1994 M998A1, Rebuild in Indiana

[gsp45]

Also, your push/pull pins should be chained so they cant be taken or easily lost.

 

[Wire Fox]

As 86humv said, your grill guard is not mounted correctly. I could take that off and be gone in 30 seconds. Bottom should be bolted and with castle nuts w/cotter pins. Also helps with the rubber cushions keeping it from rattling around.

Also, your push/pull pins should be chained so they cant be taken or easily lost.

Actually, it's assembled exactly to official spec straight from Luverne. I am missing the lanyards at this point because it was a low priority for me. I'll be buying a bunch of 6" lanyard since it seems like my HMMWV is missing plenty of them all over the place. Now, is using a bolt with castle nut and cotter pin a better idea for the bottom? Certainly. I'll be doing that later on when I'm ready to start driving this around as a simple anti theft measure, but up-front, a five pack of these detent pins was cheaper than buying just two from anywhere, so I seized the opportunity to get it all assembled. The proper rubber cushions are in-place on all four points, which makes that brush guard extremely snug and very well secured.

 

[Retiredwarhorses]

Actually, it's assembled exactly to official spec straight from Luverne. I am missing the lanyards at this point because it was a low priority for me. I'll be buying a bunch of 6" lanyard since it seems like my HMMWV is missing plenty of them all over the place. Now, is using a bolt with castle nut and cotter pin a better idea for the bottom? Certainly. I'll be doing that later on when I'm ready to start driving this around as a simple anti theft measure, but up-front, a five pack of these detent pins was cheaper than buying just two from anywhere, so I seized the opportunity to get it all assembled. The proper rubber cushions are in-place on all four points, which makes that brush guard extremely snug and very well secured.

Correct, the Luverne BG came with 4 tethered pins, that how all mine are installed.

 

[Action]

Speaking of castle nuts. Dont forget to tighten and pin the nut on the shackle near the grenade. If that vibrates off and the bolt falls out, you will be buying a shackle.

 

[TedG]

I use to use the 2 sets of luvern pins, but off roading made one set vibrated out and got lost. Now I use bolts on bottom and tethered pins on top.

 

[Wire Fox]

Speaking of castle nuts. Dont forget to tighten and pin the nut on the shackle near the grenade. If that vibrates off and the bolt falls out, you will be buying a shackle.

That was temporary, because I kept moving them around while I was playing with the brush guard...I'd honestly forgotten about it. It's still not going anywhere for a while, but I'll put it in my to-do list on the first post so I don't forget again.

 

[Wire Fox]

Updates! The biggest and most important update: the HMMWV starts and runs! In terms of major components, what was required to make it run was a new starter (was missing), an S3 (was missing), and an alternator (should have been missing-was broken terribly and not even bolted on). For general maintenance, I had changed the engine oil, the oil filter, the air filter (fuel filter hasn't been changed, but is on the list), and inspected that the coolant was not burnt or discolored. As well, all of the glow plugs were tested to be right about 1.6 ohms each and physically inspected to not be swollen or burnt...seemed to look new. Honestly, I was extremely surprised by how well this started and ran. With there having been paperwork in the truck showing that it was NMC circa June 2015, I've made the reasonable assumption that they haven't ran the engine since then. Yet still, the glow plugs cycled on for about 8 seconds, light went out, and I turned over the starter. I was expecting to hear something like "puh-chug-puh-chug-puh-chug-puh-chug-chug-chug-chu-chu-chu-chu-ch-ch-VROOOM" that I'm accustomed to with old engines that have sat with aging fuel, but was awestruck by "puh-VROOM" and a very brief (1 second?) and light plume of black smoke that cleared and promptly switched to a clean idle.

I pretty much just stared at it for about 10 seconds while it ran and then finally got up to check out how the v-belts were doing-too loose-and also saw that my capping method for the hydraulic hose that would lead to the fan clutch had failed and was leaking fluid, so I turned off the engine to save the PS pump and decided that it was satisfactory enough to have seen it run and run well. Next on my list to-do will be to physically bolt-in and fill the transmission so that the engine can level off, properly attach all hoses since the engine will be in-line, reattach the fan with new QD fittings, and top off all lost fluids. At that point, I should be able to run the engine for a little while longer to ensure the alternator is charging, power steering pump is operating properly, fan clutch system is operating properly, and that the water pump is operating well. That should hopefully help boil off any condensation that's inevitably collected and get the engine internals well-lubricated after a long slumber...

