I spent a day doing little stuff that’s ”under the hood” while access was easy. I cleaned the plugs, disassembled and cleaned the front brakes, and installed new front brake hoses. I then took a close look at the steering shaft routing in order to deal with 3 minor issues that I knew I’d have. Here’s the future path of the steering shaft (the dowel in the pic).
The heat shield around the foremost plug had to be cut down a bit, and the straight boot plug wire was swapped with an angled boot wire from my parts truck. The power steering low pressure line was also in the way, and needed to be bent. It had some rust on it, and I was worried about it cracking or kinking. Joedoh had suggested inserting some kind of rod inside the tube before bending it, in order to prevent kinking. I played around with this a bit and discovered something that works perfectly: a spark plug wire. By cutting off the boot of an old plug wire, I could feed the wire down the low pressure tube as far as I wanted, as these wires are extremely flexible and easily snake through the steel tube. I then was able to put a gentle series of small bends into the tube, which retained it’s round shape perfectly. You can still see the plug wire inside the tube prior to its removal:
With that out of the way I decided to finish off the exhaust system which I had been avoiding as it would involve lying on the concrete. I had to weld in a hanger at the front of the catalytic converter, add some gaskets and tighten a few things up. I had also discovered an interference problem when I mounted the rear passenger fender. The S10 tailpipe ended up inside the fender:
Thank god for that parts truck I have outside. I went out and cut off the end of the exhaust system from the Blazer, and sure enough there was a section that had a nice bend and the exact same diameter that I needed (the right half of the section in the pic):
After cutting off that hanger and making a couple of quick cuts, followed by some welding, I had a tailpipe that was no longer inside the fender:
More to follow!