Quality Cooling for the Transmission

My truck already had a transmission cooler on it when I bought it, which is good  the owner at least had a concern for his truck's welfare. It functioned fine with no leaks, but I hated the installation. Like most folks seem to do, the transmission cooler was installed using plastic zip tie thingy's that probably came with a kit. The cooler itself looked fine, but I don't like things haphazard and decided to upgrade it.

In retrospect, I probably could have used the same cooler and just re-engineered the installation, because the one I bought was almost identical to the one I already had. Oh well, at least I know the internals are clean now, right?

I bought a new Mishimoto Universal cooler from Extreme Terrain, item T547657. It's 12" x 10" x .75" thick, fitting nicely over one of the big openings in the radiator support. I opted for the passenger-side opening to use for my cooler, of course, because it was nearest to the transmission cooler lines. I make up a couple of brackets out of 1/8" thick steel strap and mounted them up, painted (the cooler arrived  unpainted and shiny) the whole assembly:

 

What I failed to consider is the hood safety catch--that big-ass "J" hook that hangs down for your scalp to make contact with when you least expect it. I had the whole thing installed all beautifully and was happy with the outcome. A week or so later I noticed that big J-hook was hitting one of the tubes and surrounding fins every time the hood was opened or closed! I'm glad I only raised the hood a handful of times during that period. When saw the damage, I considered myself lucky, then removed the whole thing. I re-engineered the bracketry to mount the cooler to the driver's side instead. Here's the final outcome. If you zoom you can see the garfed-up area I was talking about on the lower right (but don't look):

 

To get the hoses to nestle in closer to the grille without pushing out on it, I scrounged around Lowe's and found a couple of 90° elbows to use. I'm happy with the way everything turned out with the exception of the 'pass-thru' holes in the radiator support. I used the holes that were already there from the previous owner's installation so I used them, but I was worried about rubbing and chafing. I didn't have any grommets anywhere near that size, so I just opted for a couple pieces of heater hose wrapped around the oil cooler line at the pass-thru location. I put the zip ties on it on both sides of the support to hold it centered. Those are butt-ugly and will be replaced with grommets some day in the future:

 

I opted not to use the built-in oil cooler in the new radiator when I installed it. Why would anyone want to piggyback a new auxiliary cooler on top of a built-in radiator cooler? The only reason I could think of was maybe a little more transmission fluid capacity, and I quickly negated that point. After all, how good of a job of cooling will a coil that's immersed in 185-degree+ antifreeze do? Besides, the coiled tube they put in the new radiator was laughable in length. To use it just seemed ridiculous to me. Instead, I just slid the fittings down and pushed the hoses right over the flared ends of the existing factory lines and hose-clamped them. I like it when things don't get butchered because it's always easy to 'undo' something in the future.

GM Assembly Line Quality Alert Trim Left Placard

I have never heard of the existence of these placards, but it makes sense that they would exist. When I worked the Boeing 747 assembly line many years ago there were always "pick-up's" that had to be worked later than usual in the assembly process for whatever reason. They would move the plane out of the assembly line to await whatever thing needed to be addressed before final delivery was approved.

I suppose this is like that, eh?

I find it odd that they would laminate it. Maybe they used grease pencil on them and they were designed to be removed and reused? Haha, if that's the case, it makes me wonder: What item(s) were originally checked as 'needing attention' and were those items completed? One will never know!

Here are shots of both sides:

 

I've owned a lot of vehicles over the years (and worked on even more), and I've never seen one of these before so I thought I'd share it with the squarebody world.

'84 to '85 Wiper/washer upgrade

1984 was the last year that GM trucks had the windshield washer pump piggybacked onto the wiper motor. Hell, maybe all GM vehicles--I dunno. I just know I've always hated it. Listening to the sound of the wiper washer pump ejaculating that precious window-cleaning liquid was always something I hated about GM products. Ka-chunk-ka-chunk-ka-chunk... if you're lucky! A lot of times they'd keep on ka-thumping when they are no longer needed, exhausting the whole tank of washer fluid if you happened to be on a rainy drive.

GM truck wipers have never been impressive, but mine were downright slow. I decided it was time to make a wiper upgrade. Do I want to waste my time/money with another GM Ejac-u-Pac washer system? No. So, what to replace it with?

