1950 Willys Truck re-rebuild by 50wllystrk

4 minute(s) of a 620 minute read

Nothing big here but needs to be addressed. After removing one of the brackets off the axle somehow one of the facftory welds didn't go as planned. It burned away/melted the axle tube at the weld spot but didn't fill the weld spot. I ended up with a pretty good missing chunnk of metalhere.
Once again. being able to weld, for all you concidering to learn to do so, is a great idea. To correct this issue is a 5 minute fix. Clean, weld, grind, like it never happened. As many can tell, often times for me, I see welding as a liquid metal filler.

Are you going to powder-coat the axle?
In my personal opinion you have to be careful when repainting a classic with the gloss. To much fleck and dimension and what not makes the vehicle look a bit off. Its a bit disconnected. Unless thats what you like.
Looks like a nice shop you've got to work in there .[/QUOTE

Now on the body I'll be going with the clear coat, but on the underside and axle work I'll be going with semi/flat black. I have a long ways to drive to have powder coating done. That's the problem with living away from the bigger cities.

I'm probably gonna treat this truck the same way I have for years now. If it snows hard, it's my transportation. If I got to drive through cow pooh, that's where I'm going. I have to drive down gravel roads, here I go. Gotta get through trees and have branches drag down the side of the truck, I'm not happy, but there I'll go.

I'm not gonna take any time to clean the undercarriage other than an occasional pressure wash at the car wash.

No prima-donna here. This is the core of this redue. This is to secure another 20 years of service, and to turn heads while doing it's job of being a truck.
While we're here, one part of the rear axle we hear about, but hasn't brought into focus on the rebuilt so far is the spider gears. Although over looked, they play an absolute necessity part of the power transfer to the rear wheels.
Without them we would have major issues just turning the vehicle around corners.
They allow one tire to rotate at a different speed than the other. Just as what happens when one goes around corners.

During the cleanup of parts during reassembly of the differential, once I got all the old crud cleaned off the yoke I noticed a spot that shows where a u-joint failed years ago. Looks like another call to Randy's ring and pinion. I never had a u-joint go bad so it happened before I got the axle. Yes, it lasted this long without fail but we're gonna replace it.