gogmorgo

Just a bit of warning, WD-40 and plastic don't get along so well. But as long as you get it off quickly, you should be fine.

I've always found rubbing alcohol works for duct tape residue, but I've never tried to take it off after it was baked on. ymmv

Didn't realize I was doing much more than replacing the stock lights. Guess that's what I get for trusting the computer at the parts store... I'll look into the harness. Anyone got any suggestions as to where I should get one? I don't really know what I'm looking for there.

It's got a little bit of useful info for other people. I would never have guessed myself that as little as 2 inches of rake would alter suspension geometry enough to cause wobble.

I just put some new H6054XV's in my truck. They seem reasonably bright, but I haven't used them outside of the city, and I need to reaim them. They're not as bright as HID's, though. I just pulled my old cloudy headlights out and put them right into the factory harness. I turn my lights on whenever I'm driving, and haven't had an issue. They're better than the old ones, even pointed in whatever wonky direction they're in. I went down to my preferred auto parts chain store to get them, and that's what they had for OEM replacement. Took a bit of running around to get them to actually sell them, since they were buried in a back room somewhere, or something, so I came in three times before they were willing to sell them to me, which saved me $4 each off a $13 headlight.

Just going over basic causes for excessive fouling. It could simply be that the engine isn't getting warmed up enough to burn off the carbon, but if not, then it could be running too rich (a little unusual in an injected engine, but still possible), or else the timing's too retarded, which would also cause backfiring, or you've got some other ignition system issue, or else you've got compression/oil burning issues, typically from bad rings. Oily spark plugs are pretty obvious though. It seems like you've been over everything except the compression and maybe the fuel pretty fully, so that's why I was asking about it. If compression's off the table, it's likely the plugs are fouled because the engine's not running well enough to generate enough heat in them to burn them clean. Lots of short or low-speed trips and starting and shutting off quickly can also foul them for that reason. So the fouled plugs may or may not be a symptom of the problem. I'd look into the fuel system a bit more (injectors in particular), but I'm not much of a mechanic, so that's about all I've got for you. Sorry...

Basically, from my quick scan of the posts, it looks like they say there are three major obstacles to bolting engines to transmissions. A. Bellhousing to transmission bolt pattern B. Bellhousing to engine bolt pattern C. Input shaft/bellhousing length. Parts 1 and 2 deal with A and B at the same time. 1 is a list of transmission that share bell-tranny bolt pattern, and then a list of all the OEM bells that will bolt up and the engines they'll bolt to. 2 goes aftermarket for more unique combinations. Part 3 starts by bringing up obstacle C and list ways of making things work if it's going to be an issue. Then there's a list of gear ratios each transmission from 1 has, which may be useful if you're swapping trannies. The rest of the posts from Greg in that thread deal with individual and possibly odd issues you might encounter if you go for a somewhat eccentric combination, and there's stuff about mating transfer cases too. Might be useful to scan through it, but there's information about just about everything in there. Makes my head hurt just thinking about what could be in the other 10 pages... I'd just stick with the info in part 1 to find something that works with your transmission with minimal modification if you're still planning on swapping in the stroker at some point. If it's only temporary, does it matter what it is?

Unless it's been obviously dragged across something, the backfiring may have simply split your muffler. I accidentally switched a couple plug wires around in my dad's van when I was 15 and didn't realize it for a month or so, couldn't figure out why it was backfiring so much, and the muffler ballooned and split down the side. Carbon fouled plugs means the engine's not getting hot enough. Assuming you're running the right plugs, and since the plugs didn't fix the situation, this is definitely a symptom. How's your oil use? Got much blow-by?

Yeah, walking alone in the snow rarely turns out well, especially when you don't really know the area. When I was a kid I had a paper route, that had me walking through all kinds of weather for a couple hours. Even dressed up for it and knowing the area as well as I did it wasn't much fun if there was wind or precipitation. More than once, I came in completely numb and hypothermic. But if there wasn't much wind, even -40 wasn't too bad. Shocker what a difference it the wind made. It doesn't really get warm enough here to melt snow between December and February. It's usually a pretty dry area, so we get a few inches here and there, and it just keep building up. We don't often see more than six or eight inches at a time.

Saw the video that came from on Youtube. Some french(?) guy goes out and grabs 1000 girls tits. It's a bit pervy cause half of them look to be about 16...

