Got it running! (sorry for the lack of updates)

Allow me again to apologize for lack of updates.  The last few months have been pretty crazy.  Work's been busy, personal life's been busy, family things have happened, blah blah blah you don't care.

Anyway, when I left off in March I was in the just finishing up rebuilding the motor.  I'll pick up from there.

I cut the rest of the radiator core support out to make finishing up the engine work easier. Plus it needed to be removed anyway.  Tearing things up is fun. I finished up the engine rebuild and hooked all the necessary stuff up so I could test it before putting the core support back in.  The first crank was one of the most exciting things I've ever experienced :)

It was so thrilling seeing the truck fire up again!  I drove it around the yard a little bit just because holy crap it actually works!  My dog wasn't a huge fan of it running open headers, but she lived.

While I had the core support out I took some time to clean up a lot of rust and other garbage where the core support used to be.  I'm sure you can tell, but the clean shiny silver parts are what I cleaned up and painted.  On the driver's side you can see where the huge rust hole was.  I used the good ol' aluminum sheet, liquid nails, and rivets method to patch those holes up to (hopefully) keep it from rusting further.

Since I had the intake off anyway I figured it would be a good time to clean that up and paint it.  It was rusty and just looked like crap.  I used some 000 steel wool to clean up the "Electro-injection" sticker then sanded and painted the intake back to fairly close to what it was originally.  I removed the little vacuum system thing that was supposed to redirect hot air into the motor to warm it faster when it's cold since none of the tubing was there anyway.  One less potential vacuum leak.

I also installed a new A/C compressor, condensor, expansion valve, etc. and had all the rubber hoses rebuilt.

I forgot to put the flipping insulation on this the first time and had to redo it. Fun.

Once I got all that junk back together I painted the core support and installed that.  I read a bunch of conflicting posts online regarding bolting vs welding the core support on.  I have a huge brush guard and all that jazz so I bolted it.  Cry about it.

Since I had all that junk out anyway I went ahead and installed new headlight mounting housing things and an H4 conversion kit I got on ebay for 20 bucks.  It has glass lenses and all and seems to be decent quality.

I also got a new horn for the driver's side.  The truck was supposed to have 2 horns but one of them fell out somewhere before I ever got it due to rust.  I may be missing a few minor things here and there but I'm getting the main bits.  It's been a while...

I got the rest of the AC stuff installed and put the bumper/grille/etc. back on.  I don't know why I didn't take any pictures of that, but whatever.  Actually putting the front together took months just because I was lazy and busy.  I drove it around without a grille and with only 2 bolts holding the front bumper on from March to around August.  Anyway I'm getting ahead of myself, since it was running and in road-worthy condition, I drove it around the yard and around the block and various other places with open headers.  I think I mentioned before that I had to cut the old exhaust out.  I took it to an exhaust shop and had them build me a nice single in-dual out exhaust system.  Looks great when it's cold seeing the exhaust pour out of both pipes nice and even.

I like it :)  Sounds good too.  The truck's got a knock of some sort but it's been going on for like 4,000 miles so apparently it's nothing too important.  One of the lifters ticks too but whatevs.  I drove it for quite a while without issues, then the driver's side brake caliper went out on me.  This is the one that I rebuild rather than replacing back in March of 2012.  This time I didn't mess around.  I went to OReilley and bought the same caliper I have on the other side and replaced the whole thing in the parking lot at my apartment complex, lol.

Got my girlfriend to help me bleed the brakes, put the wheel back on, and the ol' truck's been stopping like a champ ever since.

Here's some pictures of the truck how it sits today.  I also got a new camera, as I'm sure you can tell. Those aren't HDR images, that's just how this Canon S100 rolls.

I've got some electrical issues to work out and some interior work I want to do.  Suspension will be the next big thing...

Thanks for reading!

[OFFTOPIC] How to properly create the certificate for Lync 2013 and Exchange 2013 Unified Messaging Integration

I know this is a truck build log, but the fact that this was published NOFREAKINGWHERE was extremely frustrating to me.  Because of this, ol Beast Build Log is going to have an IT post.

