I'm moving some tires around - if you follow my other builds, you may recognize these, so just a hint that there will be a small surprise coming next week.
This truck needed tires pretty bad, the rears were at about 15% and the fronts were better but weather checked enough that I don't want to run them on a daily driver. I was a bit nervous about how 31's and 3.27 gears would interact but it's actually not terrible. Probably just speed up my 3.73 swap a bit. 31's were the ultimate goal on this truck and these tires are pretty old so I figured I'd burn them off rather than buying a new set.
While I was swapping tires last night, I found some slop in the wheel bearings. The previous owner told me (in the same sentence) "I just redid the front brakes" and "I'm not mechanical at all but I can handle that." So I immediately assumed that it was not done right and of course I was correct, the nut was quite loose on both sides. Since my 2 door Explorer is being disassembled I decided that I needed to swap in manual hubs and that made for a handy donor. I'll need to go back and clean out the bearings & repack them with fresh grease - it was obviously mixed with old dirty stuff too - that can wait.
I also bought a Raptor Liner kit so sometime this summer I'll be doing that.