My J-4500

[Crankyolman]

cranky,

I see why you did not take me up on the decals,....
....because you can do it yourself,

I am also impressed with your lettering skills for the gladiator name,
great job on drawing the gladiator logo.

also great job on taping up the jeep letters on the tailgate.

you got a good eye for the details.

tailgate looks really good.

dave in NC

I'll tell you when I was fighting with that fine line tape I was regretting not taking you up on your generous offer. Next time I will go with the tape I know. I actually had to rush because I started masking it then got caught by someone who was likely to complain to management. I wasn't all that worried because management was fully aware of my activities but still don't want to piss people off. Then all hell broke loose and everything went south at work but since it had been recently painted I couldn't put it back under the table where I had been storing it and couldn't leave it at work over night for fear of someone messing with it so I needed to get it back on the truck that day. So every minute of free time and a few that weren't went into getting the paint on the letters in time for it to dry so I could get the tailgate reinstalled before I went home.



I used to draw and paint not just cars and motorcycles but oil on canvas and stuff like that. Today I spent several hours sitting in a truck waiting for things to break which was happening far too frequently but in between fixing stuff I worked on resizing and slightly redesigning the logo once again.


The one I did the other day was a hair over 2 inches high. It's hard to get an idea of scale but this first one is around 1.75" high






and this second one is around 1.5" high. I think this one is pretty close to the original decals and easily fits on a 2" wide piece of masking tape which makes transferring it that much easier.





I will still probably redesign and redraw it a dozen more times before the final paint job making minor subtle changes each time until I'm as happy as I'm going to be.

[Crankyolman]

Some time ago my wife ordered new bed panels for my truck. Some time before that she made arrangements for the guy we bought her Mercedes from to do the work on the bed. I would be doing it myself but time is at a premium right now so I agreed to allow him to do the work because I know he will do it right, won't over charge me and I will get my truck back. I've read too many times about someone working on a car or truck trying to steal it. I trust this guy and have seen him turn a Tri-five Chevy convertible from something that looked like it had been left to rot in the woods for the past 50 years to a pristine car in about 2 weeks. He had to replace virtually everything from below the middle of the door so I know he can handle this. Plus I've pretty much gotten my wife onboard about letting me paint it rather than pay someone else to do it and maybe I can find some time to work on her Mercedes.



Anyway, the parts arrived yesterday from a company I have never heard of called Nor/am ( https://www.noramstore.com/ ) even though we ordered them through BJs. Bjs lists them for a lot less than Nor/am but once you factor in shipping it all works out the same. I'd like to say the transaction with BJs went smooth but unfortunately that isn't the case but the parts finally arrived in good shape and my truck can go to the metal man. Hopefully the bed support hat channel I am having custom made will be finished by the time it goes.


Here are some pictures of the new bed panels when they arrived.


This first one is unloading it from the truck



It was kind of a pain because the crate was too long for the drivers pallet jack and when they nailed the "crate" together they used nails that were actually longer then the thickness of the boards so they dragged and snagged on the bed of the truck.


This next one is checking them for shipping damage



The ends of the crate were missing so they were open on the ends and the parts could have easily slid out and gotten damaged, Fortunately they were in good condition.


This is one with a panel held up to the side of the truck



I was very concerned about how they would fit since BJs website has this note about them

**Note: 1963-1973 long-bed models will require modifications to panel in order to fit. The front of this panel is shorter than the original long-bed during those years, and will place the wheel well in a different spot.

but it looks like the wheel well is in the right place to me. It does look like the cutout is about an inch too wide for my flares which makes me wonder if the post '73 flares are slightly larger than Kaiser era flares. I do have enough good metal around the flares that if needed the metal man can work with what I have and it be OK. I don't know if he will cut out bad sections and replace them with sections cut from these panels or replace the entire thing but I'm good either way.


Last is the new bed panels crated back up and loaded into my truck ready to go to the metal man.



These things are heavy and the crate is heavy too but fortunately my neighbor was curious about my delivery so I roped him into helping me load it all into the back of my truck

[Crankyolman]

Last Friday I got the hat channel I ordered. It's pretty much exactly what I needed.






It will be replacing this one, which you can see was in similar shape to the bumper



Today my truck was loaded onto a tow truck and taken to the metal man.



There has been a lot of back and forth between spending money and spending time. I could have made the hat channel myself but that would have taken time I didn't really have to spare so I paid a company to make it. It actually came to roughly the same price as if I had bought one for a Chevy from LMC trucks so I'm not upset about the cost although I am a cheap bastard and prefer to do everything myself.



