Steel Soldiers::Military Vehicles Supersite - View Single Post

steelsoldiers · 12-13-2009, 21:03

Man, what a nasty day to work on a truck in the middle of a field! It rained on me all day today. I was soaked to the bone by day's end. I thought I was going to have to stick it in 4x4 to get out of the field. Sorry about the ruts. John!

My goal today was to bolt the front clip in place and get it adjusted so it will close easily.

The first thing I had to do was get the pivot mount off of the parts truck. I had to unbolt the 4 mounting bolts and then slide the whole hood unit off onto the ground so I could remove the mount. That was fun to do by myself! As you can see in the first picture, the parts truck is starting to look very picked over now.

Once I got the mount off, I loaded that and a couple of other things up and went up the hill to prepare the good hood for mounting. I had to bolt the pivot mount onto the good hood and then flip it right side up so I could snatch it up with the 816. I had to snake the wrecker in between all of the other dead trucks to get to the hood. Once I pulled in front of it, I let the boom do the rest of the work. I had the hood hanging from the hook in a matter of minutes. Then, I had to slowly make my way back through the trucks on both sides of the road.

I pulled the wrecker in front of my truck and went to the shop to fetch Pete. He ran the wrecker boom while I spotted and pushed the hood into position. Once we had it lowered into place we lined up the holes and bolted in down loosely. We then disconnected the wrecker and lowered the hood down to check alignment. We tightened the bolts down once we got everything lined up.

Pete went back to work on a bob-truck and I finished the hood install by mounting the catch cables that keep the hood from going past the balance point.

It feels so good to have that hood on there. It finally looks like a real truck. I hope to get all of the lights working next time so I can do a real test drive.