Buying, Servicing, & Off-Roading The Cheapest Humvee I Could Find!!

What's up everybody! Welcome back to Diesel Creek. My name is Matt. It's that time of year again. Spring is in the air and that means one thing. Ritchie Brothers auction season. Let's head out to the auction and see what we can find. Everybody needs a Hummer in their life. Troop carrier set up. Seat's wet. Roof leaks. I don't know. They got a key in here. This isn't factory but it should start like this. I'm not getting any sign of life so I think the battery's dead. That's a bummer. I would have really liked to heard this thing run today. Are you guys excited? I mean I know you didn't buy it but are you excited? I'll be real honest. I didn't even look at this thing too well because I didn't think I was gonna buy it. I thought that this was gonna go for closer to $20,000 and the only reason I bought it is because it was cheap and I've never seen one sell for less than $20,000. The battery was dead when I looked at it prior to the auction so I got the cables on it right now. It's a 24 volt system so I can only charge one battery at a time but we got some things happening now so I'm gonna let that charge a bit see if we can't get this thing fired up. The guys here at the auction said it ran and they drove it around so fingers crossed. I'm pretty excited about it. Well I have no idea if it's gonna go but we can try. We need more power. Oh yeah. We got oil pressure. Battery voltage is going bananas. That's interesting. We'll let it warm up a bit and see what happens. All right well here's my first time driving a Hummer with that low high neutral. Put that guy there. Put that guy in drive. Oh yeah. It's ready to gallop. Boys we bought a freaking Hummer. At the same time I kind of feel like I just did one of my life goals. Like a kitten. Got the Hummer home here. Drove home fine. Definitely has a few little stupid issues on it. Nothing major that I've noticed. As you may be able to tell this top has seen better days. Let's see if we can't scare up a replacement for it. All right well I'm pretty excited about this. Inside of this box should be a new used top for the Humvee here. I gotta give a big shout out to Clint over at CNC Equipment. He's a buyer and seller of military vehicles and heavy equipment and he gets his fingers into a little bit of everything from what it seems. But he's got a really cool YouTube channel. If you guys like my channel you'll probably like his too. So if you want to go check that out tell him thanks for hooking me up. Let's see if we can't open this box as well without slicing into the top. Oh yeah look at that. That's what I'm talking about. No holes in this one. That's a heck of a lot better than what we got. Look at that. Oh man there's the new back window as well. That thing looks great. Let's get this thing installed and again big thanks to Clint. You guys go tell him I said thanks. The meatball thanks him too. Well like I said I've never done this before but it looks pretty straightforward. It's just a whole bunch of these little quarter turn clips everywhere and looks like we should be able to just unwrap this thing like a present. All right I was trying to remove this thing in one piece and it's like this stuff has shrunk and hardened from the sun. So it's junk anyway. Just make life easier and cut it off. I'm sure there are some Humvee experts out there just dying inside a little bit of the way I'm doing this but it seems like the easiest way to go about it. Yeah see I'm barely touching this window and it's just peeling right out of here. I especially love the realism in this video because every video on YouTube anybody taking the top off a Humvee seems like they're always in like Arizona beautiful sunny California and the weather's just choice. Here it's like 52 degrees and overcast and slightly rainy. All right so the part I'm really struggling with here is that there's one of these like quarter turn lock deals right down like between this column and the stake bed side here. Makes it awful hard to get off. Come on. Come on. This is way harder than it should be. There we go. Top is completely off. Sweet. I think this is going to be the hardest part putting the new top on. Completely scalped. All right so these Humvees are completely convertible from two four from the two-man setup like we have here to a four-man setup which is what you see more of and then the roof would slope down like right there and you have the little pickup truck bed. So these floor plates cover off where the second seats would go and I've never opened them because that top and everything was in the way and I just popped the two screws out of it and I slid this thing forward a little bit and I can see there's stuff under here so I figured start the camera and see what we find. I have no idea what's in here. Well look at that. This might be all the pieces to make it a four-man. I had no idea any of this was in here. This may have been a four-man and they put a two-man top on it. Why would they have done that? Do we want a four-man or do we want a two-man? Look at this. Yeah a lot of wasted room down here. They're not in very good shape but those are seat cushions. Look at that. Now you guys that know these things drop that down in the comments let me know if that's standard. If all these two-man units automatically came with that or if this is something unique here and I got lucky and got extra pieces that I shouldn't have. Well I'm feeling kind of smart and stupid at the same time because I don't know that much about these Humvees. Like I've said a hundred times I just bought this one because it was cheap. So I think you can take off that cover right there which would allow you access in and out of this back seat area and it looks to me like this thing would slide right down in a groove right there and be the backrest for the passenger seat. Hey guys another backrest here. What is this? What is that thing? I feel like this has turned into one of those gimmicky YouTube videos where there's like this mystery hidden thing but 100% serious. I don't know what this thing is. What in the world are these things for? Somebody's got to let me know in the comments what the heck these things are. Yeah look at that. There's a number on there. Not sure if that means anything to any of y'all. Could be 100% coincidence but these things seem to line up back here. The bolt holes all line up. I believe these