The tow was a similar situation. I did the math on the round trip to Shelton for me and my wife to take it ourselves and it would have cost about $100 and been a minimum of 4Hrs round trip. The tow truck cost $300, so $200 more but saved me the better part of a day on the road.



Time has been extremely short because my son has developed a medical issue while living out of state with his girlfriend and they were coming back and needed a place to live. Doctors are working on it but some days are pretty bad and as a result he can't work so they only have her income. An affordable place to live around here is almost unheard of but my wife found a used mobile home dirt cheap in a park that has reasonable rent. It was in the process of being fixed up so it wasn't move in ready. The bedrooms had already been redone and the living room and bathroom started but the kitchen hadn't been touched...well it had but not in a good way, that in itself is a long story. We needed to sheet rock the living room, remodel the bathroom, replace a few windows, remove 200sq ft of $6 a sq ft flooring that had been badly put down and when we pulled the kitchen cabinets out we found 12 feet of wall, subfloor, sill plate and floor joists so rotten they just needed the whole thing replaced. Then we had to do all new flooring throughout. We have been working non stop for a month on it, 2-3 hrs every day after work and 12+ hrs on both days of our weekends.



They moved in a week ago but still don't have a kitchen but they did have a working bathroom sink and toilet but didn't get a tub until Monday. We were over there until dark Monday getting the plumbing sorted out so we could finally have a weekend to ourselves. My weekend is Tuesday and Wednesday and we haven't done much of anything and have thoroughly enjoyed it. The kids are thoroughly enjoying their new home, which is now pretty much new. So today the truck was chauffeured to the plastic surgeons to get worked on.



It feels very strange to be without my truck, I have come to rely heavily on it these past few years as has my wife and I'm not very good at letting other people work on my stuff...or do things for me for that matter. Now if my wife wants to go somewhere while I'm at work she will have to drive me to work. It's a bit of an inconvenience but I hope it is worth the effort for the outcome.

[Crankyolman]

For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to patiently wait for the repairs to the bed of my truck to be finished but I am rather anxious and worried about it. The guy doing the work is not at all happy with the replacement panels my wife bought from BJ's, (they actually came from Nor/am). He said they are made incorrectly and unusable. Since I'm pretty sure I can't return them I told him to cut them up and make patch panels if he could or fab new patch panels. I think he still wasn't happy but there isn't a lot I can do about it, as far as I know these are the only panels available and to my untrained eye they looked close enough to serve as patch panels. Had I thought they were going to be completely useless I certainly wouldn't have let my wife talk me into letting her buy them in the first place.


So as a caution to anybody else considering buying these panels from BJ's or Nor/am DON"T! Do yourself and your wallet a favor and fab patch panels yourself or have someone fab them for you.



He also didn't like that the bed floor panels came as 2 panels split in the middle. I don't like that either because they could have done it like Jeep did with the corrugated section made separate from the side sections but this is how they come and this is a truck and will always be a truck, and will get spray on bed liner anyway, so a seam down the middle doesn't bother me.


Anyway, He has been working on it for 2 weeks now. Last week he sent us this picture of it while he was working on it.



Friday he sent me an email letting me know he had everything stripped down and was working on fabbing the rear corners and whatever else needed fabbed and would hopefully be finished by the end of this coming week, which is good because the whole project is already over budget and the money completely runs out next Friday. Our current plan is to drive out there and drive the truck back a week from Tuesday.


I actually really regret giving in to my wife wanting to let someone else work on my truck. I hate not being in complete control and am second guessing my desire to even fix the truck back up. I love my truck but I look at the money I have in it and all the work and money left to spend and think how I could buy a catalog truck like a late 50s Chevy for the same price or less and be able to buy every single part from a catalog. However one thing I really like about my truck is you don't see many J trucks around and you almost never see Kaiser era trucks and this one is a daily driver and deserves to be made to look new again. I do love my truck.


Just before we sent the truck to be worked on I had been using it to haul stuff to my sons place which put me in heavy traffic in 90 degree temps and the truck began getting a bit warm waiting for stop lights. The warmest it got was 210 but that is too hot in my book. About this time KaiserMan started parting out an "72 Wagoneer with heavy duty cooling package so I was going to buy those parts from him and try to beep everything looking original but before I could make the arrangements with him I ran into unforeseen extra expenses with both my sons place and the truck and couldn't go through with the purchase. The rainy season has begun here and the cold weather is already coming. I know the truck will be fine through the winter but by next summer I will have to have a solution. A couple days ago I found some thick aluminum sheet in the scrap bin at work and may try to make my own shroud or I have recently begun looking at the possibility of installing electric fans out of a Ford Contour. The Fitech is capable of controlling the fans and with the new 150 amp alternator I now have enough amperage to run them so I may go that route.


