1990 Comanche - My "Lucky" Truck

[amsuco]

My first love is my postal jeep.  But I finally had to park it because it needs too much work...as in top to bottom, and front to rear.  Expensive and extensive work.  But I still wanted something to tinker with and do minor repairs on.  (Note that I said MINOR repairs.  That's important to the story.)  In the Summer of 2013 I decided to search for a Comanche.  I missed out on a couple, but I finally found one on Craigslist in neighboring Indiana.  I rented a trailer, and the lady I lived with at the time and I headed out.

 

We picked up the truck, and on the way back home Kathy spotted something in the ditch along the highway.  I bailed out and she found a place to turn around and came back for me.  When I got back in the truck, I was carrying a handfull of fluff.  This one little kitten was all I could come up with.  I looked all over.  There was no momma to be seen, and no other babies.  This little girl came home with us.  We both figured that for Kathy to have spotted her like she did, this was one lucky kitty!  So we named her Lucky.  My cats are my kids.  We lost Lucky in June of this year.  Since her memory will forever be tied to this truck, I wanted to start my build thread before the year was out.  I'm cutting it pretty close.

[amsuco]

The picture above is from the original CL ad.  It was a driver when I brought it home, but it had issues.  It needed brake work, a new exhaust system, there was a sizeable hole in the driver floorboard, and the A/C was inoperable.  Those were the major issues.  I'm sure there were others, but those were the biggies.  I drove it around a bit just to play, and it was a blast to have a manual tranny again!  The brakes I tried to tackle myself.  I replaced parts and sent it to a garage to do the final adjustments.  While it was there, I also had them charge the A/C and replace a missing fan.  (I didn't notice that it was missing, and for a while, neither did they.)  When I picked it up, the brakes were great.  The A/C was cold.  That was the good news.  The mechanic also asked if I knew my slave cylinder was leaking.  Like...a lot.  Bad news.  That was NOT going to be a minor repair.  And that's when I drove the Comanche home and parked it.  For years.

 

A few years later, there was a false start.  I thought time and money were going to let me start working on it.  I picked up a new Optima Yellowtop, a DirtBound battery tray, and a new set of battery cables from @MeanLemons.  I also bought all the parts needed to convert my AX15 internal slave to external.  I figured that while I had it apart, that was a good time to do an upgrade.  And that was as far as I got.  The battery and related parts were all installed.  The clutch work never got started.  In the intervening years, all the truck got from me was to occasionally start it up and let it idle for awhile.  And to add insult to injury, a branch fell out of the neighbors tree and tweaked the front left corner from the header panel back to the door.  Darn it!