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Neither am I, but every time the OP shows us another pic, I like it a little bit more.
Oh, just wait. I'm adding PURPLE to the mix (It was my 8 y.o. son's idea!)
I've got the front end dropped out to install an HP trussed and gusseted D30 with all new steering components. Axle is yellow, steering components purple, plus I'm two-toning the rims!
Someone a while back reminded me that I had installed OBA, but not put it up here.
After getting caught out a couple times with LOW tire pressure at the end of a ride and MANY miles to travel to a gas station to fill 'em back up, I finally decided I needed to carry my own air.
I looked at the different options of tank vs compressor, and realized that I would be THAT guy at the end of the trail with the empty tank because I can barely remember to eat breakfast, so compressor it was.
After looking at all the different options on the threads I opted NOT to run it off the A/C compressor (glad I didn't as the damn thing blew up on the way back from Moab in March!). I would have liked to have gone the York route, but time and $ were against me, so after more research I went with the Viair 400h. Picked it up on
Next problem was where to mount it. I looked in the engine bay, but couldn't find a spot I liked. I liked the idea of tucking behind the front quarter panel like this
But my fender liners disappeared when the PO lifted and cut, so it would get nailed with splash-back straight off the tire.
I also thought about the trunk cutout -
But I have two small kids who climb in and out and I didn't want them breaking it!
Finally, I came across this thread talking about mounting it under the front passenger seat. Perfect!
The 400h is too tall to mount vertically, so with the the help of some 1" wide by 4" long steel L-brackets and some half inch hardware with washers and locking nuts, I rigged up a simple side mount. You can see the final product here, before the seat was put back in! (I did it pretty late a couple nights after work so wasn't thinking about pics.)
OK - a couple things -
1) Viair says that the compressor will work fine in this configuration, though it was not really designed for it, so the oil will not flow the way it normally would. Use it in this configuration at your own risk. I don't think it voids the warranty, but it might only last 8 years instead of 10, seems to be their thing.
2) It is LOUD! I was never planning on going with a tank for lockers, that is the ONLY reason I opted for an inside mount and the benefits it comes with. I ONLY use it to air-up after a trail, at which point, pretty much everyone WANTS to get out anyway, and if they don't, the noise helps to "encourage" them to stretch their legs and/or pee.
3)The compressor DOES get warm - OK, hot. I have used this for a good number of trips over the last year and experienced ZERO heat related problems, either with the seat or occupants.
For anyone considering going with kind of OBA - it ain't exactly FAST. I run 35"x12.5's, on the trail I'm usually around 11PSI. To get me back up to about 29PSI for the road takes about 4 minutes a tire. The few times I have used a tank, it was closer to 30 seconds. While that sounds nice, I pretty regularly help air up my buddies when their tank is empty or they forgot to refill it. PLUS, I never have to pay to refill my tires
Pretty sweet Idea. I just have a couple small foot lockers that carry all my recovery gear and have a portable Smitty Built Compressor. So far so good. I do want need to build a cargo shelf above the footlockers to help secure that area better. I would hate to get into a wreck or have a mishap on the trail and have spare axles and the stuff in those lockers flying all over. That is on my to do list.
Over the winter I ended up doing a full axle swap on the front end. (Sorry, not pics!)
Decided on an HP D30 from an LP D30. I went back forth over all the pros and cons of D44 and D60, and the reality was that for the difference in price between 30 and 44, I couldn't justify the minimal strength increase. I run 35's now and could go to 37's with Chromo shafts. But a 44 pretty much maxes at 37's anyway. And never mind that what they are hawking as 44's these days are really 44 diffs with 30 axle tubes anyways. And a 60 was just WAY out of the budget.
So I yanked an HP D30 out of the JY. After hitting it with several different wire wheels on the drill, I cleaned it up using
and a garden hose. Man does that stuff clean. But watch out, it cleans it SOOOO good that if you don't dry the house with a compressor, the steel will begin to rust right in front of yours. (I didn't believe when someone told me, but now I am believer!)
