And so it begins...

After 3 days in the transmission shop, the truck was ready to be picked up.  I paid the ~$900 bill for having it worked on and the shop said that the transmission was making noises and would probably need to be rebuilt.  I drove it and noticed that it does make a lot of noise, but seems to work fine.  Started searching online and found that I could have bought the whole transmission for around $700 shipped :(  Oh well, live and learn amirite?  So I drove it for 2 weeks or so just making sure it wasn't going to explode or anything before dedicating more time/money to it.  During this time I had it retitled and got liability insurance on it.  Love the truck!  It's a blast to drive and is a lot more fun than my car since it's a manual.


Anyway, since it works, I decided it was time to fix some things.  First I replaced the janky non-power mirror with a proper power one ($40)


Here's the old non-power mirror.

And the nifty new power one :)

Tested it and it works great.  Excellent!  While I had the door panel off, I figured I might as well swap the speakers.  The previous owner had already yanked the OEM speakers and replaced them with some Memphis speakers, but they were held in with one improperly sized bolt and sounded much too "tinny" for my tastes.  I bought a set of Infinity Reference Component kits.  Dropped a woofer in each door to start with.

Look pretty awesome. I love Infinity audio!  At this point... things began to snowball.  I decided I should go ahead and swap the crappy Dual brand head unit that was in the truck.  I bought a Kenwood KDC-252U head unit.  While driving the truck, I noticed that the air conditioning worked, but didn't come out at the face level, regardless of where the selector was it seemed to come out at the feet.

The more I thought about it the more I wanted to do.  The interior was pretty dirty (it was a farm truck) and I could tell there was a lot of filth behind the dashboard.  I decided that I should just yank the whole interior, clean it, fix the AC, replace the head unit, do a proper tweeter install, check all the wiring, replace the dashcap.... yep.  This is when I decided that this was going to be a long project.

More coming soon, I'm just getting started :)