Nothing Special's '71 Bronco

[Gary Lewis]

Looks like it'll work great.  

(However, you may not need it this round in Moab.)

[Nothing Special]

I know your compressor will make short work of however many tires it need to fill.  But I'll have a lot more capability than I was otherwise going to have anyway.

[Gary Lewis]

Yes, and having that capability at the end of a long day on the trail is very welcome.  You'll like having the new compressor.  

[Nothing Special]

As I reported in the "What have you done..." thread, I got Pluto out of hibernation this weekend.  Everything went great getting him running, so I've been driving him.

But on Sunday I couldn't roll the driver's window down.  It stopped with an audible "clunk" so I could tell it was hitting something, not just binding up.

Last night I took the panel off the door and found that one of the two tabs had broken where the lower track is bolted to the door. So I pulled it out, welded it back up, threw a little spray paint on it, and tonight put it back together after the paint dried.  Now it's as good as old!  (it works like it did before, meaning it does bind up a bit, but will go up and down all the way)

Here a picture of the tab clamped together to be welded, and then a couple after welding and grinding the mounting surface back flat.  Definitely not a show-worthy weld, but it's hard to weld something so small and thin.  And I didn't burn through it or anything, so I'm counting it a win!

[Gary Lewis]

That looks like a WIN!  And no one is going to see it, so who cares how it looks if it holds.  

[Nothing Special]

Time to catch this thread up after our Moab trip.  Pluto was obviously involved in the 'wheeling on the trip, but I covered that in the trip thread, so you can see that there.

Pluto did well on this trip (as he always does!), and I still don't have any changes I want to make.  But I did come home with a few projects none-the-less.

The first one is already done (just not by me).  For years Pluto has been weeping some coolant from the water pump.  On this trip the weeping increased to ugly crying.  I couldn't just live with it anymore.  I've had the pump off a few times over the years, with less than great results stopping the weeping.  So that and not wanting to spend too much time on Pluto as I'm trying to get started on Oswald made me decide to take it in.  They did tell me there was some damage to the timing cover that might have been contributing to my inability to get it sealed.  So there's a new cover now too.  Hopefully this will last a while.

The second issue is done already too.  I'll post more about it soon, but quickly here, the bed sides have been spreading out for a while, making it harder to open and close the tail gate.  On this trip I finally couldn't get it closed.  Short-term I used ratchet straps to pull the sides in, but now I put a bar across the top of the opening.  It restricts loading a little, but it's not like this is a pickup truck where I'll be loading big things regularly.  So I think it'll be fine.  Again, more detail on that coming.

Third I need to address soon.  I dropped off a bigger ledge than I should have (Lesley calls some of the ledges you drop off a "dippy-doo."  This one was a "dippy-don't"!).  I caught the spare tire on the ledge.  It doesn't look like I bent the body where the tire carrier mounts, or the tailgate where the latch mounts.  But I definitely bent both the carrier and the latch.  I don't know if I need to do anything about the carrier yet, but the latch doesn't keep the carrier from swinging out at all now.  Short-term another tie-down strap was pressed into service, but I need to fix this soon.

Last is tires.  I'd been saying that I was looking forward to getting new off-road tires because the ProComp Xtreme MT2s are so loud on the highway.  Well, careful about what you wish for!  I sliced two sidewalls, one of them pretty bad.  Both tires were still holding air, but I replaced the worst one with a used tire that's an inch smaller, so I definitely need to replace that now.  I think I'll get 4 new tires, but I don't know what I'm going to get yet.  The next planned 'wheeling trip is in October, and I'm back on my smaller street tires, so there's not a big hurry on this one.

[Nothing Special]

Here's the "more detail."

I thought about what I might do to get the bed sides to pull back in where they belong, and I couldn't imagine anything that would be likely to work and not be a MAJOR project.  So the easiest option seemed like the best: attaching a bar across the top of the tailgate opening.

The Bronco tub has stake pockets at the back corners, so I could put backing plates inside the pockets rather than just attach to the sheet metal.  Here's a picture looking at the passenger's side corner from the front.  The Phillips head screws hold the backing plates in position.  There's a backing plate against the front side of the pocket and one against the inside surface, to spread the load.  There are two nuts welded to each plate.  You can see the nut threads in some of the holes.



Then I welded up a bracket to attach to the two plates.



Then that all was repeated on the driver's side.

I didn't get pictures of the next step, but I cut a 1" square tube to be a tight fit between the brackets on the two sides when the sides were pulled in to where the tailgate fit correctly.  Then I tacked the bar to the brackets and removed it all to weld and paint it.

Here is the finished product.



As I said above, yes it partly blocks the bed.  But this isn't a truck.  I can't put anything very big in there anyway, because there's so little room behind the seats.  I'm sure there will be times when it's in the way.  But I don't thing it'll be often.  And worst comes to worst, it's just bolted in.  But at this point I'm happy with it!

