The Grand Tracker (Retard TT)

And where i am now.

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other head put on, cams in, timing chains in, new water pump, cleaned the front cover and installed, new spark plugs (resistored racing ones again lol) and gapped to .032 and finally, water neck/tube installed.

top end is pretty much done till i pull the old motor. im putting all the OG stuff from my tracker on the top end since its fresh and far less build up inside (cleaned it all many years ago). i do need to flip the engine and put in the support for the oil pickup. i missed that when i buttoned up the bottom end. easy fix though. Then a new front main seal, balancer and put the valve covers that came on this rig on top to just keep the engine sealed till i get the blown one pulled. See how this week goes, might be able to start disassembly of the tracker to pull the engine. Wont have any time this weekend to work on it, i dont think.

i was debating back and forth on putting the re-ground cams in this engine and im still debating it. they didnt really give me much boost in power before when i was n/a (dumb fucks at crower cams didnt listen to a word i said or asked of them) and i doubt ill notice much on the boosted engine.

Plan tonight is to bring the tracker in and start pulling the old engine out. lets see how far i get.
 
god damn it... it took me damn ear a month from the point above to get this shit box back together and running right. i ran into all kinds of issues... Didnt help i was only really working on it during weekends and a little on week days.

I had the 20th and 21st of oct off. originally i was suppose to do a 4 day wheeling trip behind Powell with my buddies but the whole blown engine thing put a wrench in that. so i used that time to do the swap. it took me all 4 fucking days to do it... well kinda.

Thursday, pulled the engine out. Friday, had it back in and mostly buttoned up.

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back in
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Saturday, the 22nd, i finished buttoning up the last bit of stuff by 3pm and cranked it over. it fired right off and knocked like an SOB right out of the gate. i had my suspisions about the "new head" and all the noise was coming from that head in the top end. it was far beyond a lifter tick. at that point, i had enough and put my shit away for the night. Sunday late morning, i got enough will up to go back out and tear the front cover off the engine to see if the timing chain was hitting something. the chains were binding up at one spot in the engine rotation. got teh cover off and found nothing. So again, said fuck this, went back inside and just decided i was going to order a new HG, bolts, and other shit to put the old head back on the driver side. the cams were bound up to high hell and you couldnt turn them with a wrench. something was definitely wrong there.

Halloween weekend, i go to tearing out the driverside head. By sunday, i had the head off. Now mind you, im not working at break neck speed over this. im just over it all together and have no idea where exactly the knock is coming from. get the head off finally and i find this

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Some how, when i tried changing cams a few weeks back without taking the front cover off, i fucked up and advanced the intake came 1 tooth. DOH! none of the intake valves are bent but 0 fucks given as the old head is going back on. i spent the rest of sunday rebuilding the old head via new valve stem seals, cleaning carbon off valves, carbon out of the combustion chamber, carbon out of the intake track, and cleaning the head surface.

Now im pretty stoked i know where the issue is and i can fix it. So last wednesday, parts showed up and i spent the night after work putting it back together. i had it 90% done, running and sounding awesome... till it died. fuel pressure gauge showed no fuel pressure and realized the tank was empty. i grabbed a 5 gallon can of fuel and poured 2 gallons in. started right back up and ran. I let it idle for a while and realized i had a leaky valve cover but i noticed the rig was now smoking pretty heavy white out the exhaust. it had rained that afternoon and temps dropped a ton so i figured it was water vapor. there was a different smell to it though and i couldnt put my finger on it. wasnt oil or coolant. i gave it some revs and noticed it hesitated bad and didnt like to crank right back up. i gave up at this point as i needed to pull the intake back off to fix the oil leak. All night and the next day, was trying to think what the hell caused the smell and white smoke i was seeing. water vapor just wasnt adding up but maybe the aem needed to have the tps and rpm signals reset to match the factory computer.

Got home thursday and ripped into the intake, got the valve cover off and fixed the leak. slammed it all back together and tried to crank it up. wouldnt start, wouldnt start, then it started to catch some and then die and this continued for a while. Then it dawned on me "was there diesel in that gas can i used?" poured a little out on the concrete and what ever little bit of gas that was on top lit off right away but quickly went out while leaving a puddle of diesel..... fuuuuuuuck, there is my issue! used the in tank pump to pump the rest out into another fuel can, ran to the gas station and filled up 5 gallons of 91. poured her in and after 10 min of running, shes back running like a top. fuck yeah! I had totally forgotten i filled up my black jerry can with diesel to put in my tractor and then never did it. go figure. oh well, easy fix and shes back to running like she should.

what a god damn shit show this whole thing was but thank god shes back running healthy again. i need to put the oil cooler somewhere but the cooler i have is way too big to fit so i gotta figure something else out. i might put one under the body on the frame with a good fan on it.
 
Sounds like whenever I tackle a big project.

Stoked she's back up and running. Such a rad little rig. Can't wait to see it out there one day.
 
Motiracer38 said:
4 day trip behind Powell? Count me in!
Click to expand...
it was pretty rad, from what ive seen pic wise. its the rincon trail/hole in the rock. it follows the old wagon trail pioneers used to traverse back there. you can still see their trail and the cable scars from winching.
 
84projectFORD said:
it was pretty rad, from what ive seen pic wise. its the rincon trail/hole in the rock. it follows the old wagon trail pioneers used to traverse back there. you can still see their trail and the cable scars from winching.
Click to expand...
I'm listening... just looked up the trail looks like a pretty cool zone.
 
Now that im back from my long adventure, i guess i can add some context to the above picture. WARNING, lots of reading.

