• Garage Projects

    The Lone Ranger – 1354 Manual Linkage

    This turned out to be a bit of a pain in the butt to figure out, as the D.D. kit has a bump out that blocks direct access to the linkage. This is becomes even more of an issue if you clock your case up as I have. For the Arm on the case, I wound up using part of the clutch linkage off an older F series pickup, and slapped it on the case. It turns out that the…

  • Garage Projects

    The Lone Ranger – Crawl Box Upgrade

    After killing the 1350 crawl box on our trip (rear T-case loosened up because I forgot to lock-tite the bolt, guess I shouldn’t drink while wrenching), I needed to get something fixed quickly. When the rear t-case came out of alignment, it put enough side load on the crawl box shift forks to kill the nylon that was there, and gave it some metal on metal contact. Eventually killing the fork and letting the box come out of gear: So…

  • Garage Projects

    The Lone Ranger – 1350/1354 Doubler with D&D Machine Kit

    This is my first foray into any transfer case. Thankfully it turns out that they’re quite a bit simpler than I thought they would be. I don’t know if the gear driven cases are any more complicated, but my guess is that they’re even simpler. I’m using the D&D Machine kit from Duffy (he also makes the “Box For Rocks” kits for the Jeep stuff as well). The kit really is quite simple to put together (heck, even a goofball…

  • Garage Projects

    The Lone Ranger – M50D Maintenance

    Before I pulled the truck apart, I had already replaced the non-existent shifter bushings in my 5 gear. By referring to this article in the tech library at the Ranger Station  (linky) it was a pretty easy process. At the same time that I did that repair, I resealed the rubber plugs on the shift rail by following this write up also in the tech library at The Ranger Station (linky). While that slowed the leaks down quite a bit,…