[Gary Lewis]

That looks good to me, Bob. Easy to remove but very solid when in place.

[mat in tn]

this may be a great example of the simplest solution being the best. well done.

[grumpin]

Good job!

[Nothing Special]

mat in tn wrote

this may be a great example of the simplest solution being the best. well done.

Thanks all!

This is an example of what a guy I work with calls an "allzagatta."  Allzagatta do is tie the two sides together!

[Nothing Special]

About 4 years ago I put a set of ProComp Xtreme MT mud tires on Pluto.  They've always been louder than I've wanted on the highway, but otherwise good tires.  So I kept running them until I sliced two of the four in Moab this summer.

I've had four sets of the original BFG Mud-Terrains (before the "KM" designation) on trucks and my Jeep before.  They weren't as quiet as highway tires, but they were very easy to live with.  I was hoping that 40+ years of R&D had led BFG to still have a quiet mud tire.  And number of people I asked said that the KM3 was the quietest mud tire on the market.  So I decided to get a set of four.

I quickly realized that they are worse (in my opinion) than the ProComps for noise on my Bronco on the highway.  They are probably a little quieter, but they have a two-tone noise that's really annoying (it's a tritone, "the devil's chord," for those of you who know music, or the pitches that a French police siren in a movie has).

I made a video trying to capture the relative noise of the four tires I currently have for comparison.  I only have one of one of them, so the test was to put three of the likely quietest tires on, and put one test tire on the left front.  Here's a link to that video.

The first tire in the test was the BFG KM3.

Second was the ProComp Xtreme MTs I've been using for 'wheeling the last 4 years.

Third was the Kenda Klever RT that I've had as a full size spare to go with my 33" tires.

Last was that I put the fourth highway tire on.  Those are Hankook Kinergy PT.

I think the video confirms my thought that the ProComp tire is the loudest, but the BFG is only slightly quieter, and with a dissonance that makes it more objectionable.  Those two tires are mud tires, so it's not surprising that they would be the two loudest in the test.  It's not at all surprising that the Hankook, as a highway tire, is the quietest.  So it's also expected that the Kenda, as a all-terrain / mud tire hybrid is between the mud and highway tires.  But it was surprising to me that the Kenda was much quieter than the mud tires, almost as quiet as the highway tire.

I decided that I can't live with the BFG KM3s.  I would have liked to switch to Kenda Klever RTs now, but that tire has been discontinued.  I thought about going with a Kenda mud tire, hoping that they were only a little louder than the RTs.  But I wasn't sure I wanted to take that risk, and BFG only wanted to give me (most of) my money back if I went with another set of BFGs.  So today I got a set of BFG All-Terrain KO2s.  I might have preferred the KO3, but that's not available in a 15" tire.  I did have one set of KO2s before, on my pickup.  I didn't love them there as they were loud for a highway tire and they "tracked" too much on pavement (pulling back and forth).  But I think they'll be a good compromise for the off-road tires on my Bronco, and I think they'll be much easier to live with than the KM3s.

So far I haven't put the KO2s on Pluto yet, so I don't know anything more.  We're heading out on vacation, so I won't get to try them (or be on this board much) for a while.  But in early October we're taking Pluto down to Missouri again, so they'll get tested out pretty soon.

[Gary Lewis]

I can hear the differences, Bob.  And I agree about the tritone -

So, do you know yet if the K02's track?  In my experience that can sometimes be a result of wheel width and tire pressures, so if it does initially on Pluto maybe you can find a pressure that doesn't?  Usually I've had to go up a few pounds so the center of the tire was taking most of the load.

[Ifitaintbroke]

Hey what's wrong with tritones? I've been known to use a little "controlled discord" sometimes.

[Nothing Special]

Gary Lewis wrote

I can hear the differences, Bob.  And I agree about the tritone - ....

And keep in mind this is with only one of the BFGs!  It was a lot louder with all 4.

Gary Lewis wrote

....  So, do you know yet if the K02's track?  In my experience that can sometimes be a result of wheel width and tire pressures, so if it does initially on Pluto maybe you can find a pressure that doesn't?  Usually I've had to go up a few pounds so the center of the tire was taking most of the load.

No.  They mounted the tires on the rims yesterday afternoon, but we're getting ready to leave on a vacation (without Pluto) today.  So the tires will sit in the garage until we get back.  But Pluto isn't quite as "planted" and Oswald is (was?), so I expect a little wandering anyway.

Ifitaintbroke wrote

Hey what's wrong with tritones? I've been known to use a little "controlled discord" sometimes.

"A little" dissonance is fine.  It can definitely add to a musical composition.  But eventually it needs to be resolved!  And in this case the resolution was replacing the tires.