So you've got a Lync 2013 server with Enterprise voice rocking along like a flipping champ. You've got Exchange 2013 throwin' mail around like it ain't no thang.  Shoot yeah, you're a boss.  Flipping need some of that delicious auto attendant and some voicemail though amirite?  You gotta get UM talking to Lync.  The MS documentation for this is a huge wad of mysterious wizardry veiled in vague terminology and poorly-written technet articles, so ignore that flipping junk (I recommend this post for the preliminary UM setup junk.  Even though it's for 2010 it works fine - http://blog.schertz.name/2010/11/lync-and-exchange-um-integration/).  The one thing that seemingly noone flipping documented anywhere is how to form the certificate.  I spent over 400 minutes on the phone with MS with them trying to get the cert to work.  They finally fixed it somehow, but in my 2nd Lync deployment for a customer repeating their steps didn't work.  I have no idea what sort of dark magic they used to make our first deployment work, but I was dead set to figure it out.  Shut up and tell me how to even certificate you say?  PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THE KNOWLEDGE DROP!

Assuming you've got your CA setup on a domain controller or something and all that jazz is working (I'm not even going to get into that), hop on your exchange server and bust open that Exchange Management Shell.  Run the following command with the modifications listed below it:

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>New-ExchangeCertificate -Server EXCHANGESERVER -GenerateRequest -FriendlyName UM-Certificate -PrivateKeyExportable $true -SubjectName "c=US, s=YourState, l=YourCity, o=Company Name, ou=IT, cn=exchangeserver.domain.local" –RequestFile "\\CASERVER\share\Exch_UM_ps.cer"

Substitute EXCHANGESERVER with your exchange server name

Substitute US with your 2 character country name

Substitute YourState/YourCity with your state and city names

Substitute Company Name with your company name

Substitute exchangeserver.domain.local with your exchange server's .local FQDN (exchange2013.mordor.local for instance)

Substitute the \\CASERVER\share\ portion of the final file path with some server that you can dump a cert on. The share will need to allow "Exchange Trusted Subsystem" full permissions.

Once you run the command, browse to that share and open the .cer file with notepad. Copy the big mess of text and browse to your CA's website (http://caserver/certsrv/).

Click "Request a Certificate"

Click "advanced certificate request"

Click "Submit a certificate request by using a base-64" blah blah blah

Paste that big nasty wad of text into the "Saved Request" box

Change Certificate Template to "Web Server"

Click that submit button so flipping hard

Download dat cert

Double click the cert (while still on the exchange server) and click install cert. Bust open your Exchange Admin Center and flipping click Servers on the left side. Go to the Certificates thing at the top. UM-Certificate should show up in there.  Click on that guy and click the pencil looking deal to edit it. Click services on the side like it ain't no thang and place flipping checkmarks beside "Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging" and "Unified Messaging Call Router". Click save. Close all that jank and open Services, restart Microsoft Exchange UM and Microsoft Exchange UM Call router services.

Now test voicemail and junk. That bzns should be working harder than an ill tempered IT man on a monster-fueled video game binge.

Not done, but here's an update anyway.

So the engine work isn't over yet, but I've got a lot of pictures and stuff and figured I'd throw an update out here since its been a while.  This project has been a mess.  Sourcing parts, returning bad parts, buying hoses 400 times, etc.  It's been a constant battle.

So I cleaned the block with a few razor blades.  It took forever but worked pretty well.  It wasn't hard to tell where the gaskets were busted.  Some rust had accumulated but scraped/cleaned off pretty easily.  I ordered a set of heads from Cylinder Heads International (www.headsonly.com).  While waiting on the heads, I went ahead and installed 2 new motor mounts from Rugged Rocks.  They're pretty awesome and weren't too bad to install.

The heads showed up and seemed great.  One of them worked just fine. I popped the exhaust studs in it and bolted the manifold on, then set it on the block.  The other one though, had obviously had some thread work done on the exhaust manifold side and whoever did it failed miserably.  1 of the stud holes was canted pretty severely and another was just completely in the wrong place.  I had to send that one back and get another.  The next one I got didn't have the valve cover gasket surface prepped and had a jacked up stud stuck in the exhaust manifold side -_-

Notice the stud stuck in the side

I was ill about this but didn't want to risk returning it for a refund because they said they'd give me a random core in return.  I got together with a buddy and we got that stud out without a whole lot of effort.  Got that head on, got some new head bolts and washers, and bolted those bad boys down.

I had been meaning to remove the clutch damper and replace the clutch master and slave cylinders, so one day while I was stuck waiting on some parts to show up I tackled that.  The clutch master cylinder looked awesome.  The fluid was semi-solid.  I have no idea how the clutch worked at all.

