So I spent October installing a new drivetrain in my buddy Lance's '70 Suburban. He got a 700R built up with all kinds of HD internals and a real nice converter. I built a NP208 with a fixed rear output and he bought the 3/4T axles that I built for my Suburban from my parts guy that I sold them to a couple years ago. He picked them up and then dropped them off to have ARB lockers installed in them to save my time installing them. In the mean time, he had some custom leaf packs built to lift the truck up a very specific amount. Having only one stock leg remaining, climbing into my Sub is a bit of a challenge for him, so he didn't want to duplicate my height on his truck. He spent some quality time with one of his boys and a floor jack determining the exact height that he could handle on a daily basis. With all of that figured out, the leaf packs were built and some really nice remote reservoir Fox shocks were installed. Then it came to my place for the drivetrain swap. Now a trans, case and axles is no big deal, but this thing needed everything in between. I figured out a relationship between time and work years ago and it has proven itself to be very accurate over the years. 90% of the work takes 10% of the time and the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time. This project proved to fit that function perfectly. The front axle from my Sub that he bought was a disc brake unit. A huge improvement over his drum brake unit, but it also required a new master cylinder, power booster, brake lines etc. The trans needed new cooler lines and some electrical stuff to control the lockup converter. No big deal other than the electrical system in this truck can best be described as a top heavy train entering a sharp curve with the throttle wiiiiiiide open. Well, it's probably not even that good. So anyways, everything added up to the better part of a month's worth of weekends to get it put together and seemingly functional. Well, whenever Lance and I spend time around each other, we tend to talk about traveling. This time was no different. We decided that since both of our birthdays are within about a week of each other, we needed to go somewhere. But where??
We finally decided on a whole itinerary of southern Arizona. I finished up his Suburban just in time to take it on a super-extendo test drive (anybody see a pattern here??) We headed out Saturday AM and set a course heading south. We soon found ourselves in Tombstone. We didn't do any of the tourist crap while we were there. Instead we headed over to the courthouse museum. In my opinion, that is the only reason to stop in that town. It is a really cool museum with a ton of cool artifacts from the heyday of the town.
Gratuitous truck pics from Tombstone:
From there we headed down the road to an old ghost town called Gleeson. This is an old dry goods store:
A view of the hills surrounding Gleeson:
The restored Jail house:
The remains of the Gleeson School:
They used hoist cable for rebar:
Wandering around the basement of the school:
So we cut out of Gleeson and headed off toward Bisbee. Along the way we passed a sign which, in all of my travels, I had never seen before. It kind of made me wonder how I was supposed to prepare for it:
Upon entering Bisbee we first saw the old open pit:
Above the pit:
We passed through town and headed up Mule Pass to find a place to camp. We found a sweet place and set up camp. Being that it was my birthday that day, I was regaled with the Happy Birthday Song in three languages while sitting around the campfire. We got up the next morning and decided to amend our itinerary and head back into Bisbee to do some wandering around town. It is a neat old copper mining town similar to Jerome and actually has many ties to Jerome as well.
Main Street in old-town Bisbee:
Compact cars you say?? Meh, it's just a suggestion:
Neat old hotel in town:
Doors to the county courthouse in town:
Super-cool light posts in courthouse courtyard:
A rather non-descript piece of decorative ironwork. It wasn't really picture-worthy until I noticed the entire thing was riveted together:
I like the old main streets with the vestibules at the entrances. This one was labeled for a former tenant:
This is an antique store now, but once upon a time it was:
Cool art-deco style building in Lowell (basically a "suburb" of Bisbee):
It was funny, we were all down here checking out the vintage main street and got caught in an instantaneous deluge. It was bright and sunny--and pouring rain. It lasted all of five minutes or so. The sun never went away. Odd.
The long drive home:
So, it ended up being a 534 mile test drive on an entirely untested rig. While we did have a couple issues, none were with any recent mods to the drivetrain. I prefer not to do test drives like this, but when a trip is on the line, exceptions can be made I guess. It ended up being a great trip and very worthy of the effort required to pull it off.
. The last trip I almost broke a rubber exhaust pipe mount
