Old Blue - 1984 XL Flareside

[ckuske]

Hi Guys,  

Thanks!  It's a stock radio with the internals replaced with the Aurora FMR - pricey, but it was a good alternative to me.  You can set the radio settings via a file you put on a USB stick.  The radio has Bluetooth, Hands Free, and the cassette still works too!

https://www.tech-retro.com/aurora-design/home.html

The speaker patch, it was there from the previous owner.  I'm not sure where they got it from, but it looks pretty good considering its a patch!  Someday I hope to get it restored here by a place in the San Fernando Valley, but I need to strike gold first.  

[Gary Lewis]

That's the kind of radio I want to put in Dad's truck.  Looks factory but isn't.  

[ckuske]

Yep!  When I was younger, I wanted everything in the truck to look newer.  Now I'm trying to make it look older, and am spending good money on that, haha.

[ckuske]

Ok, I did my timing chain homework.  There is so much junk in the way to see the timing mark clearly, but as best I can tell, there is maybe 2 or 3 degrees at most of slack in the chain.

[ArdWrknTrk]

Alright!  That's another bullet dodged.  

So you won't need to tear the front down and can move on to the next low hanging fruit.  

Have you done any more reading on torque converter symptoms?

[ckuske]

I'm starting to dig into it.  When you Google anything about "torque converter" and "stall", you get lots of stuff about the stall speed, which is a different thing from my basic understanding so far.

If anything, it makes sense to me (which is always questionable) that the torque converter is locking up too early, causing the engine to lug and stall.  But, I am not an expert.

Some pages mention the engine stalling as a symptom of a bad torque converter or a transmission problem in general, though...

[ArdWrknTrk]

Instead of "stall" use a term like loading or shudder.

Not to be a Luddite but I miss Boolean operators and primitive browsers like Alta Vista and Netscape.👴

[ckuske]

I write boolean and ternary statements all day, so I agree with you! :)  I just looked, you can use "AND" or "OR", but there is no "NOT" for example.  Drat.  I remember the Netscape 4.x days, using Trumpet Winsock on Windows 95... sigh

Good idea on shudder etc

[Gary Lewis]

"-" is not.

[ckuske]

Well apparently I was looking on the wrong page, then! (It was a third-party site)  Good to know!

[Gary Lewis]

I used to troubleshoot DEC PDP-8 computers down to the NAND chip, and have written my own OS.  So have had a round or two with logic.  

[ckuske]

Wow, that's impressive!  You truly knew how those machines worked.  And the PDP-8 is legendary.  I wonder if your OS would boot in a PDP-8 emulator? .  On the machines you worked on, did they normally have a tape or paper tape loader?  Or did you have to boot the machine by hand putting instructions in via the front panel?  I know the PDP-8 had more features as it matured.

Most of my current work is in Embedded Linux but I also do some cloud hosted stuff in AWS, and of course there's always a little Windows/Desktop programming too.  What a change in a pretty short amount of time!  The system I've developing for right now is an quad core ARM 64-bit processor with 4 GB of RAM that barely uses one watt of power....

But, that being said... have you ever heard Boyle's Law of Software (told to me by a Sperry/Honeywell engineer that helped design all the current Flight Management Computers on airliners)?

"Software is like an inert gas, it will rush into a vacuum and occupy all available space"

[Gary Lewis]

LOL!  No, I'd not heard of that law, but fully believe it.  I wonder if that guy and I might have crossed paths as I also had a "Honeybucket" computer.

The PDP-8 I worked on was an "L" version.  It had a very limited core memory and a 32K disk, as opposed to the "S" that had no core and fetched all instructions from the disk.  So we were very good at overlays or sub-routines that we swapped in and out rapidly, and we coded very tightly.

And we did have to put in the boot loader via the front panel so the machine would then read the paper tape which held the core routines that would read the disk.  I remember so vividly when they wheeled that machine in I said I'd never be able to remember how to use all of those switches.  And then, a few weeks later I got called in the middle of the night and I sat in the dark tethered to the wall phone and instructed the guy on the other end how to set the switches and enter the codes for the boot loader.  Something like a dozen instructions had to be toggled in.

It is amazing how things have progressed.  You have 4GB of ram and I had 32K of disk.  And your computer uses one watt and mine took up a full rack and had a power supply that looked like an arc welder.  (But the power supply wasn't very good as we kept having system glitches - and usually when my crew went down for our coffee break.  One day I stayed behind and the janitor came in and ran his vacuum in the machine room - and the computer went down.)

[ckuske]

No smoking guns on the AOD thing yet.  I wanted to take it to a local shop to get the fluid changed and the TV pressure verified.  I think the pressure is too high (I didn't trust the gauge that I bought cheaply off Amazon), but I can't find a correlation between high pressure and shudder from a standstill so far.

My truck is currently on stands as my Bluetop steering box arrived.  I have that installed, but I'm waiting for the Borgeson steering shaft.  It was supposed to come yesterday but it got stuck in the FedEx system about 40 miles away.

The next big thing is to take the bed off and freshen up the frame and crossmembers.  But now I think I will take it to the transmission shop before I start on that...

[ckuske]

Got the Borgeson shaft installed, and the BlueTop is in.  I hope to take it for a nice drive in the next day or two.  Even just moving the wheel while it was on stands, there was a huge difference.

I decided to check the transmission fluid level while the engine was warm in the garage - it is low.  Like maybe 1/8" on the dipstick when hot and in park.  So, I'll be filling that and seeing if one quart is enough - and then see if the behavior of things changes.  I know the AOD takes something in the range of three gallons so I don't know if one quart in the pan will help, but we will see.

Oh by the way, I hate my rebuilt C2 pump from Cardone.  I plan on swapping it out with the Lee one that has the Saginaw internals...

[ckuske]

Here is a picture of the new components for posterity:

[Gary Lewis]

Looks great!  And I'm happy that there is such a huge difference in the slack of the steering.

[ckuske]

Just wanted to post a brief update.  Things done so far since last Thanksgiving (that feels like last week!)

1.  EEC Wiring Harness repaired (18 splices, other repairs and new connectors later).  Thank you Bill, for the wire donations!  No more codes in KOEO or KOER.

2.  Entire exhaust system replaced (not including manifolds).  New Y-Pipe, two CARB compliant cats, Magnaflow muffler, and tailpipe location restored back to stock location.  (Was faux "dual pipe" exhaust coming out below the rear bumper).  It had some rust in it, and there was worry that the cats were partially clogged.  The hesitation may be better since this change, but I'm not willing to really say either way yet based on just driving it home from the shop yesterday.

The exhaust is now a little quieter than before, which I am good with.  However, the junk Cardone P/S pump whines louder than my exhaust.  I think the Lee CII P/S pump replacement is next on my list...

I've been driving it more often, and things are looking and feeling better.  Next project is to remove the bed and clean/paint the rear portion of the truck frame, put new wood blocks on for the bed, and put new bed wood down in general.  Then, just paint is left ()

[Gary Lewis]

Good progress, Chris!

As for the PS pump’s noise, when you get rid of one noise you realize there are others. But the C-II is notorious for that.

[ArdWrknTrk]

ckuske wrote

 Then, just paint is left...