[ChaseDale3and8]

The reason that I say 5k is that from what I can tell from the pictures, that's about what it would bring around here. I found a maroon and silver 79 2wd Silverado longbed last month in very similar shape.

Straight body, and new basecoat/clearcoat paint, nice interior, cold air,etc., not perfect mind you, but very nice. Like I said, very similar to this one, but a longbed instead of a shortbed. As everybody knows, the shortbeds bring better money, so I allowed more for the difference.

The asking price was $3,750 on the 79 longbed that I was looking at, and was negotiable. It was a really nice truck, and I came very close to buying it just for the body to put on a 76 longbed 4x4 chassis that I have. I was thinking about offering up 3k for the 79,because I'm cheap too, until I did a much closer inspection, and found some questionable body work around a few of the normally rusty areas.

An example is where they rust out behind the rear wheels. They welded in patch panels, and did an excellent job of blending the repairs in, but where it fell short of being perfect was that they didn't patch the inner part of the inner wheel well as well, and you could see the rust through on the area just by standing on the outside of the truck. If it had been mine, and I was going through all the trouble to make it look nice, I would have put a little bit of extra effort into it and spent a few more bucks buying patch panels for the inside as well, and just repaired it the right way, but I'm very picky when it comes to stuff like that.

I also dug around underneath the rubber bedmat, and found rust through on the bed floor in several spots right through that fresh new shiny paint. You never saw it until you pulled the mat up. This made the rest of the truck very suspect to me, and even though the painter did an excellent job of making it look very nice, and the interior was far better than average, I passed it up.

Had it not been for the owner trying to disguise some bad spots on this truck, it would have very well been worth the asking price, if not even a bit more. I kind of saw this truck as being worth maybe $2,500 at best after I looked it over real good. I'd say that a year from now, the 79 that I was looking at will likely be a rust bucket again with the questionable repairs that had been done to it.

With the 73 that you are looking at, I'd definately check it out in person and crawl all over, and under it. If it's solid and rust free, it's worth more than 5k, maybe 7-8k, but not over that in my opinion. If you start finding rust, or bad repairs trying to disguise rust, the value of it comes down pretty quick as you know already. Good luck,and let us know what you find out about it. ...Joe