WreckDiver1321's American D40 Frontier

[WreckDiver1321]

Here's a couple photos I forgot about until now. This is in the Beartooths just before I installed the suspension.



And this one was over Christmas, near my parent's house up north. Took the truck as far up the road as I dared go. This is about 20 meters up the road from where the snow got too intense (touching the bottom of the doors). This is one of my favorite shots.

 

[ShortyNavros]

These are some beautiful pics mate, my girlfriend is Canadian (Vancouver, BC) and I have a feeling we will be moving there at some point in the future, this has got me so keen haha

 

[WreckDiver1321]

These are some beautiful pics mate, my girlfriend is Canadian (Vancouver, BC) and I have a feeling we will be moving there at some point in the future, this has got me so keen haha

Thanks! And very cool, it looks like my wife to be and I are going to do some touring up in Canada later this year.

 

[WreckDiver1321]

This showed up at my door this morning!



You can see the dark rectangle on it? Yeah, well when they sent it, they didn't wrap it up or anything. Just stuck the shipping labels to the plate and sent it off. Oh well, a little work with a razorblade takes most of the glue off. I pulled the labels off and sanded it down a little to rough it up. Then I hit the slight surface rust around the welds with a wire brush. Then I sprayed the plate down with oven cleaner (since that's what I had sitting around) and wiped it off.



Then I got to painting. Since I have a black-with-red-accents kind of theme going on here, I decided on...



Just shot a couple coats, then flipped it over.

 

[WreckDiver1321]

Drying as we speak.

Now I decided to get this in bare steel and paint it myself because, let's face it, it's kind of a sacrificial part. It seemed absurd to pay an extra $35 to have it powdercoated so I could scratch it up. $5 in rattle can paint and it won't rust, and I can easily touch it up later.

 

[Foxtrot16]

Nice looking truck and countryside you have there; however, you can keep the snow

Karl

 

[WreckDiver1321]

Nice looking truck and countryside you have there; however, you can keep the snow

Karl

Thanks!

Haha I'll gladly take the snow. I really love winter weather.

 

[WreckDiver1321]

Well, Lola has been relinquished to someone else... Briefly. I took her in to a shop to have the timing set replaced. Nissan, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the otherwise amazing VQ40 needed to have timing chain guides made out of plastic. As you can imagine, these eventually wear out and then cause all kinds of fun damage. Luckily, this problem is easy to diagnose and when it does occur, it gives you plenty of warning before it actually does damage. It causes a whirring/whining noise that can go on for tens of thousands of kms before it leaves you stranded. Mine has been making the noise since the day I bought it, so I knew it was going to have to be done eventually.

So I'm without a truck for the rest of the week. Oh well, at least it will give me some peace of mind. As a plus, since work is being done on the front of the engine anyway, it's getting a new oil pump, water pump, radiator hoses, serpentine belt, and coolant. The old belt and hoses are becoming my emergency spares. So once this is done, then I don't have too much left in preventative maintenance to do. In reality, all that's left is brakes, u-joints, and spark plugs. Once that stuff is done, I should be pretty much set.

 

[Kawaiman]

Wow mate you have some beautiful pics and countryside to match..

 

[WreckDiver1321]

Wow mate you have some beautiful pics and countryside to match..

Thanks! I do love the scenery out here.

 

[WreckDiver1321]

I got the truck back from the garage last Friday. They put in extra hours and worked hard on it so they could have it back before I had to go to work. I'm very impressed and I certainly think I found my new mechanic!

 

[WreckDiver1321]

So, a couple of updates:

I've recently been trying to install an auxiliary fuse block under the hood, mainly because I was walking around the local sporting goods store the other day and I found out they sell Blue Sea fuse boxes. So I bought one and went about installing it, which turned out to be a bit of an upgrade for my electrical system.

First thing I did was figure out where I wanted everything to be mounted and bought some screws, washers, and nuts at the hardware store.



