Project - Grumpy's Toy II

Something had to give....

Okay, so with only 3.5 wrenching days left till RC departure, hit a little snag today......the 3rd member I had carefully tucked away under the furnace in the garage that I believed to be a *spare* for the rear turns out to be a spare FRONT 3rd.......duh.....so a bunch of frantic calls were made to the Zuk Nation and low and behold someone has the coveted rear sidegears I need to rebuilt my grenaded rear 3rd......so with the expertise of a certain *leadfooted* Zuk wildman I am hopeful that I will have it back and be able to put the rest of the rear of my truck together.......I was so pissed off once I discovered that the new rear inner 26 spline shafts wouldn't go into the *spare* 3rd member with the smaller 22 spline sidegears, that I reverted to my high school days and said 'fuck it' and installed my new stereo........I might not go far but the tunes will be chill......

this morning's project......

so this is why I bought the press 15 years ago.....glad I had it though....and glad I still had some gasket paper.....punched out two new ones for the backing plate to axle housing.......there are just some spots I prefer a gasket over using RTV.....I'm old school....(plus originally there were gaskets there). If you are wondering why the backing plates look so good, it's because I spent time to wire wheel them, clean them up and give them a shot of paint......found some Tremclad semi-gloss black and it looks so good I'm using it on everything under the truck.....

he's the mess I was dealing with a week ago......decided it was time to change the master since it had been leaking for a little while......and since I had bought one about 4 years ago to replace the master on the gray body I figured I'd use it now......it wasn't until I went to swap the resevoir onto the new one that I discovered it was different.......so I took the resevoir off the grey body (I haven't had time to strip everything off the firewall including the dash components so I have the chunk sitting in the garage taking up space), and proceeded to install it on the new master.....it fit perfectly so then it was time to wrestle the old master off.....that turned into a chore....ending with a non-returnable core....lol. Well once I had it off I compared the old master to the new one going in and wouldn't you know it....it was longer where it goes into the booster.......I could have sworn the new white body was a '90 like the original grey body.......so I rooted up the ownership and sure enough it was an '88.......next day I was ordering an '88 master from Napa......sure, some might ask why the hell I would cut the ears off the old master and I would reply, 'because there was no damn way I could seperate it from the booster without being able to twist it free'......it was in there good.....

Last minute and something nasty always going wrong, I like your stories Steve, they remind me of something I just can't put my finger on :lmao:
Looking good.

Well back from RC, broke a few things scratched up the fresh paint and as usual had a blast wheeling the rocks....pics to come.

sweet, lookin forward to seeing them! How was the weather down there?