Because of all the additional expenses on everything my wife is saying I can't paint the truck the colors I want to because the interior won't match a burgundy and cream exterior. When we had it reupholstered we had it done to match the original champagne and copper. I tell her it is close enough but she insists that if I paint the outside burgundy and cream the inside must match or be black. So in her opinion it would need reupholstered again which is simply not in the budget for the foreseeable future. On a lesser note the engine wouldn't match any more either, it currently matches the copper of the body, although for some reason people say it is gold but I'm not about to repaint the engine to match a different body color.


I've also been spending some time looking at cars for my sons girlfriend. The day before they were supposed to leave Salt Lake City she was in an accident and totaled her car which left them with nothing but my sons Mustang, which is not a winter car. So she will need some way to get to work this winter. The insurance company is finally ready to settle with her so we have been trying to find her something suitable in her budget. In the process of that I came across a wrecked Charger and a wrecked Challenger Hellcats that are at the insurance auctions and I have been fantasizing about putting a Hellcat engine in the truck. I wonder what kind of transfer case can handle 700 HP. I also thought about putting it in my wife's Mercedes but I think a 700 HP engine in a 1500# car for an old lady who thinks 65 MPH is insanely fast is probably too much.

[SOLSAKS]

wishing you good luck with the truck cranky,
it will all work out,....

hope your son gets better real soon.

at least he has family looking out for him.

your j truck is worth all the effort

I doubt my sanity/choices during every project I have done.

keep at it, you got a lot going on aboard life's rollercoaster.......hang on !!!

dave in NC

[Crankyolman]

wishing you good luck with the truck cranky,
it will all work out,....

hope your son gets better real soon.

at least he has family looking out for him.

your j truck is worth all the effort

I doubt my sanity/choices during every project I have done.

keep at it, you got a lot going on aboard life's rollercoaster.......hang on !!!

dave in NC

Thank you Dave.



I always seem to have a lot going on but lately it has been pretty extreme.



At the moment I'm really regretting sending the truck to be worked on by someone else. He said he is close to finish but needs another week but won't charge any more money. I told him I was planning on driving it home but he said my fuel tank mods are shady and he won't put the gas tank back in and the wiring on the back end is a mess so I will have to have it towed home.



OK, I will admit the way I did the wires for the electric fuel pump into the tank is probably not the best, and I have always planned on changing it but it's not unsafe.


I also knew the wiring back back at the back of the frame was a mess and have been planning on fixing that when I have the bed off for a long time now but it is not unsafe either.



He also said it will come back primed but it can't be left outside or driven in the rain. I already knew you need to get paint on it as soon as possible. I have actually planned all along to get it home, take the bed off, paint it and the back of the cab behind it, clean the frame and differential, run new wires, fix the exhaust where it comes across the diff and a bunch of other stuff once I get it home, so I really didn't need told any of that.



My wife also tells me I offended him somehow when he emailed me saying the panels were unusable and I needed to return them and I told him to cut them up and use them as patch panels or do whatever he needed to because they are not returnable. I'm guessing he is used to working on catalogue cars that have parts available so he isn't used to having to improvise. Whatever it was somehow he was offended by me telling him how to do his job or something like that. I don't know exactly what the deal was, my opinion was "here's what you have to work with, I have x amount of money to spend, can you do the repairs or not?" I don't believe I was telling him how to do his job but he somehow took offense.



At this point I just want my truck home so I can do whatever I need to to get it through the winter and possibly drag home a few hundred (maybe a thousand?) pounds of apples before apple season is over.

[SOLSAKS]

dang,....yes some are easily offended.

hope you get it home soon so you can do the things to it you want

and then you can do the things WITH IT that you want !!!!

like those apples,.....man I bet they are good !

dave in NC

[Crankyolman]

dang,....yes some are easily offended.

hope you get it home soon so you can do the things to it you want

and then you can do the things WITH IT that you want !!!!

like those apples,.....man I bet they are good !

dave in NC

I've been feeling kind of down about the whole thing but trying to keep from complaining about it. I guess I had a major failure on that last night. It will come home next week. I almost have the garage clean enough for the Mercedes and the plan is to get a Harbor freight portable garage which hopefully can be modified into a make shift paint booth. Then I will shoot the paint, bedliner and undercoating and get the back end back together.


