buck fifty 720

[tdc]

someday when i have more money i want to go up there and hit the yard(s). there's stuff down here, but i've picked them over pretty well and the turnover's kinda slow with scrap prices being so bad right now. now that i have the 720, they are fresh again (the closest yard has like 5 of them!), but those will be picked over soon too. 

[tdc]

welp, i'm a failure and didn't get the truck reg'd yesterday like i planned. someone was going to come check out the hardbody but he kept pushing it back until there wasn't time to make the dmv. he eventually rescheduled, so all was for not. oh well!

 

i need a driver mirror for the truck as the stock one is way rattley and new door used a big truck-style mirror that i'm not really into. i'm not sure what i'll go with in the end, but for now i'm going to borrow the mirror from my 73 bmw 2002 as it's a back back burner project right now. it shouldn't look too bad once cleaned up, i hope.

 

 

 

i hope the campout thing is going awesome!

[tdc]

mirror mounted, dragged the truck out of my dad's shop (literally, the exhaust hangs pretty low under the manifold) and drove it around a bit. still stumbling quite a lot, it kinda seems like the cat might be partially clogged. said screw it and drove it the 20 miles home. other than the stumbling and squealing tires every time i took a corner, everything went fine. temp looked good until the gauge quit about a mile from home.

 

next up is to fix the pass rear corner of the bed, driver floorboard, replace temp gauge sending unit, and a front end alignment. was going to hold off on the alignment until i got the drop spindles, but i the truck won't track straight out of a corner on it's own right now and i hate that.

 

here's a couple pictures, last one includes the hardbody. someone's coming to look at it tomorrow, so hopefully it won't be around any more.

 

[Rhino13]

Clean all the contacts on the temp gauge and any connections going to your thermostat housing. I did this recently and it solved my issue of my temp and gas gauge randomly stopping. Also on the back of the gauges there's very small fragile wires, inspect those to make sure they are all connected and not being pulled on from anywhere. When you take the cluster out, beware of the white backing cracking when you remove anything, I tried replacing the dash lights and now only have 2 because the white backing broke around the rest of them.

[tdc]

yeaah, it's a bad connection at the sender. just give it a little twist and it works again. i'll address that later. 

 

swapped the carb out for a different 32/36 and the stumbling went away. plus now the choke works proper, so that's cool.

 

sold the hardbody, so i'm going to pick up drop spindles and a header soon. is there a specific header for these z22s that i should go for? 

[Lockleaf]

I wouldn't spend money on the header. These Z engines run out of breath at 5k and that is because of head design, not exhaust manifold restriction. The net gains are minimal and the frustration factor is high. They rarely seal well and even when they seal, 6 months later, they leak. There are better places to spend the money to greater effect.

[tdc]

good to know, thanks! i mostly wanted to grab one because i need to redo the exhaust from the bed forward. i have some exhaust leaks at the stock manifold where the emission pipes used to plug in, so i was going to kill a few birds with one stone by picking up a header. i guess i'll just weld up the stock manifold for now.

[tdc]

so i'm chasing around my stumbling issue. does anyone know off hand what jet sizes they are running in their weber 32/36 on an otherwise stock z22? i'm not convinced it's a carb issue just yet, but my plugs do look lean and the engine falls on it's face a bit when i get on the gas into the secondary. knowing what other people are running would be super helpful, and the search function on this forum wasn't helping much.

[Rhino13]

Not sure on my jet sizes... have you gotten it figured out yet? There's a cruise coming up that's all along the coast, a big group is meeting in Florence then heading north. I'm going to try and make it.

[tdc]

the other thread i made got me a starting point, my jet kit showed up yesterday and i've been playing around with it. it's definitely running better, but it's not quite diled yet. also, the stumble i'm experiencing at maaaybe quarter throttle doesn't seem to be fuel related, as it's still doing it even after swapping jets around a bunch. 

 

i don't think this is the issue, but I'm planning on pulling the whole exhaust this weekend and getting rid of the (probably clogged) cat and trying to get it up off the ground a bit. i also picked up a header for super cheap that was never meant for a z22 (i think it's for a sohc ka24) that i'm going to cut and weld to see if i can get it to go on. i know i was cautioned against going with a header, but i have it and it was cheap and i've not seen one of these with a tri-y header set up. why not? especially since i'm already messing with the jetting a bunch, seems like as good as time as any to see what i can do with it.

 

do you have any other details about the cruise? 

[tdc]

FINALLY figured out what that stupid stumble was, all this time later. I've been daily driving the truck on mostly 3 cylinders, as it turns out.

