Military Truck Crazy Suspension Damage - Can We Fix It?

all right folks today is the day we're going to work on this old army truck i would call this a deuce and a half i'm sure there's a more correct model number for it but i don't know what that is the cool thing about it is it has this dump box which i believe is original and i don't know if i've ever seen another one set up that way it's got some oversized tires otherwise you know it's pretty original it's in good shape i think it's from the early 1970s and the reason it's here is because of the suspension the axles are walking out [Applause] so the the rear axle will get shifted sideways compared to the front axle which you know that's not that big of a deal but because it has these oversized tires it rubs on the suspension and it wants to kind of climb up on top of itself and the guy said it's pretty sketchy when that happens so we're gonna pull it inside i think the problem is that these trunnion bearings here are loose we're gonna see what we can do about it this truck's been here for way way too long i feel really bad i've just been slammed i haven't had a chance to work on it it's big it takes up a lot of space i didn't want to tear it down in my shop and not be able to get other stuff in but that's not really an excuse anyway let's see if we can get the old girl to go i think we're gonna have to flip this master switch that's it well that's fun box is full of water and the floor drain is over there all right i squeegeed off the floor it's draining out there on the hill let's try this again all right i'm gonna wiggle the spring a little bit side to side watch that trunking you see that movement i don't think that should be there all right this trunnion bearing has a cover i pop that off and inside it looks to me like it's just a pair of tapered roller bearings just like a wheel bearing set you see that play i think that's a problem i don't know if it's all of the problem looks like it's a three inch eight point on to see if i have one well what do you know i did have one well it's not tight i don't know if that's a good sign or a bad sign that's two flats about two and a half [Applause] let's see if our wiggle is gone oh yeah all right let's go ahead and pull that bearing out i just want to know what we're dealing with so well it looks like it's in good shape i don't see any problem with this bearing it looks looks new to me there's nothing wrong there the book here it does not tell us how to set these up though there must have been multiple different designs for this bearing set because the the manual only describes a tapered bronze cone part number 29 and part number 15. it's not clear to me whether the bearings the tapered roller bearings are an update so it doesn't really matter the way that they set say to set up the bronze bushings is kind of like a wheel bearing torque it to 50 pounds back off a quarter turn and then the outside nut you tighten to 150 foot-pounds and you're good to go i think when we set it up we'll just tighten it up to zero lash because i can't see any reason for it to have any kind of movement we have to repack this bearing so we can try out a new toy i picked up this is a bearing pack got a couple of cones and all you have to do is stick the bearing in one way or the other doesn't really matter that way it'll do i think like so now the whole thing moves up and down and pumps very bearing grease up into the cone there we go you see it just popped out around the cage beautiful one fully packed bearing there we go all right 50 foot pounds about there now back it off a quarter turn be right about there all right 150 foot pounds there it is you got to be kidding me okay i don't know why that can't have a symmetrical bolt pattern but it doesn't that's okay that's it hopefully you guys can see just how close this tire is i mean it's one finger width away from that bolt right now and there's actually more room for the whole axle to move over before the spring would hit that the side of the spring perch or whatever they call it the spring pad we did fix the spring side to side movement so i guess that's an improvement but i just don't think it's going to solve the problem of the dog tracking and the tires rubbing this tire is just too big so the only other component of the suspension that could really be worn is these dog bone bushings there's 12 of them and i'm not an expert about any of this suspension but they look pretty good to me i i just really don't think there's a problem there and you could spend a fortune replacing all those things you figure figure at a minimum an hour a piece times 12 plus you gotta buy parts so yeah that can get pretty pricey so there's a single bar at the top and then one on each side at the bottom kind of a classic suspension setup there's also kind of some wear pads here on the inside surface of these spring pads but as far as i can tell it's not replaceable and you can't adjust the location of these spring pads they're bolted to the axles but there's a big boss on the top that they fit over so they're fixed side to side so you're really just kind of stuck with what you got pretty cool setup under here there's the cylinders that dump the box i'm not sure if it's a scissor hoist or how how that's set up that looks like the valve that controls it and this big guy here is the transfer case there's a big drum on the back for the parking brake there's the transmission the power steering is crazy i think that's what that big cylinder is