For 10 months of the year I'm stuck in my own personal Pinky and the Brain episode.
"What are we going to do today Brain?"
"Same thing we do every day Pinky, Try and take over the Grosh."
Two months away from the Grosh, the 911 and the V wagon and the Civic and the RX-7, and the Texas heat is greatly enjoyed.
The truck is the only thing with me in the summer, so maybe that's why I started this thread? I'm still not sure. Any way, we were within spitting distance of Canada in Glacier National Park today. Spectacular scenery, but not much for the boys to do. Managed to find an out of the way glacial stream to muck about in, it was cooooold.
Had a spectacular 13 mile stretch of road where the speed limit was 55 but it was an almost constant barrage of corners marked at 25-35mph. The truck is way nicer to hustle corners while going uphill than downhill. I'm pretty happy about the fresh brakes.
I was packing up for a camping trip last night. I have three kids and a wife who likes to bring the kitchen sink everywhere. Currently I live it the city, but I see the draw of these now.
beans
Dork
6/13/15 10:38 a.m.
The seed has been planted. He's going to buy a Jeep something next and actually make it not a pile of hacked up crap.
Seriously, your threads make me want to start trolling the fancy bars to find me a sugarmomma. These are some awesome memories you're making with your spawns.
We bought a 1994 S10 4-door Blazer and ordered it special with a 60/40 Front bench seat. All dealers freaked and wanted a $1000 deposit as they didn't want to get stuck with it. Bob Jaas Chevrolet didn't care and the owner fell in love with it and ordered a few more. We too could get 6 people in it although the front seat center person had to be a skinny kid to buckle up.
Can you get a Silverado bench?
The seat in mine was called a 35/30/35 split bench. I'm pretty sure you could get it all the way through the GMT900 trucks. One of my ideas is to get a GMT900 suburban, which was never available with a front split bench (as far as I can tell) and put the bench from a truck in and create a proper 9 seat Suburban the way God intended.
I dont see how you could already own that bench and feel safe letting a human sit on it. My 2010 was basically the exact same options as yours. (texas package with the chrome delete.) Specifically b/c I wanted the bench seat for my first truck so my then new bride could sit beside me. She made it three miles before it was easier on my marriage to acquiesce to her belief that the bench seat was made out of material covering a rock and that it was not fit for human residence. My new f150 does NOT have a bench seat due to how big of a waste of time the other one was.
I love 4wd, but 2wd with good tires and a locker is VERY effective.
The truck did fine in 2wd with the stock sort of limited slip. The judgement thing is more about the closest humans being over 10 miles away. If I HAD gotten myself into trouble, I would have been in trouble. Of course that would still apply if I had 4wd too.
As far as the bench seat, it's only used in an emergency. It's not quite as bad as Mad's wife makes it out to be, but it does only have a lap belt, so it's clearly not as safe as any of the other seats in the truck. I still find it to be more useful than a console. A console is just a console, but the folding bench is a sort of crappy console that can be used as a seat. Much better.
Edited to add that the middle is wearing the same Wet Okele seat covers as the rest of the truck and has an extra inch of foam under that. Probably why I think it's acceptable.
Deucekid#2: "the towels at this hotel suck"
Mazdeuce: "you just dried yourself off with the bath mat"
Well, we've finished the adventure part of the trip and arrived at my in-laws to pick up the girls. We turned a boring two day 1200 mile trip into an exciting eight day 4200 mile trip.
Highlights of the last day were Devil's Tower in Wyoming, Mt. Rushmore, and playing around in the Needles of South Dakota where deucekid #4 tripped and I was seriously concerned he broke his arm. He got better. Kids are resilient, thank god.
In a bizarre turn of events my sister emailed me saying she was on a plane to pick up my niece for the summer. I knew this was happening, but not when. It turns out she was headed from Belgium to Wisconsin at precisely (almost) the same time as we were headed that way. We skipped driving through the Badlands and that gave us the time to meet her for lunch. I only get to see her once a year or so, it was sweet timing.
I think I like my truck. There are some things I want to improve to make adventures like this more comfortable and frequent. It's worth keeping and making better.
Just so you know you can get the GMT900 Suburbans with a bench seat, at least in 2500 form. Found a bunch of them in my recent searches.
Looks like a great trip for you and the boys.
I'm sitting pretty to purchase a similar rig. 2007 Z71 extended cab. 134k. Needs some love be but the price is very right. What can you tell me about general maintenance, issues/fixes and DD/towing duties.
The upper ball joints go about every 75k for most people. You have to replace the whole upper arm. They were about $80 each the last time I checked. A lot of the early trucks had the leaky brake light like mine.
I've only towed in the 5k lb range and for that it tows wonderfully. Trailer brake controller is easy to wire in. There is a post for power in the fuse box and a it just requires a couple of butt connectors to available wires already under the dash. Mileage drops from 18ish on the freeway to 14-15 when towing. Lifetime mileage is between 16 and 17. You can get over 20 with cruise on long 55mph stretches but you have to work at it.
