Thanks for coming back. This week I installed the Panhard Rod and got the rear Radius Arms back on the Range Rover. Interesting observation from the install. The suspension had moved due to the poly bushings failing. Probably didn’t help with me driving it.
The new bushing could not be tightened until the axle side had been installed. The was just not enough play in the system. On the first side I first tried to install it with the frame bushing installed. That was a no go. I could not get the axle side to line up the holes for the bush and the bolt.
You may encounter that when you are doing yours. I also had some trouble with the port side bushing due to my use of the cutting disc. It had carved a ridge on the mount that I couldn’t slide the bushing past. That took a little extra encouragement to get it lined up.
I used anti-seize on all the bolts. I feel pretty good about that. I’ll need to replace these at some point and it doesn’t help when they are rust welding themselves together.
The panhard rod still did not want to get lined up when I tried to install the bolt. I used the old bolt and drove it through the bushing to eliminate what ever was keeping me from installing the bolt.
I took her out for a drive down and OH MAN what a difference. This small upgrade fixed a bunch of the issues. She’s safe to drive again.
It was soooooo hot today. I tried to start early but just couldn’t get out of bed and started. By the time I was cleaning up the garage floor it was 105F in the shop and it was really taking its toll on me.
Mrs. Okierover got home from the National Senior Games where she competed in the Women’s 3v3 basketball in the over 60 age division. They did not have big point differentials so they were relegated to the Bronze Division this year. They swept all the teams but the last one out of San Diego.
The ladies of the Oklahoma Wolfpack played well and we were extremely proud of them.
My wife took our oldest grand daughter Cadence along as well as my son Drew. Erica even drove up from Spring Hill, Kansas with the boys so they could spend some time with Mimi and so they could watch her play.
I added a short clip of one of her games on the end of the video I posted.
I had some website trouble this week, so hopefully you didn’t come by and find it down. I got some TERRIBLE advise from Go Daddy’s online chat support (from India) and they managed to get my page hijacked by a restaurant somewhere in Maine(?). I also had no way to make any changes. They just kept suggesting I add products that would help me. It was all in vain because I had no protection after they had me remove my SSL certificate. Idiots.
I called back and talked to two help desk technicians (American) and they were awesome. The first guy was awesome. “Why didn’t they just put it back to the original configuration?” I said, “EXACTLY!” They nearly lost my business over this latest SNAFU.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering. May the wind take your troubles away.
Sorry no post last week. I was really tired and my back was really acting up. All you missed was three hours of frustration and a hot ember flying off the cutting wheel and landing in my ear. WHICH I didn’t manage to catch on the video. Stupid GoPro. I’ll post the link to both videos down below.
This weekend I pulled the second radius arm off. I went straight to the cutting. There was no resolution to remove the bolt with a wrench. The bushing sleave was completely rust welded to the bolt. I banged and banged on the first one to NO avail. I even managed to hit my hand at the wrist with the hammer. OUCH does not cover it. Two pound hammers win EVERY time when they meet bone.
Once off everything needed to have rust removed or nasty old sticky polyurethane failed bushing material removed from it. Think, chewing gum, but it doesn’t dissolve in acetone. Nasty.
After I spent 30 minutes at the bench wire wheel, I remembered I own a sandblasting cabinet. So I blasted all the parts. So easy. It did reinforce that I need to improve that cabinet by relocating the pick up tube like they do on a hundred YouTube videos.
Once clean all the parts got a nice couple of coats of primer and a coat of matte black paint in the vain hope that rust and corrosion will not cause me trouble later. I know I’m fooling myself, but it’s become habit at this point.
I found a nice surprise… I have already replaced the poly bushings on the front half!!! Yeah! Holy unexpected outcomes Batman! I am swapping the panhard rod bushing because its been sitting soaked in steering oil for 5 years. I wonder if a put a boot over it, it would not deteriorate….. hmmmmm.
Next step is getting the new bushings pressed into the radius arm and the panhard rod. For this I will need to visit one of my friends shops that own a press. That’s either the Evil German Dude or Mike the JagGuy. You’ll see who wins next week.
That’s about it for this week. Thanks for visiting.
May the wind take your troubles away…. Happy Rovering.
If you’ve been following along I’ve been trying to find the parasitic draw for quite some time. I finally put my head on straight and dug in.
Having found the circuit that was giving me the trouble it was then time to call in the brains and ask some questions. So I called JagGuy. Mike is a genius and understands more about the physical universe than is possible for most mere mortals.
In our chat he said it about the time the thought was pulling up in the driveway of my mind, “You need to check your relay.” He said he’d look at the schematics (which he said were terrible by the way). It indeed came down to the relay. I have the WRONG relay installed.
