headlights... idea

[Blue Goose]

Hey Mike,
Is that your Dad's Superduty? What year? Is it a diesel and if so, 7.3 or 6.0?

Kinda the same looking light, but looking at the pics i dont think theres any way they will work... JMO

 

[TheRoadVirus]

I see what you're gettin' at, Goose. Get him to join up, Mike!

 

[Mr. Stroker]

Yep Its my dads 2002 Crew Cab, Short Box, 4x4 with the 7.3. I did some Minor work to it...

 

[Mr. Stroker]

Get him to join up, Mike!

If he knew how to turn the computer on... Seriously lol

 

[Blue Goose]

Is that the reflection of a beer can I'm seeing in the bumper just below the headlight?

 

[TheRoadVirus]

Hahaha, well.. not everyone can be computer literate (I'm only semi, lol).

 

[Mr. Stroker]

Is that the reflection of a beer can I'm seeing in the bumper just below the headlight?

WOW thats nuts. No im not drinking! It does look like a budweizer can tho!! i wonder wth it is??? HAHA yea ryan, i tried to teach him how but i got fustrated and started yelling at eachother, then it got into a wrestling match that... he won....

 

[TheRoadVirus]

It's the ghost of a bud can.. oooOoooOOooohh, drinkkkk meeeee drinkkkk meeeeeeeee I'm not emmmmpttttyyyyy.

 

[Mr. Stroker]

hahahahahahaa yea no joke, i shunk those pictures alot so i could download them fast. So i just re downloaded it off my camera, and im wearing a orange sweat shirt, and thats what it was. Definatly looks like a beer can tho lol

 

[msb71]

Sure looks like a beer can to me.....

Mike

 

[NeXtras]

regardless of the measurements, i still think it could work... fill it with something or even have the headlights slightly recessed

 

[Mr. Stroker]

Sure looks like a beer can to me.....

Nope, U can see my body, and at the bumper line the flash from the camera lol. good lookin out

 

[TheRoadVirus]

It's a beer can, damnit! Oh and NeXtras.. I just think it wouldn't flow, bud. But have at her if ya like. I'd suggest using some junkyard front-clip parts rather than the current metal.

 

[A_G]

a power steering pump is a hydraulic pump...right? wouldnt that work..

If not you can hook up a little electric one with a telescoping type rods..(god i cant think of the word right now)

It would go down very slow if it where to de-pressurize. Even if it were such a catastrophic failure that would cause it to fall, you would be more than likely dead, cuz something would haft to explode.

Ive had jack fail on me while under trash trucks. in fact that trash truck killed 3 jacks that day. A heavy duty floor jack designed for semis, the bar started getting harder and harder to get it to go down, so i put my body weight on it...snap. and it lowered the truck real slow
30 ton bottle jack, same thing. it actually put a dent in the metal spacer we were using. The o-ring around the pressure release screw failed and it show fluid across the parking lot, but not fast enough where it could drop it on me.

Ive had jacks fail on small cars to. One notable was, just got done doing 4 tires and the jack wouldnt lower. We ended up getting another jack, lifting the vehicle up higher and then pulled the old jack out.

Ive also had a pin snap in the lifting pad of the floor jack before, causing it to kick out and drop the vehicle and mangling the jack.

 

[tomtoc]

i know of people that use power steering pumps for bale spike's. those things weigh a ton (literally), so it should be able to work

 

[TheRoadVirus]

Dammmmn, I'd hate to have my truck on a lift and one of those pins break. Crazy.

 

[flareside_thunder]

How'd they rig that up Tom?Just curiosity.....When I was in tech school one of the dumbshits over in auto just got done doing a brand new full exhaust on a 68 Bronco.......he left the pipe stands up when he lowered the lift......truck had just gotten a frame off over in the paint/body booths and was goin over there for mechanical touchups........guy payin for the resto even used original parts...no NOS or reman crap...he researched and got it all from boneyards....totalled the truck out......whoops

JR

 

[tomtoc]

no idea on how they wired it, just know it used the PS pump to operate it. it was slow but it got the job done

 

[frederic]

Wait wait wait... Would the headlights have moving doors or are they just stationary and shine THROUGH the huge grill...

