Wild and Free

The sounds too good to be true thing is what kept me from jumping onto the Quad train when I had my 02..........shortly after the release it was nothing but problems, sure glad I never went that direction.

I find it doesn't matter which filter you use, I have seen it both ways with several filter brands of full flow filters mainly mopar, fleetgaurd , amsoil , Hastings and Donaldson. My amsoil bypass filter stays full no matter what. I find that if you drain the sump first and let it sit for a bit before pulling the filter it will almost always syphon a bit back out of the filter which is how I usually do it. If you just pull the filter first if it is still warm I always get a hand full of oil. If you let it sit until cool I find it the same way, if you pull the filter first you get oil if you drain the sump first depending on how long you wait before pulling the filter I may or may not find oil in the filter head yet as the cold thicker oil doesn't syphon back as fast.

Different brands of oils and different additive packages will make the oil foam and look like that in some cases. It is hard to know as the flash can change the color of things and make it look better or worse as well. I have seen some brand new gear lubes look like that right from the container over the years.

I edited my last post as you typed yours to indicate I just noticed you had a 2wd so not sure if you even have a track bar, but definitely go with a Borgeson 3.3 turn gear box this single upgrade makes it feel like a new rig more so than any other upgrade you can do to the steering on a 2nd gen.

Definitely upgrade the track bar to the 3rd gen style it requires a bolt on bracket on the driver side when you buy the conversion kit. It gets rid of the POS end link that wears out constantly and goes to a bolt and bushing, much more trouble free and less maintenance and hold the front axle more stable. Other than that the only other upgrade I tell everybody to get is to replace the factory loosey goosey 4.5 turn gear box with a 3 turn unit. This alone is the best steering upgrade you can do to make the 2nd gen steering feel safer and drive nicer. I have owned three second gens a 3rd gen and a 4th gen and have tried every steering upgrade in the book so I kind of know what to suggest here from personal experience with them. On edit I see you have a 2wd so I can not give good advice in that area, have not had the opportunity to work on the front end of one so not sure how they are set up or if they even have a track bar like a 4wd does. But the steering gear is the way to go for sure.

Looks like foam to me, doesn't appear to be water, if it was water it would be milky. I would be more concerned about what that chunky dark sludge is running out just below the ring gear in the picture.

Fleetguard or Donaldson are about as good as you can get in an oil filter. Most synthetics are good now days, just a matter of preference.

Be carefull what you wish for Mike, I can't count the number of winters we went with only a dusting of snow until march or april then get 4 feet of wet heavy snow blown in over a 24-36 hour period.

BWAAHHHAAAHHHAAAAAHHHAAAA I wish I could have told my bosses and customers and our cattle that and seen how many paycheck I got going forward. 20 below is when the most money is to be made as a tech and having been a Field tech for near 10 years doing repairs in road ditches and in the middle of nowhere on many occasions with the wind howling.

And just think when it takes that long to build up full oil pressure, I need to rub it in to AH64ID and his filter info. When you are running a full blown dino oil in cold temps you are running about......... oh lets say nearly none of it through the filter media, nearly 100% of the oil is bypassing the filter, To pump something the consistency of honey through a filter media is not going to happen, if it didn't bypass you would do one of 2 things, either blow the filter off or collapse the filter media which is very common, I can't even think of the times I have pulled engine oil filters off that were totally collapsed in on themselves. This is where a quality filter comes into play as well some are more robust and have better built in bypass abilities.

Won't be until later this year and all depends on the sale of the twin home in Bismarck my sister and I inherited from our mother whom we lost last February . Once and if it sells then we will be on the hunt for another rental / vacation property. We have some work to do on the property before putting it on the market by late spring hopefully plus we need to work around the current renters too, don't want to put them out on short notice either, will see what happens come spring. But as I wrote your wife via e-mail we want to check out the gulf areas north of Tampa, your wife told me about a few areas / towns that might fit the bill for what we are looking for similar to the Ft Meyers / Naples areas, inter-coastal with gulf access via canal or river front properties.

