[davepl]

Wow... my 3/4 ton was complete, no rust, and unmolested for $6K, so work backwards from there to find out whether its worth buying a nicer truck to start with.

I'm no expert as I haven't shopped in a while, but it'd take more than $3K in work to get that truck to where mine started at, so I can't see more than $3K. And mine's a big block, AC, buckets, and so on. But things could have changed a lot in the last 3 years.