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Re: Body Moldings
From the factory, these moldings were attached with a variety of clips and fasteners. Several locations (mostly the front fenders & cab) used clips with a stud on the back that goes through a hole in the body and is secured with a nut on the back. A few locations use sheetmetal screws that go through pre-punched holes in the trim. And a few locations use springy metal clips that snap into holes in the body. The remaining areas (mostly along the middle sections of the door/bedside/tailgate pieces) are held in place with 3M double-sided trim/molding tape that's stuck to little plastic inserts on the backside of the trim.
Dad's 77 Sierra Classic was originally two-tone and had all of the moldings from the factory. When I restored the truck a few years ago, we substituted some of the plastic stick-on clips in a few locations (mostly the front fenders) to reduce the number of holes needing to be drilled in the new body panels. That required salvaging those plastic clips off the old molding, cleaning them up, and puting some fresh mounting tape on them.
I chose to keep the stud/nut or screw fasteners on some of the more critical locations though ... like the tip ends of each molding section. That did require drilling some holes in the new body panels. I test fit all of the molding and drilled all of the necessary holes while the truck was still in the primer/bodywork stage to avoid having to drill through (and possibly damage) the paint afterward.
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