Project Chronicle

As mentioned the other day, the Trooper RS is finally under the knife after two years of moving it around to various storage locations. My mechanic, Jay Gaston who runs Jay's 4WD, is in the thick of it at the moment, taking apart the front axles and brakes to refresh the components within.

The passenger side is back together, but we found the driver's side hub was pretty rough. The bearing race was just falling out, so I found a used replacement at Woonsocket Auto Salvage. New wheel bearings ordered front and rear, and we'll also track down a set of replacement control arms with new bearings pressed in at some point. The cool thing about that last job is this guy - known as Jerry Lemond - still has NOS parts in his barn from his days as the head trainer for Isuzu corporate. He bought out the domestic parts supply when Isuzu stopped selling consumer vehicles in the states.

As part of this, he's offered to have me send him a set of replacement control arms from a southern junkyard and he'll press in fresh bushings before sending them onto me. This project is a bit of a fool's errand - I'll not likely sell it for what I'll have into it - but I really do love this truck and want to see it come back to life. 

One of the dumber stumbling blocks with the junkyard-find 190E 2.3-16 Cosworth had to do with the interior. The original Recaro seats were in bad shape, so I bought a replacement interior not too long after acquiring the car. The one downside is the Recaros came without bases, so they had to be swapped off of the original, battered seats. 

Since installing the replacement seat, it would do one of two things: it would shoot all the way forward or all the way backward. The 190E regardless of seat options were all powered, so the easy fix was to replace the power seat switch, which also controls the memory. We replaced it twice with no change in behavior. Now, the reason I say this is a dumb obstacle is that the car actually starts up and idles quite nicely, but you can't very much drive it without a seat. Incredibly, the lack of easy resolution with the seat is one of the bigger reasons why this project hasn't moved much lately. 

My shop finally had some downtime today and found the source of the issues: the control box that sits under the seat definitely got soaked, with all sorts of corrosion inside the box. This most likely happened while it was sitting in the junkyard with no rear windows, courtesy of the yard "help" that smashed them out to get the window regulators (those and the radiator were the only parts they sold off of the car while it was inventoried.) 

The bad news is, not many used parts still exist; the good news is, you can buy one new from Mercedes. So, we'll order one up in hopes this lets us install the front seat and actually take it out onto the road. 

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was having trouble getting the lone gun mechanic I hired for the Trooper RS revival to start on the project. I dangled the prospect of a bonus, but what seems to have gotten things moving is that I'm now paying rent for this thing. 

Bear in mind: I did not pay rent for the six months it's been stored at a commercial property in Portsmouth, RI. But here's what I realized: if Jay, my mechanic pal gets hit by a bus tomorrow, there's no connecting him to me as far as the property owner is concerned. So, I pressured Jay into connecting me to the owner to kick-start an agreement, which not only provided me some ass-coverage but also made it clear that I was committed to this project - and now had even more skin in the game.

Who knows. Maybe the two are unrelated and I'm just an idiot for paying rent when no one was asking. But the Trooper did move indoors this weekend, with the fuel system being cleaned and replacement parts swapped in (gas tank, fuel pump, etc.) Jay let me know all of the calipers are condemned, so I just ordered replacement calipers to go with the replacement calipers and pads I sent over last year. 

The timing belt still needs to be done, but I'm hopeful we're going to see some real progress over these next few weeks.