What Did You Do In The Garage Today?

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Guess what...:?

got her running.

Tomorrow, let’s see if I can get her to stay running and moving under her own power
It's a great feeling hearing it come back to life. "It lives....IT LIVES!!!"
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It's a great feeling hearing it come back to life. "It lives....IT LIVES!!!"
alive.jpg

Yep, and I got a video of her running, but can't post it and don't wanna load it up on YouTube. But man she sounds great. Tomorrow is the radiator, finish the exhaust, and then vac lines. Flush out the coolant system, then let her idle for about 20-30 minutes and check for leaks before I take her out for a drive
 
Oil change in my '99 Taurus Wagon, also ran a tap to clean up the drain plug thread and a new drain plug, been that way since I got it used from Hertz in 1999.
 
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I picked up a 2007 Xterra last week. Something to use out on our property and not worry about getting dirty or scratched. I've been doing some maintenance on it this weekend. Front and rear pads and rotors, installed a Curt receiver hitch, had some new tires put on it, installed a backup camera, and replaced the positive connector on the battery. I'm going to do an oil change on it tomorrow. I have a replacement fuel pump to put in this week sometime too. I'm really having fun getting greasy and dirty with this thing!

CHRIS
Ok. Quoting myself. lol.

I got the fuel pump installed and it fixed my fuel gauge problem. I'm super happy about that.
Oil change was easy.
Did front and rear diffs as well. Rear was black like used motor oil. Front was honey colored.
Cabin filter change was nothing.
Did a headlight polish/clean kit for the yellowness. All clear and not yellow now!
I changed out one of the cigarette lighters in the dash with a dual USB charger port.
Changed the right side power window motor this afternoon. Works again!
I have some Bilstein struts and shocks to put on this weekend. May see if NTB can do it while at work tomorrow and have them do an alignment too.
I also have a curved 40" Rough Country LED light bar to put on. That joker is wicked bright.

I can not wait until we get a shop built out at our new property. Holy crap it sucks this time of year trying to do little projects after work at 4:30 until dark...at 5:45. My garage bays in this house are ok for parking a car but not for working on them. Not enough room width wise in them.

CHRIS
 
All buttoned up.

I need to load the videos I got. She pulls pretty strong
 

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Now go get some Toyo Proxies and see what it'll do in a corner.

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not my car lol. Though, I am on the search for a WRX now.

Agreed. Can we get a sound clip of the beautiful exhaust burble???

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

the exhaust on this thing is oddly quiet. I don’t wanna load the videos up on YouTube and I can’t upload them up to the forum.

I figure something out as she does sound good
 
Put a battery in my neighbor's daughter's car today. The husband/dad is out of town, and they had no clue what to do. Daughters b/f is staying with them, (both are 25 yo), and dude probably does good to tie his shoes. I went up and checked it, verified it was the battery, and took it out so they could go run and get a new one. Installed when they returned. Tomorrow will be rotating tires on my car, and installing new front brake pads on step sons car.
 
Taught my son and myself a valuable lesson today, one I thought I already new. Check and recheck everything when finishing up a job. Will probably end up being relatively costly but no one got hurt and it shouldn’t be to difficult to get it back on the road.

Bought a 4Runner for my son so we could go out together riding some trails. I have a 74 CJ5 I can barely keep on the road as there are constantly issues with it. He currently has a 2wd Tacoma. Bought this 4wd 4Runner and told him we would upgrade as we could to get it trail worthy. First thing was getting all the maintenance up to date. Took it to my go to independent shop and had them do a timing belt, tune up and a few other little things to it. Got it back and found there was another issue with the brake system we needed to deal with. Ordered some parts and actually got that solved today.

It was going to need a couple tires pretty soon and I planned to just stick some new matching ones on there for now and then putting a lift kit and larger tires on it later. We found a great looking set of wheels and tires on Craigslist this week and I went ahead and picked them up. After we got the brake issues fixed today we decided to go ahead and put the new wheels and tires on. Here is where we messed up. Had my 16 year old son doing most the work and I was supervising and checking everything afterward. Several distractions came up during the process from my daughter and my wife.

