The End?

"This is the end...my only friend, the end..." I'll spare you Jim Morrison's psychedelic rambling, and get to it: The truck is gone. The F100 is gone. Done. Outta here. I decided it did not fit my plans any longer, so I listed it on ebay. A guy came and looked at it and made me an offer I liked, so I pulled it from auction, and sold it.

Here K & k give it a last look, Mickey stands guard. It was easier for me to just load it up on the trailer and bring it to the guy; so much for one last ride.

Here's me and k. She is so cute, she always used to point at the truck and say: "truck-truck", or lately just: "blue". Hope I'm not scarring her for life.

Here is the proud new owner(s). Cliff, on the right, is the guy that came and made the deal. I was happy to get a big envelope of C-A-S-H and an easy transaction from him. He even gave me a free t-shirt from his business: "Electric Snake", a video plumbing diagnosis service. Bonus.

Here's Cliff again, and Jake, his one grandson. Lucky guy, his 10th birthday present is a classic F100. I hope they have many many hours of fun together enjoying the truck. It was a little easier to leave the truck knowing what it's future would be. Really a nice ending to the story.

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If I get back to doing an EV, or shall I say: "when", I plan to do an S-10. I still think the F100-EV was a viable project, and would have been extremely cool. Now I feel that I would be satisfied with a moderately cool S-10 EV.

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I have kind of missed drag racing this year. Probably watching Pinks All Out on the Speed Channel hasn't helped. I was talking about replacing my altered with a simple doorslammer(1) bracket-car(2)with my friend Joe V. Something maximum fun, minimum hassle. Not long after that, we went in on this little beauty:

A 1976 Nova hatchback. Joe V wants the motor and trans, and I bought the rest. Not a particularly cool car, but the price was ridiculously low(3), and the car was in amazingly good shape. I figured I could transplant many of the race parts from my altered into this, and be on the track by next spring. Cheap too. Just what I wanted.

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1. Doorslammer: A drag race car based on a full car, with operating doors. Not a dragster or altered or roadster, where you climb in.

2. Bracket-car: A drag car specifically designed for handicapped amateur drag racing. Not for all-out unlimited classes.

3. Ridiculously low: $300 for the whole car!Here's Joe V pointing out all the good features.
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The Nova is an excellent candidate for the purpose. So I have that to consider. But I have been thinking about how much work goes into these cars, and I have surprised myself about how fickle I have become at the same time. If I'm going to put in this much effort, perhaps I should get something I'm more attached to. How about my favorite car of all time:

A '58 Chevy! I'm looking at this little guy right now. What better way to get over the loss of one old car, than with another old car? You know, it's like crashing a motorcycle off the road into a ditch; you have to get right back on that motorcycle, if only to get medical attention (and I would know). Someday I will tell you the story of how I got hooked on '58's. This one is a Biscayne, not the top-of-the-line Impala like I favor, but the Impalas have gotten prohibitively expensive. Like 50-grand expensive; 25 for a piece of junk. I'll go for the lower-line Biscayne, Bel Air, or Del Ray instead. I want what I want, but I'm not dropping that kind of dough on any car, Impala or not. I'm hoping I can snag this and get it here before Joe V finds out; he might be a little miffed that I sold the F100 after he helped me with the sweat-fest of a trans-job we did. How that guy still likes me I will never know.

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I still have plenty to do on EV-Steve's S-10. For myself, I'll either build the Nova, or hopefully the '58 Biscayne. I plan to expand my show coverage and car features as well. So there's still plenty to tune in for. I apologize to anyone if you got attached to the F100, and for the demise of the original project. Change will occur whether we are ready or not; hopefully things are still headed in a good direction.

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