The tear down begins!

In preparation for the "big" tear down at Lamorna Garage, we first removed some of the easy stuff at our house. All the mats, the middle row seats, the sand ladders, hi-lift jack, spare tire, light bar and roof rack plus the brush wires came off without too much effor and now sit beside our house--hopefully for less than two months.... The 109 has a totally different look now!

Then, we drove over to Ballard to begin the real work at Gord'ns garage.

I am a big fan of Gord'n at Lamorna Garage (1142 NW 50th Street, Seattle, WA 98107 Tel. 206-361-7002). Both my wife and I wanted to be involved in the frame swap and Gord'n graciously obliged. Under his supervision, we began work on Wednesday, October 28, 2009.
Our goal was to get the bulkhead removed. We didn't even get halfway!

We took pictures along the way and everything we took off was put in its own labelled box or labelled gallon zip-lock bag. My wife began working on the dash while I worked on the gauge cluster.

The wiring harness under the hood looked like it was fairly new, but the wiring behind the gauges seemed--and sounded--very old and brittle. Our plan includes installing a new wiring harness so, for better or worse, I cut through the main harness just forward of the clutch tower and pulled the stump through the bulkhead with the gauges themselves. I left everything attached to the gauges to help in the reassembly.

The speedometer has only worked sporadically in the two years we've owned the truck such that, according to its odometer, we've only driven about 300 miles during that time. We've gone through three cables, thinking that was the problem. We've made sure it was tight at the transmission. In any event, with 3.54 gearing in the differentials after the frame swap, we'll need a 110 speedometer anyway.

Most of what we accomplished that day was getting the interior bits removed from the bulkhead. From the outside, other than the hood, you could not tell we had done anything so the last thing I did before leaving that day was to remove the front right wing. That way, it at least looked like we had made some progress!