The kids went back to school today.  I don't think either was really ready for Summer (or their vacation) to be over.

Universal Joints

I wasn't ready either.  Fortunately I had already planned to be off today.  I spent spent a little time working on the truck.  Not much was achieved.  The plan was to blast and paint the drive shaft.  Unfortunately it got hot before I was ready to start the blasting.  Too hot.

First I had to remove the old u-joints.  This turned out to be not as difficult as it first seemed.  After viewing a couple of videos online and calling in reinforcements (Capt. Dan), I finally realized that my u-joints had their clips on the inner edge, not the exterior.

So I learned a little something about my truck today also.  It turns out not only is the engine out of a later model ('82), the transmission and drive shaft are as well.  Because the drive shaft is from a latter model truck, it has also been modified to connect to the differential on the '72.  This made obtaining the correct u-joints a considerable challenge.  Fortunately my reinforcement had in a previous life worked in a auto parts house and managed to manipulate the folks at the local parts store into handing him the parts catalogs so he could find the correct part numbers.  The parts numbers from the computer were all wrong.  We eventually prevailed.

I never did get around to the blasting or painting, but there is always next weekend.

I really enjoyed my day off.  Back to work tomorrow.  The 'Small Engine Repair' class starts tonight.