I'm finally getting rested back up from the trip north. We played hard, accomplished much and slept little. We had so much fun, but I am paying for it this week. Now that I am more rested, I figured I'd share some pictures and some more of the story.
First is the picture of the snake that almost got me. I may have understated his size. I am about 6' 3" 200+ pounds, so that will give you an idea of how big he was. This was during the recovery of Ben's M207.
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Here are pictures of getting ready to install the new engine. We both tackled different things that needed done and made awesome progress that way. The parts trucks came in handy. They supplied the under dash wire harness, intake/exhaust manifold and I was able to make one carburetor out of 2. Hopefully Ben will post before and after pictures of the under dash wiring as well as pics of the dash. The 211 was missing the light switch and some military gauges. The instrument panel had non original holes drilled in it so we traded it out with one that didn't.
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After the engine was ready, we mounted the transmission to it and set everything into the truck. Once that was done, it was dark.
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Our wives came down for a little while to see what was going on and got to see the engine start up. We have video of this and will have to post it later on. After we knew the engine would fire, we installed the grill, radiator, etc.
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The girls stuck with us until about midnight. Some of the old oil hoses kept blowing, so we had to replace those to continue. We finally got everything ready to go for a test drive around 3:30 am. We only had a little gas canister as our fuel source. The transfer case would not stay engaged unless one of us held the lever up. With Ben in the driver seat and me holding the transfer case lever up, we headed off for the pasture that is below the house. We got up to third gear in high range before we ran out of gas. At that point we decided to call it quits. Those trucks are sure loud with no exhaust pipes or muffler. Both of our wives are redheads so we figured we would face their wrath for waking them up as soon as we walked in the house. By some miracle, they had not even heard us driving around. We got to the house about 3:45, but I had to be up by 5 to head for home at 6 am. No point in going to bed at that point. I think I was up again for a total of 37 hours before we stopped in Denver on the way back to Oklahoma.
It was great to see another G749 come back to life!