We finished up and I went back over checking lugs on the passenger side my son had just been working on. He wanted to run over and show my dad his new wheels and tires. My parents live in the next neighborhood over so only a couple miles away. My son calls a few minutes after leaving and says, Dad, your not going to believe this, a tire just came off. It really didn’t register at first, I’m thinking, how can this happen? I checked the lugs, checked and filled as needed all the tires after installing, what could have happened?

After asking a few questions I told my son I was on the way. Threw the jack in my truck along with a lug wrench. Fortunately he made it into my parents neighborhood and was on their street when the wheel fell off. It ended up falling off when he was going around 25mph or so. He probably drove or slid 25 yards or so on the rotor. Ended up wearing at least a 3/4” flat spot on the rotor and bent and wore down the dust shield. Lugs were in rough shape and a couple were loose. Wheel and Tire ended up traveling down the road and took out a mailbox. It was and old 4x4 post and it splintered with the mailbox attached.

We were able to jack the truck up and get the wheel back on temporarily. Pulled a lug each from the other three wheels and mounted the tire/rim. Had to bend the dust shield some to stop the rubbing. Lowered it and put it in gear. Slowly moved forward, turned and backed in a driveway. There was a little noise but it felt solid. By that time my dad was there after driving around looking for lugs. Ended up finding 2 out of the 6 that fell off. Now we needed to try the roughly mile and a half drive home. Made it home pretty easily. Further inspection shows the inner fender liner is trashed from rubbing the tire. The tire also hit the lower fender while falling off and bent it up some separating the fender flare a little. No idea what that is going to take to fix. Will be ordering rotors and pads tonight along with a new drivers side hub.

Lesson learned, check and recheck your work. Even more so when there are distractions around you. First picture shows as we were finishing up mounting the tires/rims. Unfortunately we didn’t take many pictures while we were dealing with the accident. Second is a zoomed in picture where my son was standing where the tire stopped.
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Damn @Carolinatlc, glad no one was hurt, that could have been much worse. Yota looks very good btw. Good reminder here to always check behind yourself or someone else when it comes to tires/brake's.
 
Damn @Carolinatlc, glad no one was hurt, that could have been much worse. Yota looks very good btw. Good reminder here to always check behind yourself or someone else when it comes to tires/brake's.
Yeah, could have been very bad. We were definitely fortunate and learned some very valuable lessons.
 
That’s my daughters Subaru you can barely see behind the 4Runner. What my son and I figured out happened was she came out as I was tightening lugs on the drivers side to tell me her tire pressure light was on. Got distracted checking/filling tires on her car and then my wife pulled up. Helped her do something and didn’t finish on the drivers front wheel. Stupid mistake.
 
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Man, see what women do to us, get us all distracted, lol.
This is exactly why I ask my wife not to come out to the shop while I'm loading up what I need for the day. Inevitably, she comes out and asks a couple questions or stands around or moves into my way while attempting to get out of the way. I end up forgetting something and have to come back to get it. I've politely explained this to her a couple times. Now all I do is not say anything and point at the door. This still doesn't deter her. Wummins!!
 
3rd brake light on my 2014 F150 started leaking....again. Second time it's done it. First time I bought another OEM brake light that was suppose to be "improved" which is their way of saying a little thicker gasket around it. It's a known and very common problem for these things to leak. Ford dealership wants $125 for a new one and don't sell just the gasket. Gasket on Amazon is $10 with mixed reviews. I do not want to put silicone (RTV or otherwise) on it as some videos or post on other forums suggests. Looking over some Youtube videos and apparently it's a problem for some Dodge truck owners as well. Got the idea of using a weather seal from a Youtube video of a Dodge truck owner. $3.48 for Duck Weatherstrip Seal and I'm back in business. No leaks during the rain yesterday.
 
for my 87 yj

Finally got all of the lift kit delivered from jegs
3.5 inch lift kit with tcase drop shocks, brake line extensions ect

This took longer than I planned, hoped to drive it this year, but nope...

