Fixing up an older pickup truck, part 7

My last post on this project was 13 days ago. Since then we've had some rather cold weather, and then several days ago, it warmed back up to a bit above freezing during the day. That gave me some ambition to go out and do some more work on the pickup truck.

The first thing that I wanted to do was to get the side boards put on the flatbed frame, and get the back bumper mounted back on the truck. I used stainless steel bolts to mount the bumper, I want to be able to take the bumper off again in the future if I need to for some reason. Mounting the side boards on the flatbed frame was just a matter of screwing treated 2X4s onto the ends of the 4X4s that are mounted on the truck frame.

Here's the rear bumper hanging on the frame. It's not tightened up yet in this picture. You can see how I have the back end covered up to keep the snow off the frame and gas tank. I was hoping the used trailer hitch would fit on the truck, but the mounting points are to far apart for the frame, it was made for a bigger truck.

This is the passenger side before I screwed the 2X4 on.

One side is done.

The driver's side.

Since I have to wait for payday to get deck boards for the bed, I decided to start working on fixing the exhaust system. When I bought the truck, the exhaust system had been cobbled together and had several leaks. This is a V-6 engine, and a previous owner had separated the wye pipe at the junction and put 2 separate pipes on it for "dual exhaust". The pipe from the driver's side manifold was a straight pipe, no muffler. Also, they had used electrical conduit for the exhaust pipe, and did a shitty job of welding the pipe together.

You can see the 2 exhaust pipes in this picture, looking down between the frames of the truck, the gray pipes to the right of the drive shaft.

The first thing I did was to crawl under the truck with my sawzall and cut off the straight pipe to make the driver's side section of the wye pipe easier to remove. Then I pulled out the piece of the wye pipe from under the truck. The wye pipe was barely hanging onto the exhaust manifold because the ring that holds the pipe onto the manifold was about half rusted away. That was the cause of one of the big exhaust leaks from that side of the truck. The weld where the conduit had been welded to the piece of wye pipe wasn't very impressive either, there was an exhaust leak where they hadn't bothered to finish the weld. I suspect they did the welding while the pipe was on the truck.

The next thing that I need to do is to get the exhaust manifold off the engine so that I can replace the 2 bolts that hold the wye pipe onto the outlet of the manifold. They are rusted into the manifold so there's no way to get them loose while the manifold is still on the engine. I've been working on that for the last couple of days in the short afternoons now that it's winter sunlight. The problem with pulling the exhaust manifold off the engine is that the truck has 160 thousand miles on it, and the manifolds probably have never been removed. The bolts are well stuck in the flanges on the head where they bolt on. I managed to get 2 of the 6 bolts loose, and one bolt broke while I was trying to get it loose. The other 3 bolts are still holding the manifold on. I'm going to have to keep trying to get them out until I succeed one way or another. I can't replace the exhaust pipe until I either replace the bolts on the manifold outlet, or replace the manifold. While I have the exhaust manifold off the truck, I also have to replace the oil dip stick tube, it's broken off right above the manifold. Hopefully, I'll get the manifold off the engine before it gets really cold again.

That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!