Clutch hydraulic fluid is not supposed to be green/black.

I drained the nasty fluid out of the lines and also removed the clutch damper, replacing it with a 10mm metric union.

Clutch damper = thing designed to make your clutch horrible

Doing all this wasn't too bad.  Even the slave cylinder wasn't horrible to replace.  The old one was leaking everywhere, another pretty solid indication that my clutch was working at about 30% of what it should have been.

Prior to me cleaning this area (some) there was hydraulic fluid everywhere

And here's what the new master cylinder looks like.

Complete with nice new clear hydraulic fluid.

The next thing that needed addressing was my radiator core support.  It was in horrible shape and was just always in the way anyway, so I figured I'd yank that while waiting on parts.  It would make reassembly easier anyway.

Note the huge rust hole in the bottom of the driver's side portion

about 2/3 of the core support removed via sawzall and a lot of drilling.

The core support is welded in, so it was pretty aggrivating to get removed.  I ended up stretching that out across a few workdays.  The core support is completely gone now.  There's a nice shiny new painted one sitting in the bed waiting to be reinstalled once the engine work is done.

Once the heads were bolted down and I had everything torqued properly, I wanted to address some bits of the intake manifold that weren't needed.  The EGR didn't work anyway because someone had made some small degree of effort to block it off in about the most stupid way possible.  I removed the EGR completely and blocked it off with an aluminum plate a friend made for me.  I plugged up another hole that went to some sort of little dilly that had a couple of hoses attached to it, but that weren't actually attached to anything.  It was basically the vacuum leak port, I have no idea what it was for.  I figured if the truck ran with it leaking everywhere I'd just plug it with JB Weld, so that's what I did.

So this is pretty much how the truck sits now.  I have a few other minor things put on, but I'm going to hopefully get more work done this week.  I hope to have the timing all sorted and get the engine back together completely in less than 2 weeks.  Hopefully she'll crank for the first time since September this month :)

Yay cosmetic things! Aww.... Engine failure :|

So last time we left off where I had just finished getting the bed rail installed.  Shortly after the last post I got that finished up, then my grandad took a turn for the worst and passed away.  Here on out, I'm dedicating the truck to him.  I was hoping to get the bed rail painted and whatnot before he passed on (I knew he wouldn't like it in pink) but that didn't happen.  Anyway, between that happening and then me moving, progress got delayed for a bit.  I digress.  I got the sanding done (I didn't sand it down all the way to the metal for the most part, just knocking the surface paint off and roughing it up to allow my primer/paint to adhere better, also to get rid of any rusty spots where the paint had chipped.  Painting the rail in the truck wasn't real fun, but it wasn't terrible either.

Taping bits of magazine and those big black garbage bags all over the truck helped me keep the black paint off the rest of the truck.  After I got the whole thing painted, I got some lights off Amazon.  These are "Tuff LED Light" brand rated at around 1200 lumens.  I wanted two facing forward and 2 facing rearward (to use as reversing lights).  The bed rail already had holes for installing lights, so I yanked all the old wiring the previous owner of the rail left in it and bought some shiny new wiring, again from Amazon.  Amazon is the best place I've found for wiring, switches, etc. just FYI.  I ran the wiring through the bed rail, then through a hole in the bed, along the frame and up to the cab.  There just happened to be an unused grommet under the seat :)  I cut a hole in this and ran the wires (in loom) up through this and through the same channels the rest of the wiring under there used.  It worked out well.

Here you can see the grommet with the wire loom exiting

Wire loom going out of the bed rail and through the bed

The switch beside the power mirror adjustment knob is for the forward facing lights, and the one below the dash dimmer is for the rear facing lights.  I originally wanted them side by side and still would have preferred that, but there just wasn't enough room.

So I finished this a few days after grandaddy's passing and took the truck out for a spin.  I was pretty excited about the lights being on there and was anxious to try them out.  I drove it around a bit and then when night came I headed out to test the lights out.  Man, were they awesome.  I was super impressed with the dispersion and how far the light was cast.  Then I noticed my temperature gauge.  This was late September, so it was still hot during the day, but at night it was nice and cool.  Well, my truck was sitting at the red line.  I knew one of the head gaskets had been gone for a while (I could smell coolant in the exhaust and had to refill the coolant regularly) but it wasn't too bad, as long as it wasn't real hot and I didn't have to stay stopped a long time it was fine.  Well, now apparently both of them had gone and it didn't take long at all for it to get hot.  I drove it around a bit the next day and it got very hot rapidly.  I shut the truck down and parked it for a fair while.

