Hello all, hope everyone had a merry Christmas and is off to a good start in the new year.
Not much happened after my last post, other than the transmission getting painted, since I was mainly waiting on being able to take the engine to the machine shop. However, I'm back in Kansas now, and back to work. The engine should be going in this week, and today was the first day of the three-week sheetmetal class, so I've gotten the body work started.
I am going to bring the entire truck into class in the next day or two (or what there is of it, meaning the cab and chassis), but I need to get some tie-rod ends put on it before I can move it very far. I ordered them over break and had them shipped out here, but the mailroom hours are quite limited, so I wasn't able to pick them up today. Meanwhile, I'm keeping myself occupied working with the little bits and pieces that aren't mounted to the truck. Today I worked on the grille, or more specifically, a rather large kink in the center of the lower grill bar. There are also a couple of other dings, but this was by far the worst, and the fact that it is over the top of the "R" in "CHEVROLET" isn't making things any easier. I made some pretty good progress, though. The first thing I did was to use a short piece of bar stock with a slot of the proper depth cut into the end to carefully flatten out some of the flange along the bottom of the grill. This was done to make it easier to take a wire wheel to the effected area and to facilitate the use of a jaw shrinker to restore some of the curvature to the lower grill bar. After that was done, a variety of tools were used to try and work out what remained of the dent. It's not done yet, but it's way better than it was. I took too many pictures to attach directly, so here's a link to a Google Photos album:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/MbFivXq2PqLUKfVB8After I get the grill done, the next order of business is the driver's door, and then the cab. The door is pretty well crunched, as well as being rusted out and bondo-ed over, although everything above the belt-line is in decent shape. The plan is to fabricate a new outer door skin to replace everything up to slightly below said belt-line (to make the weld easier to finish), and replace the door bottom with a repro patch panel (also languishing in the school's mailroom). The cab has two areas of concern. The easy one is the passenger side rocker, and outer floorboard area. I think I can fabricate the section of floor easily enough, and I lucked into an NOS rocker panel which I will use to replace what's left of the original. The tricky part is the header panel above the windshield. I've been given several suggestions as to how to go about patching it, including using a lap joint, plug welds and filler, but at the moment I'm leaning toward the more tedious method involving drilling out all the spot welds holding the outer roof skin giving me access to the backside of the header panel to make it easier to finish a TIG weld. I had toyed with the idea of replacing the entire inner skin just by drilling and re-welding spotwelds, but, after doing a sort of practice run by removing the good inner skin from an otherwise almost useless cab, I decided that wasn't going to work. If I do it this way, I know I'll have to be careful not to distort the windshield opening, but it does have the added benefit of allowing me to take some preventative measures with the inside of the cab roof. I'm open to suggestions.
Besides these two big issues, there's also a bunch of smaller, less intimidating projects which I will do in class if I somehow finish these, and on my own time if I don't. These mostly involve the passenger door, bed, rear fenders, and front clip (which is still back home, so I won't be getting to that until summer regardless). Here's some pictures of the rust issue that I have out here with me:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/4fMqjBdVQBNmVH1Y9On a side note, I recently discovered that my wheels are not the correct ones. As I understand it, the correct set should have riveted tabs for holding the hubcaps on. On the wheels I have, the hubcaps are retained by three tabs stamped into the wheel itself. I don't have a picture of my wheels, but good ol' Google images gave me a picture of a set that looks to be identical. They are stamped "GM", but I have no idea what they came off of, which leaves me wondering what options I have for hubcaps since I really don't want to clean up and paint another set of rims. When I bought the truck, it had three beat-up aluminum hubcaps, which I have also included a picture of the design of. I'd like to find something fairly close to what the truck would have had originally, and they would have to be white. If any one knows of a style that they think might work, I'd be most appreciative.
That's all for now, but I should have an update every day or two for as long as this sheetmetal class runs.
