I recently bought Duck89s bigfoot project for a pretty amazing deal. It was over 600 mile round trip but it will totally be worth it, plus I git to rude up and see Lake Ontario in person for the first time. Got to meet another 6x6er and came home with a badass machine, well it will be badass. All of the hard work is done. Everything is disassembled, cleaned, and labeled. There is a little work left for me to do but mostly just reassembling, nothing too major.
Hydromike did a great job of lining up the frame and making the two frames into one good one. I was told it's a 950 frame with the 980 seat riser and other stuff welded to it. The axles seem to line up fine, I just have to finish the welds and may need some tweaks but it looks pretty good to me.
Dirtdobber has been carrying me I feel like, he hooked me up with some major pieces to help me along to get this beast going again, and giving me great advice and simpler solutions, I have a tendency to try and solve problems that aren't even problems.
It came with new 26x12-12 swamper tsl. I'm won't be in the water alot and if they are absolute crap I can switch them out and sell these or save them for a dirt only project.
I need to do some doctoring on all the sprocket tubes, they all have some level of egging in the original holes. The sprockets themselves look decent.
5 of the axles are pretty good no egging surprisingly and straight. One axle was previously repaired it has a slight wobble and us about an 1/8" shorter than the rest. I am going to just have a pair made for now just to keep things even side to side. No reason other than that, I may never break an axle but have just enough ocd that I can't just put one new axle on one side, I have to do the corresponding on the other to match.
The t20 needs reassembling, it came with relined bands. Dirtdobber saved me big in the transmission, he hooked me up with everything I needed except the seal kit and a drum, which I may or may not be sourcing from a parts/project hustler 900 I might or might not be bringing home with me next week. It's a complete machine but it's been neglected for awhile. If it's nice enough it will get rebuilt for my wife if it's not it will be parts.
The opposed twin Briggs seems to have good compression so it will just be getting resealed unless I find anything ugly inside. But the oil looks good no weird knocks or anything when turning by hand, compression feels pretty strong when at that point. Muffler and tins all look nice no mice nests hiding in the tins. There was some mud wasps it something I hucked into the field across the street but otherwise pretty clean considering it's a mid 80s machine.
I need to build laterals and seat cushions/covers. Buy all new chains and it can go back together. I think I will be running the snap idle tensioners for simplicity and ease of maintenance. Not doing anything too fancy, maybe add a 12v power port to charge my phone. And build some sort of rollover protection I can throw netting over to double as a blind but otherwise I think hustler made it as good as it can be for my use.
This project came just in time I was really missing my max but thanks to the max I learned enough to be confident in taking in a project like this. And I settled for the max after missing out on a hustler locally. I just some happened to luck into a Bigfoot.