Long ago, when i first started building this shit box, i wanted to do TTB in the front. Problem was, this thing is a pass drop t-case/diff and beams are driver drop. Atlas had nothing for t-case adapters to run an atlas, no one had any kind of adapters to convert me to any kind of driver drop t-case and the only info i found was that 89-93 montero auto transmissions would allow me to bolt my bellhousing and converter onto the front but the rear output was a jeep 23 spline with a NP t-case 6 bolt adapter on the back. That would be perfect to just run a jeep t-case. problem was, those transmission were non-existent. So i considered building a pass side beam setup but that was just getting too far fetched at that point. So scrapped the idea and just decided to do an UCA conversion, longer LCA, 8.8 irs diff in the front and yadda yadda yadda. Thats clearly taken forever to and im only half way done with the control arms. Part of the reason is loss of interest after getting the current front end working so well at 10" of travel and the main issue of getting an outer cv to hold up to rock crawling abuse.

fast forward to a few weeks ago, i really wanted to go back to the beam idea. 1. i had more tools at this point to help with said adventure (mill and lathe). 2. i had forgotten that the output shaft on my tracker trans was smaller than a jeep so i thought it would work. 3. i gained more info on t-case adapters.

while i couldnt find a montero trans again (looked very hard once again), i was noticing a common theme on the t-case adapters between jeeps, toyotas, suzuki and isuzu. The rear adapter plate all seemed to have the same 4 hole bolt pattern at the top but the bottom 2 bolts were different. A toyota a340e or f output adapter would bolt directly to my trans but unless i go with an atlas with a tacoma adapter and a custom t-case input shaft, i wasnt gaining much. So i looked at doing a jeep aw4 output adapter. i was hoping my trans would have the bosses in place to just drill and tap a jeep aw4 adapter lower two or 3 holes but wasnt the case. So instead, i planned to just do some aluminum welding and fill up the cavities where the 2 suzuki bolt holes need to be drilled in the adapter, drill them and make it work on my rig. Heres the part where i fucked up. i thought the suzuki trans output shaft was the same dia as the jeep as the suzuki output was 23 spline.... nope. fucker is 1/8" in dia smaller. So I need to make my own input shaft for the jeep t-case but thats fine with me. ill take an old stock suzuki t-case input gear, cut it down and then do the same to a jeep input gear. Ill make the trans spline side press into the jeep gear side, v it and then weld together. should be plenty strong as i dont feel the weld heat will get all the way into all the splines on the trans side to take the temper out. luckily the stock jeep and stock suzuki adapters look to use the same size holes for speed sensors and i just need to shim my 4 tooth reluctor back 1/4" to line up right in the jeep adapter plate.

once thats all done, ill run a stock np231 t-case that ill hve a guy build for me (hes got all kinds of 231's to mix and match all the best parts from jeep, dodge, chevy and give me the strongest 231 you can do). Ill run a cable shift linkage and then bolt it all in. I do need to make sure i can make my vss sensor work in the jeep t-case but if not, ill do something like the dakota digital box. Down side to that t-case, stock 2.72:1 low range. i currently have 4.24:1 gears in my tracker t-case and love those for crawling. if im really really hating that low range, ill pull the trigger on an atlas and see if i can con them into making me an custom input or if ill just have to make my own again. i think ill survive alright on 2.72 though

So that leaves me with finding a bronco front end. Not going a d35 exploder front end because i want the larger 8.5" ring gear and iron housing. Going to hurt up travel some but ill take the strenght over uptravel. I can probably massage some of that anyhow since its not exactly going in a stock bronco. The bodj actually hit me up when he saw tommy post on here about parting out a bronco. Tommy and i worked out a deal and i got the whole front end. So this past thursday, i headed out from phx to grab the front end. Picked it up around 6:30 that night, then headed straight down to glamis to meet family and friends down there for a guys ride/trip. 10 hours of driving later, i finally made it to glamis lmao. between all the accidents on the roads and the snow, it made for a long ass trip!

shits all back home now so we can start on making this work. i probably wont hack the tracker up till after our Silverton trip in July. so in the mean time, ill be getting the adapter and t-case figured out.
 
Excited to see this thing with a real suspension setup aka TTB front end.
 
I like the direction you're going! after running the LT I built for my 86 4x4 pickup for a year I wish I just did TTB. TTB's offer more strength, more travel, more ground clearance, simplicity and are cost effective, for a multi purpose vehicle like yours, they cannot be beat.

Are you planning on grafting the frame of the Bronco on or building mounts?
 
Kellyex1450 said:
I like the direction you're going! after running the LT I built for my 86 4x4 pickup for a year I wish I just did TTB. TTB's offer more strength, more travel, more ground clearance, simplicity and are cost effective, for a multi purpose vehicle like yours, they cannot be beat.

Are you planning on grafting the frame of the Bronco on or building mounts?
Click to expand...

Honestly, the biggest reason for the change wasn’t really anything more than simplicity at this point and I wasn’t sure I was going to get the travel numbers I wanted from my LT kit. The cad said I would but the measurements it got were not 100% precise. With the marfield outer cv I made, the inner 930 cv and 8.8 irs diff, I highly doubt strength would have been an issue but diff to oil pan clearance would have potentially been. I also had yet to build the upper arms or get the diff placed in the mock up frame. Time is lacking anymore…

Yup, graphing the whole frame section in. It’s not much different in width and will be the easiest/quickest way vs doing mounts on the stock frame. Also, the bronco frame is far more heavy duty. Let’s me use readily available parts on the ttb front end as well like swing steering, shock mounts if I choose, and the Bronco steering box
 
keeping steering box, beam mounts, and even initial radius arm location was a huge influence in grafting the frame to mine. Plus the strength compared to my wet noodle of a sonoma frame is a huge plus
 
Excited to see this take shape.

On a separate note if anyone needs front frame with beam setup I have another one I will sell. Thanks
 
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