 

Apparently, something passed through the rear cylinder at some point during it's life with the PO and squished the sparkplug electrodes. The plugs were pretty new, the PO had replaced them and the cables and dizzy cap a few months before selling it to me. He said he started experiencing the stumbling one day and thought it was the carb and couldn't work it out. I went through 3 carbs (the stock carb and two webers) and the symptoms remained, so I went searching for an air leak or something and nothing was ever coming up. I did pull a couple plugs to have a look at them and they looked fine, it never occurred to me that I should pull ALL of the spark plugs and have a look. The exhaust side plug gap was totally closed, and the intake side was like a sheet of paper thickness from being closed. Regapped the plugs and it's running like a whole new truck! At some point I'll stick a scope down in the cylinder to make sure the piston and valves all look happy enough, but it's firing on all 4, the stumble is gone, and it's got a ton more power. 

 

I'm excited! I'm driving it up to Seattle later next month and I was worried I wasn't going to get it figured out before then. My gas milage should go up from the 21mph I've been getting too, so that's awesome. 

 

Now that it's running proper, I'm going to start messing with the body some, maybe try to get it one color or something after fixing some of the rust, so hopefully I'll have pictures next post!

[Charlie69]

I have seen this on a couple of Z24s.  I take and de carbon my engines about every 50,000 miles.  I always do this be fore changing the plugs.  The way I de carbon the engine is turn the idle up to about 2,000 RPM and slowly trickle water through the carb, about 4 ounces on a 4 cylinder..  This works best on an engine that has reached operating temp.  I have found that AM pm gas is terrible burning along with many other low priced stations.

 

You can do this also with various chemicals such as Sea Foam.  I find the water to be the most economical and creates less smoke.

[tdc]

so i've been driving this thing for a while now, got over 1k miles in it, and i'm a big fan. i never did get those drop spindles like i said i was going to, and still haven't fixed the holes in the floor; it's hard to commit to doing stuff like cut up the floor when you're talking about your daily driver.

 

got the front end aligned, it needed it super bad. the tires were getting tons of wear on the insides. swapped wheels from front to back for now until i figure out what i'm doing for different wheels. checked the front brakes while i had the wheels off as they have a little squeak to them once in awhile. they look newish, so it's probably just cheap pads squeaking like they do. these things have the weirdest calipers!

 

 

over the last weekend, my family and i went and camped a couple days out by the river. normally i take the van and sleep in it, but the van is currently off my insurance and is keeping a motorcycle out of the weather, so i threw my tent in the truck and loaded up on wood and headed out.

 

love how low a load of wood made the truck. flaps on the ground!

 

 

 

it was a fun weekend, though i did have to jump in the river fully clothed when my nephew who can't swim fell in and went under. but camping's supposed to be intense, right? (get it?)

 

 

my trip to seattle is on thursday, so i'm going to give the truck a good combing over this weekend (sun-mon is my weekend), maybe try jetting it better as my mpg isn't much better than it was before i discovered the smooshed spark plug and it falls on it's face a bit when i try to get on it. or perhaps finally get around to cutting the cat out. overall i'm pretty confident the truck will make the trip flawlessly.

 

at the end of september i'm going on a trip to san deigo and i'm flying out of eugene, so some of you might see me driving around a little bit. i don't know how much parking at the airport costs, but it'll probably be cheaper to park the truck in town somewhere for the weekend and catch a cab. are there any safeish places that i could leave this thing for a few days and not worry about it getting towed/stolen? i do have a couple friends up there, but one lives on this big hill with no parking and the other is hard to get ahold of sometimes. 

 

after the san deigo trip, i'm going to focus on getting this thing a little more close to what i'm after and then probably switch gears to getting on one of my other projects for a while. there's still plenty to do here, but it's my best runner right now (more confident in the van's reliability at this point, but it needs some wiring help to be my daily again) and i have a pile of projects i need to get out from under.

[tdc]

.

[LTJ]

Great truck!

You are making me miss my old 720 Kingcab!

[tdc]

thanks! it'll never be as pretty as a lot of them on here, but pretty things aren't really what i'm into. i like not having to worry about scratching the paint 

[racerx]

Is that a dodge a100? Nice.

[tdc]

the trip to seattle went without a hitch. discovered my speedometer is about 10mph off at around indicated 60mph, it gets worse the faster i go and better the slower i go. it's on stock wheels and tire size, i'm not sure why it's so off. kinda throws my mpg tracking out the window, though. i've been thinking about yanking the whole dash out of the truck and doing something of my own. 

 

while digging through a storage trailer of parts we've been hauling around for years, i found this old grant challenger wheel buried in a box of junk. it's pretty crusty, paint's flaking here and there with some rust, the bolts in the front were totally rusted out. i replaced those and painted the spacer ring between the two halves pink and i think it's my new favorite part for the truck. i gotta pick up a horn button and adapter for it, but i figure i'll have it on by the weekend.