In other news, I've got the troop seat fully mission capable. All missing carriage bolts replaced, all nuts torqued down to stiffen up the bench, hinge brackets have been straightened out, brand new clevis pins installed all around, and all the detent ring pins are tethered and locking the bench in place. Only room for improvement now is some paint, but I'll have that one come later. Related, I've started to try and clean up the cargo cover bows. A couple of them are a little bit bent, the turnlock fasteners are trashed (some just need new rivets, most need replaced), and all of the bows need fresh paint from where its worn down. As well, two of the brackets are broken and I'm working on replacements. Also similarly related, I've got new rivnuts set on the windshield frame for the left and right hand rails. Some ARNG mechanic replaced them with wellnuts, which left the rails loose and completely disintegrated when i went to disassemble it. They enlarged the holes slightly to make those wellnuts fit, so the rivnuts are just barely hanging on and I fear they will fail. If anyone has a lead on any 10-32 steel rivnuts that have an oversized body to allow for installation in a larger hole, please let me know!

EDIT: Oh heck, how could I forget? My SF-97 arrived yesterday as well. I think it's super-cool that the SF-97 arrived on the same day that the engine first started.

 

[Wire Fox]

Did some more work today. Proper hose and fitting come in today, so I installed the quick disconnect for my engine fan. Now that I wouldn't be dumping power steering fluid, I was able to run my engine for a more extended period of time. Finally was able to pick up a few quirks... (and if you look at my gauges, they all seem to be working. Voltage is high side of green, oil pressure came right up to 60 at idle, fuel level is appropriate for how much appears to be in the tank, and the temperature rose up to about 150 by the time I was shutting off my engine)

As you can guess and should be obvious, my power steering pump severely needs bled. Any demand on it causes some bad grinding sounds. Since fluid levels are a-ok, I can only assume that it's a massive amount of air. When it warms up a bit outside, I'll lift up the front and follow the bleeding procedure in the TM. As well, this is the first place where a hose was noticeably loose. When I first tried turning my wheel, it actually caused a surge of fluid to blow by the connection at the inlet to the fan valve-that stopped right away when I tightened the clamp. I'll also replace these hoses, since it's apparent that the material has broken down enough to need it. If I'm still making noise after all that, then I'll be worried more about fluid quality and ultimately the pump itself.

More importantly, I've got some fuel leaking at the injection pump. It's nothing too fast, but it's enough that after ten minutes of running, I saw that the entire length of the valley was damp and definitely smelled like fuel. As well, once I ran the engine, it shook some parts into view in the engine valley. A large o-ring, a flat washer, and rubber washer of the same size. Anyone know what commonly will leak on the injection pumps, and as well, does anyone know what these three parts might go to? I looked through a breakdown of the injection pump and these didn't look like they were part of the injection pump-but I'm open to suggestions! Cap is shown for size, as well, if anyone knows a good, cheap source of Sapporo beer in Indy, I'd like that too.

 

[TNriverjet]

Nice work WF. It always amazes me how well this equipment starts up after sitting so long. Changing fluids and hooking everything up correctly will do wonders. Keep us posted on your progress and keep posting photos of the work.

 

[Wire Fox]

Thanks, TNriverjet. I've been idly waiting on money to order the next batch of parts. I'm pretty close to ready for that next stage, so I'm putting together my next detailed part list of everything I know I need. More fasteners (especially on equipment attached to the transmission), all the wiring supplies I need, and dropping off my driveshafts at a local shop to be right-sized from A1 to A2 configuration. Nothing for pictures yet, but they'll be soon enough. I've not posted nearly enough of those things, so I owe a bunch more to you guys. We especially need more pictures on 4L80E installs...not enough of those documented and they're in very high demand.

 

[Terrh]

Sweet rig. Hope you get it on the road soon!