My wife says I have a serious apple obsession. I have some crazy apple processing stuff and last year picked and pressed somewhere between 1,300 and 1,500 pounds of apples which netted me 95 gallons of cider plus 5 gallons of pear juice. This year the apple trees went just as crazy but I haven't had much time to pick. So far I've only pressed 15 gallons of cider but it's now time for the dessert apples which are the most important for sauce, juice and, for us, pie filling, although the tree that produced our best pie filling apples got cut down so it has been a bit of an issue finding a replacement for that.



If you let me get started on apples I will go on and on about it. Some people even think my biggest apple equipment is my truck itself which is some times referred to as the Apple Reaper.


Anyway as far as the truck I just have to try to be patient and hopefully the work will be what I'm hoping for.

[SOLSAKS]

it will turn out good cranky

I want to see a photo of that truck loaded with apples

heck

I want to see some pics of you processing those apples !

it will be like an episode of " on the road with Charles kurault"

.......interesting stuff done by interesting people.

dave in NC

[Crankyolman]

Here are a couple pix from last year


This first picture was taken in July. The first apples I pick every year are Yellow transparents. Each of those bins holds over 100 LBS of apples. This was my second trip to that tree, it regularly gives me 300 to 600 LBS a year, there is also a tree in the back yard of that house that pretty much matches it in weight produced.




This next pic was on Nov 14th. A bucket of apples weighs between 20 and 25 LBS depending on the size of the apples, 23 LBS is a pretty standard figure. The big red tub will hold close to 3 buckets full.


This is a picture of all of the November apples I picked. Getting ready to process them all. You can see the chopper in the background, It's a kind of crazy machine I developed to chop the apples up small enough for pressing.



Last year I picked from July until Dec 31st, there are only a few types of trees that hold on to the apples into Dec.



Somewhere I have a picture of the back of my truck completely full of buckets of apples but I can't find it right now.


I have some youtube videos showing my chopper in action if you would like to see it, although I am constantly making improvements to it. Today it looks like this



I tried to make a video of it operating this year but there were some technical difficulties and when you only have 100 LBS of apples and a chopper that is capable of eating them in around 2 minutes if one little thing goes wrong during filming you miss the whole thing.



I do have a youtube video I put up last year that shows a timed test.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZUNsuiHJxI

Since then I have made a bigger hopper and a chute to funnel the apples pulp down to a large red tub. This makes it easier and faster to process all of them. My press is also constantly evolving in an attempt to make the whole process more efficient. The chopper is actually faster than most commercial grinders/choppers/scatters but the press slows everything down. I'm considering building a second press to make everything go faster.


If you want to see the long drawn out video of the evolution of the chopper You can see that here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awiBsXrJt_Q

[SOLSAKS]

cranky

just found the apple photos !!!

great !!!

thanx for posting.

Iam sure I am not the only one that is envious of you,...

I love apples

and apples in a j truck, well thats even better !

I will watch the video soon.

thanx again.

dave in NC

[rang-a-stang]

I am usually super picky about which posts on this forum I show my boss (wife); I don't want her to roll her eyes and think "oh great, here he comes again with more of his jeep stuff". Your apples post was one I showed her (along with the video). Your apple chomper (my name for your apple chopper) is awesome!

I need to get up to PACNORWEST ASAP!!! I want to pick apple like that!

[Crankyolman]

Right now is prime apple season. I frequently have people asking if I want to come pick their tree but don't have much time this year so haven't been able to take anybody up on it. The trees that produced those November apples last year are actually already ready to pick and I need to go talk to the owners of it to see if I can have them this year. I don't know if I mentioned it but the area I live in used to be the major apple producing area for Washington state and pretty much the country and a lot of the trees are remnants of those orchards. A lot of people around here view the fruit trees as a nuisance then I come along and rake up all the drops that are already in their yard and take all the apples that would otherwise make a mess and I will often bring back some fresh pressed sweet cider or hard cider for them to thank them. They are usually pretty thrilled to see me. The truck also sometimes helps break the ice, after all how many of us frequently hear "You don't see one of those every day" when someone sees us?