Threw on an Artec Truss and Gussets with Johnny Joints. I had a professional shop do the welding on this and I am glad I did. First, it came out GREAT! Second, it took WAY longer than either of us thought it would, because it did it correctly by bringing the cast steel up to temp, then welding in short, small segments all over so as to not warp the housing, then cooled it back down under a blanket.
Once I had the axle back from the shop, painted it up in way too many coats of yellow to count, then got to work on installing an Eaton E-Locker I opted to go with a 27 spline instead of the 30 because 1) cost: replacement axles can be had at the JY pretty easily and cheaply, and 2) trail replacement: in the event I blow a 27 on the trail, there's a good chance someone else on the trail has one, too (I carry spares, but you never know!)
By the way, the 4WD page for the Eaton E-Locker CLEARLY tells you what size bearings to get for this thing. GET THEM. I completely ignored this info, as well when they tell you in the instructions, picked up some "Dana 30" bearings, and then couldn't figure out why they wouldn't fit!
Anyway. I tried setting up my own gears, and it actually totally makes sense how to do it, BUT I managed to not quite seat the outer pinion bearing cup quite square, so every time I went to set my backlash, I was getting wildly different numbers.
After a month of not being able to get it to work, I called a spade and spade and took it a gear shop, who tore the whole thing down, figured out the problem and put it all together perfectly in about 2 hours. Their comment after the tear down: "You wouldn't have made it around the block the way it was in there." So, money well spent.
After a trip to CO that left the rear diff cover peeled and leaking oil, I had ordered up some RuffStuff covers front and rear, so I slapped that on. These things are BURLY! I no longer worry about my diffs!
Since I had the whole thing apart, I also replaced the inner axle seals and the ball joints with Synergy ball joints. They are expensive, but BOY do they ride nice! I also added a sway bar relocation bracket to the passenger side, because every time out I was bending the stock one with the steering setup. Once the axle was put together, I threw on some purple paint on the control arms and steering components.
While the axle was getting worked on, I dropped the old axle out, and with all that room, I dropped the oil pan to replace the leaking pan gasket. And since I had the pan off, with the axle out of the way, I figured I would replace the rear main, and the the oil pump with a Melling High Volume oil pump. This is NOT a high VOLUME pump, just a high VOLUME pump.
1) You need a stud tool to get the oil pan off, pliers ain't gonna' cut it. (I "rented" pretty much every job specific tool I need from Autozone, except for a bronze punch for knocking out the rear main seal, and the micrometer and stand for doing the gears).
2) I ended up taking off my down pipe to get more room. Otherwise I would not have been able to get the pan off. I think this is a CA emissions thing. Getting the downpipe back in place afterward SUCKED. The bolts got galled, and I had to cut them off and install new bolts, blind. NOT fun.
3) You NEED to prime the oil pump! Having a an '01 with a coil pack instead of a distributor, I wasn't interested in pulling the camshaft position sensor in order to reach the top of the oil pump to prime with a drill and long cutoff screwdriver. So I went for packing it with vaseline. But I couldn't get the cover plate off. So I heated up the vaseline in a warm water bath and poured it in. SMART! I got everything buttoned up in the same day, but the temperature had dropped over the course of the day so by the time I was done, it was 28 degrees, and my soft vaseline was a block. And it stayed cold, for 2 months. I finally ended up putting my halogen work light under the oil pan for two days just soften up the vaseline enough to get it flow.
4)The best trick I learned was from a different video, that said to take a shoebox, and punch holes on the lid in roughly the shape of the oil pan, and when you take each bolt off, put them in the corresponding hole. LIFE SAVER. There are 22 bolts and studs holding that friggin' thing on there, and you want to make sure you know where each one goes when you go to put it back together!
This site was a godsend for torque measurements, since each one of those stupid studs and bolts needs to be torqued down differently!
Alright, so new pump, rear main and oil pan gasket in, oil pan back on, downpipe reconnected (or so I thought), so new axle up and in.
