After about a year away from this project, I had some time to make some progress recently.
I was pretty apprehensive about how the firewall was going to look after trimming the top channel, but I think it turned out really well. The firewall is primed, painted, and I started reassembling some small pieces (can't do too much before dropping it back onto the chassis), and I'm really happy with how it turned out.
Next up was to get the chassis sorted out. First things first was to swap out the 1970 drums and manual steering for parts from a mid 70's 1/2 ton.
With the chassis able to roll again, it was time to sandblast. I reconfirmed what I already knew: paying someone to blast a full chassis is money well spent. Oh well, i got it cleaned up and was happy with it for $50 of sand and a day of effort.
Now it was time to get in the air, clean, drop the "paint booth", and shoot some black.
It turned out pretty good!
Now, ideally the next several steps would've been done before the blasting and painting, but weather, field conditions (too wet to be planting beans, so shop time was actually possible), and shop space dictated the order, and I'll work around it.
The first modification was to flip the truck arm brackets. This truck is going to sit on 3"/5" drop springs, so this will help keep the pinion angle and anti-squat in check. I removed the rivets and used bolts/nuts to position the brackets while I welded them to the x-member.
Took some tweaking, but the vertical-ups turned out ok.
That's all for now. Next up will be fabbing some rear top shock relocation brackets, installing the new springs/shocks, installing the ply truck arm and panhard bar bushings, installing the '79 metric o-ring steering box (to hook right up to the Vortec 454 PS hoses), 6 lug conversion front rotors, etc. I'm just happy to be making some progress on this truck again!