I don’t remember when I came up with the fact the OEM relay failed. I do remember bringing it into my house were it sat on my end table and then in the drawer of my end table and then moved to the office? and then lost forever. SO I suspected the relay, I just forgot why.
So back to “the wrong relay” this is the one I had installed…..
What I should have installed was this relay…
You can see the slight difference. The 87a relay has 87a hot. the 87 87 relay is NOT hot all the time. How he came up with that I will never know. What he shared was the 87a relay might be the most common relay in the “relay world”. He has purchased and installed 1000’s of them making his trailer wiring converter boxes for military to civilian service [xm381.com]. He said they are common on fuel injections too if I remember the conversation.
Anyway, he said the far LESS common 87 87 relay is the one I needed. I promptly ordered one from Atlantic British an hour before he texted me back all the great details.
So there you have it. Something as simple as that can disable you. It is good to know that your can use an 87a in a pinch if your 87 87 fails. But you will want to pull it before you park it for any length of time.
UPDATE: The part has arrived and I’m going to test this weekend to confirm by parasitic draw is gone!
In this installment I apply seam sealer to the most recently welded “L”. Seam sealer was not how I wanted to seal this joint up. I wanted it to be welded closed. That is just not possible. It wasn’t originally built that way. I can only hope the seam sealer I’m using will last long enough for me to quit this Overlanding Hobby.
I also look at the floor patch I’m going to need to build. I talk about the two structural bends in the panel. I saw the guy on Make It Kustom [Youtube] build a jig and a tool to make these kinds of bends. You can look through his videos to find it. I’m going to think long and hard about this before I tackle this problem.
It might be fun to build the jig. I will need to buy a router bit to get the jig in the right shape. I’ll probably need to build a special air hammer bit like he did too. It would be a one off fix. I don’t think I will ever tear this apart again.
It’s a short video and I know it’s über riveting content watching me smear seam sealer. In my defense I didn’t have time to produce anything else this weekend. Saturday we visited the Evil German Dude and his lovely wife. Paparazzi Ford was there too. The Evil German Broad made brunch for us and we all got to catchup on the latest happenings and see their almost finished “cabana”. That’s what the county commissioners called it for tax purposes.
It’s an amazing space and it took a lot of forethought, planning, engineering to make it as awesome as it is. Several things I saw had me comparing how much time I’ve spent thinking about the future state of the Big White Bus. I know I’ll have some great ideas that will need additional thought and probably re-engineering to get them right.
I picked up a parts washer from EGD too while I was there. So that’s pretty cool. That’s all for this week. Like and subscribe to the blog and the Youtube channel.
I think I know the answer to that. But I have to show my exasperation. This rust find is possibly the worst thing ever. It’s in the most terrible of locations.
Mrs. Okierover said, “Maybe you should call it Rusty Rover instead of Okierover.” She’s not wrong.
Every where there’s red its rusted through.
It’s as bad as you can imagine. There are at least four different panels converge in this area to form the firewall, fender well, and the foot well.
There are a LOT of peripherals that run through there too. Including the fuel lines which I may have nicked when I was air chiseling the panels out. If you’ve followed the blog for very long (at least since 2010) you’ve seen The Evil German Dude and I attempt to fix the floor pan when it rusted out.
We had fun, but we failed to keep the water out and our work finally failed. I had an ongoing issue with water getting in and wetting the fargin’ OPEN CELL floor pads under the carpets. The carpets too we constantly wet. I found the place where water was getting in making the carpet wet. It was through the firewall at the corner where it married up to the side wall.
As you will see in the video, this rust is bad. Real bad. The repair is going to be really difficult and probably beyond my skill set. That being said, I have to fix it myself. There is no money to send it off. The body work itself would likely cost more than the entire vehicle is worth.
I’ve still got a LOT of work to do. I need to find a solution. It will probably be welding several panels together. I’ll need to study it more to make my mind up.
I stared at it at least an hour while I shot the video. Still struggled to sort out a concrete idea.
I am going back out the weekend this is published as OkieF150. We are going to the 200th Celebration of Fort Gibson. Fort Gibson is the oldest town in Oklahoma. Way back when it was still Indian Territory the United States needed a fort to protect the trade from this area.
We are going to make a weekend out of it and I’m hoping we can get some fishing in while we are at it. This will be the last overlanding trip for this year as I will be spending every weekend for the rest of the year trying to sort out all these issues.
Unless you just crawled out from under a rock or came down from a cave in the mountains you probably know there was an eclipse on April 8th, 2024. I told Mr. Fisher and our newest add on Mark Obermiller that we had to go see it. So…we did.
Let’s talk a little about comms first. All three of us got our GMRS licenses prior to the trip. Mr. Fisher splurged and bought several radios.
