With the weather starting to degrade the conditions were predicted to go straight to hell. Well just prior to the shit show that was displayed in the last post, the weather started off with a little rain, nothing serious but enough to start making its presence known. The ole lady took the Tracker to make a run to the store and to a restaurant to get some food for the night while I continued to do some work in the garage, mostly cleaning things up in preparation for moving the Mustang up there to pull the engine.
I get a call from her saying that she took a curve at a spot on a normally traveled route, having one side touch the dirty shoulder, causing the vehicle to loose traction and slide off the curve and into a tree. Now while it wasn't the head on type of impact, she did slide the truck side ways, hitting the tree with the right front quarter of the truck. After the tow truck came and dragged her back on the asphalt she was able to drive the truck back to the house. Of course it was all fucked up from my point of view since what I can see is me having to do some more cutting and welding and more fuckery to get the body fixed back up. After really looking at the whole thing I told myself that the best bet is going to be to find a junkyard truck and take my battery powered tools and cut out the twisted metal from that truck and weld in the replacement metal versus trying to beat and cut and re-weld the twisted metal into a somewhat normal enough shape to be able to bolt on replacement panels. The first chance I got I started removing everything that could be unbolted. The headlight housing was trashed, the bumper skin was heavily damaged and would need replacing. The inner bumper frame was bent at the right quarter section from the frame rail out. The right fender was of course totally trashed. The hood's damaged but was straightened out. Depending on whether I find a replacement or not will determine whether I straighten out the damaged unit. Even the air cleaner housing will need replacing due to the mounting tabs being broken. The grille of course will need replacing due to its being in several pieces. Now there's some solace to all this. Before we scrapped the other Tracker I took time to pull off the body panels that were still usable even after the tree fell on the truck. This included literally everything that got damaged on this Tracker. The hood, right fender, headlight housing, grille and bumper skin. Even though these panels aren't in the best shape, they are here. If I can't replace these panels with junkyard parts. All I have to do is get that internal structure metal from a junkyard truck to replace the shitty metal on ours. Since the headlight housing was all hashed, it was held on by only a couple of bolts. The inner bumper was held in by a few bolts on each frame rail so I was able to remove that entire component. Funny thing is I didn't take time to make this observation on the other Tracker when I was making the repairs to that inner bumper because I could've just removed the trashed bumper from that truck and replaced it with a straight inner bumper from the several junkyard trucks we encountered during those repairs. At least now I won't make that mistake twice. I also removed the air cleaner housing, which since the mounting tabs were broken, all I had to do was unplug the MAF and take the worm clamp loose and pull the unit out. There were some other lone bolts along the fender apron where the fender used to be secured. I did another assessment of the fender apron metal to see how much I would need to cut out so I can duplicate those same cuts on the junkyard truck to have a clean patch. Even with this plan I still want as clean a job as possible so it doesn't look too ugly or is too weak. I looked at what was bent or damaged and made strategic cuts around the end of section of the grille frame where the headlight is mounted and just past where the front right body mount is located on the frame, all the way to the back just in front of the cab portion of the body. The welds will be more at the edges of this section more so than in the middle. With that, the Tracker is ready for its new metal and components. Of course because of the shitty cold weather, the junkyard has been closed for the last few days so we're going to have to wait until the weekend and hopefully be able to get in to grab some parts for this impromptu project. Of course while we're at the junkyard I'm going to hunt down some F150 parts. I have to see if I can find a 5 spd manual transmission, clutch pedal assembly, clutch master cylinder, flywheel and clutch and if need be a driveshaft. The plan is to put a 5 spd manual into our F150 so I don't have to wrestle with rebuilding the AOD that's sitting on the shelf. Plus as anyone who knows me can tell you, I prefer manual transmissions in everything since the transmission is one less thing I have to worry about. Worst case is replacing a clutch. But that will be another project for another day.
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