are antenna mounts but I think it's just a standard four on four bolt hole configuration and that doesn't mean anything. So yeah comments. What the heck are these things for? Also in the process of undoing everything we uncovered another issue here. See that? That's supposed to be you know mounted in that hole but uh it's not. All right well so the whole vehicle is built with these threaded inserts that are kind of like rivets and they have threads in there. I know the camera's probably not focusing on them and I'm pretty sure that's what was in here and fell out. So I just made my own threaded insert out of a grease fitting here and I tapped this out for the grease fitting which was pretty close to that size already. So I'm gonna put some Loctite on that thing and we'll stick that in there. It's just gonna last until the threaded insert tool I just ordered off Amazon shows up. It's only temporary unless it works. All right maybe not good as new but good enough for what we're doing. Well there she is guys. There it is. Man does that thing look better. So again a big thank you to Klinit CNC Equipment for sending this thing over. Getting me all high and dry. So make no mistake about it, even with a nice new holeless top on here, I'm betting this is still no picnic to drive down the road and rainstorm. Can you see that gap right there? I don't think we did anything wrong. I think maybe you could adjust the door a little bit to close that up a bit but it's still like these are just not vehicles that are made to be completely wind and water tight. I mean look at that guy right there. That's a hole straight in right behind the driver. So there's not much getting rid of a lot of this stuff. I'm sure you could probably play around and make it better but without buying one of these aftermarket top kits that's all stamped aluminum and everything, which are very expensive, you're just not going to get that kind of seal. Alrighty well I've owned this thing for several months now and really haven't driven it a ton. I have driven it some but it's time to do some preventative maintenance on it. So when I picked this baby up at the auction I did check all the fluids and everything. All the fluids looked good. The oil was dirty but not too terrible. I haven't driven it enough to cause any damage I wouldn't think. The oil is clean. There's no coolant or anything in it like that and it's full up to the correct level but it is dirty. It's definitely time for an oil change. I got a fuel filter coming for this thing and we're going to check out the coolant again. I was able to get the regular old oil filter from Napa but the fuel filter is actually in this canister right here and I actually had to google that myself because I couldn't even, I didn't even see that thing. The engine in this Humvee here and I can't remember exactly what year they switched up to the bigger engines but this is the 6.2 liter GM diesel. I think it's a Detroit diesel. These were early small diesel engines. They were not particularly powerful. In fact it's completely gutless but it will run forever from what I'm told and what I researched but they don't make a whole lot of power. I want to make sure that we're getting every little pony out of it that we can. I'm going to check the air filter here which I think I did when I bought it but I really don't remember now. Get a 9.16, pull that guy off of there and hopefully it's nice and clean. I say that but I would actually feel better if it was dirty and I could just clean it and get a little more air to this thing and maybe make a little more power out of it and same thing goes for that fuel filter. When the new one comes in we open that fuel filter housing up I'm almost in a weird way hoping that it's dirty so that I can say oh well we're going to have a little more power here after we put a fuel filter in it but I don't know that that's going to be the case. I think it's just a big boat anchor under the hood here. They do make turbo kits for these engines well let me rephrase that they used to make turbo kits for these engines. I think you'd have to do pretty much a custom thing now or find a used one because the Banks Sidewinder turbo kits have been discontinued and I think any of any other manufacturers that used to make one have also since ceased production on that. Let's pull this air filter. Well I guess it's actually a good thing the air filter is nice and clean. A little teeny bit down here at the bottom where it was rotated but I can't complain about that at all. It looks like it's probably hasn't been driven much it's still nice and white no visible heavy dirt or anything so we'll put that back in no sense changing that it's quite good. Let's fire this thing up and check the transmission fluid. Now I haven't had any cooling issues with this thing it seems to run nice and cool but down here between the radiator and the transmission cooler there's quite a bit of debris underneath there so I'm going to take the air compressor and try to blow that out of there. Kind of a pain on this setup I wish there was some way that this could easily be like unpinned and flipped up out of the way and cleaned that better but it doesn't appear that that would be very easy to do here. Well I think it might just be a hair low because there's the cold level line there about halfway down the tank and it's hot right now and it's about at that level so it might be just a little bit low but that coolant looks really nice it's good and green doesn't look doesn't look like it's contaminated at all so I'm gonna let that go. Magnetic drain plug doesn't really have anything on it at all. Teeny little bit of oil sludge but no metal flake or anything looks good. Got the drain plug back in there while the oil was draining I was down here rolling around inspecting everything and I don't know if you guys can see it lighting's not the best but the brake pads look good they're probably a little more than half so for as much as I'm going to drive this thing those will last me a long long time. There are grease fittings on every pivot point down here except for the a-arm bushings so I'm glad to see that we'll have to get the grease gun down here and grease up everything. Well that oil filter is a little too tight there we go so for an oil filter we got us a Wix 51061 it looks like looks like last time it was changed was in April of 2010 or 18 I can't make out exactly. All right so you