Saturday, July 3, 2021

Ten pounds of crap in a two pound bag

 How do you put new thirty one inch tires on a truck that is not currently road legal . . . ?

You run them to and from the tire shop . . .

anyway you can . . . four in the back of the Golf. . .

. . . . and the spare on the front seat . . . yea I got a few funny looks along the way .

As the the Honda van is temporarily DOA , the old T-100 that has been parked since 2017 when I rebuilt the infernal combusted engine is going back on the road . But the old tires were near twenty years old and though they still had good tread , they were dry rotted and did not hold air for more than a day at a time .

Don't much care for the knobby sidewall pattern on these new ones , but choices are limited when you try to keep the price of four new tires under five hundred dollars . That there is about one third the value of the truck . As the front brake calipers are old and dragging , new ones have been ordered from Fleabay and will get replaced when I muster the courage to tackle that project . I fear that I might have to remake some of the brake lines as they will likely snap off when I try to replace the calipers .

Ran my DIY bumper through the planer to clean it up and gave it a coat of paint .

Chipmunks got evicted from the air-box too . 

 

8 comments:

  1. You got yourself a project truck... You know, you fix one thing and a new problem will pop up like a whack a mole game.

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    1. Yea, I've owned that thing for over 20 years now and has become a test of wills. It has 206400 miles on it now. Done a lot of work to it over the years. Did some big trips with it too. All the way up to Newfoundland and Labrador. But the engine is the first generation three liter V6 that Toyota made and they never got it right. Same 150 HP as the R22 four banger and less torque, gutless. Best I ever got out of it was 12 mpg, pathetic. The heads have been off it three times. The last time I did the job myself and found that the previous two times Toyota had done it wrong and used the wrong head gasket and that's why it failed. Oval cooling galleries with tiny 1/4 inch round cut outs in the gasket restricting flow. When I tore it apart in 2015 I learned about the wrong head gasket and corrected it. Then life got a bit pear shaped so I parked it as I did not have the time or the courage to deal with it.

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  2. I have a 2000 Chevy C3500 with 16" wheels (265R75 tires) and I got a set of Coopers Mud/Snow tires with living in South Dakota. They had a similar type of tread on the side and was told it helped grab snow and mud to propel you. I didn't notice any difference, Just hype to me.

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    1. These are 31 X 10.5 R15 which supposedly translates 265-75 R15. Just over 100 bucks a pop, plus mounting, balancing, disposal fee and taxes came out to just under 500 bucks. It was the best deal I could find locally . I expect that pattern on the sidewall will just collect dirt and be hard to keep clean. The truck wont see more than a couple thousand miles a year.

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    2. I wish my tires cost a 100 a pop. I have to use 10 ply rated and you are looking at least a $1000.00 bucks to shoe my horse. Now with inflation gonna take a big leap I may be scrounging for even 6 ply tires...

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    3. These are "six ply equivalent" , "C rated" at supposedly 2730 lbs...what ever that all means ! It really wont see a whole lot of use . Its 27 yrs old now so I've registered it as an antique which eliminates the hassle of the state inspection . But it buys me some time to work on the van to get that one to pass the state inspection again.

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  3. Good work, M!

    My Toyota truck is an 08 Tacoma with the V6 and while it is a gas gobbling whore…it has been pretty solid…

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    1. Yours has the 3.5 liter V6. Much better engine. The one in my truck is the dreaded 3VZE P.O.S. first Generation 3 liter V6. Toyota never got it right on that one and dumped it as quick as they could replacing it with the 3.5. When mine blew the head gasket for the third time I looked into replacing it with the later 3.5 V6 but it would also mean a new wiring loom and ECU. I just was not up for trying to figure that CF out. It was easier to repair what was there except this time I put the right head gasket on it, something Toyota had failed to do three times. Wish I had the 4 cyl R22 engine. Same 150hp, more torque and way better MPG. It does have a full size 8 foot bed with 4 feet between the wheel wells which is the reason I got it originally.

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