With the box mounting location figured out, I set to building the cables. I bought a Kicker 4 AWG stereo wiring kit complete with a 100A inline fuse and holder. Super high quality stuff, and money well spent. I also bought a Kicker battery terminal. Luckily I am an employee at Best Buy, so the whole thing only cost me $40. I cut the wires to length and got the inline fuse set up.

 

[WreckDiver1321]

My OE battery terminal was looking pretty rough, and I needed a good way to attach my accessory wiring. This wasn't going to cut it.



Thanks to a build thread from a friend over on Expedition Portal, I was able to place an order for this beauty from Sonic Electronix.



This Xscorpion terminal gave me a great place to mount the factory wiring as well as a great spot to put the positive cable for my fuse block. It will also give me a place to put the positive cable for my winch and a smaller positive cable for the second power distribution block inside the cab. A great bit of kit for less than $20. I installed the new positive terminal and attached the factory wiring with a stainless bolt and a couple of washers I got from the hardware store. Everything got tightened down and I attached the small ground wire to make the built-in voltmeter work. It looks awesome now, and as you can see, I am currently at 12.8 volts.

 

[WreckDiver1321]

With the positive side assembled, everything was looking sweet.



The next thing to do was take care of the earth side. Unfortunately, my earth terminal was looking pretty rough too, and there wasn't a good way to mount the accessory box earth cable.



Remember the Kicker terminal I bought? I had intended to use it as a positive terminal and figure out something else for the earth terminal. I couldn't find bolts short enough that were the right size to make it work, so I ordered the Xscorpion terminal and figured I would just return the Kicker one. Then I looked it all over and decided it would make an excellent earth terminal. So a little bit of wire work later, and I've got this:

 

[WreckDiver1321]

Nice and beefy, looks good, and very secure. Overall I am super happy with the way everything turned out. It looks great, allows me to run my accessory wiring easily, and should be a much better setup power wise than the stock connections.

Now for a bit of bad news. After I finished up all the wiring stuff and moved the truck, I noticed a small oil spot had formed underneath the truck. After doing some looking around, I found out the valve cover gasket is leaking very slightly. Now for the good news part of the bad news. The mechanic replaced the valve cover gasket when they did the timing chain kit. This means they should cover the repair work without it being a problem for me. I'll drop the truck at the shop Monday morning and hopefully it'll be fixed pretty quickly. Overall I'm pretty optimistic.

 

[user 10312]

Thanks for write up and pics.

 

[WreckDiver1321]

Because we both happened to have a day off, my fiancee and I took a day trip on Friday to the historic town of Chico Hot Springs, in what is known as Paradise Valley.



Chico is located about 50km from Yellowstone and a few minutes south of the town of Pray, Montana. This is about a 1.5 hour drive for me. The hot springs there had historically been used by the native population as a place to bathe. Mining activity in the region led to the discovery of the hot springs by settlers in 1900, and since then it has gradually been turned into a resort.



Being so close to Yellowstone, it is a great place for staying in a nice hotel which, I might add, has one of the finest dining establishments in the region. Chico also has a working tourist ranch, where they provide guides and horses for riding tours into the park. The biggest attraction to Chico though are the pools. Chico boasts two pools fed by naturally filtered spring water that has no need for any sort of chemical treatments. Since the water is coming up from a natural hot spring, it has already been filtered through the rock strata. They keep the pools themselves clean by draining and scrubbing them every night. It's quite a relaxing place to visit to kill a day. Then there are a couple of roads that snake up into the mountains, one of which leads to the old mining town of Chico. I took the opportunity to do a little scouting, since I've never been up this particular fork of the road. There a quite a few old buildings and many old abandoned vehicles.

 

[WreckDiver1321]

This shed is one of my favorite old sights along the road.

 

[WreckDiver1321]

Then the road starts making it's way deeper into the mountains. I had to turn around due to time and snow.





After making it back to Chico, we headed into the city of Bozeman and spent some time browsing the local camping stores before hitting the Montana Ale Works for some good beer and tasty food and driving back home, through a slight blizzard.

 

[user 10312]

Nice shots!

You have certainly worked out what composition is.

Thanks