Thanks for the nice comments. I know these posts are coming quickly as I get caught up, but also it has been at or below zero since the weekend so my time out in the garage has been limited a bit. It does give me a chance to post the progress so far.
As I had mentioned in part 4, we found a pretty decent set of used tires on a truck at a salvage yard. We figured that these could work for a while, at least through the restoration process, so Kevin made a deal with the yard owner. These were on 8 lug rims and the truck had been in the yard for almost a year. The yard is kind of a mess with several huge fallen trees blocking a normal path. Of course, both the 6400 parts truck and the donor Isyzu were near the back if the yard. We made a cursory attempt to get the lugs off with very little success. We were only able to loosten two of the 48 lugs before we snapped off the 3/4" to 1" drive adapter......Clearly this was not going to be a cake walk.
I ordered a new adapter, and had Kevin recruit the aid of one of his strong pals. This time, armed with two floor jacks, my acetylene torch, a 5 foot T-bar, a 5 foot breaker bar and two 5 foot cheater bars, we took another stab at it. Even heating the lug nuts red hot, they still fought every turn. It took us almost 4 hours and I ran out of oxygen on the very last lug nut! We were all leaking blood to some extent and a few bruises, but the 6 tires and all the tools were in the back of the pick-up. The next day while Kevin was at work, I went to the tire store and started the process of getting these tires mounted on the 6400 rims. I took the 450lbs of Isuzu rims to the scrap yard. At least now we didn't have to worry about not having 6 tires that hold air and are at least in town serviceable for a while.
The next major step in the body work was going to be addressing the rust in the cab corners. The problem was that the flat bed was still on the truck. It was still just sitting on the frame from when we picked it up with the fork lift when we brought it home. The tool boxes on the bed were blocking my access to the back of the cab. We would have to remove it somehow. That will be part 7