It is a lot of work to pick and process apples but it's also a lot of fun and you get to try apple varieties few people ever get to. Have you ever tasted a Yellow Transparent, White transparent, Vista Bella, Arkansas Black or Hazen? These are only 4 of the 20+ varieties that usually go into my annual cider mix.



I also have my very own apple tree that was a chance seedling that I found that produces apples that can have twice the sugar of most store bought apples and very low acid. I spent years attempting to clone that tree with only a small amount of success. Last year that tree and an entire apple thicket was bulldozed to develop the land. I managed to get 300 cuttings a few days before it was taken out. From those 300 cuttings I managed to grow 4 trees and I am now the only person with any of this variety of special apples. I also have a multi graft ed tree that has bears these apples. They are very late season apples that under certain conditions produce up to 12% alcohol. Because they are low acid I can freeze concentrate the juice to nearly double that without any harshness that most juice gets when you freeze concentrate it. I then ferment it with special yeast that can only tolerate up to 12% alcohol to make what's called Iced apple cider. The problem is you don't taste the alcohol, it just tastes like really good apple juice...until you stand up, then it hits you all at once. My wife calls it her "happy apple juice"



I told you not to get me started on apples

[Crankyolman]

I got some pictures of progress on my truck today











It looks like there is a little bit of structure and the bed floor left then it can come home


My wife and I went to the casino the other day and actually won enough that it will pay for the ride home with enough left over for at least some paint. We are still arguing about exactly what colors it's going to get painted. I still want burgundy and cream and like the idea of colors that I can pick up touch up cans at the auto parts store. She still says it needs to stay original because the interior won't match if it isn't Champagne and Copper Tan.

[Crankyolman]

My truck finally came home today but there are some issues.




Right now it looks like this









Overall I think he did a good job on the fabrication work. The lower aft corners are awesome! but the side sheetmetal was done just like the factory. Which of course leaves a place for stuff to build up and cause the rust that these trucks are plagued with.



Does anybody know some kind of seam sealer I can put in there that I can paint over?


Here are a few closeups.


Front right



which didn't have any visible rust but I guess he found some because the section a couple inches on each side of the seam has been replaced.



Aft Right



This was the seam that drove the entire body work, it was rotten for several inches at the seam.



Front Left

This one had rust showing that was needing cut out and replaced.


Then Aft Left

I don't think he did anything to this one other than clean it up but this is also the only one that got seam sealed, which is weird.


The bed floor didn't come out too bad all things considered.



but underneath is where I am not very happy. To begin with he indicated on the invoice that he was going to paint the bottom with "Alkyd Industrial Enamel for underside of truck bed" but it is bare metal, not even primed



Now I planned all along to take the bed off as soon as I got the truck home and undercoat the bottom, bedliner the inside and paint the outside before putting it back on so I didn't really regard it as all that big of an issue...until I began taking the bed off. That's when I discovered that he never took the bed off to work on it, he just worked on it in place. So the forward and mid cross braces are still dirty and the bolts are being a real pain to get off, especially given that he also didn't locate the access holes for the bed mounting bolts


I can access the front and aft bolts without needing to go through the bed floor but you can't get to the mid bolts without them. So I had to carefully measure then drill and cut the access holes so I could then get a breaker bar on them and snap them off so I can remove the bed.



When the truck was dropped off it was placed facing the garage. My plan was to quickly install the gas tank, turn it around, back it into the garage then remove the tank and then the bed but when I went to install the tank I discovered the brackets that the tank strap goes to are now missing. So now I couldn't install the tank, I couldn't turn the truck around and I have to figure out and install new tank brackets when I have no idea what they are supposed to look like or even exactly where they are supposed to go. On top of that today is supposed to be the only sunny day for at least a week. Tomorrow and the rest of the foreseeable future are predicted to be rainy and he sent the truck back with bare metal, which I wasn't expecting since he told me he would prime it, but he only primed the new metal, not the old stuff he had stripped the paint off of.



So the plan now became one of get the truck in the garage facing forward and get the bed ready to remove. So I steered the truck and my wife pushed it in using our Ford Escape. It's now safe and sound in the garage and I have most of the bolts out to remove the bed. I'm hoping I can use ratchet straps on eye bolts in the ceiling to raise the bed high enough to get the bed above the cab so I can then push the truck out underneath it but it's not looking like I will have enough room.



Once I do get the bed off I'm thinking about making a temporary bed out of a sheet of plywood with the tank strapped to the top side with ratchet straps so I can take my time working on the bed and still have something to drive so my wife and I can be back to a two car family again.