MORE Issues With the Autocar Construcktor, (I Took the Torch To It)

What's up everyone, welcome back to Diesel Creek? My name is Matt behind me, this giant of a stripped down truck is my 1980 coach. Builder now, if you haven't seen the previous videos of this unit, basically the gist of the story is that we're going to be taking this thing apart, going over it. everything, fixing it up, we'll get some new paint, we'll get a higher horsepower reconditioned engine and I'm doing all of that to have a reliable way to transport some of my larger heavy equipment. this is coming out with a lowboy trailer now that I've gone a lot deeper into the whole project in some previous videos, so if you want to check them out I'll leave a link in the description. there, but we have a lot of work left to do on this beauty, as I mentioned in a previous video, all these tires need to be replaced, but we can't just replace the tires, we also have to get new rims.

They are called 1020 and they are not exactly easy to get these days. I'm going to exchange them for 11R 225, which are much easier to find. I actually have 12 r 225s in the front and I could go the same r route in the rear. I haven't figured all that out yet, the first thing I want to do today is get all these wheels and tires off here, get them out of here so we can have better access to the suspension and everything under the truck because We have to do some work under there if you can see the oil stains coming out of this front differential.

There's a pretty good leak at that intake seal. The same goes for the output seal that comes out of the back of that differential. and the inlet seal on the next rear end going down there is not exactly a good time, so another thing I want to investigate besides playing with a tape measure here and you know, we have about 4 and A4. Let's say the edge of the tire on the opposite side of the truck where you're sitting is much closer to 5 and 1/2 on 5 and 1/4 on something like that, if that's the case and we have some worn bushings.

Now it's time to replace them while we have the entire truck totaled. So after removing the wheels and tires, we're going to investigate, check all of that, and if necessary, get some parts. I ordered and started to dive in. This is the engine and transmission setup that we

took

out in the previous video. It's in my way currently, so we have to pick it up and move it somewhere, but I don't want to take it out. from the shop yet because when I start reassembling the new engine for this truck we will probably need to steal some parts from it and use them in the new engine, the transmission that was originally in the truck here is a t955 dll and I don't know if any of You guys have driven that transmission before, but it's unique, to say the least, and it's not a great fit for our application, so I have a 13 speed to put behind the new motor and I think that will work much better for us, so in addition to playing with the rear ends changing the intake seals, maybe the bushings, we're going to need to get into the cabin here and start removing things like this junky seat that I have.

A much nicer air suspension seat that we're basically going to put in the truck before I worry about putting anything back on, although we're going to go through the whole truck and get everything ready to paint everything that doesn't need to be on. there like the mirrors, the power steering reservoir, this oil filter won't be here for the new engine, the filter is actually in the block so it can be removed completely. The cabin lights, the air horn, the air filter here on this side of the cabin exhaust. stack all that up and then you have to take something out of there and once everything is disassembled and all the mechanical work is complete on this chassis, we're going to take it back outside and we're going to have to do some serious steam cleaning.

Here, do you see all that mud, debris, grease, grime and grit built up on the frame rails this truck ran in an open pit mine its entire life by the Energy Company console and all the miles it saw were most likely ? all off road so there's mud covered in every little place that you would never imagine mud could get to one of the other things that I would like to do to this truck before paint prep is this rear frame if you look. On a lot of tractor trailers that pull down often, they don't have a square frame like this, a lot of times they're cut away and they have kind of a rounded frame that comes up and just helps you get under it. a low trailer, so that's something I'd like to do to this truck as well.

I already cut this frame once last year or well maybe two years ago, but I'm not too thrilled with the way it looks, feels or anything like that. I think it'll be a lot better if we put that nice little radio in there for a penny a pound, so once the truck is completely pressure washed and completely cleaned, then we can start thinking about getting it ready for paint prep and that is. a long list of things to do No, uh, I don't think it's going to be done in this video, enough talk, let's dive into this.

I don't know if our little forklift will really have the taste to lift this back of the truck, but let's give it a try. No, I was wrong to sit on the forklift seat. They don't look like they were raised off the ground, but they are perfect. Bo, if only I had a top box. Whoever put these wheel bolts in here last didn't do a proper job, they were just held on with three threads. I'm glad we're going over these, oh man there are a lot of these bolts like that. I also just realized we should do it.

