Exaggeration lol but had to take the 3rd gen into the city to get parts. Doing 72 up and down mountains I got my 8th best gas mileage.

 

Holy smokes. I wish my truck would get even HALF that.

 

Bought it used the PO said he did all kinds of things to it. I don't know exactly what though

 

Today I reinforced the hvac control and headlight mounting with aluminum.
I’ll drill and tap the holes tomorrow.



While that was setting up I prepped the instrument bezel.
With the original the aux power outlet is fused into the back of the bezel.
The new bezel only has the locating pins, no studs for mounting.
I epoxied it in with some plexiglass blocks.






And finally today, I took it to the shop to have the a/c evacuated and charged.
Yeah... I have chilly air again.

 

Oh, and for anyone interested... the cabin air filter has earned its keep already.



There’s no sign of restriction when they’re wet.
So far I’m very happy with them.

 

Looks like I'll be ordering them!

 

That's a really nice job you did on the hvac and dash repair. I dig those filters too.

Today I slipped in a second band in the transmission. Just trying to get as many miles out of this one as I can before a rebuild. This time I took some strips of sandpaper, fed them around the drum and did the shoe shine action on it to see if I could take some of the rough off of the drum. I didn't get even get past the lowest grit before I gave up on trying any higher grit. Seems like I might have smoothed over some of scoring, but not enough to make any real difference. Oh well, it was just an experiment. I didn't keep track of how many miles I got out of the old band, but it went a lot further than I thought it was going to. As of now it's back to shifting great.

 

Today (after drilling and screwing in the headlight switch and hvac controls), I started on the new double DIN radio.

I had read negative reviews about the double din conversion kit for 2nd gens, with comments about following the instructions and it not fitting, and no matter what they did they couldn’t get it to work.
Well, I will confirm that it doesn’t work per instructions... they only tell you to trim the floor of the existing sub structure... but at the slightly flatter mounting angle (to clear the metal dash frame in the back) the top of the radio hits the top of the opening as it goes in... so I trimmed that out as well, and it fits nicely.
As you can see in the pic, the bracket has 3/8” interference in the back, and the top of the radio is probably 3/16” above that.

 

Not much to show today.
I swapped the (never used) cigarette lighter for an Aux-in & USB socket for the new radio.
Also spliced the adaptor harness to the new radio connector, and planned how I’m going to mount the backup camera.

 

I added my camera to the left of the tailgate handle (in the handle)