With some E/G tires you need to worry about shaking and rattling the TT to death as you are riding on flintstone tires at that point every single road crack is jolting your trailer extremely hard unless you keep them aired down a lot., Would be ok on any other trailer but I would watch your speed and roads and drive accordingly with them on a TT or any sort of towable camper.

Ha Ha CAD is not what it should be in my posts here it should be Computer Aided Design and not Central axle disconnect, I think the system needs some refining yet .

What's even more impressive are guys who build these small engine without the use of CAD programs or computers, I met an old timer diesel tech from Minnesota who worked at the Cummins NC shop down there in St. Paul who had a hobby of building small I mean fit in your hand and fully operational small steam and diesel engines from scratch in his spare hobby time, He had a steam engine at the shop he demonstrated and it was really neat, and all done with hand tools and lathe without computers at all. He said he had made a couple diesel versions too and had pics but didn't get to see them.

My shop is about 40 feet from my house and I had to look hard to see it through the little flurry we had yesterday morning too. Not many places you can have a blizzard with clear sunny skies but we get this all the time.

Same here, had several 75+mph reports about 70 miles north of us, weather station here at work had registered 64 mph and was sustained at 35+, since about 3pm it has settled down to under 20 sustained now finally.

Looks like someone looked into the JBS!

I have a thread going over at Ramforumz and there is a tranny gurur over there helping me out with some pointers here is the link if anyone wants to follow it. I go by Toon tugr over there. http://www.ramforumz.com/showthread.php?p=1296597#post1296597 Update : Got the pan off and all looked in good shape and clean and oil looked and smelled ok yet.....other than the spin on filter fell off just like I have read about so off to town for new OEM filters and see if she comes to life again. Several codes all relating to low trans line and main pressures and 3-4 gear ratios not right. cleared them, off to town..... Update 2.o.... Back in business again and she runs strong................only needed I quart of ATF to do the job, was able to carefully recover most of the oil and keep it clean since it only had a thousand miles on it, two new OEM filters and a carefully threaded on spin on filter to make sure it wasn't over tightened. Now to see how it performs over the long haul again.

I am really hoping it is simple too, got home and got her in the shop around 2:45 am "Ain't shift work great" , good thing I had the wife come, started it at work and there was nothing when I tried to put it in gear forward or reverse all like being in neutral revved it up a few times to see if it would grab and then the CEL came on. Got the coffee brewing and am headed out to get the pan off again and see.

Killer the fluid level is actually a tish high.

Funny you say that, my first vehicle was a 66 GMC with 3 on the tree. My wife is going to be a sport and come pull me home in the wee hours of the night with the cummins. Decided against driving it any further and potentially destroying a tranny in case it is a stupid simple thing like a filter and there is still life left in it. Hey one can hope right? Not sure what you mean by no more dealers though, its ever been to one outside of 2 minor warranty issues right after i bought it 2 years ago. Driver side heated mirror didn't work and a very slight right front axle seal leak and one rear axle pinion nut recall update to prevent it from loosening up.

Dag nammit!!!!!!!!!!! Rig almost left me sitting today, tranny started doing real funny things on the way to work this afternoon, started shifting erratically and slipping, let off it and feathered the throttle to feel it out a bit and it finally settled into first gear and wouldn't upshift past first, got to a spot I could pull over and checked for leaks and fluid and all looked ok, fluid had a smell of beginning to get hot but looked good and the temp gauuge for the tranny was normal, took off and it was slipping until I got to about 20-30 mph in first and it held strong once there but it took a couple miles to get to that speed. No MIL or any other warning just no tranny functon, now to see what happens at 2 am on the way home in the middle of the country. :banghead: But hey I didn't see any blue puffs when starting it today.

We call any area that is warmer on average than the surrounding areas as "Banana belts". But yeah the left coast libs are moving in closer to home all the time..........

I have been in contact with your wife and have already learned a few things.

She is from Colorado so she is used to the warm air anyhow. lol. Every body knows Colorado is the Banana belt of the plains states.