Meet Tatanka, my 99 Suburban K1500

[Dan Barlow]

It's been at least a month and I still haven't put the cowling back on . At least the maples aren't dropping those helicopter blades ! Probably messing up my aero !

[Dan Barlow]

[Dan Barlow]

I deleted the ones that showed how I got it of but basically I had a 1x5 that I had 8n the middle and slide it off . Here's the after shots .

[Dan Barlow]

.Glad you had a fairly easy time with the wipers . I had to take the hood off and put it back on by myself . I'll see if I can find the pics .

[tedly]

Lather, rinse, repeat 3 more times. I was able to save 2 of the actuators by working them back and forth with some lithium grease. Now all my power door locks work! woohoo!

The reason I had the plastic weld out was to fix as many of the broken and cracked door panels as I could. Tatanka will never be a show truck, so I wasn't worried about the glue matching the color. I'm OK if her scars show, so long as it doesn't look like a kindergartner put things together while geeked up on a sugar rush. Also replaced all of the door speakers with decent Boss ones from AutoZone. Not the high end stereo by any means but way better than the worn out factory ones. That's good enough for me.






Not perfect, but noise level has been reduced, comfort and enjoyment has been increased.

Crap. I've forgotten the prices of everything, so I'll have to look them up. I'll try to remember to do so and add the the expense list soon.

[tedly]

Also, not all of the holes line up.



There's a tab/button on the actuator body, it holds the actuator in place correctly and keeps it from moving when in use. At least that's what I'm guessing it's for. Gotta have some purpose, right? Bracket won't go flush unless I either enlarge the hole or trim down the button.




Took a razor knife to the tab and whittled it down until the bracket fits.



the speed nuts won't hold on their own and I am not spending the afternoon magnet fishing inside the door while they fall off within seconds. Had some JB plastic weld handy and used it to keep them in place, after making sure they were in the correct spot and position. Worked too!

[tedly]

Time to start on the locks, so yank the interior door handle. The handle mechanism is fine, no broken parts or jams.





Pull the door lock actuator, and it's all but jammed up, barely moves. There's the culprit.



Got the new piece. A slight problem though. Mounting bracket is considerably different, putting it in a different location. I don't know if or how this would screw me but I will put money that if it goes in and connects up, something will jam it and it probably won't rear it's head until everything is back together. I really don't feel like doing this whole job twice on one door. There's 3 more waiting their turn.

[tedly]

So we've made it to Virginia and have moved into our new temporary place. We get a little settled in and then it's back to tweaking Tatanka. One thing that has always bugged me but was not a priority was the fact that none of the power locks worked. None. Combine that with the drivers exterior door handle breaking to the point that the key cylinder was pushing inside the door... I never kept anything valuable in it, when I was at work the truck was always visible, and at home we were in the middle of nowhere. Not a huge problem but more of an annoyance. Finally had enough and yanked the doors apart. We'll start with the handle. It was a pain in the ass to get out of the hole and I did scratch around it pretty badly. I'm not terribly concerned with this but if you are it would be a good idea to protect your paint before doing this.



Here's the trashed door handle, every time I opened the door I was expecting to rip it out if I wasn't careful.




Comparing the new against the old before installation. There are differences, but no functional ones. Should be no problems putting it back together.



It's not going back in quite yet though. Got a few other issues to address first.

[tedly]

Used tapping a socket with the hammer and a C-clamp to get the new u-joints in and centered. I was careful that all the needle bearings stayed put and weren't damaged during installation.




Now to the broken bolt in the dif yoke. I tried something new. Since the broken bolt was down in a recessed area, I put painters tape around the drill bit, leaving enough of the bit exposed so that an easy out would be able to get a bite. My thinking was that the tape would help center the bit and keep it from drifting or cutting at an angle and chewing the threads to hell. Actually worked decently too.



cleaned out the area of metal shards to keep the piece from jamming on them. No idea if it was necessary but I really wanted to get the damn thing out and not replace the yoke.



Well that didn't @#$!ing work like I wanted.



I am so screwed.

Luckily I could get a new yoke from Napa next day. You know, the day before we HAVE to leave for a 12 hour drive.

This is going to be fun.



At this point I stopped taking pictures because I just needed to get the damn thing done ASAP. I yanked the old yoke and put in the new one. I think I even used the same crush sleeve because I just did not have the time to try and find my torque wrench and figure out a way to keep the pinion stationary while it's torqued down. I had to do it by feel. This is not a method I would recommend at all, but luckily when I was trained how to swap gears in an 8.8 dif I was taught to tighten the pinion nut by feel. I got pretty good at it too with as many as we did. I set the load to roughly what an 8.8 called for, but this is not an 8.8. Big damn risk.

