Cleaning Up Underneath on my 72

[cwaite12025]

Hey Everyone,

So this is my first restoration, I just wanted to ask if anyone could give me some guidance. My 72 is all original, I'd like to restore it (though it's not in horrible shape and with a few dollars and it could be), but I would like to restore it similar to a resto-mod so I can use it as a daily driver. It has the original 350 and the original 4 speed transmission and I'm thinking of swapping the motor out (Keeping it because it's the original motor of course) to a 5.3 Vortec so it has a little more reliability. Have any of you done this, I've been looking around and it's been asked many time on all of the other vehicles forums but I wanted to get an opinion on someone who's done it to a similar truck. I was also going to ask for anyone for restoring these, is that underneath has some bad rust spots but overall all of it needs to be cleaned up, what have some of you done? Get parts or clean up existing pieces and parts and painted them?

Thanks!