Head For The Hills!

We left Hondo on March 29 and headed for the hills. Hill Country that is! We only went about 80 miles before stopping for the night, because we wanted to have a bit of a shakedown before we got out of familiar territory. Darn good thing we did too!

First though, I need to cover a little unfinished business. 

If you remember back a bit, I did some suspension modifications on the HOW. I still had to finish that job by installing a rear track-bar. That didn't go well on the first attempt because things weren't lining up the way they should, and I couldn't get the two most important nuts to seat properly. I followed the instructions to the letter, (probably where I went wrong) and when everything didn't fit or tighten correctly, I had to get it all apart again. Not an easy task as the directions said to use the red flavor of lock-tight, (which is pretty much permanent), on everything. Also the nuts that wouldn't tighten right were self-locking and had locked themselves nicely about a 1/4-inch short of where they were supposed to stop. After too many hours of "persuasion", I got everything apart. I called the manufacturer and spoke to support gal who pretty much said that as long as I use the red lock-tight,  I could use as many washers as it took to get the whole assembly to align correctly, and I could swap their nuts and bolts with appropriate replacements of my choosing. So off to the hardware store I went for a 1/2 dozen washers and some nice new Grade-5 nuts and bolts, (and yes... I did get ones with deep enough shoulders that no threads were covered except with the end lock-washers...). I had to wait out a couple rainy days before I could continue, but happily, it all reassembled the way it should. 

While I was workin' on the track-bar, I noticed that the U-joints on the rear of the driveshaft looked dry, so I did a lube job on the whole chassis, suspension and steering. 



I had raised the HOW as high as it would go, on its jacks, so I could get to all the grease zerks, and while it was up there, I noticed that the rear anti-sway bar was making contact with the differential. I was aware that might happen so I had to reverse the Cheap Handling Fix, and restore the anti-sway linkage to their stock locations.





And as long as I was down there, and already all dirty and greasy, I did an oil change...

(I went with synthetic)


We couldn't be happier with our new dining/ work area. 

As you can see, we got some chairs.

We used the former seatbelt anchor points to fasten the table down so it won't go airborne if we get in an accident .

Sorry about the crummy picture quality. I just can't get the hang of those hold-it-out-in-front-of-you-point-and-shoot dealies.