Sam's Man Cave 66 Project

[SulphuriousSam]

A couple of my good friends have been building 71’ C10 Pro Streets (one started as the parts truck for the other) and I’d been hanging out with them so much I sort of caught the bug if you know what I mean. So I put the word out that if anybody ran into a good deal on one I was looking for a running project, since I can’t afford to do a frame off restoration and I’m not looking to go Pro Street, just have a fun classic truck to cruise around in and maybe be a daily driver.

So anyway, a mutual friend of ours heard about it and mentioned this truck his brother found and passed on. He thought it was a 67’ or 68’ and the guy only wanted $100.00 bucks! Now that fell right into my budget, i.e. it was ultra cheap!

Big surprise though, when we showed up to haul her off the truck turned out to be a 66’! Which only added to its value in my opinion. The 67-72 trucks are nice…but the 60-66 trucks are better IMHO.





I know that most people posting here are doing full restorations or modifications to their trucks but I thought there must be more folks like me who just want to get their old truck running and drive it and for as little money as possible. So I figure, why not just do a thread about what it took to get this ole gal back into a roadworthy state. No frame offs here (well planned ones anyway), no BBC swaps (I wish ), no extreme lowering or Z’ing the frame (cool but not in the budget either).

Plans for this project are as follows;

1) Get the drum brakes back in working order. Worry about possible disc conversion later.

2) Freshen up or rebuild the motor whichever is the minimum required

3) Fab up a temporary gas tank until I can find a good under the bed mounted one. The original tank came with the truck but not installed and missing the sending unit. Seems like a good time to move it out of the cab anyway.

4) Put in a new bed floor.

5) Drop her down a little bit with either purchased drop springs or cut front/jeep rear.

6) Replace worn out stuff. New ignition switch (just needed re-keyed until my buddy got a hold of it), various rubber doohickeys, bushings, etc., etc.

7) Run dual exhaust with Cherry Bomb’s (always wanted those since I was a kid).

8) Figure out what wheel/tire combo I’m going to run and acquire them. Right now I’m running freebees with throw away used rubber.

9) Repair major body damage and rust. So far I’ve found less than expected but more than I wanted

10) Figure out whether to paint it (small dings and all) with a cheap paint (I really liked ol_skool_chevy’s suggestion, I’ll explain later) or just keep the patina. It may be years before the real body work and nice paint job happen. In the mean time she’s rusting…