My 83' Crew Cab Dually project

[DblTrbl]

I have a thread going over on the C10 forum, but things seem a little slow over there, so I'll drop this here...

I picked up this 83' back in February and have been slowly making progress on it. It was in rough shape, but it was a government vehicle, only had 70k original miles and a stack of every maintenance record ever done to it...and the government does maintenance regularly whether the vehicle is being used or not, so I knew it was mechanically solid. Secondly, 2wd trucks are quite hard to come by in Montana.



First things first...the rusty steelies had to go. I had a set of true Alcoas that I'd saved when I sold my 96' Dodge. I spent an entire weekend wet sanding and polishing them to bring them back to their former glory. Then I ordered up a set of spike lug covers from Iowa80.com.





Then, boating season happened and not much progress....



I added some LED lights...









I finally collected all of the parts that I needed to static drop the truck and went to work. I used 3" drop spindles up front and a flip kit for the rear. Of course flipping the axle on these requires a notch, but I expected to eventually bag it anyhow, so I went to work building a step notch and bridge.

Pulling the bed with limited help was interesting...















I still intend to tow my 25' boat, so I boxed and fishplated everything for strength.







Much better...



Added a little bling to the interior...



I searched and searched for some decent replacement fenders, but it seems that these are made of unobtanium, so I decided to just repair this really poor attempt at fixing this previously.



I started by building a cardboard buck. Then I liberally filled it with great stuff. The trick to using this stuff as a form is to mist water into it as you fill. Moisture is the catylist (thank you YouTube!)







Then I carved it with a loose hack saw blade until I had the form I needed.



And covered it with fiberglass mat and resin...



A little additional build up with kitty hair and filler and it came together.





A couple weeks ago I got a little crazy and ordered a bunch of this ****...



I'm just getting started today on my front end. I grabbed some 8 5/8" schedule 40 pipe and burned some 1/4" plate to the bottom. I'll be dropping the lower arms out shortly to cup them.