That's fine -- I appreciate you taking the time to educate me!
I see you are one of those lucky people who *has* a voltage gauge. I have a dummy light shaped like a battery, nothing more. If it comes on halfway across the state of Wyoming from home, there's nothing much I can do about it, other than take a long, long hike. I don't drive this far often, but I do commute 15 miles in the middle of winter. Walking this distance home loaded down with stuff at -30 would be NO FUN.
I am firmly convinced that my truck will be unreliable forever. There's just been too much wrong with it for me to ever imagine that it will be a dependable vehicle. I thought I had most of the cobwebs out, but then I got stranded twice, on successive trips to town. Once because I didn't want to drive home with a missing exhaust manifold stud and once because the igniter died in the middle of a busy street. Between these short trips, I squeezed in a long one, 500 miles round trip. I'm just waiting for the breakdown to happen during a long trip instead of before or after. Alternators, ignition coils/igniters, fuel pumps, fuel hoses, distributors, steering gear, brakes... The list of possible failures just goes on and on. Any one of these parts, failing at the wrong time, could be a disaster.
Wheel it, get stuck in the wilderness...drag it home, repair it. it's the only way to get a better truck. one thing I might recommend is to have a carb rebuild kit somewhere in your truck...you can really be dead in the water when one of those diaphragms develops a tear. I sent you a PM on an SR5 cluster, the conversion is super easy and it looks better. I am in a different boat than you by far...my truck has never been more than 60 miles from my house, which is within AAA towing range to my house.
