I think the Mass Backing is a $55 add-on last I checked. Price seems to be consistent regardless of cab type.

That's almost half-again what the carpet itself costs... but yeah, after I understood what you had explained to me the other day, that was my thought exactly - it would work very well as a heavy second "panel" over the Frost King.

One thing I will add about silence - my cab is very different now than before I did all the Peel & Seal, Frost King, and now my carpet and plastic wall panels (that also have FK on them). Before when I sat in the empty cab it was like being in a tin can - which I suppose it was. Now it is like being in a sound booth. When I talk out loud it feels like my words fall at my feet and hardly make it to my ears. The difference is very noticeable and striking. I think even the carpet just by itself absorbs a lot of sound.

Of course the real test will be later with the engine running and the road noise going. The main source of noise in a cab is not my voice, but sounds penetrating from the outside. Whether all my efforts will have made an apprecialbe difference in those, remains to be seen. But I'm optimistic.


Luke

 

You are right about the carpet - it absorbs sound. A good sound control system will have mass/deadening, isolation, and absorption - just like you've done. So, I have every confidence that you will be very pleased. For you to notice the difference now says you've done well.

How is the carpet fitting with all the P&S and Frost King under it? Does it lay properly and have enough material to reach the edges?

 

I haven't had a problem with the carpet fitment. This is one thing I did worry about, but the truth is the P&S is not much more than 1/16" thick and while the Frost King looks to be maybe 3/8" in the package, after you roll it on it's probably not much more than 3/16" and is still compressible beyond that if need be.

Even more than the carpet, I was worried about all this padding behind the plastic trim panels, but it hasn't been an issue. In fact when I took off my trim panels originally, there was jute behind a lot of them from the factory, that was probably just as thick.

So overall I think these additions are really negligible in terms of fitment.

My carpet is none too wide, especially in the door area, but it's wide enough. I just mean there will be no trimming required there! Kind of worried me they cut it too close but it's ok, the footsills still cover the edges. As for length front to back, the carpet is probably at least a foot too long, if not more. So plenty of extra there.


Luke

 

Good. I'm hoping they have options for trucks that have the taller transmission cover like I have, but I'll find out when the time comes.

 

Yeah, they have options for the tall hump and short hump... Basically 2 and 4wd. They also ask about floor **** vs column shift.

Also, at $130 or so it's WAY cheaper than LMC...

 

I've not been very good at updating the thread, but here's a few posts...

Last time we left off with the rear bench. This time let's talk front buckets. I decided to splurge and order bucket seats from Qualitex down in Texas. I looked on the internet before-hand and found very few reviews of these people. At the same time I found very few reviews of anyone. Also there aren't a lot of vendors that sell seats so if you want new buckets your choices are somewhat limited.

Anyway, I won't list all the alternatives you have when considering new seats. Suffice it to say this is what I chose. For the amount of money they cost I felt I was taking a risk but I'm happy to say the seats appear high quality and Qualitex customer service was quite friendly when I spoke with them.

The seats I chose are their "Ranch Hand" design in black vinyl. On their website the photo they have of the "Ranch Hand" is in some kind of two-tone brown leather with frills all around. Hardly recognizable when compared to what I got in plain black. It goes to show that for a given seat the look can be quite different depending on what you cover it with.

The seats were not exactly cheap at approximately $750 each. I also added the optional armrests (on the inner side only) and manual lumbar for an extra charge. They have a whole bunch of other options you can get as well. Total including a $140 shipping charge came to ~$1,750 for the pair.

If I had to do it over the one other option I might consider is their extended 14" slide tracks, especially for the passenger side. The "standard" tracks that come with buckets only have about an 11" front-to-back adjustment. For the driver who is going to be sitting close to the gas pedal this is fine, but on the passenger side I wish the seat slid back even further than it does. However it's not a big deal. I'll never sit in the passenger seat so I guess I don't care too much.

They fabricate the seats to your specs after you order them, but they were fast. My seats arrived 9 days after I placed the order, and I'm all the way out in Oregon.

This is probably more detail than most people care about, but since there isn't much info on the internet about this company I thought it might come in handy to someone in the future considering a purchase through them.