there on the back side of the front axle it looks like to me like it's an add-on like these trucks were probably originally designed without power steering and then they bolt that thing on it's got to be a handful to drive with no power steering yeah looks good down here though nice and clean i mean there's some oil drips but no rust all right guys i finished up the spring pivot bearing i took the deuce for a ride there was no improvement which that's not surprising it was definitely not the problem so i'm just checking the run out on the wheel the rim and tire here and it appears to be appears to be excellent so we don't have any kind of bent rim issues the problem is for sure with the right side though the right rear axle i probably can't show you on the camera because it's going to be too dark but it's already rubbed on that new bolt that i installed there so that's the problem area well folks i've done some measuring and just some general visual inspection and i believe i found the problem so we come over here and we shine some light let me look at that spring can you guys see how the bottom two leafs there the ones that go through to the axle are not in line with the rest of the spring pack see how it's shifted over like that you can see how there's a layer of mud on there so it didn't just shift over it's been like that for a while and if i can get my light in the right spot you'll actually see that that spring is worn pretty substantially on the inside there about a quarter of an inch this is on the left rear this is the right rear side looking at it from the opposite end so we're looking from the pivot towards the rear you see how it's also not lined up correctly let me show you what it should look like if you look here at the front spring you can see it's perfect so that's how it should look all the leaves should be perfectly in line in a vertical plane i don't know if it'll show up in this view or not but that is the problem the springs are bent towards their bent this way towards this side substantially like three quarters of an inch i just i have no idea what could have caused that problem i never seen anything like it something had to hit that axle and drive it towards the left side of the truck with a huge amount of force those springs are they're two and a half inches wide and each leaf is like i don't know 7 16 of an inch thick or something like that so yeah we're gonna have to replace those springs there's no two ways about it these are bud style wheels so they're inch and a half hex on the outside 13 16 square on the inside this socket actually can do both oh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] wow we appear to be leaking on this side wheel seal or wheel cylinder maybe these are inboard drums so both hubs are gonna have to come off see what's going on i'm pretty sure these are grease packed hubs so if it's leaking oil out then it probably means that the seal around the axle shaft is leaking letting oil into the bearings and then it's leaking out the wheel seal or it could be the wheel cylinder for the brakes i don't know anyway you can see our deformed spring pack let's get her out of there so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] wow so so that's the seal that separates the grease and the oil well i guess it should i don't see any grease though there we go all right folks i think we might finally be able to put this military truck back together let me share some wisdom with you first if your wife ever asks if we air quotes here we can watch a four-year-old and a one-year-old overnight understand that she's not asking you for your permission she's probably already said yes what she's asking is if you'll help her survive the night and uh that's no small task two four-year-olds and a one-year-old can take a toll second it is not easy to get parts for a 1970s military surplus truck i believe it's been apart for 19 days where do you want to start one of the wheel seals was leaking i could see that before we took it apart once we got the wheels off it was pretty obvious that all four wheel seals were leaking so we're never gonna have a better time to do it than now i pulled them all apart i found one bad bearing here two bad bearings there not a speck of grease anywhere so we're going to replace all the wheel seals repack all the bearings fix that up right as far as the springs go i tried two local spring shops and a driveline shop nobody wanted to help me we used to have a really good spring shop called davenport spring they got bought out by mutual wheel and they absolutely destroyed them they can't do anything they can't make any part for any spring at all all they can do is order stuff out of a catalog just like you or i could anyway i scored a set of used springs from a local junkyard and they're actually a perfect match so our stack here has 12 springs or 12 leaves this new set has 12 leaves they're worn but they're not bent as far as the other parts go i ended up buying them from memphis equipment in memphis tennessee we had a bit of a snafu there so i got all the bearings and wheel seals and gaskets that we need that was not a problem but the u-bolts i tried getting these locally they didn't want to make the u-bolts for me so he told me that the i guess these trucks were available with springs i guess 10 leafs is the most common and then there's 12 15 and 17. he said they stock the 10 and the 17 leaf u-bolts you take the 17 leaf u-bolts you cut them down and you make them in make them fit the 