Mike,
Surprisingly very few hours are spent underneath the truck these days. Mostly its all about standing directly in front of it looking at tire angles, or PHB placement or tie rod positions.... or hunched over a portal box from the side trying to crane my neck into some crevice to see where the interference is. It's a sinking feeling when you are pumping the jack to raise the axle into a "bump" position and you feel that VERY slight change in the way the jack handle acts when the suspension hits an immovable object.... as soon as you "feel" it, you know that brackets are going to be cut off and thrown away, AGAIN!
Yes, only 1868 days until the 50th Anniversary BlazerBash event in Moab....! I'm painfully aware of the ticking clock, but think of it this way:
With an 8-hour workday each weekend, and 3 nights a week in the evenings (roughly 4 hours each) I'm logging 20 hours per week on the build. Extrapolating that against the remaining days I am left with 5337 man hours remaning to complete this build.
The huge, time-burning projects are mostly behind me now.... the thought of 200 - 300 hours of bodywork is really almost trivial by comparison at this point! Ultimately, I want the truck to be finished well in advance of the Moab trip so I can get a LOT of street time in it, and iron out all the bugs. Usually, when I plan a Moab trip I'm wrenching right up until the night before (and sometimes into the wee hours of the departure day!)... it adds a lot of extra risk when nothing is well-sorted and you hit the road in a completely unproven truck.
Defintely don't want that additional stress this time around.
-G
Surprisingly very few hours are spent underneath the truck these days. Mostly its all about standing directly in front of it looking at tire angles, or PHB placement or tie rod positions.... or hunched over a portal box from the side trying to crane my neck into some crevice to see where the interference is. It's a sinking feeling when you are pumping the jack to raise the axle into a "bump" position and you feel that VERY slight change in the way the jack handle acts when the suspension hits an immovable object.... as soon as you "feel" it, you know that brackets are going to be cut off and thrown away, AGAIN!
Yes, only 1868 days until the 50th Anniversary BlazerBash event in Moab....! I'm painfully aware of the ticking clock, but think of it this way:
With an 8-hour workday each weekend, and 3 nights a week in the evenings (roughly 4 hours each) I'm logging 20 hours per week on the build. Extrapolating that against the remaining days I am left with 5337 man hours remaning to complete this build.
The huge, time-burning projects are mostly behind me now.... the thought of 200 - 300 hours of bodywork is really almost trivial by comparison at this point! Ultimately, I want the truck to be finished well in advance of the Moab trip so I can get a LOT of street time in it, and iron out all the bugs. Usually, when I plan a Moab trip I'm wrenching right up until the night before (and sometimes into the wee hours of the departure day!)... it adds a lot of extra risk when nothing is well-sorted and you hit the road in a completely unproven truck.
Defintely don't want that additional stress this time around.
-G
