[cwcarpenter98]

Originally Posted by LT7A

I haven't been on the site for a year, so I took a little time and got caught up on your build. Lots of cool progress. You should flip back through the photos and see how your engine bay evolves from a creature habitat to a propulsion system. It's cool to see.

Piece by piece, you're getting the whole rig back into shape. These are my favorite kind of builds both that I do and watch other people do. Where it's not about making something perfect, but catching up on the maintenance, fixing what's wrong, and getting it back on the road. And then other modifications can happen after that.

I've had old paint like that respond really well to a gentle process of iron fallout removal, clay bar, meguiar's number 7, light compound, light polish, and cleaner wax. You don't get that mirror shine that a lot of people go for, but I do it all by hand and it preserves as much paint as possible and brings out the luster.

I vote getting the turbo 350 rebuilt since they're basically bulletproof and not very expensive as far as rebuilds go.

If you were closer, I would be happy to lend you another jack stand. This makes for a cool picture but made me nervous just looking at it, haha. And thanks for keeping this up-to-date, I'll enjoy following along.

Thanks for reading through the thread and for the advice on the paint. I would like to make the paint look a little better once I get the truck back on the road, so just might have to give that a try.
I pulled a sneaky on y'all. There's 2 more black jack stands supporting the truck, but they're just behind the front cab mounts, so I wanted the single one under the front cross member to help support the full weight of the engine and front end. I would not trust just one jack stand to balance the truck like that

I'm slowly working through a rattle can restoration on the rest of the suspension parts. Figured I should make it look a little better than just leaving everything rusty. That is one thing I didn't do the first time on my 63 and later regretted. Sure it'll take a bit longer to complete, but the truck will look a little bit nicer underneath than just rusty