 

Qualitex sells a "bench" version of all their seats which they call "Truckers". These consist of the two buckets with a center console. If you purchase this arrangement they have brackets available that will fit our trucks without modification. However I didn't care for their center console so much, preferring to make my own instead, so I just bought the buckets by themselves. They do not have a ready-made mounting system if you use the buckets alone.

That meant I had to come up with a floor mounting system of my own.

I went through a bunch of extended cabs at the junkyard that had factory buckets and most of them had the same style of tracks/brackets, which look like this:



These tracks unbolt from the stock seats and as you can see I bought a few of them from the JY to see if they could be modified. The passenger and driver's side are identical in this style.

However the big problem was that they didn’t fit my floor-pan at all. I’m not entirely sure but I think the difference has to do with 2WD vs 4WD and some extra humps and bumps in the floor to account for the transfer case. My truck is 4WD and I guess the ones I found at the yard must have been 2WD. I never did figure out for sure if that was the problem but again, the type of bracket pictured above was very common at the yard and simply didn’t fit my floor.

Finally I found a Bronco that seemed to have what I needed. The passenger seat has the cool flip-up feature although I’m not sure I really need it. This bracket unbolted from the stock Bronco seat and fit my floorpan perfectly. I was also able to mount it to the rails on my Qualitex seat with very minor modification, I only had to drill a few holes in the Bronco bracket.




For the driver’s side seat you can see the Bronco has two brackets riveted to the left and right sides of the stock seat. These would also have been perfect but one side was rusted so bad one of the tabs where it bolts to the floor had completed broken off. This bracket would also have been a pain to remove because it was riveted to the seat, not bolted like the passenger side.

 

Gotta run for now... I'll wrap this up later tonight.

 

Ok, back to the cliff-hanger with my seats. But I couldn't miss this week's episode of "Fast N' Loud," where the boys finished a truly awesome Bronco.

After more scrounging at the yards I found a truck where someone had rigged up a bizarre custom bench arrangement. Underneath were two brackets, and wouldn't you know it - they were Bronco driver side brackets. All the rivet-cutting had already been done and they weren't rusted through, so I snagged them for a song.

Here's what they look like on my floor-pan:


Because they didn't line up exactly with the rails on my Qualitex seat and because I wanted to beef them up, I ordered a sheet of 3/16" hot rolled plate steel from OnlineMetals.com. Conveniently they will custom cut your piece to whatever size you want. Here I'm test-fitting the plate to the brackets:


I had the plate welded to the brackets and I also cut out a recess in the front of the plate so I could reach the track-lever. Then I had all the metal sand-blasted after which I followed it with POR-15 and a topcoat of satin black spray paint to tone down the gloss.





These things should last another 50 years or so if I'm lucky. I bolted them to the floor with Grade 8, 7/16" black phosphate flange bolts (the stock seats use 3/8" bolts) and hardened washers underneath.

By the way, I found the best way to "cut" holes in the carpet for these bolt holes and such is to use a 100 watt soldering iron. Stinks like hell but makes a very clean and very round hole.

Anyway - the seats were only put in for test-fitting, right now they're back out while I get the dash re-installed, the wiring done, and the center console built.



Luke

 

All that money spent on seats yet you go with pacer cab lights?

 

Ha ha! Good catch Brad. If you only knew the truth - they're net even Pacers.

Yeah, I might do it different now but the holes are drilled and sealed. When I looked around at the lights that LMC had or other places with similar designs, or for that matter the stock lights, I didn't like the white plastic types since that would look weird on black, nor did I want chrome since I felt they might look too ricey.

I found these on the net and they looked pretty high-speed to me: black footplates and orange caps. Plain, simple, no frills.

Now I see them on the truck and now I've had some time to examine other options in person I probably would choose something slightly different if I were to do it again. Not even so much for looks but for sturdiness, these ones are flimsy.

But I'm not disappointed either and they look nice when they're on at night. I've bought a spare set in case I need to replace them and find they've been discontinued.


Luke

 

Luke - Wow! Those seats look great! I'm jealous. I'll bet they are comfortable. Well done.

 

Lately I have also been working on some electrical stuff. It sort of started small and turned into a bigger project over time.

Initially I knew I wanted to do a relay upgrade for the headlights. I also knew I would probably add a few after-market gadgets. The last car I worked on I added this and that and before you knew it I had quite the mess of wires and fuses and taps off the battery.