 

 

driving up to salem in a couple weeks to fly out to san deigo for a weekend. still not sure where i'll be leaving it for the weekend, but i think i have a couple options. lots in store for the truck soon, i hope! once i'm back from the san deigo trip i can start saving and actually put some time and effort into it. can't wait

[tdc]

realized there's no reason to have a 2nd thread for the new truck, as i'm putting everything worth saving from this truck into it. this truck was a great runner, but super rusty. floors were mostly gone, rust around rear window and windshield, bed was rotted out. the new truck has a great body with only a little rust that i can live with for now. 

 

quick recap; my brother found this 83 on facebook's marketplace, we went to check it out. the truck had the front off, most of the interior was out or rough, engine has a blown headgasket. overall, though, it was in much better shape than my daily driver, and for $150 with a clean title, there was no passing it up.

 

 

after a bunch of running around and plans falling through, i was left with no way to get it home other than using my dad's old beat up tow bar. the truck's bumper was in the bed, so i threw it on using the bolts from the bumper of my daily driver and got it hooked up. i was worried about how it would tow, but it went flawlessly.

 

 

after we got it to the shop, we started prepping the engine to come out. the truck had some front end damage at some point, but other than the radiator being wrong and the vertical support being all bent out of shape, it wasn't bad.

 

 

here's a couple random pics of the truck as i got it. 

 

 

 

no pictures of the engine coming out, but one of my brothers did get a timelapse video of it all. hopefully i can get that from him soon. once the engine was out, we shoved the white truck out and brought in the old daily driver to pull out the engine and transmission.

 

 

again, no pictures of the engine coming out, but i got a few of my youngest brother going crazy with the degreaser and cleaning up the 2.2 while my other brother and i worked on pulling the rest of the parts i needed from the old truck. 

 

 

 

then we brought the 83 back in and dropped in the 2.2.

 

using both the rubber and the metal motor mounts from the 2.4 allowed the 2.2 to fall right in place. we used the whole clutch system from the 81, from the master to the slave (no bleeding required, score!), the speedometer cable (i'm going to use the 81 dash in this), and the radiator. pretty much everything else was from the 83. nixed the electric fuel pump, bypassed the power steering, wired the engine bay and fired it up. 

 

 

 

bolted the 81's hood on (i like those vents over the ugly gold racing stripes on the white hood), threw on the plates from the 81 and took it for a spin around the block.

 

 

 

the test drive revealed that the 83's brake booster was bad, the brakes in general were bad (it's got new pads and lines on the front, didn't check the rear, but the system needs a flush), the Y pipe under the header has a nasty crack in it (i left the exhaust system in both trucks and just bolted the 2.4 manifold to the 2.2 with new gaskets), and the rear passenger leaf springs are super saggy, making the back of the truck sit cockeyed. 

 

well, that was all the weekend before last, i had to call it quits and and get back to work for the week and play with it more this last weekend. i'll make that a new post.

[Draker]

Nice work man! Better than endless bodywork to fix that rust

[tdc]

yeah man, this was a solid day's work for sure. it was sad tearing down the old truck. it was only 9 months that i've had it, but in that 9 months it took me to seattle once, eugene a couple times, and all up and down the coast. i'm going to swap the whole rear end (springs and all) with the old truck; at that point it'll pretty much be the same truck from before, driveline wise, so it should be as reliable as ever. just sucks taking down the reliable daily driver for so long!

 

but it's been an excuse to drive the a100 daily again, which is always fun :D

[Draker]

Yeah man, same truck.. different body. All good!!

[tdc]

this past weekend i only had one day to do anything, and i had to replace the rear brakes and struts, as well as a front A arm, on a friend's honda, so i didn't get much truck time.

 

i did, however, replace that booster with the one from the 81. seeya, 24k booster

 

 

now i knew the 83 booster was bigger than the 81, and that the tube length was different, but i assume messing around with the push rod length would take care of all of that. here's the boosters side by side how they came out of the trucks.

 

 

welp, maybe i shoulda noticed, but i didn't. after swapping around the rod bits to get the right length, turns out the boosters have a different bolt pattern. had to put the push rods back to how they were and swap the tubes as well. here's the two tubes side by side, 81 on the left, 83 on the right

 

 

 

the differences are obvious, i just didn't look that closely at first. oh well, now i know.

 

all better!

 

 

the swap definitely took care of the vacuum leak and the truck wouldn't start misfiring when you got on the brakes, but i still need to flush and bleed the whole brake system.

 

after all of that, i put the truck out in the street while i worked on the honda. took a couple pics of it in the daylight. it's still super dirty from sitting for so long, and i really don't like those wheels much. they may look better with the center caps off, but at any rate they'll be temporary, i bought some steel 15x10s that i'm going to be stretching tires on sometime soon. 

