Hello All,
There is the prospect of a ranger overdrive and or a brown lipe with the OD as well.
On a quick tangeant, I have a somewhat funny and pertinent story here. Among some of my stovebolts I own a 1951 6400. Practically stock, except for a built 261 installed and 8.25x20 tires in the rear.
My uncle and I own a nursery in Long Beach, Ca and it is that time of year when Christmas trees are for sale. We buy our trees wholesale in East LA. Anyways we loaded up 261 trees (Nice huh, 261 for a 261) that weighed about 20 pounds a piece giving about 5220 lbs of load. On the way home we actually got pulled over by a HP officer, for guess what? SPEEDING. Yeah that's right, speeding.
Now, my speedometer doesn't work and hasn't for about 20 years, but I never fixed it because I've never found a paired set of speedometer gears for this truck, not to mention that I don't have the vacuum control valve for switching between hi and low on the split rear. That and I never thought that I could ever even speed in this truck.
Well he clocked me at 64 MPH. Being a truck we're limited to 55MPH. Well, to make a long story short I talked to the guy for a little bit and lied. I said I thought I was going 50, my speedometer is old and maybe I don't have the right tires and he bought it. But not before giving my truck a complete safety inspection. He checked my tires, brakes, hydrobooster, wheel cylinders for leaks (just a visual from the outside for a wet tire), wiring, checked my fire extinguisher, and how my load was lashed.
Then he asked for my bill of lading and he did this quick calculation and tried to tell me that I was overloaded. My only luck in convincing him that I wasn't was that I had a split axle. He said I was limited to two tons and I said three. He put my VIN in his computer and my luck had it that at some point someone before me had registered the truck with a load capacity of 10000lbs and I have been paying for the weight fees for years. So luckily, I wasn't legally overloaded even though I know that this is a two ton.
But the guy go me thinking. Might I really have been going 64MPH and loaded? I doubt it. But it's a cool story anyways. I'm going to borrow a GPS from a buddy and see if this is even possible. If it is, I'm going to buy a tach and see what RPM I'm pulling or maybe use an RPM calculator to figure that out. My engine is noisy, but it's supposed to be anywhere near 2500-3000rpm anyways so I've never been nervous about it anyways.
Happy Holidays,
54Monster
