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Just grabbed this off the used car lot of the Ford dealership I work for the other week. 2000 K2500 Suburban LT.
It uh. It needs work. A lot of it. Turns out it was actually from Cheyenne. Who uses road salt in the winter. Yay! i knew about the rust when I bought it, but after furhter inspection I found it to be a little bit worse than I first thought. But nothing major. Just a broken leaf spring is all. And a rusted-in-half muffler. Nope, no safety hazzards here!!
In all reality, I knew this old truck was going to be a project. I felt it was worth it since these are all issues I can easily fix myself at the shop I work in on weekends. It seems like it's on the rarer side of things too, being a 3/4 ton with barn doors. Full leather bucket seating, and no third row so it has all the space I need in the back. My ultimate plan with it, once I get the major issues fixed up, is to turn it into a microcamper. I already have a bed thrown in the back, just a top bunk mattress from a Kenworth T680. But I'm gonna take it further than that with shelving and such. Possibly even go as far as setting up running water and solar panels! But that's all to come.
Current list of issues:
-Oil leaks. Valve covers, oil pan / possible rear main. Drain plug was really leaking bad, but that's already been fixed.
-Exhaust... This is gonna be an expensive one. On top of the muffler being rusted into nothing, everything behind (what I think are) the resonators (Might be the cats) has already been replaced. With pipe that is all about 1/2inch smaller than factory. Not kidding. So that all has to come out and be redone at a muffler shop.
-Busted right-hand leaf spring. Thankfully this truck does not have air ride. But one of the leafs is snapped clean off.
-Fuel managment is panicing, and overfueling the engine. Though I'm pretty sure this is just a bad O2 sensor. B2S2 keeps reading around 32mV.
-OEM Stereo is dead. Ish. I can't really pin down explaining exactly what it's doing, but it sounds awful. Like I'm trying to listen to a single speaker on a cheap laptop. I'm thinking the amplifier in the head unit is bad, but I need to read up on how those units really work first. But then again, a brand new touchscreen with nav sure sounds nice!
-Both oil and trans cooler lines are leaking (Big surprise there)
-Pitman and idler arms are junk (Again, Big surprise)
-Frame has severe surface rust, and some body panels have rust coming in from the backside. So that all needs to get repaired at some point.
-Needs a coolant flush, no idea on the service history on that, and I know Dexcool well enough that I'm not gonna risk it sludging up.
And that's not even everything. But on the bright side, excluding a few rust spots, the body and the interior are all in great shape. Hood has a slight fitment issue on the driver side, have not really looked at it yet. To be honest, this truck is a prime example of why I generaly refuse to let other people work on my cars. Lots of half-assed repairs that need to be corrected now. They couldn't even be bothered to wire in the lights in the visor!