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We spent the morning working on another rig, but the weather cleared today and we made a gas station run. The ignition switch conked out, but a couple quick jumpers and we were back on the road.

One of the rear bleeders was leaking when we go back and we found that ham hands had damaged it, so we had to put in a new pair. Overall, the brakes feel great and it drives, so progress is being made.

Next step: yank out the janky electricals and put in the new harness/gauges.

The steering is a bit loose, as expected from checking it out in the air. That will be fairly high on the list, but I have driven much worse for much longer.

The welded in seat is awful, but that can wait a while. The biggest reason to swap to the new seats is to get the seatbelts they come with.

And the horn is reassembled and ready to install.

I wwas thinking to myself that it was a good volume, if a little on the quiet side. Then my wife came out to see what the racket was and I realized I was still wearing my noise cancelling headphones.

At least it wasn't 11:00 at night.

We are getting ready to put a new wiring harness in, so we are working on getting everything that will be connected to the new wiring prepped.

I got an electric wiper conversion for my birthday last year and finally got around to installing it. It was supposed to be a simple bolt on swap, but when I climbed under the dash, I found that someone had kludged in a single speed electric unit. The bracket appears factory, but it rotates horizontally instead of vertically. As a result, a PO had bent the wiper transmission arms something fierce.

Since the bracket on that motor was not compatible with the new one, we ended up tanking a bunch of measurements and making a new set from some strap from the bin.

We ended up spending pretty much all of daylight getting the unit out, pulling the transmissions and fixing the arms, then making brackets and getting it installed.

At the end of the day, we put the knob on and they were working! We went on a celebratory bike ride to the park with sandwiches.

We will need to adjust the index on the arms and figure out why the wipers themselves are all floppy, but progress is progress.

I am behind on my updates. We haven't accomplished anything major, but we have done a bunch of little things.

I was having a dickens of a time getting the timing to be consistent and discovered that the distributor was out of whack. The shaft was moving up and down in the housing and grinding away the bottom of the cap. Instead of adding more whack (also known as a thrust washer), we put in a new small-cap HEI, along with new plugs and wires.

A tactical error was made when I showed my daughter the chrome section at the FLAPS. We ended up with a few shiny bits.

I had found this steering wheel at a yard sale about a week after I bought the truck and stripped/refinished it. We got it installed, cleaned/tested the turn signal switch, and fixed the horn contacts.

The gauges are not connected, but they look good with the bezel and the increasing amount of chrome in the cab.

We decided that we want to have DRLs, so we got some "dual filament" LED bulbs that are white and amber. The housings we had were single filament, so we adapted them to work with the new bulbs. They look pretty great with the new lenses.

The old exhaust has been removed and a new y-pipe is installed, but the rest of the exhaust pieces are still on order. Hopefully we can get those installed this week.

You're going to need one of those flat hats to go with that steering wheel. Like Stroker McGurk used to wear.

Yeah, I am not 100% sold on the wheel. It is much better than the plastic 90s GMC wheel that was on there before.

It looks better with the gauges and chrome knobs than it did before I put them on. I will get the rest of it put together and then circle back around to maybe replacing it.

That looks like the same that was on my truck.
Good work!

What is the diameter of the wood rim wheel? A smaller diameter makes for harder turning, especially at slow speeds.

My wheel is a 16" and I don't have any issues turning it while stopped. I put slightly larger than stock tires on, but they are still fairly narrow (195?). I intentionally did not go wide to avoid straining the steering.

I wasn't familiar with Stroker McGurk. That is pretty good.

Got the new parking light housing put in. I was reminded that Frank is a biter, but I didn't notice the bloody print until looking at the pictures.

I think the housings will look better once the grill is painted. For now I just pounded the big dents out of it. I have another one that I have been prepping for paint.

I am curious if the passenger side light even worked with the wiring pinched that tight.

We spent a while polishing random bits of chrome too because we were running out of daylight and didn't want to start a new project.

Per Wikipedia ....
Stroker McGurk is a cartoon character created by Tom Medley, featured in Hot Rod and Rod & Custom. Medley's famed creation debuted in the third issue of Hot Rod, and continued in the magazine until 1955. He would reappear briefly in 1964 and 1965, and occasionally in Rod & Custom in the 1980s.