12-leaf well when i got them i didn't have enough threads to do that so i called him up and he said oh no i made a mistake you actually need the 10 leaf spring or 10 leaf u-bolts and they're long enough to accommodate the 12 leaf springs the problem is i had to wait for the 17 leaf u-bolts to be made they were out of stock so that cost me a week and then it took me another three days to get the correct u-bolts i did make one other discovery the i don't know what you want to call it perch here that the spring sits on it's pinned to the top of the axle and the pin has uh well it's had a bad day i don't know if it was from the same incident or a separate incident you can see in the bottom of the perch here it's actually egged out about half the diameter of the pin so i don't know what we're going to do about that i don't think there's any way to really you know fix that we're just gonna have to line it up we'll take a measurement off of the backing plate from the backing plate to the the pin and we'll do some dead reckoning tighten it down and it should be should be good enough for the you know the purposes of this truck it's not like it's going into commercial service or anything like that let's start putting this thing back together shouldn't really take that long hopefully if it fixes it cross your fingers we're going to reverse the springs as well so we're going to flip them end to end so i'm going to flip it around and we'll use the unworn side we'll put that towards the inside where it rubs on the inside of that perch also the springs we're putting in have quite a bit more arch they're about i don't know one leaf taller than the old spring so it should pick the back end of the truck up a little bit which is always a good thing okay all right well the new u-bolt doesn't have this bend like the old u-bolt the guy at memphis equipment said don't worry about that and then the new ones have rolled threads instead of cut threads so the actual diameter of the bolts a little bit smaller but they should actually be stronger especially since they're not corroded almost all the way through that's a three-quarter inch diameter u-bolt 19 millimeter it's worn down to about i don't know 12 13 millimeters by half an inch that's not unusual [Music] with this style of a spring perch the problem is the spring perch fills up with crud and then it it just rusts everything inside same problem with gm pickup trucks since the dawn of time i think they're still being built that way on the rear axle now torque spec on these is 180 to 220 foot-pounds we're going on the tight side [Applause] [Applause] there you can't actually get a socket and a torque wrench on the inside bolt for inside nut so i'm just taking my best guess but the old torque wrench here she's pretty well calibrated [Music] [Music] well both the inner and outer bearing use the same outside race the only difference is the inside diameter of the bearing itself first casualty that piece of wire got me so it's kind of cool because the outer races are the same you can actually reverse the hubs and i guess later on with these trucks or with a similar model truck they did reverse the hubs and then they used super singles instead of having dual wheels and what's kind of cool is that it has the shield inside the drum so when the seal starts to leak which it inevitably will the grease or oil or whatever happens to be in it gets funneled away from the brake shoes and there's actually drain holes out here on the perimeter so the centripetal force centrifugal force will push the oil out through the drain holes and you don't get contamination of the brake shoes it's pretty clever that's it we're gonna replace this grease seal i don't know if you guys can see just how beat up this stub is but she's been worked over a few times to be expected i suppose there's the new seal and as far as an installation tool we're going to use the old bearing slide right up against and then i found this uh cap off of a welding tank folding bottle and it fits just just right over the stub i'm sure there's a for real installation tool but i don't i don't have one or even know what it looks like there we go if you're thinking you can do this job without getting grease everywhere good luck that's not gonna happen oh what's the problem now now the book shows that there's a little cork wedge that goes in the keyway underneath the bearing but the memphis equipment guy didn't seem to really know what i was talking about apparently it's not maybe not a a common part or i don't know if it's just been discontinued or if it's not really necessary i really don't know i just cut some strips of cork gasket material we're going to stick in there and if you look at the way this is constructed it has to leak i mean at a minimum it has to leak oil into the into the grease but if you look in the book i'm sure there's a very short service interval on these bearings probably like 5 000 miles or something might be less than that i know i had a couple buddies in college who were light vehicle mechanics in the military various branches and they always said they spent a lot of time repacking wheel bearings even on stuff that had basically no miles well the bearing setup procedure is to torque the inside nut to 50 foot pounds while rolling let's make sure we get everything seated it's probably good now we're going to back it off between a sixteenth and a quarter of a turn which is pretty pretty open but i think we're gonna we're just gonna go two flats right