I can't get the wheel to turn right now, the brake should be fully engaged, now we need to take this apart and see why the brakes aren't holding. I think this whole project will become this, let's keep it. Digging deeper, we'll continue to find

more

problems, but it's better to address them now than on the side of the road, who knows how long it's been since these tires were last taken out of here. These are old tires, they have a lot of tread. on them but that's because this truck didn't have much mileage on it, it's a shame to even get rid of them because there is a lot of tread and I like the tread pattern which is an aggressive tread with open shoulders of the old school, but, the fact is they are dry rotted and aren't going to hold up to road service very well at this point, well, three

more

to go.

Well, we remove all those wheels and tires from there and that opens up a lot. More room to thoroughly inspect the suspension and get in here, remove the drive bud and replace the seals in case you're wondering what 1450 pounds of tires look like, like playing with a scale on the new forklift. 1455 and that thing is pretty accurate, I would say also because I weighed a tire individually and it was 180, so multiplied by 8 and then you have to calculate that we have some pallet wood in there and plus I have a strap that goes through the center. so there's a piece of tubing that the straps are wound through and they're anchored to the main hub on the deck so keep that tire tower a little more stable so yeah I would say the scale is pretty accurate and Originally when I first brought this one into the shop the numbers were jumping all over the place and I think it just had water and the readout or load cell there on the fork carriage, but now that it's been here for a week or two .

It looks like it has dried and is working much better. He's been keeping Rock Steady at that number for an hour now and I'm really excited about it. It's a shame that these tires, some of them are in bad condition, but most of them are in pretty good condition. shape, except for a little dry rot, they have some cracks, otherwise we could still run them, hopefully some farmer can use them on a farm truck, you know, a grain truck or something, so I'm going to throw them away . on Marketplace and trying to get rid of them.

I found a couple more

issues

here, this axle seal. I knew it was wrong. You can see how greasy the whole thing is, so we'll have to take it apart and clean everything well. The other thing I noticed was this right here, uh, I don't know if you guys can tell that the spring here should be square to this shaft, the bracket it's mounted on is bent in that direction and it looks like the weld is cracked. . all the way down and under here, so I'm going to grab a chain binder and we're going to hook from The Hub here to the bottom of that bracket and pull it back nice and square, of course, I keep finding more . and more work for me here too, they put these remote grease lines on this truck, which is nice, you know, they have these little lines that run inside the frame rail and get to all the hard to find and hard to reach grease fittings.

Which is cool, but it was just an idea that they weren't really concerned with aesthetics at all, they were just going for functionality, so they just grabbed a big chunk of 8's on a plate. Here it seems we don't need to have this. There's a very large plate here, so I want to reduce this to the smallest piece we need. Not just for aesthetics, it also creates a place for rust to accumulate behind. You know, a lot of dirt builds up there and creates rust problems that we want to avoid, we'll cut those things down to a more manageable size at some point, oh, that looks perfect, just clean this up, put a little bead of solder over there, it looks like that the factory weld has just a little undercut.

Anyway, like cheating, going downhill, yeah, it looks good when you turn off the light. N I have the camera lens, can you see that blurry spot? Damn, it's okay, it's welded, it's in place, it's not going anywhere. I feel good about that. thing off the list let's keep working here it's time to commit I gotta get under here I gotta destroy these transmission lines and we gotta change these seals There's not much room for a guy under here I don't know how well I'll be able to show it to you , maybe you can see there is a forward and backward tilt in that slot because this is a sliding axle that way, when your suspension moves up and down, this driveshaft can lengthen and shorten on the fly, but we also have that which doesn't seem right to me.

I don't think I'm supposed to be able to do that, we have to get this thing off anyway, so once it's out we can inspect it better, but to get these driveshaft buds off, it's not like your little car with some little clips there and you can just take it apart with a hammer, there's two little ones, what are these 5/16 or 38 bolts that hold these U-joint covers on and they're? retained by these bent metal locking tabs, so we have to bend them down, take out the bolts and then a lot of people just burn the U-joints off of these because they're so hard to get out, but I, uh,

took

a tool.

It seems to work pretty well. I already made the front driveshaft without you guys yeah let's go back here and see how it works so I used this on a full U joint now and what I found out is that they just need to take. take your time and make sure everything is centered right before you hit things and it works a lot better yeah look how it went caddy Wampus that's not what we're looking for anyway we took all the bolts out of those caps , so we'll try, yeah, I don't know if you guys could tell what happened there.

He took that cover off the back. It worked pretty well. You can only take it so far because the U-joint reaches to the side of the bud. so you just have to touch it the rest of the way, there we go, that's one minus eight more to finish the biggest problem here is the space limit where we're working, it really would be better if I hit all the brakes and then I could turn the line driveshaft, it would make life a little easier, hell yeah, the only other way to get these things out of here is to take a sledgehammer and do the same thing, just hit the driveshaft and knock it down like that or burn them.