If the truck runs, and you need/want to drive it, I'd put money into fixing driveability issues. It might mean you'll have to wait another 8+ months once you've saved up again for the stroker, but a great engine doesn't do any good in a truck you can't drive. Either way, you'll likely end up doing both in the end, so minus the amount of time lost going to the back of the queue at the shop, does it really matter what order you do it in?

Yeah, me too. When I was sixteen, I dug out a fifty foot path in about three feet of snow to get my parents' car out of a ditch I slid (read flew slideways and miraculously didn't roll) into when I tried to pull a handbrake turn. Even now, if I can walk out or get help, I'm too proud to admit I got stuck until I've exhausted most resources, and if there's no calling for help, I'll get pretty creative before I give up. And then, I wouldn't leave my gf behind. Either we'd both leave or we'd both stay. I wouldn't say we get hammered by snow, but there was only 4ish inches of the white stuff on the ground two weeks ago, and now there's about a foot and a half. Last year we got next to nothing, but I expect a good 2-3 foot blanket by February.

Seen three in Saskatoon. One of them's mine, one I saw on campus, found out it belongs to a history prof, but I haven't seen it for a couple months or heard from him. I've also seen one cruise past twice, around the same time of day on two consecutive tuesdays, but that was back in September and I haven't seen it since. One up locally on kijiji, but the rest of the Comanche ad's are for trucks at least 300 miles away. I've never noticed one back home in rural MB, or in the bigger cities "nearby" or even when I was living in the GTA, but I really didn't know too much about them until I bought mine this summer. Don't think I would've remembered seeing one.

Half way down the page, I was thinking "my god, the pics just don't stop..." I never really realised how big those were... it makes the 37's look normal... Beautiful truck!

My experience is that a lot of bad situations start with "hey, I've got 4x4..." Yeah, they're up in the mountains, so likely snow's not all that foreign to them, but they were from Cali. I don't know what the "winter" driving is like there, but I suspect there are lots of people there who don't really have that much experience driving in snow. But even if you've got experience, snow can be an unpredictable animal. In the last couple weeks, we've had at least four different kinds of snow fall, making breaking trails down the back lanes a little interesting. In some spots there are hard packed drifts, that will pretty much support the weight of a truck, in other spots you've got snow that's like driving through coarse dry sand, the top in some spots is hard from baking in the sun, and then there's the wet heavy stuff that fell and then froze mostly solid... I drove down a 100-yard section, and there was enough "topography" just in the snow to make me wish I hadn't started down that lane, with a chain link fence down one side and a row of trees on the other, and only about 2 feet clearance on either side. I was barely scraping my diffs along the top of it, but it was still sending me any which way, and that was a perfectly flat and level path before it snowed. Even if he knew what he was doing with the snow, he could still have gotten hung up on a buried rock or stump, or broken through a shallow pond, or any other obstacle than could be hiding under a blanket of snow. Another thing the article mentions is that the "rescuers" were on snow machines. If he was following sled trails, they can be really deceptive. More than once I've been walking down a groomed path, and just took an absent-minded step out of the four inch deep track, and found myself sunk as far as up to my hips. And I'm 6'2. Do that in a car, 4x4 or not, you're @#$%ed. But you're right. Hindsight is always 20/20.

Mine gets fed with electricity when I'm not using it... keeps it warm and happy so I can use it when I want to, instead of four hours later.

"even though that shift knob only says 4 gears, there are five! Jeep did not make a four-speed version of their pickup" quoted from the block of text right after the door panel pics.

Snow's not really the issue... it's more to do with the sub-zero(F) temperatures and the omnipresent 10-15mph breeze... But I do enjoy it, so long as I"m not working in it.

At least it's warm enough where you live for it to rain... here it's -10F and dropping...

Didn't look past the price tag, heheh...

Like one of these? Seems almost useful enough for the $150 after shipping, except I'm pretty near broke and would be buying it just to turn a light off...

The "paint" might be more rubber/plastic... if it sticks up, did you try scraping it off (very carefully)? Typically things like that are molded with the rest of the case, and not applied afterwards. It may go deeper than you think.

First basic survival rule, always tell someone where you're going and when to expect you back. You never know what could happen, and if no one knows where you are or when you should be back, no one's going to be looking until it's mostly too late. It's sad when people don't heed that and die, and in some cases, someone will shut down that location because of it.