywheel. Changed the pilot bearing, reinstalled the clutch and flywheel. Installed the clutch fork, throwout bearing, new nose cone, front seal, and shift fork ball with clip. Got everything lined back up and the trans mated back up to the flywheel housing and installed the bolts. Dropped the front of the motor as I raised the trans and got everything lined up and replaced the crossmember. While doing this, I noticed that the bolts holding the mount to the bottom of the trans stripped the holes a bit. So, I through bolted them going back together. Lots of vibration I think is what caused the bolts to back out and junk up the threads on the way out. Everything put back together, new fluids in the trans and transfer case, all items hooked back up an motor mounts tightened.

All in all, about 12 hours of work in and out, which is better than I thought it would be and there weren't many surprises aside from the front seal. I buttoned everything up Sunday morning and took it for a drive. Super smooth clutch now, almost zero vibration at all speeds, and shifting works very well compared to how it was. I can basically roll up to a stoplight and go right back down to 2nd gear after sitting with my foot off the clutch and it goes right back in. This is NOT a project I want to repeat, so hopefully I finally got everything in correctly and all parts remain serviceable for a while. On to the pics!

Oil pan sits SUPER close!

Old bearing had broken clips and was not centered in the fork

Old nose cone...FUBAR!!

UGH!

Fork had been riding on it a while

Shift fork completely jacked

Clips were digging into the fork before they broke.

Bolts through the trans now. Hopefully they won't come out again.

Ye Olde Trans Jack

 

Well, been a while since I updated this thread and really it's because winter was stupid with rain and cold and the spring/summer transition went from cold rain to humid and nasty. Back and forth several times actually.

Today I drove the X to work like I always do, stopped or fuel, then hit the grocery down the road from work. Got out at the grocery and smelled burning brakes. UGH! Driver front was fine and passenger front was smoking. Not fun. Drove back to the office and had a co-worker drive me down to Autozone for new front brakes. $500 later I have new rotors, pads, calipers, and brackets. Super busy at work, so I jut did one side and I'll hit the other this weekend. I'll get some pictures then. Hot and humid today and not fun in the office parking lot. The driver side rotor is a little warped and I've felt it vibrating for a while now so it's time anyway. I have to swap out the ABS sensor on the drivers side anyway, so that'll be as good a time as any to do that as well.

I will note that the brand new dust shields I put on during the Cummins swap have started to rust already along the edges with the coating starting to peel. So, they lasted all of 2 winters. By far not junk at his point, but not super excited about the longevity. Seems to be that the paint on the underside is holding a bit better though.