I too am/was a mechanical designer as I see you are. I know you have the common sense to figure things out. I found out that after I read up on something, ask the guys here, search the internet, I just dive in and do it. We all make mistakes and have to fix them, but it keeps us out of the bars. Not too many tools needed for many jobs. Just tinker and dinker. Basically the fun is in the doing and fixing the old trucks the way you want them and sit back and look at what you've done. It's not economically feasible to have all the work hired out for most of us. These old trucks are easy to work on and are forgiving with their straight forward design of all components. No electronics just electrics, no power accessories except if you add them, no fuel injection circuit, no MacPherson struts, rear wheel drive, No metric hardware and enough height that we can crawl under them. So dig in and you will develop the "skills". Everything you can ask about on here has several experienced guys who have done it and will help. Take the varied opinions/know-how and decide what to do from that.