Had to pause at one point to order Ironrockoffroad BPE's because I completely spaced that the formerly stock axle would not have them.
Knowing that my front end had over 75K miles on it rolling 35's down the road, and that virtually ALL of my TRE's were shot, I realized I needed to replace the whole steering assembly. After much research and soul searching, I opted to stick with the inverted Y set up. I drive this thing to the trails, and sometimes the trails are 12 hours away, so I wanted something that was going to handle well. After all was said and done, the advantages of a UTK or OTK steering set up just didn't outweigh their significant draw back, namely the dead spot. So I ordered up a
I was a little pissed because during the tear down, I could not free up the TRE's from the actual oversized Tie Rod the PO had installed, so I ended up ordering a new TR from Ironrockoffroad. It's not quite as large a diameter as what I had, but it is burly and strong. I've wheeled it pretty hard since I installed it, and no problems. It's also easy to adjust after the trail. I just had IRO add in the TRE's, too.
So new axle got bolted up, new steering (including a new
But the track bar (RE 1660) that I keptis suddenly too short! So I adjusted and adjusted, but still too short. More research says I need to drill out the mount on the axle. Ok, done, mount it up, but now the whole axle is off to the passenger side.
More fiddling, and tweaking. Research says nothing. I figure out that if I the steering wheel hard passenger (I think...I did this almost 6 months ago!), the whole body shifts, but now is being STOPPED by the track bar. So, I enlist my 8 year old son to sit in the driver's seat, with engine on and crank the wheel to the limit, while I unbolt the track bar from the new hole, rebolt into the old hole, and readjust the hole thing back to where it was. Now the axle finally sits correctly!
Of course, when I tried to start it up, it would crank, not actually turn over. This was GREAT for getting oil into the new oil pump, but bad for actually running the thing. Turns it out was the CPS, which had some how gone bad while sitting on blocks for 3 months. Who new! If you want to know how to change a CPS, look at this site. I didn't find it too bad, but some people loathe it!
Really, the only change I made was to run sprinkler wire from the fuse box to the switch box in the cab, rather than the recommended Cat-5 cable.
For the switch box, I just got a project box from Mouser and some switches from OTRATTW. I went for the green for on, red for off.
I cut out the slots for the switches on the side of the project box, followed the OTRATTW directions for wiring the pins, and mounted the whole thing with some l brackets next to my shifter (I'll try to get pics!). Tapped into the cigarette lighter for power with the ignition, and grounded it out to a ground I already had run in the area for the compressor.
After a week of running trails up in Moab without breaking anything, I figured I would try to keep the streak alive by doing some low/no cost improvements to the rig.
When I did the axle swap, I tried to fix the tramlining I was having by increasing the negative caster. I pushed the lower control arm frame side bolts as far forward as they would go and that seemed to do pretty good, but I was lazy, and just torqued the bolts down. Well the big drop on Steel Bender made the bolts slide, requiring a mid trail adjustment the next day, so I figured it was time to throw some shims in there and do it right.
I'm running the RE drop brackets, so the first step was removing the nuts from the bolts that connect the brackets to the braces that link up with the crossmember. Taking the nuts completely off bought me a almost another inch of forward movement on the LCA.
Once the LCA's were at the front of their range, I grabbed a piece of scrap steel plate from a buddy and cut out a pile of shims using this template. It ended up taking a over an inch of shims (9 per side, for the thickness steel i was using). After a shoved the shims in, I cranked the connector bolts back on, and tightened the whole thing up. No she drives like a dream!
1) If you already have a rear bumper mounted, a worn down (i.e. 3") cut off disc will make the job of cutting WAY easier.
2) On the driver's side, you will need to unbolt the gas fill tub guard from the inside of the quarter, and then when you are done cutting and folding, you will need to bend the panel on the guard with the bolt holes up to lay flat against the bottom of the quarter and rebolt it with some self tappers.
12-10-2015, 12:57 PM
(It was my 8 y.o. son's idea!) 