 

[Wire Fox]

Wow, what a busy day (and morning, technically)! I've been working on the wiring harness for my transmission for two days solid. By far, this is the most progress I've had in any one stretch of time.

I'm mobile, so I'm sure the pictures will be a jumbled lump at the end, so I'll just explain how things went down.

Yesterday I started the day early by taking the wires I had already cut and bundled and routed these back thru the HMMWV. This time, they were all carefully zip tied to their final routing and I started marking the wires with zip ties: Green would be where a wire splice would be, blue would be where the harness branches, and pink was where the looming would stop anywhere that I thought it was important to specially note. With everything marked for its final placement, I cut the harness free of the HMMWV and got back to the next step...

I laid the harness across two tables I setup end-to-end and tried to spread it out according to what would branch off first. Inevitably, things were a bit twisted and tangled, so I taped down the ends of the harness, marked with marker where I had placed the marking zip ties, and then cut the remaining zip ties so that all the wires were free to be arranged. I got everything untwisted and laid out by branch sub-group: Brake switch (and horn, for a switched +24v source for reverse lights), engine sensors, LED indicators, transmission, and then power. Sounds super easy, but this part actually took a couple hours due to a crappy picnic table and triple-checking against the schematic.

Next up, my favorite part: Soldering. The splice marks come to use, because now I needed to tap in things like the transmission to power, the indicators to power and ground, and several of the sensors were better spliced than separately run. Cutting the insulation in the middle proved tricky because this Prestolite wire/Hypalon-insulated wire is extremely gummy and stretchy. My strippers just wouldn't do it, so I made use of my pocket knife and rolled the wire under the blade with slight pressure until I felt it hit solid wire. About half an inch down, I'd repeat this and then carefully slice near-parallel to the wire, as if scraping glass. This got off most the insulation and allowed me to pick the remainder off with some pliers or my fingers. I now was free to tightly wrap wire in the open space, solder it thoroughly, and seal the new joint with adhesive-lined heat shrink for mechanical strength and water-resistance.



The part I actually have some pictures for: Vinyl-wrapping. Just like most car harnesses, I decided that vinyl-wrapping the wire would help tighten everything up and add another layer of chemical protection. For this one, I first wrapped the transmission branch because I was worried about preserving the wire twist I had put in for three pairs (TISS, TOSS, FORCE MOTOR HIGH/LOW-please note, the twist rate doesn't really matter, as long as all three pair are different, or they will interfere with each other). After this, I started at the end of each branch and worked toward the center, tying off once I got there. All the way at the end (power), I started wrapping and working my way to the TCM end as the final section. As I came to each branch, I did a reinforcing X and moved down toward the end. After about an hour of back-wrecking wrapping, I have the final tie-off and prepared for the last step of the harness structure.



At this point, I was pretty happy to see it all taking shape, but it wasn't done yet. I pressed on into cutting sections of monofilament nylon braid to add proper abrasion resistance. This had a nice flow of measure, cut, seal with torch, and carefully slide onto harness. Luckily it got easier as I went, since there were progressively less wires to navigate over the closer I was to the end. This is actually where I stopped for tonight. I'll get pictures of it in the daylight. Next step will be to tape the braid in-place at the branches, then I can test fit the harness once more before starting to terminate the leads!

 

[Wire Fox]

Alright, I posted those promised pictures into the post above, so now I can tell you about the next step... As stated, I needed to secure the braid in-place so that it wouldn't slide around once installed and that it would be harder for anything to get trapped in the harness. I decided to make use of a friction tape, because it was very strong, sticks to itself extremely well under tension, I've heard of it being used in automotive applications, and it was available in my toolbox. If anyone would like to suggest an alternative tape/loom securing, please let me know, as I might invest in that for future projects (or if this tape ever fails). This was pretty straight-forward. My technique was just to wrap around the loom itself in a complete, tight loop to cinch up the extra slack and start the extremely strong cohesive bond, then I would wrap it in a tight spiral like I would have on the vinyl non-adhesive tape. Everywhere that branches would fork out, I would secure the loom of the two smaller branches first, then I would slide over the loom from the larger, feed section of the harness and tape it, that way the branches would look a bit cleaner and harmonious. Check out the pictures below and hopefully you can see what I mean.