Remembering that experience I decided to be methodical about this project and plan ahead now for every last possible addition I might want to add to the truck at some future date (which turns out to be a lot), and account for the electrical requirements now while it’s relatively easy to do so.

You can only slap so many terminals on the battery or the starter solenoid, so it became clear I needed my own distribution/fuse/relay box.

I took my inspiration from some of these Jeep guys, see this cool thread for some examples: Click Here.

The box I built has input from the battery in the form of 2 – 2 gauge welding cables. One of these goes through a 175 amp relay and back out to the 3G alternator (which I don’t yet have). The other powers a bus-bar that leads into some Hella boxes which are very convenient and neat devices. They are modular so you can gang together as many as you need. I have one 16-fuse box and then two 4-relay boxes. There are other assorted fuses and circuit breakers for various circuits that required something beefier than ATC fuses.

For now I think I'm only using 13 of the 16 ATC fuse slots and 6 of the 8 relays so I have some room for expansion if need be. The extras are brought out to some terminal strips so I can easily vary the arrangement at a later date.

The red board is 3/16" electrical grade fiberglass from McMaster Carr. The box itself is an LMB Heeger aluminum Omni Chassis kit, 12"x12"x4" which I painted. The rubber exits are rather nice pieces from VTE Warehouse, these guys have all kinds of great stuff including mainly terminal insulators, and their prices are quite reasonable. The ANL fuse blocks are Cooper Bussmann 4164 and the AGU fuse block (hard to see in the photo) is a Cooper Bussmann BM6032SQ.

The 20-screw bus-bar is Blue Sea 2312.

Wire and terminals and other accessories were purchased mostly from WayTek and ElecDirect. Both companies have all kinds of great accessories for electrical projects.

There are slightly over 100 crimped terminals inside this box, and I soldered each one after crimping. So it was a very time-consuming process to assemble. Also each wire has been pre-measured and cut to length for whatever place it is going to. All the hardware inside is stainless.

I tried to follow the overall black-and-chrome theme slightly on this box by polishing up some Home Depot aluminum channels I used for rain guards on the lid. I still need to install some latches for the lid. The whole box attaches to the passenger side wheel-well. There is just enough room but I will have to move the bottle jack to somewhere else.

 

I am still keeping the stock wiring for some things, this isn't a complete replacement. But there is not a whole lot left I am trusting to the stock wiring: front park and turn lights, blower motor, and stock dash instruments. Aside from that all the other stock items are being rewired: headlights, every light in the rear, ignition, choke, fuel system, and power door locks (I went to manual windows so no wiring there).

Things that are additions include AM/FM radio, CB radio (Cobra 29), ham radio (Kenwood TM-V71a), alarm system (custom), bed lights, backup camera, heavy-duty trailer wiring, trailer brake controller (Tekonsha), 800 watt inverter, 3G upgrade, air compressor (hopefully a York with Viair backup), rear airbag valves, future E4OD wiring, and other misc accessories.

I don't have all these devices purchased yet, there is a limit even to my funds, but at least there is a plan to incorporate them and a comprehensive and sufficient electrical foundation in place for when they are added. If I seem to have been moving slow it's because I've spent the last few months planning, planning, researching, and planning. Hopefully all this preparation will pay off in convenience later.

 

Finally, while I was at it I made up a set of jumper cables. They are roughly 30 feet long and made of 2 gauge welding cable from Temco. This is long enough to jump the battery from the rear of the truck.

On the business end we have Phillips 9-309 parrot-style booster clamps, which are about the heaviest-duty you will find (although I only got the 500 amp models, they sell an 800 amp!)

At the battery end I have some Anderson PowerPole SB175 series connectors with a rubber cap. I will have a second connector installed somewhere in the front maybe behind the grill or on the front bumper, haven't decided yet. This will save wear and tear on my battery terminals and anyway the terminals will be covered with boots so it would be a pain to access them.

If you decide to use a plug arrangement like this do your shopping. Warn sells a plug set that is literally identical to the Anderson PowerPole plug but is priced very, very dearly. I've seen them sold for upwards of 50 bucks. The Anderson's shouldn't cost you much more than $20 for a pair.

Speaking of batteries, I would like to do a dual-battery setup at some point but I am going to save that for later. I am making allowances for it now but probably won't add it until much later. It would have to be mounted under the frame somewhere because I'm pretty much out of room in the engine bay.