More adventures in old Mopar land !
I recently started having a semi intermittent ignition problem. It would start fine when it was cold but after it got hot it was hit or miss if it'd start again. I started by getting it warm so it'd fail and then following the troubleshooting in my Haynes manual. This led me to believe that the ECM was bad. I replaced it and all was well. Until I drove it to the store the first time. It didn't want to start when I got back in to go home, but it eventually fired up and got me home. Repeat this story a couple of times and I started getting frustrated and that got me to do some deeper looking without following the manual. I was able to get the ignition coil to spark if I bypassed the pickup coil in the distributor, so I plugged the harness into(kind of) the "start" pickup coil on the distributor and I now had spark, just 180° out. I put the distributor that was in the 318 that came in the truck and it's running pretty well again. I think I need to take some timing out though as I'm getting some pinging.(I'm at about 38° total).
In the middle of the ignition headache I went to drive to the store and the right rear brake decided to lock up. I pulled the brakes apart and found the hub seals had been leaking pretty good along with the wheel cylinders and the p/o had installed the brake shoes backwards, with the long shoe on the front. That was relatively painless, and brakes are cheap for the old stuff. I was just at $100 for everything.
Today, with some motivation from my neighbor mentioning how loud the truck is, I put a flowmaster 50 series on it after the thrush muffler that I had originally put on. I was also able to get the exhaust leak that I had at the right collector fixed while I was under there. It's much more pleasant to drive now. I also found and fixed a bunch of nuts and bolts that had rattled loose (or I forgot to actually tighten when I put the sheet metal together on the front).
I still need to get tires, get a heater core, reseal enough of the cab that I can get the floor covered, and get a new center support for the rear drive shaft.
I'm also starting to think that I found another "gotcha" from the taller frame vs the donor truck. The thing steers like a boat. Really sluggish response and the turning radius is huge. I had a similar result on my old xj when I accidentally adjusted the upper control arms too short when I installed the lift. I think that there's too much positive caster, caused by the rear of the front springs effectively being mounted about an inch lower than the axle was designed for. I'm not sure what the fix for this is going to be yet. Cutting the front spring mounts loose and sticking a 1" spacer in between the frame and the mount seems like a reasonable solution. I'd like to see if I could find some measurements on the front mounts from a factory 4x4 crew cab to see if they're taller to deal with the taller frame.
