More F100 fixing and I'M ON THE RADIO FRIDAY!

I will be on the radio this Friday morning, August 8th!!! Please tune in to 97.7 fm, Mix 97, the Bob Miller morning show. I will be on with Digital Editor Irwin Goldberg, from the Poughkeepsie Journal, to promote the Poughkeepsie Journal Classic Car Blog, which I write. We will have two spots, at 7:35 and 7:50 am. I'm excited, this should be fun.

I took the F100 to the Smokehaus cruise in Hopewell this past Monday. It was pretty good, there was a good selection of cars there. K & k met me there, and we strolled around, and then had an ice cream. Sorry no photos, since it was getting dark.

The F100 has had a bad howling noise in the lower gears, that goes away in high. Classic symptoms of a bad trans input bearing, I have heard and cured this before. It was bugging me, and really takes the enjoyment out of driving the truck. With my good friend Joe V helping, we pulled the trans out Tuesday (Joe V has a vehicle lift, and is like a mechanic-guru). I was lucky to get a replacement bearing the same day. It looks like the one above, and it is a biggie, like 4" across. So far, so good.

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We finally got the trans heaved back into position, ready to go onto the bellhousing. But it would just not go in the last 1/4". We struggled with it for about an hour, there was no way we wanted to pull it back out. This is a heavy duty truck transmission, it is an IRON CASE 4-speed with the granny low (super low) first gear. This pig must go 200 lbs. It is heavy. It is even heavier over your head. We finally relented and pulled it partially out.

The bearing retainer, like above, was cracked. I must have cracked it putting it on, and it spread open just enough so it wouldn't go into the bellhousing bore (it is a very tight fit there). I was going to get a new retainer, but since the one we had was already cracked, Joe welded it up to see if that would be ok. We decided it looked good enough to try. I test fit it on the trans, when I discovered that the new bearing had an outer snap ring that was larger than the old one, which no doubt caused the retainer to crack! Who would think to check that? (This is not shown on the bearing 2nd photo above, but it would be on the outside of the outer bearing race). I swapped the old retaining ring on the new bearing and the welded retainer fit perfectly. We finally got the trans in and I finished putting the truck back together this morning. I thought this job would take about 4 hours, it actually took about 10. Whew.

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One last fix: The engine had a miss. I found one spark plug was fouled. I made sure the plug wires were engaging properly. No fixey. I put in a new plug, and the miss went away. Ran so much better I had to lower the idle speed a bunch more.

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I drove the F100 around today, and it was so nice and quiet! It purrs like a kitten.

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I fixed the vacuum leak on EV-Steve's S10 (it was a tricky one), and ordered him all new mirrors.

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That's all for now folks, thanks and listen in Friday morning.

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photos: radio: artmarket.com; bearing: bestbuyparts.com; retainer: quad4x4.com