New DD!

I bought another blazer today! LOL. 

I only have one picture of her so far, but here she is, it all her strange glory. It's a 1991 4.3L automatic 2wd two door blazer. Sound familiar yet?

This one however has and will retain a full interior, keep the quite fresh engine and transmission and be driven every day.

As she sits now, she has ZQ8 coils in the front with 2" drop spindles and stock brakes, rear are bastard pack ~ZQ8 leafs with 2" blocks. Front shocks appear to be edelbrocks, but backs and cheapy black monroes and you can tell driving it. The wheels/tire combo are also too short for the current gearing so the speedo is about 12% off. I'm going to throw the tires from my V8 project blazer on this one to get the speedo closer and bring her about an inch and a half off the ground.

The interior is in pretty damn good shape. It's got later style blazer black leather seats, with a few rips in the front, but a pristine bench. The carpet is practically new black carpet and the interior panels have been painted(fairly well) black to match. It still has a brown dash though, so that'll need addressed when I can get around to it. It's got a mystery console in it that has quote a lot of storage.

The exterior is a bit rough, needs some body work, it's been rattle can painted the factory-ish white, has a second gen rack on top and an exterior spare carrier both in black. The front and back bumpers have been painted black and it has a newish lower valence with fog lights installed.

All in all, she's in pretty good shape and will make a nice driver.

good score!

but the wheels are painful to look at

That is a nice score.  Somebody put some work into it and it shows.  Just needs that final push to clean it up.

Did door pins on the driver side today so it'll latch fully without having to slam the hell out of it. Then got the stock steering shaft yanked, the tulip joint had 20° and 1" of play, and the rag had an additional 30° or more in it too, but couldn't get to the tail of the column to grind it down quite yet, so my jeep shaft isn't on quite yet. The V8 truck will get a custom DD shaft when it gets put back together, this one can have the heavy, isolated shaft on it.

I also got the extra wiring from the subs and a blacklight out of the interior and the 8 or so floor mats in the back pulled out. Then got the steering wheel from the other blazer swapped on. I don't know exactly what steering wheel will go in each, but I had to have something smaller for this before I drove it much more, that stock 14 or 15 inch wheel is just awful.

I think I'm going to take the rest of the night off, have a lot else going on so I could really use the time to relax tonight. Will be back on her tomorrow though.

Chased my tail around all morning on something else so I didn't get to put any time into her tonight. I'm REALLY hoping I can work in the little bit of grinding I need to do to get the jeep shaft on so I can drive her into work tomorrow to get a feel for how much just doing the shaft helps. I may also steel those night tie-rods I put together for the other blazer if this needs them so I have an excuse to go fully aftermarket on the V8 truck and do a bit more for bumpsteer and alignment than can be done with stock inners. The idler looked in good shape, we'll just have to see once I get it in the air to swap the wheels around.

Just decided, I'm going to pull the swaybars off my 88 to put on this truck as well, and put one of my sets of bilstein zq8 shocks on it as well, get it to drive like I want my DD to drive, and go ahead with the "nascar" style swaybars on the 88. A bit more to do befoe I DD it, but just a couple morning or afternoons. The 2007 silverado is officially for sale, I'll get an ad up here for it later and get pics tomorrow.

Hand me down parts are the best. 

Spent a lot of elbow grease on her over the weekend. Tore the TBI unit out, cleaned it up really well, put my old injector pod on it with flow matched really well rebuilt injectors on and the IAC solenoid and TPS sensor off my old TBI and it fires up and idles much better. Also got the wheels and tires from my other blazer swapped on to bring it up off the ground a bit, they're too tall, but the others are just too short. I'll find somewhere in the middle I like. Possibly 25" tires and get newer springs under the front and only a 1" angled and offset block in the back and I'll be happy. I'm also going to swap on the electric doors from my old blazer and get the alarm hooked up to unlock the doors so it's a bit more convenient of a DD.

I'm going to get power to the seats tomorrow hopefully so I can see if they're going to work or not. If the seats don't run I'm probably going to throw my cavalier seats in it as the seat angle is all wrong and kinda bugging me. After that is swaybars and shocks from my spare parts.

Wow, It's amazing the amount of progress you can make on a truck doing little stuff you've done before. In the last 10 days I got it converted over to my 7747 ECU so it ran better, but was still having a chugging issue at idle. Got my non-sealed beam headlights and headlight harness swapped onto it, so I can see at night. Had a small snafu on that, for whatever reason my old truck had the quad light mod built in, this one does not, so I'm going to add a diode bridge to both sides soon, get the super high beams I had before and miss. Also need to pick up a couple headlight adjusters, they just don't last and are much too easy to break.

