The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area General Truck Talk Creativity rules

Working on my no-buck suburban, I have to be creative. Two examples are the shifter and the instrument panel. I was given an old polished aluminium steering colume, but had to come up with a floor shifter. Instead of paying 300.00 for a new one, I found a colume shifter off of a new dodge truck. It bolts to the side of the steering colume and uses a cable to the transmission. Made a bracket that bolts to the tailshaft housing, put the shifter on one side and the origional parking brake on the other. For the shift lever, I am using a polished stainless steel golf club shaft.
For the instrument panel, I was given a set of autometer gauges.( It's good to work at a street rod shop)Unfortunatly, they do not fit in the origional dash opening very well. I took the chrome rings and lenses off of the autometer gauges, trimed the plastic housings, and then heat welded the housings into one unit. I modified the origional instrument cluster by cutting out the center area that has the slots for the gauges. I made a new piece that has 5 half moon cutouts and glued that in place. Black krylon crinkle paint, and cleaning the origional glass brings it together.
Those are some of my ideas, now lets hear what some of you have done to be creative.

The brake pedal return spring was a rubber bungie cord when I bought the truck.

The spring that I bought to replace it wasn't long enough, so I used a brake shoe return spring from the rear brakes. Works like a champ.

I have a s-10 five speed in mine and got tired of bending down to shift as the shift stem is a lot shorter,, the best way to fix this is to get an old shifter, cut off the s-10 at the bottom and weld.. well I am no welder so I got me a couple of couplers , one of those rods from home depot and put it together that way,, then covered it with a black hose so the threads on the rod wouldnt show and it it high enough,, a pix of it is on my website headliner stuff,, you can see it if you look careful but the steering wheel hides the knob...

I do like you idea about the golf club, I may redo mine and try that,, I would rather the shifter stem look chrome or stainless..rather then covered

my tail lights sucked (not very bright) and people were always yelling at me.

I took apart a set of el-cheapo trailer lights and put the guts into my "stock" repop'd tail lights... works mucho better.

Gosh my mod seems rather puny compared to the above. When the knob of my rotary heater switch (with the light in the center) broke I could not find another. As the switch was good I epoxied a spare wheel from a Von Dutch die-cast truck to the switch. now the knob is a wide white with a baby moon hub cap on it.

hahah, i dig the gold club shifter...thats pretty sweet.

nothing real creative on m behalf. using a whiskey sign for patch panels on the floor of the cab..

erm.

fabricating my own dual 2 bbl intake for the 292...it turned out pretty decent, surprisingly.

otherwise...nope. i'm sure something will come up as i get closer to finishing.

but, keep it up!

.later days.
.sam.

Great, Keep them coming. I'm sure I will find one I can use soon.

I have a set of harbor freight trailer lights as the rear lights on my flat bed 59 1 ton. Work real good. I took a set of $10 driving lights and welded one on top of the flat bed for a bed light and the other on the bumper to make a backup light.

Pics of the aforementioned would complete the story...

That's a good mod!

When grandpa snapped the choke knob off, he pulled the throttle pull off of the throttle linkage and put it on the choke on the carb. It's still like that to this day. I haven't installed the new choke knob yet!

a pal of mine took some silver paint and painted the buckets where the light bulbs - behind the lenses - on a old car he had... to brighten them up, worked great.

-W

I used 57 chev car front mounts and bolted them to a 73 chevelle rear trany mount to mount my v8 in.

Windshield wipers can be difficult to find for these old trucks, and can be relatively expensive. I got one of the largest sets of wipers I could find... I think a 28 inch pair... for about $6. I cut the end of the platic spline off and slid the rubber squeegee off. I then cut that to the length of my original and slid it back on the original wiper arm. I was able to replace both wipers with only 1 of the new ones and will use the other as a spare.

This also worked on my 74 MG midget that had the tripple 9 inch wiper blade system, and my 2004 Wrangler when I got stuck in an unexpected storm and had to get wipers from the nearest gas station. They never have the smaller sizes.