Northwoods

If you need some help breaking the 1M mark, let me know and I'll be happy to roll your speedometer forward for you. It's only illegal to roll it back, right?

If you aren't planning to run your truck in the near future, plugging it in does more harm than good because the heater creates a warm spot that attracts moisture, which then migrates to the colder parts of your engine where it condenses into water.If you aren't going to drive it all winter, let it get cold and stay that way so the water vapor will stay on the outside of your engine where it belongs. Plugging it in 12 hours before you're ready to drive, or even firing it up without the heater is better than letting the block heater run for weeks without getting the engine up to temperature.

Those cars work great for hitting deer with no body damage, but you sure as hell don't want to roll one. Trust me on that...

Sounds like an excellent plan to me. Unless you need the power, there's no reason to drive a nose heavy slow to warm up pig through a Canadian winter, especially through salt with new paint.I've spent the last week getting my own winter beater ready for another season of abuse.

While he's got it all apart, make sure he takes care of the KDP.You might also want to price out a decent set of air tools and compare that to the labor quote. My rule of thumb is that I'll do my own work if the labor savings pays for all the tools I need to do the job right. If you do that for a couple years, you'll wind up with a pretty respectable set of tools.

You're thinking of Fords. As far as I know, the lug pattern hasn't changed on Dodge or Chevy.

Those are 3rd gen wheels and hubcaps. I've got the same wheels on my 95, but had to use the 2nd gen hubcaps because the 3rd gen caps wouldn't fit over the drum brake hubs.

Harbor freight has a $50 set of gauges with the connections you need to recharge your AC. If you need a vacuum pump, their two stage pump for $150 works pretty well.

After swapping out gears and tire sizes I made the mistake of trusting the stealership to get the right speedometer gear for me based on their charts. $80 later the speedometer went from too slow to too fast. :banghead:I tried to do the math to figure out exactly what I needed but I got caught in the paradox of 4.11/3.55=115.8% versus 3.55/4.11=86.4%. Did I need to change the gearing 15.8% or 13.6%? :banghead: In retrospect, I'm pretty sure that this is what caused the dealer to give me the wrong part and it makes me question the accuracy of all the online conversion tables.After a few beers and remembering some algebra from 20 years ago, I figured out how to make the truck tell me the answer. :thumbup2:Here's what you do:First of all, you need to know what gear you're currently running, so pull the gear and read the stamp which tells you the number of teeth.Second, reset your trip meter and gps (or pull up even with a mile marker out on the highway)Third, drive the same number of miles (measured by gps or mile marker) as the number of teeth on your gearWhen you get to that point, look at the trip odometer, and it will tell you exactly which gear you need (round up or down to the nearest number).Here's how it works if you're actually interested in the math:In my case, I was running a 29 tooth gear, and drove 29 miles. Taking those first two known values I had 29 teeth/29 miles for a 1:1 ratio. On the other side of the equation I had 30.3 miles on the trip odometer. Since the first side of the equation was already set to 1, I knew I needed a 30 tooth gear to balance the second side. After ordering the right gear and putting it in, I double checked the odometer against the gps and I'm less than a mile off after a hundred miles of driving.If you need the gear, its $80 an up at the dealer with some of them going for over $100. I ordered mine through wermopar.com for $70. Later on I found out that there are aftermarket ones on ebay for $40. The dodge/jeep part #is 520676xx with the last two numbers being the number of teeth you need. I've got a spare 29 and a 36 if anybody needs them.