I did a little digging and found out that 1985 was the first year they had physically removed the washer pump from the wiper motor, mounting it instead, in the washer reservoir. It also no longer ejaculated from twin nozzles mounted below the windshield. The 85-up system instead sprayed a fan pattern from the wiper blades themselves. Teeny little hoses snaked their way up the wiper arms where they sprayed a perfect pattern of 'wet it down' onto the windshield for as long as you held the switch. I did more digging to find out if I could swap the system over easily. My investigation (crossing part numbers, reading manuals and parts books) revealed that the 1985 wiper motor (with no washer pump mounted on it) was a direct bolt-in. Cool!

Per usual, my OCD brain required me to do lots of investigation just on which motor to buy. I finally narrowed it down to a Cardone unit, A1 Cardone part number 85-182. For sale lotsa places, but Cardone has their own sales site on Ebay, and you can get it a lot cheaper than most places. Here's the link to the one I bought (which of course the link may or may not still work by the time you read this): https://www.ebay.com/itm/155245776208. I also bought a new motor-to-firewall donut gasket. I'm not really sure on the purpose of the large rubber squish donut that mounts between the cowl and the motor because both sides are 'outside air' exposure. Maybe it's for vibration while the motor is turning or something. Anyway, make sure you put a new one on your new motor and clean up the surface before you mount it up. 

I bought a new reman washer bottle from LMC Truck, part # 36-4094 which ended up being a Dormer product, located here: https://www.lmctruck.com/1973-87-chevy-gmc/wiper-components/cc-1985-87-windshield-wiper-and-washer. I also added washer nozzles to the order, shown as #17 on that same LMC diagram. 

The washer motor I bought is ACDelco part# 8-6708 and was bought through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001S7TQ4U

 

As you can see, the 1984 motor and the 1985/86 motor are exactly the same except for elimination of the washer pump that's usually riding piggyback. The new motor also came with new rubber grommets mounted.

Being on it already when I bought it, I don't know which wiper arms are on my truck. Who does? Anyway, they fit fine, and seem to be the right length, but the angle of the blade end was just slightly off (before I tweaked them each in the vise). I do think they are truck arms, but I don't think they are 85/86 units, based on that angle.

The nozzles I bought from LMC Truck have a little 'nubbin' molded into them to lock into a hole on the arm to keep them stationary. Well, the arms on my truck do have the little locator holes for squirt nozzles to lock into, but they are too far down the arm for the spray pattern to work. At least for the nozzles from LMC that is. If memory serves me (and it seldom does), the factory nozzle spray pattern was a fan shape, shooting all one direction. These little nozzles from LMC Truck have more of an elongated '+' pattern that shoots (4) directions, so they needed to be relocated farther up the wiper arm.

   

I didn't notice that difference until I had already gone through filing the arm to the necessary width for the nozzles to snap onto at their original locations. Note: Even though I had to file the arms to the proper width, providing a notch to lock them into, I still had to drill holes in the arms for nubbin clearance or file the nubbins off.  on the nozzles t's n, but because I had to file my arms for them to fit there was no need for the centering tit at all any longer. I bought (3) of them, knowing full well I was going to break one of them. Oddly enough, these babies are very stout. They can stand the twisting and prying multiple times (test fitting you know) during installation without breaking!

 

Right after I gathered all my parts together and was ready to start my wiper update I found a guy near me parting out an 86 Suburban. His rig was pretty stripped already by this time, but I did end up getting another washer bottle with pump and a complete cruise control transducer, all for $15. Bonus: I also got the electrical plug and about a foot of wiring for the washer bottle to make the swap easy!

A little note about washer hose:

The washer hose between your washer pump and windshield washer nozzles has to be reduced down to 3/32" exactly at some point if you want your washer hose to snake through the spring on the wiper arm like the OEM version did. Anything larger, no matter how close it looks, just won't quite fit through that spring. Problem: finding hose that is 3/32" in diameter. In this day and age, everything I found was 3mm instead. While the metric sizing does fit the nozzles and connections fine, it will not fit inside of the arm spring like they did from the factory. For this you need real 3/32" hose, such at Gates part# 27030 'wet arm vacuum hose'. I can verify that this particular hose does snake nicely through the wiper arm springs for a perfect fit. The problem: I only bought enough to do the job, and when I had to relocate the washer nozzles farther up the arm, both hoses were then too short. Buying locally, I was subject to what was available, and that was the metric hose. Because the replacement hose did not fit through the springs I opted to just affix them nicely with zip ties.