This one was my favorite. I used to drive a convertible in college and there were a number of girls that only went with me once.

Looks like we are taking a break today...

We keep getting more snow, but we went out anyway to test fit the new LED headlights. Obviously it is not aligned right, but they fit the buckets nicely and we really like the overall look.

Since these have DRL bars in them, we might go back to amber lenses for the parking lights/turn signals.

Progress is being made and I want to keep that momentum as much as possible. Even just little things like fitting the headlights or painting the pedals move towards completion and keep the interest up.

15 mimutes a day will accomplish much. Keep pecking sway at it.

Between the bad weather and my wife's health issues, I have not made much progress lately. It was pouring rain this morning, but the sun came out just as I was getting home from church so I took it as a sign and dug out the welder.

We picked up a tubing bender, but all it did was mangle and crimp the pipe. I ended up cutting up the elbow that I got for the tip to make the y-pipe to muffler section.

I am overall happy with the progress. It is not as beautiful as some exhausts I have seen, but it is a lot better than the last one I made and it will function. Having lost a couple feet of pipe to the bender, it won't reach the hanger yet. I need to get another chunk of pipe before I can finish installing it.

Everyone has been sick around here, but the weather was so nice I couldn't resist going out and tinkering for a bit.

I got the exhaust done, pulled the throttle linkage, removed the gauge pod from the dash, and twisted off the temperature sender in the intake.

I gave up after that. I was trying to come up with a way to get the rest out without pulling the intake, but no dice so far.

To abbreviate a long story, the kludged in squarebody radiator failed when I was replacing a cracked hose. I actively disliked it, but couldn't convince myself to replace it since it was working.

I picked up one of the mid-priced radiators off ebay to replace it. The box came with my new favorite warning label.

I decided that my super legit original overflow tank needed a new home, so I picked up one of the universal ones that Otto recommended. I am quite pleased with how it tucks up into the inner fender.

Overall, getting this in was the highlight of my month. The rest of the new hoses should be here Thursday so I can hook it up and refill it.

Really coming along, great job!

When I ordered the stock style radiator, I ordered a set of stock hoses to go with it. Oddly enough, both were right at 1" too short. I am not sure what the deal is there, but I have longer ones on order now.

My helper put a new electronic speedo sender in the trans, we made a new battery negative cable, and finished pulling the old wiring out.

The battery tray was badly rusted, so we pulled it out to fix it. The heater core hookups are coming out of some home-drilled holes, so we need to figure out what is going on with that.

It looks good from in the cab, but all of the control cables have been cut off. I am not sure if it is the right one for the truck or not. I need to do some research on what it is and if I can make it work.

For now, I think we will just hook the heater hose up in a look so we can fill the cooling system and run it until we sort the heater out. We want to pull it, clean it, and test it before we hook it up permanently. We want to seal and sound deaden the firewall while the heater core is out.

Edit: It looks right to be the deluxe heater, so I don't know what the other two holes in the firewall are from.

Your helper looks to be a huge help!

She sure fits places a lot better than I do. That's for sure.

The fact that both hoses are 1" too short seems to indicate that either the radiator is in the wrong place or the engine is in the wrong place. I see it isn't a stock radiator. Perhaps they made the inlets and outlets, too short?

Are there supposed to be standoffs or rubber vibration dampers or something between the radiator mounting flange and the radiator support that would move it 1" closer to the engine?

The FAM doesn't give dimensions, but it has 1/16" vibration dampeners from LMC. I am assuming they are the correct thickness.

The motor is on the stock birdleg mounts and the driveshaft is the stock length (I measured it when it was out).

My best theories are that the radiator is an 1" off somehow, though that would put a huge gap at the top that I don't see in any pictures of stock vehicles or the 58/59 have a different setup and the 55-59 parts are correct for the earlier ones.

I am leaning toward the latter because I know the hood is shorter and hood latch is off by about an inch of you get the earlier hood latch. I already fought with that.

OK, what I would do if your new ordered longer hoses don't work. Why not use a flex hose there? Thermostat housing to top RAD. Same on the bottom. And yeah those 58/59`s are different sometimes.