So when the headlights are off you'd just see a giant mesh grill all the way across the front of the truck?

Here is an example, my old 1969 XL convertible:

When the headlights are off, the grill goes all the way across the nose of the truck, corner lamp to corner lamp.

When the headlights are on (or in the case of the above picture the vehicle has a severe vaccum leak) the headlight doors (with pieces of grill their front surface) flip up exposing headlights.

I did this on a 1988 bronco II actually, and it came out reasonable. It was a difficult project in some aspects, but because the Bronco II's of that vintage have slightly recessed, rectangular headlights and have essentially a flat nose, getting things to "look right" wasn't difficult.

The 92-96(97) nose is also reasonably flat, except for the outer edges of the hood and that particular contour can be matched with a homemade, full-width grille.

Where I mentally got stuck was with the curvy, wrap around turn signal/marker lamps that are integrated in the headlight housing. Ideally, I'd want to remove them so the full-width grille can have some height to it. Doing so would require me to figure out what kind of markers I'd need to integrate so that I have forward and side facing markers/signals to comply with the DOT rules. Obviously one can use "vintage" parts and slap in some kind of old car rectangular bits and call it a day, but because my truck is what it is, I wanted to try and find something that's more modern looking that fits within the vintage of the truck.

Using a junkyard headlight surround from the same vintage, I table-sawed off the headlight trim and the top marker on the side, trying to get enough plastic for the lower, wrap around light with the intention of "frenching" it into the lwoer front valence panel (below the grille, above the bumper) and into the lower front edges of the fender. Unfortunately I moved the housing a hair too fast and the table saw shattered it into a zillion chards and that's about as far as I got with implementation.

Actuation will be very simple - at some point in the near future my rig will have integrated air for the eventual air suspension (and air horns, and various other things) so I'll be actuating the headlight doors (should I do this project) with a small air cylinder and electrically actuated 4-way valve. The doors will rotate on a pivot that has a lever that will be convienently welded on somewhere out of the way, and the pneumatic cylinder will move that lever to, or away from it's mount, opening and closing the doors. The old cars actuated the headlight doors using vaccum bellows, which are fine until one has a vaccum leak, or they themselves become brittle and leak - causing tremendous vaccum issues in the engine. I had a hell of a time keeping this system working on my 1969 XL, though I kept replacing the actuation bellows with junkyard bellows because new ones were un-obtainum at the time. Rubber parts in junkyards tend not to be much better than the rotting garbage on an old car.

The air compressor (12V) and air tank will be mounted behind/in the homemade bumper that's already on my truck. "Superbumper" will also be the housing for the air supply for all this, and partly why I made it so darn big. The other reason for "big" was to prevent damage to my truck when idiots cut me off. The factory bumper was "removed" on the highway by such an incident then driven over by the tri-axle dump truck behind me. Ugh.

well dont wait to long. You might see your idea on something.

I had an idea for a hydraulic lifting system that jacked the vehicle of up on all 4 corners.

I believe some fancy luxury suv has that on there already. But only one corner at a time.

AIR !

I designed and have collected some of the parts to build a full air suspension for my F350 crewcab. Being that it's 2wd it turned out to be easier to design than I initially thought. The front coils are simply replaced with two double-bellow air bags. Based on the measurements I took a while back I don't even have to relocate the shocks - at least on my particular truck.

The rear required my designing a simple arm setup - the front of the arms mount at the front leaf spring mount and extend to the leaf spring pads already on the axle - making life very easy as far as locating the axle.

The arms will extend past the axle, bend down, then out again with two round pads for each side. These pads will support double-bellow air bags as well - two per side. I'll have to make the arms, pads and of course the new bracketry behind the axle on the frame to mount the airbags, and box the frame in that area as well. Add a panhard rod and the design is complete. Like so:

This way, when the truck is completely unloaded, I can soften the ride by running a particular air pressure all around. The front air bags would have a higher pressure than the rears becasue most of the weight is on the nose.