about there i bought new fold-over locks the old ones were in pretty tough shape usually get a couple uses out of those and then the ears will start to break off then we torque the outer nut to 200 foot pounds that's it we're good this bearing packer is fantastic for this job i've packed a million bearings by hand this beats it any day of the week i've got one of those cheesy ones where it's two plastic cones you hook up a grease gun to it but it actually i think it makes more of a mess than just doing it the old school way by hand that's just me beautiful i'm sure this is not the correct mil-spec double-a grease or whatever you're supposed to use but it'll be just fine all right folks we're getting pretty close springs look good i'm happy with that there's some big bolts here that come through from the back side that are supposed to pinch this saddle onto the spring pack i cannot get those to budge you can't reach it well you can't get on it with a socket once the spring's installed i can only get it with an open-end wrench and it doesn't want to turn so i think we're gonna have to just leave that one leave that one alone we're going to go for a drive show you it's not it's not quite as good as i hoped it would be this is the side that i think was giving us the problem [Music] well there's a problem this one's loose too i don't know what's up with that anyway i'll tighten those up and i bet it'll start a little bit better hey see it's all it's all cored out inside there that or somebody's been wailing on the top of that terminal who knows all right the truck's in a hard turn so the front axle should be all the way that way and the rear axle should be all the way this way this is the one i'm really worried about but it it does not hit i mean all we need is more than zero i don't know why but on the right side the rear axle is a little bit further forward than the other side yeah i just don't know why well folks another problem has revealed itself take a sight down the right side here see how the two wheels are basically perfectly in alignment right now right there we're lined up on the front axle and the rear axle is just way off i think the rear axle is bent significantly i believe that it's pushed back i don't know how that happens but or how long it's been that way or or what happened to this poor truck but that's what i suspect i had the misses helped me we measured from the outside of the wheel to the outside of the wheel front and back and the front axle is perfect the rear axle it's almost a full inch difference from the front side to the rear side and i think it's over here on the left side of the truck not the right side so i don't know what to do about that i mean it's going to scrub tires like crazy but then again if he doesn't drive it that much maybe it's not a problem i don't know i guess we'll see we'll see what he wants to do i don't i don't know man that's crazy i wish i would have known that before we did all this work i don't think this fella is going to be too happy with me damn it all right i better tell him about it and see what he wants to do i guess huh [Applause] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so so can i help you gotta go lady get that up get that car all cleaned up well i mean don't look at the outside i have a hose and a pressure washer everybody likes to see you i wanna know what you're doing they're still waiting for your video about your new car which will never be completed it probably won't mostly because you have the footage yes i'm holding it hostage yeah yeah that's how it works it's a pretty fancy rig here i know it's actually a lot more helpful than when i did the tried to make a new car video footage because then it didn't happen well here's the deal if anybody out there designing shop vacs they all suck they all this one sucks that one sucks i mean isn't that their job wheels break they fall over aren't there jobs to suck they're just well yes very funny so i i modified mine with a furniture dolly it's much better alright folks the lady confirms the axle is bent i think you can actually see it pretty well without the without the wheels on it hope you sight down the down the hub straight on we'll see that it doesn't quite line up if you look at it this way i think it's pretty obvious so i'm squared up on the backing plate and it's it's definitely off good news is i think the axles are the same slight differences i noticed the check plug is in a little bit different spot and i think they're actually made by a different company so this is a legit legit rockwell axle the other one says dta whatever that means i can't read most of the tag but i believe they're compatible i think most the parts of the junkyard axle were good the third member is fine i just i didn't trust it because the axles were removed so the gears and stuff were exposed to water and whatnot for however long that thing sat in the junkyard the brake shoes were junk some of the brake hardware was junk so we're going to transfer all that stuff from the old axle and we shouldn't have to worry about it unfortunately the backing plates are riveted on otherwise i would have just unbolted those and switched the whole backing plate over but yeah the anchor pins at the bottom on this side were pretty rusty so we're going to switch all that stuff over yeah i probably won't record that it's pretty straightforward i'll bring you guys back when it's done all right folks got all the parts switched over took a lot longer than i anticipated