[HO455]

I had some M&R that I needed to get knocked out this week and fortunately there was one dry day and incredibly I had it off!
First up was fixing the tail lights. Two nights before I was 2 blocks from the house when the dash lights went out. A couple of quick checks revealed I had no taillights or emergency flashers. The fuse looked good so I knew it wasn't going to be a simple fix so I parked the WMB for a couple days.

When I started troubleshooting the problem I assumed the issue was going to be with the light switch. Lately when I turned on the high beams the headlights would go out. If I pushed and pulled the head light switch the high beams would come on. So I pulled the switch out and tested it with an ohmmeter and found poor conductivity through the dash light circuit of the switch. I thought I was on the the problem. However...

I disassembled the switch and cleaned all the contacts and reassembled the switch. Now I had good conductivity through the switch but, when I plugged it in and tested it, the lights still refused to light. After another 30 minutes of troubleshooting I decided to pull the fuse and check it and bingo! The fuse was bad. Visibly it looked good but, no conductivity. Grrrrrrr! I installed a new fuse and everything was good again. There is no indication of why the fuse failed.

This time there was an upside to making a bad assumption. And it was, now the high beams work every time and the dash lights seem a bit brighter.

Next up was fixing the leak in the power steering pump. Ever since I installed the CS130 alternator I have had very little adjustment range in the alternator drive belt. This comes from the alternator hitting the aftermarket valve covers. So a couple weeks ago I decided to do some slight modifications to the alternator mounts to gain some more adjustment range. By now I imagine you're asking what does the alternator belt have to do with a leaking power steering pump?

During the imagineering part I managed to drop the alternator and it hit the pump and deformed the edge of the fluid tank. At the time I was only bummed since my new pump now looked quite used but, the reality was that the tank now leaked. It was a pretty bad leak that left a 6 or 7 inch oil spot every time I parked the truck. The fix required that I pull the pump out and remove the pump housing from the tank. Once that was accomplished I carefully tapped the dent out of the tank and reassembled the pump with some sealant on the O-rings to be sure of getting a good seal. That seems to cured the leak. (Knock on wood)

Last on the work list was to replace the driver's door hinge pins. Since getting the WMB on the road I've had to re-adjust the upper hinge 3 times. Over time I would start feeling the door dragging on the latch, so I would move the upper hinge to get things back in line.

Thanks to all the folks who posted the how to replace the pins this task was pretty straightforward. Fortunately the pins in my hinges were not fused in place. So the actual time to replace the pins was about 10 minutes per hinge.

The time consuming part of the job was removing the hinges from the truck. It took a combination of 4 different wrenches to remove them. (Photo #1) The bolts on the cowl side ended being a real pain as they had a fair bit of rust on the ends. Lots of pentrating oil and patience were required. Only an 1/8th of turn at a time on some of them. I supported the door with a cool door support, my buddy Bob turned me on to, while I removed the hinges one at a time. (Photo #2) That really made realigning the door fairly simple once the pins had been replaced.

The hinge pads for the swing control (? I'm not sure that is the right name) weren't worn very much so I just turned them 180 degrees and reassembled the hinge.