It worked though. It felt a little loose but did just fine on the trip and straight up until October when I started bigger projects on the big girl and then life got in the way for awhile.

[Deaf Bob]

One way to remove Ujoints is to support the driveshaft on a sturdy surface so it can't move, put an old socket that's just smaller than the cap on top of it, then whack the @#$! out of it with a BFH.



If this fails, heat it with a torch, then beat it with the BFH again.



Now lets see those bearings. It's been so long that I don't remember which was where, but that's not really that important. Here's the important part: Seeing exactly how bad these things were.






I got very lucky Tatanka didn't leave me stranded on the interstate or a back country mountain highway in the middle of nowhere. VERY lucky.

Powder coated at it’s finest!

[tedly]

One way to remove Ujoints is to support the driveshaft on a sturdy surface so it can't move, put an old socket that's just smaller than the cap on top of it, then whack the @#$! out of it with a BFH.



If this fails, heat it with a torch, then beat it with the BFH again.



Now lets see those bearings. It's been so long that I don't remember which was where, but that's not really that important. Here's the important part: Seeing exactly how bad these things were.






I got very lucky Tatanka didn't leave me stranded on the interstate or a back country mountain highway in the middle of nowhere. VERY lucky.

[tedly]

vibrations tend to come from the driveshaft. If you put it in neutral (engine idling), do you still have the same vibration? on high-mile vehicles, especially 4x4s, bad motor mounts (trans too) can cause that issue.

So it appears SBG was right.

I almost forgot to include this next bit of fun, so this is a little out of order. This happened days before we were leaving for Virginia, so it was before the wiper took a swan dive. When I say days, I mean single digit numbers, less than a week and I think only 3 or so days before moving day. Something started making a hell of a racket and suddenly had massive driveline vibrations. I limped it back to the house and threw it up on jacks. Grabbed the driveshaft and I could turn it quite a bit back and forth before the diff yoke or trans yoke would turn.

U-joints.

Absolutely no way Tatanka is driving more than 12 hours straight unless I change them. No possible way, I doubt it would even make the drive into town. This is going to be all kinds of fun.

OK, to change the U joints you need to take off the strap retainers at the pinion yoke and slide the trans yoke out, removing the whole driveshaft. It is so much easier to do this on a bench than trying to do it under the truck. You'll need a drain pan under the trans tailshaft and you'll lose some fluid, but no biggie.




Note to self: Do not try to rush a job on a 21 year old truck that's spent it's entire life in Wisconsin. Just don't. It never ends well. You know better, don't be that guy.



Yep. I was that guy.

I sure hope I can get the rest of that bolt out of the pinion yoke or this is going to SUCK. The other 3 I took my time with and they came out no problem. Time to soak the caps for a minute.

[tedly]

The transmission side of the connection was a different story. It's held on by a clamshell/clamp type deal, and over the last 21 years the metal had deformed just enough to allow the ball to pop out.




Since it was only bent a little and not broken, I tried flattening it back and seeing if it would still hold.



I think it worked.



Greased up all the pivot points, threw it back together, and 2 years later not a single problem. They even function better now.




Cost: An afternoon out in the sun but no money.

[tedly]

First chance I got after unloading the stuff and locating my tools, I dug back in to figure out what the hell happened. Yanked the arms and the cowl cover back off. and found that the transmission had come off the motor. Interesting. Never seen this before. No bushings, just metal to metal. Each side has a separate connection point, which explains why only the drivers side came off.




Time to pull everything out and get a better look. The ball attachment point on the motor seems to be intact and has wear expected of a 20 year old part, but no real damage.

[tedly]

Ok, so maybe almost 2 years later isn't soon... Whatever.

So we're deep in the hills of Kentucky, the largely rural areas. It starts raining a little so I flip on the wipers. Shortly after that the drivers side wiper arm decides this has all been entirely to much to bear and does a dramatic flop onto the A pillar and stays there. Passenger wiper arm? No problem, it's trucking right along. Drivers? Nowhere to be found. Probably means the wiper transmission is screwed

Oh this is fun.

Pulled off the next exit that had a gas station sign by it to assess the damage.



Luckily I left a basic toolkit handy. It wasn't much, but I could pop the arms off and get the cowling out of the way to see what was happening.




I still couldn't see much and the sky was starting to clear up, so we waited to see what would happen as I put the cowl back and the passenger arm back.



It cleared up not too long after I got it put back together, so we took the opportunity and made a break for it. If we hit more rain we'd deal with it then.

Somehow we made it the rest of the way to our new rental house with no more rain. Talk about luck.