Sometime I also installed this oil filter relocation kit, but I don't remember when, lol.

Months pass...

My car started acting up one day and a whole bunch of other junk.  It was a stressful time with money being short and Christmas coming up.  I was behind on some credit card debt and some other stuff anyway and it was just a bad time.  I was stressed and didn't know what to do.  Borrowing vehicles, paying for rentals, hemorrhaging money like a stab to the jugular.  I decided I'd just reach into savings and pay a shop to rebuild the Beast's engine for me.  I had gathered all the parts over the last few months, but I'd never done this in depth of work on the engine before and was pretty nervous, plus nobody has time for that.  I called a shop and they were like sure bro bring it over here and we'll fix it.  They kept it for a few days, then were like "LOL J/K too many rust" and gave it back to me.  :|  Frustration to the max, yo.  Feels were raging faster than the Ocoee river and I felt like setting the world on fire.  I decided to get after the car again see if I could figure out what was going on.  Previous attempts had failed.  It was misfiring, barely running, throwing a million codes, etc.  I cranked it up that day, and it was like "lol bro I was just joking" and has been working ever since.  I'm glad it's working, but I really wish I knew what the crap happened.

I digress.

Since the shop are a bunch of punks with minuscule testicles, I got after the truck on my own.  Started yankin stuff off this old guy like it weren't no thang.  My buddy that's helped on some other bits of the truck helped here and there, but for the most part I've done a good job of making progress on my own.

That intake manifold was stupid difficult to remove.

Remove things so I can remove things so I can remove things so I can remove things so I can remove things.

Got that nasty leaky piece of trash of a water pump out of there.  It was the 26 year old original water pump.

Heads off

Heard you like gaskets

 Apparently whoever sortof almost tried to fix some things on this engine before was a complete douchetard.  He didn't bother cleaning the gasket surface before when the pump was leaking, just used silicon and a new gasket over the top of the old one.  What a champ.  I got a surface prep kit and an angle air grinder thing and went to town, finally got all that stuff off.  It took forever.  While doing that I got a bunch of degreaser and whatnot and cleaned the front of the engine as best I could.

So flipping shiny amirite?

 You can see in the picture above that there was still a lot of nasty head gasket residue left over.  This, luckily, wasn't as bad as the water pump gasket, so I was able to remove it using the razor blade method that seemed to be favored around automotive forums.  The gasket residue came off easy enough, but the exhaust manifolds were being stubborn.  I had new ones because the whole exhaust system is one large mass of rust, but these have rusted together so hard none of the bolts will move at all.  I'm going to have to just cut the exhaust free, then take it to a shop and get them to build me a new exhaust.  I've got the new heads sitting in the garage and hopefully will have a couple of little gaskets I was missing in in a few days.  Once those arrive and I get the exhaust out, I can start putting stuff back together.  I found so many problems with this truck along the way.... one of the intake pipes had a shotgun bore cleaner brush stuck in it, for crying out loud.  A ton more hoses were cracked, rotten, leaking, or just missing completely.  It's a wonder this thing ever moved.

After I'm done with it, I really hope it runs like a champ, and runs for another 250k+ miles.

In memory of J.M. Burns January 1937 - September 2013

Fixing things, adding things. Things things things.

Due to some family stuff and having a fair bit of overtime at work I've been a bit lazy and haven't updated the build log in a while.  Progress on the truck continues, however.

A fairly quick and cheap task I wanted to get out of the way was fixing the janky crap of a positive battery terminal that the truck had on it.  There was also a wire that had been spliced together by hand and didn't even have tape over it, so I figured I'd tidy up some of that.  The old terminal was really soft and the way the previous owner had wired some other stuff to it was pretty gnarly.

Plenty of corrosion damage, you can tell it didn't have much life left

That nasty splice

I replaced the terminal with a nice new brass one.  Cleaned up the end of the positive wire and re-terminated the ends of the 2 additional wires with some properly sized terminals.  Cut the ends off and soldered that nasty wire and heatshrinked it.  I then wrapped the whole thing in some nice new wire conduit (not pictured).

