1983 Jeep J10 Honcho 5.3 4L60E

[sierrablue]

I came up with a fix for your front bumper. Just cut the middle out and build a winch mount--then you're done!

[Harry Dawg]

Sorry to hear you got scammed bud.

I hate to think there are dishonest gear heads out there, but that's the sad reality of it.

Happy belated birthday though.

Truck is looking good. Kudos for all of the hard work tinkering around with it.


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[thej10guy]

Thanks Harry Dawg!
It really stinks that there are people like that out there, especially in our already very small world. But life goes on, and with what I have done to the frame, there is most likely no going back.

I really wish I could work on it more, I feel like I get done virtually nothing at a time. But that's part of the problem with being as busy as I am. Between football, wrestling, track and field, school, and interacting with family, and sleeping, I have very little time left in the day to work on it, and usually at that point my dad doesn't want to come out and help with me.

[thej10guy]

Well I made a TON of progress in the past two days. I have the rear frame pretty much buttoned up. Sometime soon I will paint it with por15, then do box mounts (or vice versa, probably box mounts first). We test fit the box today (no mounts, just to see where it was sitting now with the frame finished) and it is now about 1” below the bodyline (no 1” body lift yet, so it will be 2” below once we get that) which is perfect because it will give us room for a bed floor.
We completely replaced a few major sections on the frame, 1 being right where this right rear shackle hanger is being it was pretty much paper thing there. Once we cut the old metal out, I could bend the old metal with my hands. Probably not a good sign. We also replaced about 6” of metal under the front bed cross member.


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[thej10guy]

The front spot we replaced (similar on the other side). The rest of the thin areas or small holes we just welded in and smoothed it out with a grinder. One or two more good long days of work and in theory we should have the frame painted with the bed mounted and ready to roll.


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[sierrablue]

Looks good! Pinion angle looks a lot better than it did w/o any springs in it

[thej10guy]

For those that are wondering…this is what sierra was talking about This was right after we cut the shackles off the frame (you can see them still hanging there, or what’s left of them at least). The green areas were parts we felt needed to be sand blasted (we did this yesterday).


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[thej10guy]

Well got more stuff done today. I’ll give you the initial plan for the day:

1. Paint back half of frame
2. Do cab mounts
3. Hopefully start working on box mounts

The other day in school, I donated blood (red cross came in and did a blood drive). My body, apparently, did not like that so much, and I ended up passing out (while I was standing up in my engineering class) and fell and hit my face on a table. I hit my front teeth, which thankfully didn’t break or get fully knocked out, however they were loosened. So I had to go to the dentist and get my teeth fixed and they said no heavy lifting for probably hopefully 2 weeks. So putting the bed on would be iffy as to whether or not I could do that.

So here is what I proposed we do since we didn’t have much time before lunch:

1. Do body mounts (cuz we could theoretically get it done before lunch)
2. Paint frame when back from lunch.
3. Work on bed if we have time for it

Dad said sure, why not, that makes sense. Famous last words.

Instead, we got the old body bushings out and when we took those out, we also took all of the metal touching the bushings with it. So that threw a wrench in the plans. We were able to fix the body mounts (replaced the top part of the body mount, primarily where the bushing touches). So all in all, the body mounts/lift was an all day affair.

Since we couldn’t completely remove the cab and front clip because that would entail taking out radiator, misc lines, steering, etc, it made welding the new pieces in an absolute PITA!


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[thej10guy]

Got the frame painted today. Turned out pretty good I think.


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[thej10guy]

Also my dad had a realization the other day. He, for fun, held my tailgate up to my ford bed and realized that it will actually work. It was pretty much perfect height wise, it just needed to have 2” trimmed off of each side to make it fit width wise. So that is what my dad worked on while I painted the frame.


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[thej10guy]

Lots more progress yesterday. We got the front bed mounts in, we will just need to finish welding them when we take the bed off. For the rear mounts we will just use my lift pucks that I have and stack them two high we think. That’s what we have in right now and it makes it sit level. We just need to drill holes through the rear cross member to put a bolt through.


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[thej10guy]

Along with that we also got my tailgate mounted. We built hinges out of a piece angle iron which we bolted to the body, then we took like the circular pivot pieces off of my original truck bed for the gate to actually hinge on. My dad had a set of hidden latches (made for stepside trucks) laying around so we used those that way we can keep the outside clean. I will pictured the latches next.


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[thej10guy]

Here is the latch (top of the driver said part of the tailgate). To release the latch you pull the little nob towards the middle. It’s got like a rod inside of it that goes into the bedside (after you drill a hole in the bedside) to hold it in place. It’s on both sides. For cables we plan on running something on the inside of the bed for when it’s down. We want to do this just to keep it looking clean on the outside when the gate is up.


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[thej10guy]

This is what the assembly for the latch looks like. The grommet pictured goes into the hole you drill in the bedside to keep it from rattling. This assembly is $40 on lmc truck ($50 for stainless steel).


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[Yeller]

I've used those latches on other builds, they work well.

On my truck I used cables from a 2010 F150. They worked well

[thej10guy]

Sounds good, thanks for the recommendation Yeller!


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[thej10guy]

Well got a lot more done over my long weekend (had a 5 day weekend for easter break).
The coolest thing I think I did was make my handle for my tailgate work with my hidden latches. We used the original tailgate handle along with the original rods that went to the lathes, we just had to shorten them up and put a nut on it that we could thread a bolt through into the hinge piece.


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[thej10guy]

Along with that, we also got a rear bumper for it. My neighbor had stopped down to chit chat and was wondering what we were planning for a rear bumper. When we built my moms purple jku (we bought it wrecked and fixed it up), we bought a burned jku as well and this rear bumper was on it. We at the time had no use for it so we gave it to this neighbor because he thought he might be able to use it. He didn’t and he said we could have it back, and it ended up being a nearly perfect fit for my truck. It will most likely go up about 2 more inches and we will build a receiver that comes through the bottom where the split is in the lower bar.


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[thej10guy]

Also got a t case shifter that is factory for my drive train (mid 2000’s gm 4x4) and cut up the floor to put it in. Now we just need to build a rod from the shifter to the t case to make it functional


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[thej10guy]

Well a lot has happened since my last post almost a month ago. We got my bed disassembled and sand blasted, then we primed it and put a bed liner on the inside of the bed to protect it. I also finished laying dynamat on the interior and installed my vinyl flooring so the interior is nearly buttoned up. Picture dump coming soon. I also pulled a leaf out of all four corners to help the ride a bit. It moves so much better, meaning that it actually moves now. Along with that, I built a rear receiver hitch.