Neither of them are very nice, oh I just realized the whole top of that cap blew off so we're not actually pushing on the top of the cap we're pushing on the shoulder which isn't really ideal, that cap is so hard. I can't really take a bite, these keep sliding fine, this sucks, I've never had this happen. I think even though Cap's not out, we could still get this thing out of here, come on, woo, hey, oh, that. She sucked, but it's over. I should be able to get what's left of this lid out of here.

That's all it took. I did not see him coming. I thought he was just taking out a signet ring. I don't want to do it right. I have locked myself in here with the seal and I am currently becoming one with the seal and I am going to try to find a seal number and verify that I have the correct ones on my workbench. Maybe he was lucky. There we have it, there we go, we finally get one out of there, those suction cups are tight on that wedge, we can finally get one outthis shaft here and when I do it, I'm probably going to drain some oil, so we better get a frying pan, so there it is. see that's your axle okay I think I lost my audio there for a second basically all we had to do there was remove that nut we had to remove those nuts that retain your hub and everything and basically put the preload on in your bearing.

There are only two nuts and a lock ring, they all engage with the shaft and each other. Now it's time to take out the bucket with the drum and that suction cup is heavy, so I'm going to turn on the forklift and get it out of there just fine. Although the brakes are not applied, they seem to still hold tight, so I will have to back off the slack adjuster, but I don't know if that will do anything if the S cam breaks on this hub like I think. It's just that no, I don't think that's really going to work.

Some of you may remember that the new forklift here has a scale so you can see exactly how much this hub and brake drum cost together. I want you to pause. the video, leave a comment below and let me know how much you think this big thing weighs. Oh, I was right, there is a lovely mouse nest inside here. Can you see it? Well, I guess we better fire up the old parts washer. It's getting hot, let's get this cleaned up because there's tons and tons of dirt in here, okay, taking a look inside our brake assembly, that guy over there is your SC cam and the way it works when you apply the brakes, this spring pushes a rod that drives this thru axle that comes out here to your cam and then this guy has to rotate in this direction and it rides on these rollers on the shoes here that spread the pads against the drum and I Looking at the SC cam here and the dirt on it, I can tell that the SC cam hasn't turned for quite some time and if we lock the brake we should see the SC cam turn, but you can watch and nothing happens, there is no movement. try putting a bar on our hm well I guess the shaft is fine.

I think we have a problem in our spring can, maybe the parking brake spring is broken. This is a super old and dated spring can design with a built in cage bolt. that cannot be removed. I've never seen that type before except on this truck, so it wouldn't hurt to replace them anyway for a penny for a pound. I think the best option might be to just take out all these spring cans. and put four new ones in here so we don't have to worry about it, plus it's all greasy dust, so what that means is there's a good chance this axle seal on the back of the hub is leaking, come on a Go ahead and replace it too while we're here, the bearings look good from what I've seen, but we'll also take a good look at them before putting them back together.

Well, you've had time to leave your comments, what do you think the hub weighs drum roll please, 220 lbs? It's actually a little lighter than I thought. I thought that thing was going to push 300. Well, we have our bushing assembly in the parts washer. Let's turn this on. Seeing it come out nice and clean this is a greasy mess. I got a lot of criticism last time we did a wheel seal just to clean the pads and reuse them, so they are pretty cheap. I'm going to go ahead and probably get us a new set for this side, this thing is baked in C, it's disgusting looking, there's like an inch of crap in there.

I'm glad we have that parts washer that will fix this quickly. I had to clean the The last one I did by hand was a mess, okay this thing just went out, let's see how well it turned out, check this out, the slag TR down here was completely empty when we started, look how full it is, just It is overflowing. throw that out, okay, I only ran it for 10 minutes and it came out pretty clean, but we still have some junk in there, so I flipped it so the Jets can hit it from another direction and we'll give it another chance, okay?

I have bucket number two in the parts washer. This is really going to be the test. This thing is nasty, let's see what it will do. That was a fight. His brakes were too tight on that one. Oh, we're missing the pigman. well that's the last one, yeah that's another one where the seal was about to start leaking catastrophically but it hadn't done so yet or maybe there was just so much dirt built up around it that it wouldn't let it seep out. leaked, created a kind of filth. seal what a mess I think this brake shoe slipped while we were taking things apart here I don't think it was like that anyway we're going to clean them all and we're still going to run these hubs through the parts washer clean everything up and repair what we need to repair and then put it all back together with nice new things.

