Bomber Green '73 620

[Eagle_Adam]

happy to help 

[KlassicMotion]

I took a closer look at the control arms;  The upper ball joint arms are mounted to the shock tower, just the same, but the tower is mounted at an angle to the frame rail, where as the king pin shock tower is mounted in parallel to the frame rail.  I suppose the ball joint setup could be swapped over, but it would take some accurate measurements, and good welding.... not worth it for this truck.

[sebpv]

Hi, would u be willing to ship the door cards to Alberta, Canada? I have a bunch of shit I need. It would all depend on what you have. PM me plz. Thx

[KlassicMotion]

PM sent.  Albeit, along time ago, but it seemed your post^ needed a response on here.

[KlassicMotion]

Not much to show, but I swapped out the old leaky steering box with the good, clean box from the '78. 

I also decided to swap the dash out at the same time.  I didn't want to have to do too much re-wiring, so I swapped all the accessories and wires from the '73 over to the cleaner '78 dash.  I figured while I was in there, I'd throw in a cheap tach.  I made up a crude little bezel and and holder for it. All together the tach install cost less than $40. The tach is a tad small, but the bigger tachs I found created some issues and cost $60-$100. Since I'm already $1500 over budget for this truck, I thought this was a fine solution. I'm hoping to finish running the wires for the tach and get the dash back in the truck today. Here's the pics to tell the story:

 

[KlassicMotion]

While I was testing everything to make sure it all worked before I put the dash back in, I found two issues.

 

The first issue, is the "Park/Tail" fuse blows when I turn the headlights on.  I tracked the issue down to the engine bay harness, or rather I eliminated all other possibilities.  I'm thinking the short is somewhere in the harness that goes between the front park lights.  The headlight wiring is pretty ugly and uses the same harness..... I will take some time and completely unwrap that harness and inspect all the wires. 

 

The second issue was a burnt circuit on the back of the cluster, so I put a dab of solder on it.  I've never worked with circuit boards, so forgive me if this wasn't the "proper" way to fix this.

 

 

 

Since the truck is a '73 and the new dash is from a '78, I didn't need the little idiot light cluster that rests on top of the '78 dash, so I removed it, and made a plate to cover the whole.  It's not very creative, but it works.

 

 

 

So here is the new dash in place.  I've sill got to take a plastic bristled tooth brush and some cleaner and scrub the front of the dash before I put the column cover on, and the steering wheel.

 

 

 

Here is the old dash for comparison.  When I get the truck outside, I will get a good shot of the shiny painted metal section on top of the new dash.

 

[KlassicMotion]

While I was under the dash, I went ahead and installed the good hood latch cable I got from 420n620 (Thanks man!).  Of course the grill had to come back out, but the new cable works great!  I did lube it up with some graphite and gear/rope oil.

 

[KlassicMotion]

Hmm... While hooking up the tachometer to the coil, I found the previous owner has the coil wired backwards with the points wire going to the + side and the hot wires going to the - side....  Maybe this also explains why the PO was monkeying with the wires, bypassed the stock coil wires and ran a new wire directly to the coil!?...  I will connect the wires correctly, see how it runs, then hook up the stock wires and see how that runs.  Here are some pics:

 

Notice the lovely coil hold down strap the PO put on!!