but i guess that's to be expected at this point the hardest part is getting the brakes adjusted there's actually two adjusters for each brake shoe so there are eight total adjusters on this axle easier to see on this strip down axle so at the top by the wheel cylinder you've got this cam and then at the bottom the anchor pin is also a cam so this one adjusts the brake shoe out this one adjusts the brake shoe out but it can also adjust the brake shoe down or up depending on which way you turn it so you really end up chasing your tail when you have to adjust both of them so normally you'd only have to adjust this cam at the top unless you were replacing the brake shoes or in our case we're kind of switching everything around and i did replace the anchor pins on both sides so it took me a while to figure that out [Applause] it's in it's pretty straight not much to it really there's 12 three-quarter inch bolts through the various torque rods and spring hangers here four half inch bolts in the driveline and one brake line i went ahead and bled the brakes just like bleeding any kind of hydraulic brakes nothing to it there is one catch though i had a well someone reached out to me from youtube he has a channel called tactical repair and he mentioned to me that these trucks originally would have had dot-5 brake fluid which is a silicone based brake fluid i hadn't thought of that so he told me what you should do let's take a sample of the brake fluid from the master cylinder mix it with some water and see if it beads up and i mixed it with water and it does not bead up which means this truck's been converted to regular old brake fluid so we're going to put some dot-4 in it and we'll move on the the master cylinder location is hilarious so the master cylinder is in an access panel underneath of the floorboard but there's a cross member for the cab that's right above the master cylinder so you have to kind of weasel around that cross member and then take off the cap you cannot see inside the actual master cylinder i guess you're supposed to pour it through that hole so i better find a funnel man i don't even like saying that but i guess we're gonna have to we'll fill that guy up it's pretty low so so so maybe you're ready people there's a surprise road construction the first time ever let's see if i can do a smooth shift through the gears it's kind of weird getting used to the u-shaped pattern so so all right folks i think that went pretty well but i did find an issue i popped the check plug out to check the fluid level and there was pressure inside the axle so the axle creates heat and that expands the gases inside and creates pressure and it has to be vented or it'll blow the seals out the old axle tube had a vent drilled right in the top of the tube itself but the new axle does not have that same provision so i snooped around a little bit and it turns out the vent is in the side cover on the top of the third member there so here's the cover off of our old drive unit no vent and then there's the replacement so all i have to do is swap out those covers and we should be good to go that's it we're done all right folks let's wrap it up what a project this truck turned into way more than i ever expected when he first brought it in and described the problem you know i was looking for a worn bushing or a loose bearing or something like that and when i tightened up that the trunnion bearing there and it didn't solve the problem i very nearly sent the truck home because i couldn't find anything wrong and it wasn't until i started really measuring with a you know a tape measure and trying to figure out the alignment that i discovered that the springs were bent and then it wasn't until i got the springs replaced that i figured out that the axle was bent so i don't know what happened to this truck it must have been something pretty spectacular and i had a customer in here who was a seabee in the navy and i i showed him what happened he thought maybe the truck had been picked up with a crane there's sling hooks on the trunnion and then up in the front he thought maybe they picked it up with a crane and then swung it into something i don't i really don't know i'd say it's had some significant work done on it since whatever accident caused the springs and axle to be bent but why they didn't replace those parts i i just don't know but the good news is i think we've got it completely straightened out now both figuratively and literally so the axles are tracking pretty much perfectly that was the good side this is the bad side so that rear axle no longer points off into space yeah i'm happy with it and uh i don't know it's hard to get parts for these military trucks but we got pretty lucky i was able to find the axle and the correct springs locally used but in good condition so i guess i can't complain too much about the the parts situation of course i got the last parts they had in that yard so maybe the next guy's gonna have a little bit harder time anyway thanks guys for watching i don't know how long this video will be i feel like it's gonna be it's gonna be kind of a doozy anyway i'll see you next time i think we'll wait until tomorrow to do something about this and this and this and these [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so you

Channel: Watch Wes Work

Views: 378,472

Rating: 4.9574623 out of 5

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Id: -bqOmA7nEjM

Length: 52min 17sec (3137 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021