got a few things done, found a problem and made a lot of progress in
the remaining few things to do this evening....
I tried my hand at dynamic balancing today. A lot of 'wheelers swear
by throwing half a pound of BBs or a few golf balls in their big tires
to balance them on the street. Anything able to move inside the tire
should naturally find the light spots and balance it out. There are
two commercial products that I know of that do this: one is a powder
called Equal that goes inside the tire, but it makes perfectly dry air
a must; the other is a ring with a viscous liquid in it that is about
12" in diameter and is sandwiched behind the rim, which does the same
thing -- but is not designed for balancing heavy tires). As far as
I've found, no one has really tried going straight liquid. Since I
haven't cut down the runflats in my hummvee rims (I'm not planning to
'wheel hard with these all-terrain BFGs, and I don't have a spare right
now, so it seems like a good idea to keep them for the moment) I'm not
going the BB route since that would assure the death of a tire if the
runflat was used with the BBs being ground into the tire.
I broke down my tires (blesedly easy with the 8 bolt split rims, but
still time consuming) and poured about a quart of RV antifreeze in each
of them - it shouldn't freeze, should be all right for the rubber, and
will be nonpoisonous in case of a flat or blowout. That should be in
the neighborhood of two pounds per tire, which ought to be more than
enough even with the heavy runflat ring inside. At least I hope so.
More on this later
I also got my front shocks in. I had to cut off a stupid hard sleeve
that was on the piston side in order to clear my mounting, but they
appear at first glance to work well where I put them. I just this
second realized that a few odd feelings I had while driving may have
been the shocks bottoming on my coil buckets. I'll need to check
that....
I picked up an odd pulsing in my poor brakes that I'm certain is
related to the small bit of rust that was left in my left drum after it
was turned down. I think my low pedal may be related to poorly
adjusted drums. This would be good news.
I checked out my limited slip, and I can't turn one tire by hand (w/
tcase in neutral) up to a bit over 100 pound feet on a lug nut. So I
think the clutches may just have been dry while I was busy getting
stuck at Jon's.
I have also found what I think to be a hub clearance issue in back. I
could not get my rear lug nuts tight - I probably went around a half
dozen times and it always took about half a turn to get 105 pound feet.
Then I noticed some weird shimmy that didn't really feel like
out-of-balance, so I moved my mirrors to look at my rear tires and shit
a brick! they were out of true by *at least* half an inch. /me is an
idiot for not checking for this earlier, but *damn*. So I need to
figure out what my problem is there before I drive the truck again.
I also didn't get my rear shock mounts remade. I decided to wait 'till
I have a working bandsaw to fab them with. But I did grab some
material for them, and figure out how I'm doing them, so that's a
start. And then I'll just borrow the wirefeed from the theater to buzz
them on with. The TIG in the baja shop won't reach outside, and the
truck doesn't fit inside - I tried, but I'd have to take a door latch
down the whole passenger side to squeeze in by -1" =)
-- Michael Maskalans <http://mike.tepidcola.com/dak/> '98 Dakota CC 4x4 318 '84 RamCharger 4x4 360 mobile.612.618.4652
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Oct 01 2004 - 11:38:59 EDT