Oh well
 
I replaced the drivers door speaker in my '02 GMC and also fixed the power mirror switch while I had the door apart.
 
started on the brake job on the MR2
Got one side disassembled. Tomorrow I'll start swapping the rubber lines for SS lines and put on EBC GreenStuff rotors



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Put rotors on, but that was it. (yes, I cleaned them up first with BPC to get the oil off)
I spent a lot of time cleaning the garage up, making some space, throwing out some things etc

Sometimes something as simple as cleaning/organizing is just as rewarding as working on a car/motorcycle etc, in my opinion
 
Sometimes something as simple as cleaning/organizing is just as rewarding as working on a car/motorcycle etc, in my opinion


A lot of times the cleaning and organizing is what makes working on the car take so long. I have to do an hour of straightening in my garage before I can do a 15 minute job on the car.
 
A lot of times the cleaning and organizing is what makes working on the car take so long. I have to do an hour of straightening in my garage before I can do a 15 minute job on the car.

I did NOT do that before I started and regret it a little.
I should have swept a bit first and just tidied up a little before beginning. Oh well, in the future...

But taking an hour and putting things where they belong, organizing to create more space etc really was nice last night.

Yesterday was really good fall weather, so it felt great in the garage last night, really enjoyable.
 
Cleaned up where transmission fluid got on my floor.
And aired out the garage, that stuff stinks.
Today I'll clean all the tools that I used during the week and put them back where they belong. Nothing exciting, but productive and gets me ready for the next project.
 
We mostly fixed the screw up from last week. Complete front brake job on my son’s 4Runner. Also added a cheap spacer lift for now. I purchased a black fender from a salvage yard we will probably put on at some point. Original doesn’t look terrible but is bent out near the door. I’m tired of working on vehicles in the driveway. My broke down CJ5 sitting in the garage might finally push me over the edge to get a detached garage/shop built.
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My garage has been 30% faux paint booth lately. Finally painting the custom cabinets that I built for my laundry room. I now see why custom cabinets are so dang expensive!

Thankfully the finish is coming out really nice; using BM Advance primer and paint in an airless sprayer (Homeright Super Finish Max)
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i found where that solvent stench was coming from.....had a large spray can of undercoat decide it was time to spew all over the other cans and shelf , even leaking down to cause a 2 sqft mess on the lower shelf. only had time to move the cans to a box before they became totally stuck to the shelf...still need to scrape all the sludge off the shelves...lucky me...
 
Replaced the driver's side leaf spring shackle, bushing and hanger on my Ranger over the weekend. What a PITA.
Gotta do the passenger side when my bruises heal up...

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It's surprisingly easy to take the bed off. I did it with just the help of my 17 year old nephew after removing 6 bolts and unplugging the wires for the tail lights. Should make a shackle job quite a bit easier.

.
 
Changed oil in truck, pulled plug, over shot drain pan with screaming hot hole because I was to impatient to wait. :(


Been there its times like that you either seem to miss the pan or you manage to drop the oil plug into the bottom of catch bucket full of black diesel oil and have to fish it out when you were trying not to get real dirty.
 
Been there its times like that you either seem to miss the pan or you manage to drop the oil plug into the bottom of catch bucket full of black diesel oil and have to fish it out when you were trying not to get real dirty.
Changed oil in truck, pulled plug, over shot drain pan with screaming hot hole because I was to impatient to wait. :(
Do that on the first year 6.7 ford diesel. the hole is at least 1 inch.

Its hilarious to take it in for an oil change WARN THE TECH then watch him have to change clothes, because HE is the tech and KNOWS how to do it.
 
Been there its times like that you either seem to miss the pan or you manage to drop the oil plug into the bottom of catch bucket full of black diesel oil and have to fish it out when you were trying not to get real dirty.

OTC Tools 5911A Drain Plug Pro Magnetic Remover
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