When I want to dump 3500lbs of crap in the bed, then I'd air up the backs to retain the unloaded ride height (and rake) when loaded. Aside from giving my truck a much better ride loaded or unloaded, by raising the back to unloaded height when heavily loaded, I'll also retain the steering alignment which was done at the unloaded height/rake. While my truck rides much better heavily loaded, the rear going down changes the caster of the front end due to the chassis leaning back instead of forward, and makes the truck unpleasant to steer.

Air all around will solve all these problems. Also, when I yank out the very tired 351W and replace it with a 460-based 500cid twin turbo EFI stroker, I can air the front up a bit to retain it's current stock height/rake. Air up a little more in the front and I can support the weight of a snowplow.

Intially, controlling ride height would be done manually, to get baseline pressures for different loads, lack of loads, seasons (16 deg F in the winter like today, and 100 deg F in the peak of august), as air changes volume with temperature. Once I have these baselines, I'll make everything automatic using standard Ford bits - ride height sensors for each front corner, and one for the rear since the axle is solid - and control the air pressure using either a custom homemade controller (Parallax PIC chip based) or possibly a newer Lincoln Town Car EEC for the 4.6L - most of them support four-corner air strut controls as well as a V8 engine that's MAF based, all I need as the foundation for air suspension control *and* a 500cid MAF-based twin-turbo stroker

Add the same year Lincoln body controller module and I can wire up all the fancy crap that Lincoln has as well - auto door locks, automatic down driver's window, climate control, and so forth.

This is just scratching the surface. Other plans for this crewcab in no particular priority order, just seperated between done/not done.

Done:

Digital Dash (Windstar)

Upgrade front seats to buckets (chrysler minivan)

Add temporary overhead console (chrysler minivan)

Add power steering.

Add 4-wheel ABS, replacing stupid rear wheel ABS.

Add roof marker lights front.

Replace EEC with 94 E350 EEC (better timing curve)

Semi-Done:

Built center console, with CUP HOLDERS also housing a pentium 4 3.x ghz PC.

Built steel framing for 13" touchscreen LCD.

Not Done:

Add roof marker lights rear.

Build/add side steps under length of cab.

New homemade dash for above touchscreen (I tried this several times, all were an absolute failure).

Add power locks/windows on all four doors.

Add air conditioning.

Add power rear window aka bronco tailgate or late 60's/early 70's full size station wagons.

Full grill side to side with hide-away headlights.

Air suspension (all four corners).

500cid twin turbo stroker/ZF5sp

Dual PTO on ZF - one hydraulic, one 120V/240V AC 60Hz generator.

New Frame - extending the wheelbase of my crewcab by 22". Why? Hmmm.

Weld-on of extended cab "snip" to rear of crewcab. This gives me interior room behind the rear seat that's usable and I can get rid of the bedbox, and put my tools and stuff inside. And a pair of 12" subwoofers I've had sitting in my attic for 8 years now.

Roof-mounted fiberglass enclosure (small) to house GPS and wireless ethernet antenna, as well as sprint PCS wireless antenna. Internet anywhere on the road for passengers and the eventual built-in-the-console PC.

Dump bed mechanism, hydraulic powered off PTO, over the bumper style so the bumper can stay put. Modification to bed separating lower sides from upper bed and floor, so only the top half of the bed dumps. This allows the fuel doors, cups and hoses to stay put.

Underbed, side out drawers, integrating into the lower sides of the bed that don't "dump" (see above).

Homemade headache rack and bedside rails, integrated with removable back piece which when attached, allows me to mount ladders above the bed and the cab roof.

I'll also eventually get rid of the vinyl floor and carpet it as well as replace the vinyl rear bench seat (which is a front seat on sliders actually ) with a nice red cloth bench that matches the interior. I'll probably have to sew covers with piping on the edges, but things like this are way down the road. I'll wait until my 3 y/o is old enough not to open peanut butter sandwiches and stick them on the seat backs.

There are a lot of other things as well, mostly tangents from the above, but they're not coming to mind at the moment. I'm undercaffienated.

 

[89frankenford]

holy crap frederic!!!!!!! wow and i thought the plans for my truck were ambitious!!!!!! man, ive GOT to giv you props on the stuff youve done already and the stuff you plan on doing. you should just take the ford emblem off and replace it with a FREDERIC emblem!