Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Wheels and lights

Went for a while without doing much work on the truck, just driving it around and enjoying it being functional.  I did find a pretty good deal on some wheels (no tires) on craigslist.  I picked these up and just had a tire shop move the tires off the old wheels onto the new ones.  Both wheels are 15" the new ones are just wider, so the tires actually fit a lot better anyway.  I took these pictures shortly after having the wheels installed.

Era appropriate amirite


Dat offset
I was super pumped about these wheels. They look great on the truck and really make it look a lot better.  Plus the truck drives a lot better having tires that aren't all bulged,  hopefully this will help the tires wear more evenly also.  I had these for about 2 days before my mom ran into the truck :/ It didn't do any damage to mine, but jacked her bumper up pretty proper.  Dad decided to move the truck to a different spot in the yard, which for some reason made one of the rear tires go flat.  Not just flat like oh it has 15psi in it, flat as in there was a gap between the rubber and the wheel.  FFS.  Luckily I had kept all the old wheels, so I loaded one of those up in the Yaris the next day and had a different tire shop throw a used tire on it, balance, etc.  Took this home and installed it.  Drove the truck to the tire shop the next morning and had them fix the problem with the other wheel.  Turns out tire shop #1 used the wrong kind of wheel weights (the ones that clip around the rim) and it was causing an air leak.  I went ahead and had all the wheels rebalanced at tire shop 2 and they have been fine since then.  The truck didn't have a spare, so at least I have one of those now.  I mounted it under the truck properly and everything, so hopefully I'll be able to find a jack and toolkit that matches the truck soon.  I have a jack cover trim panel on order right now.

So, that wasn't really necessary but it really spruces the truck up.  Next I felt that I needed to knock at least something off the to do list.  I had ordered a new blinker/headlight control stick and that finally came in last week.  It doesn't have cruise control, but who even cares about cruise on a 5 speed anyway?  I replaced the switch and the interior lights work a crapton better, several of the idiot lights that didn't work before work now, and the best thing is that dim/bright work.  One of the previous owners had done something weird with the headlights and made this odd janky wire going across the front of the truck to the passenger side to power that headlight.  Dim didn't work at all so the lights were just on bright always, much to the chagrin of my fellow drivers.  After installing the new switch I began working through the wiring and eventually got everything sorted so that bright is bright and dim is dim.  For a while one light would be bright and the other dim because he had wired the passenger lights up wrong during his janky expedition to do whatever the crap he was trying to do.  After undoing all of his jank the lights worked just the same as they did before, so I really have no idea what he was trying to accomplish.

that blue wire is the one that goes to the driver side. There's supposed to be a plug here instead of just 3 wires stuck to the headlight.
dim
bright
So it's pretty awesome having that fixed.  The truck just feels better all the time.  I love that things are finally starting to come together for this little guy.