guys have seen me use this stuff plenty in the past here the Rotella T5 I really like this stuff it's a synthetic blend so it's got the best of both worlds the conventional and the synthetic and you're supposed to be able to get longer oil change intervals out of this stuff it's got different additive packages and stuff in it compared to the regular T4 and I just believe it's better bang for the buck and since this is a low mileage engine we want to treat this thing right and yeah we'll keep this thing on the road for quite quite a while longer. I can't fill the oil filter all the way up because it installs from the side but I can fill it up about halfway that of course helps keep from having a dry start up we'll go with that there and get the filter installed and fill up the engine I'm not even sure how much this thing takes but I got a little over five gallons here I like these two and a half gallon jugs too it's it's enough that you don't feel like you're going through 20,000 containers and being wasteful and it's not so cumbersome like a five gallon jug where you have to get a crane to hold the thing upside down for you while you're pouring it in get this filter installed I've said it before too these jumbo metal funnels that I have if you don't if you don't have one of these things you're missing out it really makes pouring all the good stuff in that much easier oh man no no no no here I am bragging about my funnel and making a mess with my funnel at the same time the filler neck of this engine is a little goofy ah making a mess again the way the oil filled tube is on this engine it has these two ears for the cap to lock into and if you fill the funnel up and it's trying to suck air it blows the oil out those two notches for the ears and runs all down over the engine so gotta go gotta pour slow all right we are just over the full mark and that should be perfect because we got to start it up and finish pumping the oil into the oil filter so let's do that and check it again gotta let the glow plugs run on this thing it is I mean the engine's warm still but not hot and uh it does not like to start without the glow plugs the batteries are also getting a little bit weak in this thing so I'm gonna end up having to put a set of batteries in it so if the batteries were better and spun the engine over faster it might start easier without the glow plugs but when you let the glow plugs go it fires right up there we go just a little past the full mark and that's fine though because we're actually leaning back a little bit so that stands the reason we'd have a little more than we should back there around the dipstick not a big fan of that oil cap kind of feels like it could come off of there well we're still waiting for the fuel filter to show up so we might as well get after the whole thing with the old grease gun here and I'm not really going to make you guys sit and watch me uh pump every grease fitting because uh there's a lot of them well the fuel filter we were waiting on finally arrived so let's go ahead and work on getting this canister off of here looks like we need to unplug this wiring harness two hoses and a drain hose down the bottom and then just loosen that bolt and I think this whole assembly will come right out all right I think when I pull this bottom hose off of here any water and fuel that's in the filter is going to drain out I got a pan down here but we'll have to pay attention here and see if there was any water that looks like good green diesel I don't I don't see any water gotta be honest I'm not a fan of this filter setup I don't understand what is wrong with a regular old twist on canister what do I know what a pain you can't go straight up with it on account of you don't have enough headspace how stupid there we go good lord man that's a pain it's a fine mesh screen that goes down inside the filter it looks really good there we go actually this fuel filter I don't know if you guys are able to tell on camera but it uh it doesn't look too good it's got a bunch of this little sediment looking crap down here at the bottom of it you can kind of see it where it's draining the fuel down here on the tailgate it's it's got some stuff in it it does not look super clean but it's not super dirty either so so here's the new filter which appears to be made considerably better new filter new screen ready to reinstall this thing get this thing back in there right so our fuel filter is completely empty now I have the bleeder screw on top of it opened up so I don't think there's an electric fuel pump on this thing I think it's all mechanical so we're gonna have to crank the engine over until fuel squirts out of there and hope the engine doesn't start because that could potentially put a bubble in the system and start it for fuel not only is this filter a pain to install it is a terrible pain to bleed as well it's just got every strike going for it I think we finally got it bled down trying to tighten it up now all right let's see if we can get this thing to fire we definitely got a bubble in the fuel system all right teeny little whiff of ether got that bubble out of the system real easy and we're able to get this thing fired up it's running good now it's time to take this thing for a rip and see if we notice any performance improvements we got a big hill to climb here hopefully we can do her yeah you got a little bit of exhaust so the muffler broke off and it's gonna hang down and catch on stuff so we're unbolting it because muffler deletes are better anyways yeah a little field a little field repair there performance upgrade in the field that was a pretty good little mud hole I'm gonna be ripped right through that I'm I'm right impressed with that even my buddy with the jeep there said he didn't think I was getting well I fell into the deep part again here this thing sounds ignorant without a muffler man this thing is incredible oh nice old humvee might have to come to the rescue here better winch him out this is one of those cameras don't do it justice kind of moments this hill isn't super steep or anything but it looks flat on camera and believe me it's a hill and it's rutted out pretty bad but on camera looks like a highway man I think I love this thing this is by far the most off-road capable vehicle I've ever owned this thing's a beast hit I must be honest here I love driving it it is so choice if you have the means I highly recommend picking one up