The List Grows

This weekend I had great hopes and aspirations of getting a lot accomplished… And I actually did, although not many pictures to show for it as most of the work was “busy work”. I did things like put new door posts catches on so the doors didn't rattle anymore, put my Explorer hood ornament from Jack's brown hood onto the blue one, mounted the front bumper properly, and even filled the carb with some gas to pulled it out of the garage under its own power for some sunshine. Wise words of advice however- try to use something shorter and more stable to sit on than a 5 gallon bucket when trying to drive a truck like this with a stick shift and manual steering. :-)

I now needed a game-plan for finishing up in the next week or two. Part of what I needed to do that kept incessantly nagging on me was to get that bed and cab aligned properly. So I started there.

After putting my Google-fu skills to work, I realized in short order that the rear cab mounts for a 2 wheel drive truck are ¾ inch taller than on a 4 wheel drive truck. Since I used the donor ones from the 2 wheel drive frame, that’s what ended up giving me my cab rake. So off came the bolts, shims, etc and the whole process started all over again.

As it turns out, I had a revelation that along with the 1 inch aluminum spacer blocks I was using on the rest of the cab, I happened to have a set of ½ inch spacers as well! So instead of figuring out how to cut-down the rear cab mounts I used, I just slipped out the old 1 inch spacers, put in ½ inch ones, and shimmed up the rest of the cab and front clip for a nice level fit.

Dropping the bed back onto the truck once again and putting in the 1 inch blocks under the bed cross-member areas, everything looked IDEAL. Now all I had to do was measure out what size steel box tubing I needed to order to build the sub-frame, where I needed to drill holes in my existing frame, and how I wanted to brace it all up so that the floor was fully supported and wouldn’t flex if I was hauling a heavy load.

As it stands, everything looks fairly straight forward and $152 dollars in ordered steel later, I’ll have everything I need arriving hopefully at the end of this week to mount it.

Another thing I’m also waiting on is the gas tank. I found an aftermarket polypropylene one on eBay that’ll fit PERFECTLY between the frame rails. That also was around $260, so it’s on order too...

Oh, and a floor mat! That nasty blue carpet isn’t going back in of course, and a truck just isn’t a truck without a black rubber floor. So add that to the list for $150...

Once again, broke and bored at this point waiting on parts, I thought- well, there is this other thing with the truck I truly don’t understand….