First some conspiracy theories: People I bought it from had recently put a bunch of new parts on the truck to get it to pass inspection as it was his daily. Fast forward, trans starts slipping, he limps it home, they don't want to keep pouring money into it, buy new truck. Need to sell old truck to liquidate some assets.
MY ASSUMPTION is that they put $700 (their asking price) into it to get it inspected, and so they just wanted to recoup that money. Why I got it so cheap. Also there is snowplow equipment so transmission and front driveshaft probably broke 'cuz of that, right? right??
Now for the interesting stuff. Among those new parts they installed, they listed exhaust, fuel pump, water pump, and maybe a couple other things I cant remember. Crawling around under the truck I found new brake lines, TRANSMISSION LINES, and potentially a new axle seal on the rear.
Trans lines had been replaced and weren't sitting in factory location, rubbing against a skid plate mounting bracket. Outcome, a small hole in the trans line where almost all the trans fluid leaked out from. I say almost because its still dripping in my driveway (fluid level was nonexistent on dipstick when initially looked at the truck). Anyways, although the fluid was gone, they didn't continue to drive the truck (according to them), and so I'm hoping patch the hole in the line, fill it up and away I will go.
There's also the issue with 4x4 which was claimed to be just a bad CV, and they didn't need 4x4 enough to replace it, so they just pulled the axle and "disabled" the transfer case. So while inspecting the third member output, i noticed the flange had an unprecedented amount of movement, so I'm suspicious of a bearing having gone bad (or maybe the output shaft itself maybe broken? idk), so I'll have to take that apart and check it out. As for the t-case, I'm waiting for the seller to get in contact with their mechanic to see what he did to disable it. The symptoms are no lights on the selector switch and there's no response from the t-case when I press the buttons. If anyone has any ideas let me know. I already checked the fuses and all the plugs i could find/know where to find. More to come on that.
Other than that the 5.3 runs like a top, has plenty of power and no discernible ticks, knocks, or rattles.
All of the aforementioned work and looking over has occurred in the dark so i don't have any pictures, but once I start working on it again I'll be keeping photo record.
Also i cant seem to figure out how to post quality photos so if anyone has suggestions on that it'd be great.
Peace out