I did also have one wheel speed sensor go out. Standard code readers couldn't tell me which one but the Autozone one did, simple easy fix. Oil consumption is nothing for the first 6k of my 10k oil changes and then goes up a bit for the last 4k. I need to add a quart or so over the last 4k. This is probably telling me to change the oil at 6k, but I'm stubborn. Only cropped up after 120k.
Lots of talk of the transmissions lasting 125-150k and needing to be rebuilt. I don't have any signs of failure other than hating the four speed. It seems most people don't mind it though.
The window switches will probably fail, easy to fix for free. My speakers also all died. Also easy to replace.
When I write all of this down it sounds like I have all sorts of trouble, but all of the hard parts on the truck have been as reliable as gravity.
In reply to mazdeuce:
Great! Thanks.
It's funny because what you mention is nearly everything that the truck has wrong with it. The guys at work before my time took it to the local Chevy dealer and had them look it over. They had an estimate for like $5k or something stupid for brakes, axles, rear shoes and wheel cylinders and air bag sensors. We got the airbag sensors replaced already so we're good.
I will just have to replace the front rt wheel bearing, both upper control arms, sway bar end links, and three tires. Has one brand new tire on it now.
I can get it for $3500 as it sits. Would you buy it for that?
On hell yea. The wheel bearing is a 25 minute job (unless it's 4wd, then add 5 minutes to pull the axle nut) they're unit bearings so they come off with three bolts. The longest part of the whole job is pulling the caliper. Front arm is maybe a 20 minute job. You can check the alignment with strings and a level.
I haven't had to do rear brakes yet, but they're just drums. Not hard, just dirty and annoying.
These trucks will operate for a shockingly long time on deffered maintenance. What seems to be happening at the age they're at is people are letting things pile up until they are at the point where the one you're looking at is. Then they "cost more to fix that they're worth". Except parts are cheap and the work is really easy.
I pulled a 2012 mustang on a uhual car hauler with my 2010 5.3 version (crew cab) it had no issues doing 80 mph from tx to sc...
So the truck threw a CEL. First one ever. TPS out of range, p0120. I did some reading and it seems that a dirty/sticky throttle body is the most likely issue. Pull the throttle body, can of throttle body cleaner, a couple of minutes cursing after playing 10mm plinko down the front of the engine, all back together.
I knew it was going to have to relearn idle, but everything I read said it was a pretty short procedure. Idled in the driveway. Idled in the kids car rider line. It's still being moody. At least the code is gone. Success?
This will be taking residence in my driveway on Monday. $3500. Needs tires, a front wheel bearing, and upper control arms. 135k miles. It's never been cleaned before and the door speakers are gone.
I will be starting a grosh truck build thread of my own next week.
If you look around the interwebz you'll find alot of complaints of the 5.3 consuming quite a bit of oil. My grandmothers 110k 06 Envoy does it at a shocking rate, but it's not driven very hard, it rarely see's 2500rpm. My 00 Silverado goes through it faster than I like, but it clicked over 190k this week. It see's 5k almost daily once warmed up, merging into traffic where I live can be a royal PITA and a 3/4 throttle run can make life easier. No traction control on the 00, with an empty bed can make rapid acceleration rather amusing but with 70+mph traffic baring down on you not that smart.
Scottah wrote:
This will be taking residence in my driveway on Monday. $3500. Needs tires, a front wheel bearing, and upper control arms. 135k miles. It's never been cleaned before and the door speakers are gone.
I will be starting a grosh truck build thread of my own next week.
Looking forward to the build thread! I think these are starting to get in the sweet spot for GRM type trucks. They're mechanically very solid, the interiors are super durable compared to earlier trucks, and they're just starting to have enough small easily fixable (by GRM standards) issues that people are getting rid of them fairly cheaply.
In reply to Spinout007:
Do we know where the oil is going? Clearly some of it is going into the intake, but what is the mechanism for that? Just through the crankcase ventilation? That's widely regarded as the route of oil loss for the CTS-V cars on track, and I would use at least 1/2 quart during a track weekend.
My mom had an 08 that went thru oil, but hers was the rear main seal, and she traded it in on an 05 Yukon XL with a 5.3 that doesn't go thru oil.
The dealership I used to work at had a Grand Master GM Tech, and he said the 5.3 were always coming in for replacement of the rear main seal.
He came to the KIA dealership (moved to a smaller city for his kids to be closer to grandparents) before he ever found out if they developed a 'better' part or not.
May be worth checking out?
The motor is dry. The power steering is weeping a bit and the valve covers look like they sweat, sort of like the oil just oozes directly through them. They're dry around the seals. It's pretty much always happened and hasn't had any effect on oil consumption. I try to pay attention to it as I'd really like to figure it out if I can.
We did find some cool rocks.
Climbed almost to the top before I pulled the dad card that it was getting too steep. Still having fun.
Another very common failure on these trucks (and on many GM vehicles of the era I hear) is failing window switches. The switches aren't really failing, the contacts are just corroding, which is easily fixed. Conveniently GM built the doors such that you don't have to remove the panel to get the switch out.
Then it's just a matter of disassembling the switch and hitting all the contacts with a wire wheel on a dremel. The whole processes takes less than 15 minutes, which is nice as this is the third time I've had to do it.
