Fully Winterized Freedom

This is the arctic entry to the Autocrafts, they too leave the interior door open. Kind of defeats the purpose.

If you click on this picture, you can see the icecicles hanging from the undercarriage like little stalagtites. It took 4 full hours of being in a heated garage to melt most all of the ice off. The melting ice is a pain when you are working underneath, you get your own private little rainstorm.

Here's a shot of the ice build up under the skid plate. The thing weighed probably 40 pounds. You can see the puddle under the truck is getting bigger. I'd have to stop every once in awhile and squeegie the water down the drain.

Close up of the skid plate.

Winterization consists of three parts. A block heater to keep your coolant/antifreeze in a liquid state. This goes into a freezeplug on the side of the block. Then there is a heating pad that glues to the oil pan to keep the oil a little more fluid and doing its lubrication job. The last piece is a way to keep your battery happy. The old way was to use an electric blanket or a hot pad for it to sit on, but the new way, or so I'm told, is to use a trickle charger, which heats from the inside and keeps the battery topped off. The cost is about the same so I went with the trickle charger. All three parts are on the cart along with coolant to replace what drains out when I knock out the freeze plug and a Mountain Dew to keep me topped off.

Do the Dew. Mmmmmm! High Fructose Corn Syrup!!

Here's the trickle charger installed on the side of the battery. Everything plugs into a standard outdoor multi plug which gets routed out the front of the grill. A few zipties to keep everything out of the moving belts and off the exhausts and you are good to go. Being my first time, I of course had to rearrange everything 10 times to get the fit just right. The oil pan heater cord was the shorty so I had to make sure that it wouldn't come unplugged with rough usage. This is my new fun hunting and fishing rig, so it will see some dirt roads along the way.

Here she is, fully winterized. I removed the spot lights that weren't being utilized, took off the plastic cover for the license plate and lost the side bars. I think she looks better already and runs and drives a ton better without all that damn ice frozen underneath. You can see the plug in hanging out the front.

After I finished in the shop, I headed to town for a taco and to buy an extension cord and a good ice scraper. I've already found a bumper in a u-pull lot in Fairbanks, so hopefuly I get up there in the next few week and give the old girl a $40 facelift. that'll make her look a decade younger overnight.