First was the Midland GXT1000X3VP4
My personal experience with it? Battery life A-. We used them while we were driving for 6 hours. The knock on it was the battery life indicator showed full, right up to the moment it died. That’s pretty disappointing. Sound quality, B-, they were scratchy at the beginning of each transmission. We didn’t really test how many “far’s” it would work but a mile they seemed to work okay. Three pack for $99.00(US). That’s an inexpensive option.
The Second was the Rugged GMR-2 Plus
Mr. Fisher used this one when his other died. It took him a bit to program and his main complaint was getting it setup. We also were broadcasting on Channel 19 privacy 19. But on this radio the display showed channel 19 privacy 10. Not sure about that. Two for $150.00(US)
We’ll have more to say about these and others as we get further into GMRS. Almost all the options for GMRS radios are made in China. There are some made in Japan.
I did fiddle-fart around a little bit and didn’t bother to secure a campsite. Thankfully my friends at Fort Towson were hosting a Eclipse Watch Party. They consider me family, mostly because I visit them with my 1820-1840 Cherokee living history presentation.
We started out on Saturday morning. Mr. Fisher had plotted our route and I fell in behind him and Mark. Our first stop was Lexington Wildlife Management Area. This is a public hunting and fishing area in Slaughterville, Oklahoma. If you watch my videos, you may have seen a sign in my shoppe. Look for it next time. I have a creepy Slaughterville story, so ask me some time we are around a campfire.
We saw some fun stuff along the way including this moderate sized snapping turtle. Which apparently I can’t add a photo of right now. Thanks Google Photos, good work.
About a foot across the shell.
We drove around visited the Lake. My camera didn’t record while we were at the lake. Bummer cause we had some fun stuff to say.
The wind was blowing pretty hard 20-25mph with gusts to 30mph. We looked around a bit to find a campsite. We started where you see above but also went down to the lake shore but the site was too windy. With Mr. Fisher and Mark in tents, that wasn’t ideal. I went around to the opposite side of the lake but there wasn’t a suitable site over there either. We’ll be back to this site another time.
We setup camp and had some delicious sirloin steak, fried potatoes, and yeast rolls. Dessert was cookies. We had some adult beverages and started a small fire. We were expecting storms and they did not disappoint. We had a nice gust front hit us and then the rain started. I ducked into the F150 and they to their tents.
We rode out the weather which turned out to not be all that impressive. Considering I’ve slept through two near misses with tornadoes, once outside Kansas City dressed for 1750s living history where I slept in a wickiup and the second I was in the back of the Big White Bus at American Horse Lake, this one barely rates mention.
It was my turn to lead so I used Gaia to map out a route. I didn’t have as much trouble mapping as I did when I tried to use the PC. At this point, if it doesn’t get better I’ll probably cancel. I need to try the Overland Bound app.
We had a mostly uneventful second leg. That is until we were traversing what we call a “jog” in the road. This one made a right and then an immediate left all on a 10% or greater grade. There were some brick-sized rocks. Mark must have caught one just right because it separated and cut the tread on one of his Wrangler SR tires. Not necessarily rated for “trail” running but I didn’t think they would fail.
Without a spare we got back on the pavement to avoid another incident. We didn’t have another tire and it was a Sunday so better safe than sorry.
We arrived at Fort Towson and setup came while I found my friends and said hello. We cooked dinner and got setup for the night. They had a nice spread and we had some delicious food. Homemade cinnamon rolls really finished the night off right.
We were tasked with parking duty. We had a good time and welcomed everyone. I shared some fort history to those who hadn’t researched it themselves. All in all we parked around 75-100 cars and roughly 375 people came to watch.
The clouds were sparse early but built up more and more as the day went on. It was looking like we weren’t going to see the eclipse. But just as one of the guest said the parting of the clouds would occur and just in time.
There are no words to describe the eclipse. It was in the top 5 events I’ve ever attended. The light right before the eclipse was eerie. It was like an old Argon street light. Such a special event. Seeing the ring, seeing the solar prominence, it getting dark right in the middle of the day. Birds stopped singing, a tree frog croaked, basically nature thought it was night. I said “so cool” about a dozen times during my video. Like I said, there were no words.
The fort staff set off a cannon during the totality.
They say the next one is in August of 2045. I’ll be 80 years old. The path will go right through Oklahoma. If I’m still residing in Newcastle, I’ll only need to drive 75 miles to be in the center of the totality.
I hope you enjoy the video. I know it is a bit long, but it was a big weekend.
Like and subscribe to the blog and the YouTube channel if you see fit. I would really appreciate it.
I have a Patreon account setup if you would like to help with the cost of keeping this website up. Okierover Patreon.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering (of F150-ing if your Land Rover is in a shoppe).