I determined from vacumn readings and temperatures of portions of the exhaust that the cat was the reason for the idle chugging. Yesterday and today I managed to pull the previous and terrible cat-back off, gut the cat, and put on a $115(including muffler) cat-back fom Jegs, all mandrel bent 2.5" alumined pipe and a basic "turbo" style muffler. I did however manage to pop one of the studs connecting the passernger manifold to the stock y-pipe, so I have a minor cold engine exhaust leak that I'll have to address.

Lastly, just this evening I got the 33mm front swaybar swapped from the race blazer to this one with some moog thermoplastic frame bushings and 3.75" energy poly endlinks, what a difference between the 1" and 1.25" bars, but now I'm really noticing the rear weight on this one with the rear seat and spare tire mount hanging off the back. I like the ride the extra weight affords though, so I'll definitely be getting the rear bar on sooner rather than later.

Never did get power to the leather seats that are in it, because I've decided once and for all that I just can't stand leather seats in AZ, especially black ones. AC cranked, 72 degrees in the cab and my back still sweats from not being able to breathe at all. I may swap in the cavalier seats or I may poke around the yards for some comfy cloth seats to swap in.

I'm looking for suggestions on center consoles to put in the truck as well. I don't really want the smooth, rounded look of the second gen console, but the first gen blazer console is just a crappy design and the door ALWAYS breaks off.

Got the drivers seat swapped from the leather electric seat, that was just way too hot in summer,  over to a damn-near new cloth cavalier seat. Seat is very comfortable and has great bolstering, but is just a bit too low. The leather was set just a bit too high, so I'm going to measure from the roof to the passenger seat and from the roof to the cavalier seat, split the difference and raise it up with a piece of square tubing between the rail and the seat. May go as much as an inch higher, but we'll see.

Still trying to decide on a console, I may just scour the junkyard in the next couple weeks and see what I can find that'll fit.

Having driven it a bit more, I think the seat is offset towards the door a ways too I'm not quite sure what do to about that, but it's a solid inch off I think...

Loosened the driver seat and re-tightened left then right instead of right then left and that got me a bit more centered, I think I will be able to take up the additional offset I'd like in the spacer without too much issue.

However I really noticed I haven't been using first gear unless I really get on it and my revs have been higher than I thought they should be, so I used my phone for GPS speedo against the engine RPM at two different RPMs in two different gears and realized that somewhere along the way it's gotten 4.11 gears in the back, which is just stupid. When my back starts doing a bit better I'm going to get the rear from my other blazer swapped over since it has 3.73s, which still aren't ideal, but are a step in the right direction. Looking for 3.23 or 3.08s for my DD though.

Updates on this truck. Every time I try to do anything on it, I find that the last time it was done was a botch job, hack fest. Just replaced front wheel bearings, rotors and pads because the drivers side was so loose you could rock the wheel and tire back and forth on the bearings. I'm sure it wasn't that way when I first had it up, but apparently they were a bit loose and packed with half a can of grease, so I didn't notice it right away. They're done properly now. I also did the tie rods up front, transferred the half custom, stock inner rods from my red blazer, which has helped with bumpsteer notably, going to go with something a bit more custom on the red one.

Went to replace a bulb in the drivers tail light to find one of the connectors had been spliced on from a later truck and didnt' fit at all, was being held on with electrical tape. Replaced it with a complete tail light harness from the connector in the rear quarter, fixed everything right up.

In other news, my old lady wrecked her Sonic, accidentally ran a red light and plowed into a truck. So we're both driving the White blazer, and she wanted me to put together a number for how much it would take to finish the red blazer so she could just drive the white one and I would quite playing with it, lol.

$50k sounds like an accurate number....

That sounds like most of the repairs I make on my everyday cars.  I don't want my repairs to be the head scratchers.  Although I usually put them off until I can do them the way I want to.

$50k sounds like an accurate number....

That sounds like most of the repairs I make on my everyday cars.  I don't want my repairs to be the head scratchers.  Although I usually put them off until I can do them the way I want to.

She might shoot me if I said that, lol. I have most of the components, think I'm going to pick up a small press this weekend so I can knock out the LCAs and leaf spring bushings. She won't be happy about the bill on that one. Oh, and I need C5 rotors, because I got the wrong hubs, can't forget that...