So that was a simple enough task.  Whole thing took less than an hour.  The next thing that had been bothering me was a piece of metal interior trim that goes below the rear window.  It was rusty and I had removed it and had it lying in my garage for around a year.  I finally sanded and cleaned it, then sprayed it with Rustoleum rust converter primer.

After priming it I shot it with 4 coats of Krylon Oxford Blue.  It doesn't match perfectly but it looks pretty good.

Realised I didn't have a picture of it in the truck, so I just ran out and took one.

One day while browsing Craigslist I happened to see a trailer hitch receiver for a early model Frontier.  I sent the owner a message asking about it. He said it would work on the hardbody as well.  I did some googling and found this was the case.  I decided since I'd have to pull the bumper off anyway that it was time to get rid of that jacked up rear bumper.  I ordered a early model Frontier chrome bumper and brackets off eBay.  The bumper arrived after a few days, but I was going offroading with some friends so I decided to wait until after that to install it.

After I got back I yanked the rear bumper.  Upon doing this I realized there was some minor frame damage on the passenger side.  The bumper bracket on that side looked like it had been stretched.  It was warped and the bolts were so badly damaged that I had to just use a breaker bar and break the heads off, then tap them out with a hammer.  That bend in the frame was preventing the hitch receiver from lining up properly.  I took a couple pieces of flat steel I had and used my ball joint press to straighten most of it out, then tweaked on it by clamping an adjustable wrench on it and bending it around with that.  It turned out to be pretty easy.

There's what it looked like before. The receiver uses that bottom hole, so that had to be fixed.

With that fixed, I installed the rear bumper.  It did require some modification to get 3 bolts in.  The bumper said it only needed 2, so only 2 of the holes lined up.  The 3rd hole (the receiver hitch recommends using 3) lined up about 70% of the way, so I just used a dremel to open the hole up some more on the frame.

The new bumper looks significantly better.

If you watched the video above, you'll have heard me talking about water getting in the motor.  I took a little bit in through the intake (luckily no damage done).  The cause of this was mostly this huge rust hole.

I'm pretty sure I had mentioned fixing this before but just had been putting it off.  It was finally time to do something about it, so I went and bought some sheet aluminum.  I cleaned the rust hole up some and then sprayed it with rust converter primer.  Waited a day then sprayed a 2nd coat.  Waited another day and then sprayed the area with silver hi temp paint.

I know this isn't the best fix, but it's good enough for now.  If it keeps getting worse I'll tear the snout of the truck off and do a proper rebuild.  Anyway, after painting it I used some paper and made a template of the hole, then used that to cut some of the sheet aluminum to shape. I put a nice thick bead of liquid nails around the opening, then drilled and riveted it in place.  The liquid nails should do a good job of sealing it.  I used liquid nails under the bottom to try to fill in areas I thought moisture might accumulate.

First piece of aluminum riveted in place

both piece in place. It looks pretty good IMO.

After getting the aluminum in place I let the liquid nails dry for a day, then primed it and sprayed the area again with the silver high temp paint.  The next day I put all the stuff that goes in that area back in. 

Once it gets dirty it'll hardly be noticeable :)

I don't remember if I've mentioned it here, but ever since I purchased the truck I've been looking for one of those light bars that goes in the bed.  Well, I finally found one.  It was actually made for a Toyota so I figured it would require some work, but thought I'd check it out.  It barely fit in there.  We literally had to shove it in place.  Once it was in there, it wasn't coming back out.  Oh well.  Paid the guy and drove home.

Original janky bumper is still lying in the bed today, lol.

As you can tell, it was night so I didn't get to work on it any on day 1.  I'm sure you can tell the paint job is pretty crap.  Also, it's pink.  I would have preferred to be able to paint it outside the truck, but whatever.  I can deal.  I'm not sure if you can tell from the photo, but it's leaning forward because the Toyota's wheel wells are shorter.  I leveled it out s that I could bolt it up on the wheel wells and then measured the gap.  It was so tight fitting in there it would just sit like that, with the front bars just hovering in space even without the bolts in the rear.

I was planning on buying some steel tube to use as a 2" spacer.  A buddy suggested just using pieces of pipe cut to length.  That seemed easier so I went with his suggestion.  Drilled some holes and put the pipe in, then bolted it down.

I've currently got about 30% of the rail sanded and primed.  I'll post pictures of it fully painted in the next update.  I've got a ton of parts ready to do some major engine work.  I'm not sure when I'll get around to doing that part, but hopefully it'll be pretty soon.