Tonight I plan to fish the harness through the HMMWV again to ensure that I branched everything correctly. It would be very annoying to disassemble this harness at this point if I made an error, but it's much more possible now to fix it than if I were to wait until after i put on the connectors. Fortunately, this should fish through about 4x faster than all other attempts, since I'm not going to be tangled up in lots of small wires. The trickiest thing to work with is getting the cable (I can call it that now!) around the parking brake, so I'll probably just fish the TCM branch behind it first to make my life easier.

I also technically have three other sub-harnesses to make, but they're all point-to-point, no branches-probably will take 10 minutes each to go all the way from wrapping to taping. One is two wires to the ESS, another is 5 wires from the rear of the engine to the IP (2 relocate the fan cutoff switch from the stock harness, 3 are the TPS), and the last is the T/C lock light (being honest, I forgot to put these two wires in the transmission branch and shouted a few explatives once I saw this sub-branch sitting on the ground beside the table once I finished wrapping the harness).

 

[ryanruck]

Work looks great!

As someone who deals with wiring and cable management for work, I can certainly appreciate all the effort you've put into that. Nice job!

View attachment 697996

I see someone else besides me likes RipIts! I just finished a Power in fact.

 

[Wire Fox]

Work looks great!

As someone who deals with wiring and cable management for work, I can certainly appreciate all the effort you've put into that. Nice job!


I see someone else besides me likes RipIts! I just finished a Power in fact.

The ripits are part of the authenticity of the experience. I couldn't commit to heavy smoking and chew, so I decided that I would drown in energy drinks and crack jokes about officers all day. But really, I am stockpiling the cans to deliberately clutter the HMMWV with, so that way if I decide to make a joke about "the base gate being wide open" to someone when they ask about where I got my HMMWV, they might just believe me if they look inside...

 

[ryanruck]

The ripits are part of the authenticity of the experience. I couldn't commit to heavy smoking and chew, so I decided that I would drown in energy drinks and crack jokes about officers all day. But really, I am stockpiling the cans to deliberately clutter the HMMWV with, so that way if I decide to make a joke about "the base gate being wide open" to someone when they ask about where I got my HMMWV, they might just believe me if they look inside...

Haha! My brother who was in the Marines turned me on to them. I actually do like the sugar free Power and G-Force ones!

 

[Wire Fox]

I've been ready to test my transmission the last couple days, but my engine is now failing to start. The batteries are known to be weak, so I don't get a whole lot of cranking time before I have to let the charger bring them back up (probably about 10-15 good 15 second cranks over an hour). Glow plugs appear to be cycling correctly. We're multimeter tested and physically removed and inspected last time the engine was run about a month ago.

I did some further testing on the fuel filter drain and thought the flow was a little weak and kinda dirty. Since the fuel tank was low enough, I drained it into a fuel can (had some tarry substance come out, too...), then put in 5 gallons of fresh diesel. To then remove variables, I removed the filter housing, cleaned it, and replaced the filter elements. The main fuel filter was definitely gummed and beyond its service life.

As it is, I was out of battery life in the middle of trying to bleed air. I hope tomorrow is a quick fix with just bleeding!

 

[DCIV]

Why not replace the batteries, you are going to have to anyways and if it's stopping you from fixing it then it's just making matters worse.

 

[Wire Fox]

Why not replace the batteries, you are going to have to anyways and if it's stopping you from fixing it then it's just making matters worse.

Dollars! Everything else has pretty much already been bought and paid for, so I can easily keep working on those things. Since I have some massive purchases to make very soon, I'm trying to hold off on the batteries as long as I can in the event that there are other high dollar items that will prevent me from rolling with the HMMWV (in which case, it'd be annoying to just waste my new batteries' warranty by just having them sit on a shelf).

And as it is, my roommate has 2 pretty new batteries that he just pulled from cars he won't be driving for a while and is willing to lend me, so those are going to be great batteries for this maintenance work (too small to use long-term).

 

[big block 88]

Man i lived off of rip its!!!! The orange flavor was the shiot. Nicotine and rip its kept me going for days on end!