1971 GMC Sierra Grande 2500 "Sadie"

[Odaroloc]

Hey guys! Im Michael and 18, im a long time lurker on the site. Been looking though here since i was 12 in 2009!! I bought my first car on March 31, 2014. Its a 1971 GMC Sierra Grande 2500 2wd. It has a 1972 7.7L Cadillac 472 in it! I get about 7-9 mpg. I saw the add on CL for $800. I was just about to pull the trigger on a 84 GMC Blazer but decided to look one last time and i saw it and called him up! He said he had 3 other people in line to look at it. I was crushed! I thought for sure one of them would've bought it. I asked him to call me if none of them bought it. I moped around for a couple days until my mom picked me up from school and said "Hey, were headed to Anchorage!" I was really confused. Turns out no one bought it and 45 minutes later, i was looking at my future truck! So the ad said $800, but when we got there, the first thing he said was the TH400 lost reverse, so he lowered the price to $500. Test drove it, and offered $450! We got it back to my house and parked it for a while. I didnt have any money to work on it because i didn't have a job at the time. So about two months past and we moved and i finished my Junior year of high school and got a job! It's unfortunately only at McDonald's but hey, i was getting paid so i didnt care. So in the next few months i bought another TH400 from a 74 pontiac for $150. and then bought a rebuild kit off e*ay for about $170. Took two months to rebuild. We made our own shift kit but drilling out some holes, plugging some, and shaving the tabs off of a cylinder piece in the valve body. (I dont remember the name of it ) Taking the tranny out wasnt hard. It was putting the rebuild one back in. we had moved up to Alaska from Kansas about a year earlier from when this took place so all we had was out bottle jack, 4x4 wood blocks, and our awesome strength!! What was supposed to be a 2-3 hour tranny install turned into a 9 hour nightmare! So we got it in and it was time for the first test drive of the new tranny! Backed out of the garage great! Put it in gear, good so far.....then it was getting close to the first shift point, aaaannndddd it never shifted! My dad hoped in and he must have revved it to 6-7K before it shifted ti 2nd. So we parked it till the following Saturday when we both had off. Took it out, tore it apart, and found out that my dad put a beveled ring in the wrong place and it ate the inside of the case!! So we put the new internals into the old case and it runs like a champ!! I got my Permit and started driving it all the time! So ive just been doing small things since then. Carb rebuild, plugs, wires, cap and rotor. All that good stuff. Here are some pictures from the day i bought it to a few weeks ago. Sorry for the quality on some of them, i took them with my phone.










This is a few days after i bought her. I painted the rims black and i took my model car paint and painted the white letters on the tires!








More pics to come!!

Michael