It's not as bad as that, but it's pretty nasty in there, so it's a good thing we're stuck here, taking everything apart, getting all that dirt out. From there and all, I think this truck saw a lot of mud jams over its life, so there's just a buildup of mud and dirt in places you wouldn't normally find it. I mean, these, the back of the spoke hub is what you see in there and it's full of crap. No, I don't think it's very normal to see it when you remove them from there, so it's good that we did this.

Let's get it. They were all cleaned and I'm actually going to pressure wash all the brake assemblies so we can get those nice and clean. The parts washer was still running when I left last night with this really very greasy guy. I let it go. About 40 minutes or so because it was so caked on and crusty. How does it look flawless now? The first time I did one of these wheel seals like last year, I did it on video and I cleaned it, you know, as dirty as it was. I put together a practically identical one with nothing more than a scraper, a wire brush and some brake cleaner and let me tell you, this is the way to go that sucked when I did it the other time, yes, everything looks good here, we can set this aside for reassembly I've never made a set of half shoes before, but here we are killing it, okay, the next thing I'm going to do while I'm waiting for the seals and other parts here is I'm going to attach this frame.

Back here you basically make a ramp with the rear frame rails here and this helps you get under low trailers or it can give you more roll angles if you go over it like a sharp knob or something it would give you more angle than the one the trailer might have. Bend before contacting the truck frame rails. Oh, okay, we have the notched frame rails. Now this crossbar will also need to be cut and repositioned, so I simply cut that angle off the piece we cut. I have the crossbar nailed there for now. I must have gone down 1 or 2° from side to side on my cut here because things aren't quite even, but it won't really matter because what I plan to do is take a piece of uh two or 3 wide flat bar and wrap it from here all the way up and up, giving you some nice solid places for the trailers to go up, the other thing you need the stand for here is a good spot for a neck stand for a short guy to get down and rest on the frame there and hold the neck as you separate it.

I think we ran out of welding gas, dammit, so my plans are to do a redesign of this area of ​​the walkway to the back. the fifth wheel, so I want to start by burning off this old stuff and getting ready for the new. I'm impressed with my own work with the

torch

until I got there to cut that corner. I made a bit of a mess, but you won't see it once we get the walkway here anyway, so it's not really that important, but the part you'll see did a great job. Well, we cut out all that junk and excess material there and cleaned it up looking good, turning our I pay attention again to our frame cutting that we had to stop because the MIG welder ran out of shielding gas.

I just pulled the old Drive Lincoln stick welder off the engine and I'm going to try to finish firing this thing up and this should be interesting. Because I haven't soldered at all well, I think over a year, so what could go wrong? As grandma used to say, the grinder and paint make me a welder. I'm not a guy, I'm glad that's over, as always, everything takes its form. more than I had anticipated, but I went over this with the tiger paw and got all the sharp edges and burrs and everything that was removed from this side turned out pretty good.

This was 6011, it was all 8 in 611, so I'll never look as good as 78 or something, but man, I'm so glad I didn't solder it. I think after a year it's like riding a bike. I will return to you. I was really planning on doing more in this video but as always everything takes longer than I anticipated firstly and then secondly finding more problems as we go and fixing them takes more time so I think I'll Let's go ahead and finish this one here since I think we're getting pretty long, all I have to do in the next video now is put the seals back on the drive line and put it back together.

I think I decided I want to remove the fifth wheel plate. I did a trick job. on these brackets that actually hold the slide plate uh that was before I had a MAG drill or something and the idea of ​​trying to drill through those big heavy plates with a hand drill just blew my mind and there was no way it was To do it. I broke my wrist trying so I tried it with a blow

torch

and I'm not the best at making holes with a blowtorch so I want to get some new brackets for that. I'd feel better about that, so I'll take the plate off the 5th wheel. anyway before I paint and then when we put it all back together I'll do it with new brackets and they'll screw in there again.

I still want to remove this crossbar and the driveline setup that used to run the winch we're on. I'm going to ditch that and use this hydraulic winch which ultimately gives me better control of the winch and will save me some weight overall. that transmission line junk removed, so all that and more in the next video. I thank you for your patience. The car series, this is an important project and I can't dedicate 100% of my time to it. I have a lot of other things going on in the background so I appreciate your patience, thanks for hanging out with me and I'll see you around. in the video below by the way if you want to help support the channel head over to diesel creek.com we have a new t-shirt in the store now so if you don't have one of those yet pick up. buy yourself a fresh new t-shirt for spring maybe if your hat is getting a little dirty pick up a new hat.

Anyway I would appreciate it if you guys, that's all I have for today so thanks for watching, I'll see you. next video later