The "Green Trucks" rebuild

[MAC71]

I started working on this old truck a few months ago and thought I would start a build thread. I hope to get others thoughts and ideas as I work on it and maybe what I am doing will help some one else.
So a little history on my truck. I bought the truck in high school in 1993, it had just been painted back to its original medium green and white. Because of the color it became known to my family and friends as the green truck. I was told it had 190,000 miles on it and since then I have added a little over 400,000 miles to this truck. It has been the one vehicle in my life that always works and we can always rely on. In all these years there has only been two time it has left me stranded and that was my fault. I had in high school a 406 cid engine in it and once broke the transmission impute shaft and the other time was the differential while running slicks.
so over the years I have had many different engine, transmission and gear ratio combinations but currently it has the original 350 but it is .030 with 9.5:1 compression, World products SR torquer heads, a small cam, 700r4, and 3.73 gears with a posi. It smoke the tires but can still get 17 mpg on the highway at 70 mph.
The truck is my daily driver and my round trip to work is 80 miles. This being said it needs to be safe and stay reliable. The way this rebuild started is due to a few things going bad at once. I started smelling fuel but could not figure out where the fuel smell was coming from, my feet were getting wet when it would rain because of a rust hole in the area under the windshild, the brake line that goes from the front to rear rusted out and then I had a short in the fuse box that melted a bunch of wires in the main harness. When I discovered that the fuel smell was from a rust hole in the fuel tank and the carpet was soaked with fuel we decided it was time to take the truck apart.

This photo is from 1994


This is from this summer