 

if you pay attention to the tire gap at the bed in these two pics, you can see how saggy that passenger side spring is

 

 

 

after i finished up the honda, i pulled the truck in and got the front bumper on with the correct plates. i had tried to get to the dmv to get the thing registered, but their system was down all day. figures, my one day to get anything done and their shit doesn't work. oh well, i'll try again this week.

 

 

here's a crappy shot of the inside after swapping steering wheels and stuffing the 83 dash in. the truck has the 81 speedo cable, so that's not hooked up. pretty much the only thing that's working is the fuel gauge, the tach moves, but it starts off pointed down, haha. 

 

 

you can see where the PO had mounted an aftermarket temp gauge in the stock cluster, then removed it when he decided to sell the truck. i'll be installing the 81 gauges once i have the truck at my place.

 

 

that was all for last weekend. hopefully this weekend i'll get the rear ends swapped, brakes bled, y pipe switched out, tags sorted, and be driving it finally. then, once it's home, i can tackle the inside.

 

[tdc]

welp, since that big ass post from a couple weeks ago i've gotten the thing on the road and have been driving it daily. tires were hitting the fenders a bit, but after rolling the fender lips, that mostly fixed it. I won't be running this wheel/tire combo forever, so I'm going to let it be for now.

 

last weekend i didn't end up swapping rear ends thanks to a stubborn brake line. i did swap all of the rear suspension over, which took care of the dumpy passenger side spring. while bleeding the rear brakes, i discovered the driver side brake cylinder was seized up. had to get one overnighted to the local part store, and they got the wrong one. both of my trucks have a 4 bolt rear brake cylinders, the parts guys was showing the 83 to have a 2 bolt cylinder that was much smaller (which is what they got me). i don't know if they were wrong, or if this truck has an earlier rear end in it, but luckily the old truck had a recently replaced brake cylinder so i was able to swap it over. i didn't end up getting any pictures from that weekend, sorry.

 

today i decided to swap the gauge cluster over since i missed having a speedometer. the 83's cluster was all hacked up from the previous owner and was pretty much garbage. i posted a picture of it above, here's what the back looks like.

 

 

the temp guage was ripped out for an aftermarket one, which did a good job of tearing up the circuit board on the back. 

 

for the most part, the 3 plugs in the 83 had all the same wires as the 2 from the 81. most of all of the colors matched up, and i went through both clusters to make sure the wires were going to the same thing on both clusters. the only real wire color difference i saw was that on the 83 both of turn signal wires are the same color, the left one goes to the plug on the left side of the cluster and the right goes to the right, whereas in the 81, the two wires are different colors and go to the same plug. 

 

i forgot to get any worthwhile pictures of the harness after i soldered up all the wires, but here's a chaotic shot from mid process.

 

 

otherwise it was pretty straight forward. the silver face of the early cluster is kinda ugly with the woodgrain dash, but i'll probably paint it at some point. 

 

 

everything works perfect except the actual dash lights. there are 3 wires of the same color on the 83 (i forget what color, i think red/blue?), one of them works the lights through the switch on the column so that when you turn your headlights on, the dash lights come on as well. the first wire i tried made it so the lights were on unless the headlights were, which is backwards of what i want obviously. the 2nd wire was showing voltage when the lights were on, but it was only 3v. i knew the po had bypassed the dimmer knob on the dash and had a fuse in it's place (you can kinda see it in the picture above where the wires are hanging out of the dash), so i figured that was the correct wire and went with it.

 

next, i pulled out the dimmer and cracked it open to see why it was bypassed. looks like it got hot enough to burn out the ground tracers on the back and pop the capacitor! 

 

 

 

the cap is a 47uf 25v, and i happened to have one, so i decided to try and fix the dimmer to see if i could make it work. the dimmer in the 81 works fine, but it's over at my dad's about 40 miles away, so fixing the one i have on hand seemed like worth a shot.

 

 

 

before clipping it back into its plastic case, i took it out to the truck and tried it out. it works perfectly, dimming the center console lights just as it should, but still no dash lights. looks like i'll be popping the cluster back out again tomorrow messing with that some more! i already was planning on pulling it back out to make wiring the stereo easier, so it's no big deal. i'll try to get more/better pictures of the harness then.

 

and that was it for today! here's a picture of the truck after i took a pressure washer to it last week. still not pretty, but at least it's not covered in moss anymore! 

 

[tdc]

this'll be a boring post, but i figured out the dash light issue (had the wrong wire hooked up), and got the stereo wired in. it seems so many people run wires from their aftermarket stereo heads to the fuse box, many just mashing the wires under the fuses, but the stock radio harness has all the wires you need already. 

 

anyway, here's how my cluster harness looks for now. next time i'm in there, i'll be wrapping it, but i'm not totally done wiring everything up under there, so it's good for now.

 

 

 

yeah! overall, it was a much easier job than i was expecting. the rheostat being blown out threw a monkey in my wrench at first, but after fixing it up everything was good and it's all working proper now.