-
The Lone Ranger – 1st Long Road Trip
The wife and I took the first ‘long’ road trip in the Ranger this weekend (about 600 miles round trip). While not really part of the build, I thought a little update on how the thing does on the road would make some sense. Onto the photos! Headed south (MO) on the two lane for awhile: Stopped at Blue Springs: Continued on To Rocky Falls: And then onto Alley Spring/Mill. This mill is a little different as it uses a…
-
The Lone Ranger – 30,000 mile update
The truck really hasn’t had any major changes since Nov of 2011 when I swapped in the front D60. So I figured it was about time to do a bit more or a long term update. At this point, I have put 30,000 miles on this thing since the initial build back in early 2011. So I’ve been putting miles on it at roughly the 15,000 miles/year mark which is cool. I wasn’t lying when I stated that my wheeler…
-
The Lone Ranger – Military Tire Take Off Update
Now that I’ve had these tires on for a while, I thought it was time for a bit of an update. On Road Comments: Snow – This year has been utterly disappointing for snow down in the St. Louis area. I did get to run them in light snow (less than 1″) both ways (siped and unsiped). They really weren’t any worse in the snow than the swampers I used to run on my Cherokee so I’m not sure why…
-
The Lone Ranger – Intermediate Steering Shaft Repair
There were surprisingly few articles written on how to replace the rag joints in our steering shafts, so here’s one for ya. The intermediate on my generation of truck has two rag joints, and after several years (and miles) they’re bound to fail. When pulling the transmission out (for the third time) I noticed that the upper rag joint was in very rough shape. I did a brief search and it appears that this part is no longer being made.…
-
The Lone Ranger – Steering update
So I’ll just start out by saying I was wrong. Heims for the street do in fact suck. After about 7k miles, there is noticeable slop in the heims I was using, and I’m pretty sure the little bit of mud I got into is what killed them. I’ve now gone with the GM TRE’s and I’m amazed that I didn’t notice how sloppy those hiems were getting sooner. For the TRE’s, its just the typical GM Stuff with Ruff…