1989 RamCharger

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I'm going to use a razor blade eventually, but those windows are worthless, especially in a truck with power windows.
 
In summer when it's hot af it's awesome to open the wing window just enough to shoot cool air right up the leg of your shorts and cool off the twig and berries lol
 
Catch up posts:

Painted the roof white with some Rustoleum High Performance White Enamel. Now it should be faster!

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I sanded out all of the rust, down to mostly bare metal, hit it with some rust converter, then used a scotch-brite "heavy duty" pad to scuff everything else. It looks nice except for the overspray, lol.

On Saturday of Memorial day weekend, on the way to a party, I noticed that the engine was ticking slightly at idle. I blipped the throttle, and it went away. Later that night, it came back while sitting at a red light.

The next morning morning, I noticed it again while on my way to get some 10w-30 synthetic to do the oil change it had due. And I noticed it on the way home.

This is after dumping 1qt of fresh oil in...
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Nothing on the stick at all. :( Not good at all. I guess I should probably get around to changing the 27 year old headcover gaskets so they stop leaking.

I drained 2.5qt out of the engine, put 5 in with a new filter.

The white roof really makes a big difference with the cabin heat, so there's that.


Hopefully this will fix the valve cover leaks:
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I got the factory oil pressure gauge installed. The 16 year old who owned it before must've put a mechanical oil gauge in, and removed the factory one. The thread adapter in the block still was leaking like a gut-shot pig, and had a bolt in it. Good god it was messy.

On the way home from Lowes getting painting supplies for a honey-do project, I got pulled over. The trooper knew me and gave me a warning for having no tail lights or plate light (was dusk-ish, so I had headlights on) and as a result, solved my issue of having no cluster lights for the past couple months, lol. I spent the next couple hours tracing out everything... Then I realized the only thing I changed was the radio, pulled the radio, replaced the #8 fuse, and it didn't blow. Turns out, there was a short to ground inside the head unit on the "lighting sense" line. I lifted the line, and it stopped shorting fuses. Go figure, a broken out of the box $30 wal-mart radio, heh.
 
The new valve covers fixed the oil leaking up top, but I've still got a leaky rear main seal. I'm not that worried about it because it's such a slow leak, and such a pain to replace.

I had a strange banging/clicking that was caused by the exhaust banging against the skid plate. But that's due to my absolutely worn out transmission and engine mounts, so I wrapped some header wrap on that section and now it's gone. lol.
 
Regio left me stranded the week before last. On the highway. Not fun.

I tried troubleshooting it, eventually got it running well enough to take me the remaining 9 miles home... Only died three or four times on the way...

I tried troubleshooting it later that week. Ruled out a bad fusible link, relay, ignition coil, and then decided it was either the Ignition Pickup Coil (which is a hall effect sensor), or the ECU. I bought a new ECU, and pulled the distributor from Waylon to test.

Turns out it was the ECU, or Single Module Engine Controller. Distributor didn't do it, so I swapped the spare ecu. And it fired right up.



Sunday I went wheeling... Hard. Like almost totally stuck, and I broke an aux-light on the bumper. Wednesday I hit a bump a little too hard while driving on the street, and this happened:
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So, yeah. Now I HAVE to swap to the spare leaf springs I have sitting in the garage. I just have to figure out to do it in the garage, without any spare truck-sized jack stands, since they're all in-use holding up Waylon right this minute.
 
All I need is a pair of them. I think I have all the rest of the tools needed now that I have a real floor jack.
 
After I got Waylon on the ground, I put Regio up on a single jackstand, and got the broken part of the leaf spring off him.

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So, yeah, it was snapped pretty bad. The new leaf springs are in really nice shape, so hopefully they'll actually put up to the limited abuse I throw their way.
 
When replacing the springs, I broke both of the old stabilizer bar end links taking them out, because apparently 291k miles of northeastern weather seizes things together. The shaft that went through the stabilizer bar (known as a sway or anti-roll bar to the non mopar world) was worn from the stabilizer bar, and when I torqued the nut, the shaft snapped.

I figured it'd be easy to find new ones, so I just lashed the sway bar to the frame and left it alone for a while. Today I started looking for the end links, and struck out, very quickly.

Dodge no longer makes those endlinks. There is one seller who seems to have bought all of the NOS across the country, and is now selling them for $109 on eBay. I decided I was going to weld some grade 8 nuts onto the old bushing carrier, but that wasn't going to happen, because they were cast steel/iron, and I'm nowhere near good enough with a TIG to make that work. In retrospect, I should have just cut the riser shaft and the head of the nut off, then welded those together, but I thought I could do it. I tried pressing out the rubber bushing, but failed miserably, as the bushing started to disintegrate as soon as I got some pressure on it from the press. I tried welding with the bushing in there. I got it tacked, then it all went down hill from there. I started with about 15a but then bumped it up to 30A to get a good puddle going, and then filled the garage and my helmet with rubber smoke. Oops. I tried again, and still couldn't get good penetration without destroying the rubber.

So, I came inside, trolled the internet for approximately three hours to find thi on summit racing's website, cross referenced the part numbers, found that I could get it locally. So, I went for this:
4

http://www.autozone.com/parts/suspe...-cylinders-l-2-4l-mfi-dohc/526738_10302_3499/

Which looks almost like this:
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http://www.ebay.com/itm/4WD-Sway-Ba...Ram-4-WD-Ramcharger-Trailduster-/262063060628

And looked like what I had in my hand. So, I called autozone, and they had ONE. One of them. Only one. But, the non-value brand, they had four. I asked them to hold 'em, drove out there, and got it. The kid who rang me up asked what car they were going on, and I just laughed at him. He told me that it didn't matter, I've got a lifetime warranty on it anyway.

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So, now it's got a sway bar that works.


The other day, I was driving to work, and the "check engine" light was blinking/flickering... So I ignored it.

Then, a day later, I saw it again, so I tapped the part of the dash it sits in. And it stopped flickering.
 
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