Thanks DirtyLarry! It'd be great to get together some day for a trail ride. I've read many of your trip reports and buildups myself and you do some great work.
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Originally Posted by jbclassix
Any updates?
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Just one or two, nothing too exciting.
I have been quite busy. Last year I got married and decided to put an end to my rambling, freelance work style. Eventually I settled into a fulltime position at a company in my particular field. Still living in the same town with the same great scenery all around. Then winter came. Two weeks before I got hitched, I sold my daily driver Jeep XJ to help fund the honeymoon. For six months now, the Suburban has been my regular use vehicle. Only very recently have I been riding my bike to work now that the weather is warm. No, not my 49cc Honda Z50 (though that would be kinda awesome to license and ride), just a vintage Huffy 18 speed.
Last fall I spotted a single 35x12.5 tire mounted to an aluminum 16.5” Centerline wheel on Craigslist. It was 50 miles down the road, but my Mom was going to be in that area, so she paid the man $20 and brought it back to town. Now I've got a fullsize spare which is never a bad idea.
I managed to take care of one or two small issues last fall. I wrote in post #210 about some spark plug wires that I'd routed badly and temporarily bypassed. I did wind up ordering some new wires with 45˚ angled plug ends to replace my 90˚ ones on the driver's side of the motor. I got a universal kit and purchased a vice mount crimper to get the lines the exact length I wanted. This was the worst of the old wires:
No wonder it hadn't been running right. At the same time I also discovered another culprit. The vacuum hose to my MAP sensor had rotted away at the ends so I replaced it with better quality material.
All winter long I've driven the Suburban through sleet, snow, salt and muck. I absolutely love the Mickey Thompson tires. They never feel squirrelly in deep puddles or slick slush. The nearly 50/50 weight distribution on Suburbans is also great in the slippery stuff. Even my brakes seem nicely balanced when traction is limited. During the worst storms I never felt uncomfortable driving at reasonable speeds. Many people here freak out in snowstorms and drive 20 mph no matter the actual road conditions. I can never bring myself to do that but try to maintain a good distance from others and always wind up passing those slow pokes because they seem so frighteningly unpredictable. I tried driving my 240Z one day on unsalted roads, but with the manual trans, revvy motor and summer tires it was all over the place (which was fun in its own way). I did go out with the Suburban and do some doughnuts in a big box store's parking lot a few times this winter. The engine's torque makes for very lazy, relaxed revolutions.
I'm not afraid of a little snow. Sometimes I wish it were a little deeper and more of a challenge.
Its the salt I have a problem with. It keeps making my rusty stuff rustier and my non rusty stuff is now becoming all orange and oxidized.
The Suburban only let me down once this winter. There was a nasty cold spell for about a week. I had to leave for work at 5:45 a.m. and on this particular morning it happened to be -10˚F (overnight low of -16˚F). The Suburban absolutely refused to start. The starter would spin the motor and it coughed but never ran. I tried different approaches in vain for 20 minutes (jumper cables from my wife's running car, starter fluid, etc...) but eventually had to get a ride from a coworker. Daytime temps were still single digit, but I did manage to get it to start later in the week by holding the throttle wide open while cranking. After that I installed a battery blanket and purchased a block heater incase I need to put one in in the future. About a month later the Suburban started up just fine when the temperature was 0˚F with just a turn of the key and nothing more, so it may have simply been a fluke. Other than that one instance, it has been dead reliable.
There you have it, most of the stuff that we've been up to since my last post. One other thing I did do was take my wife out for a little wheeling in the rocks from post #188. I put a little dent in the gas tank, bent an ear on the hitch chain loop and tested my transfer case skidplate, but nothing at all serious. I also still get people occasionally who come out of the blue to talk to me about the Suburban. I left work one day to find a couple in a minivan taking photos of it in the parking lot. We wound up chatting for a while about our individual project vehicles and how cool older Suburbans are. I pulled up alongside a lifted square body 'burb with tube bumpers a few weeks ago and we each called out to the other about how we dug each other's rides.
Now we need to plan some summer trips. The Suburban only has 4,000 miles on the odometer and is ready to be packed up with supplies for some wheeling. Hopefully it'll soon be time to break out the maps again...