A grandpa’s camper truck resurrection

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Over the summer while driving around at work, I spotted this blue camper truck back on a piece of property tucked behind some weeds and a couple of other vehicles. That weekend I had convinced myself to go knock on the people’s door and ask if it were for sale. I figured for sure this truck wasn’t for sale and was “going to get fixed up some day” or “that’s my brother in laws truck” etc... type of story. I get to the people’s house, knock on the door and an elderly lady answers the door, introduce myself and told her I had noticed the truck and curious if they had ever considered selling it. To my surprise the lady replies “Yes I think he wants to sell it, let me go ask him”, comes back a couple minutes later, “he said he’ll sell it for $1,500” at this point I can hardly contain myself and also thinking no this is too good to be true, it doesn’t happen this easy, there’s got to be a catch. I tell the lady I was going to go tromp through the weeds and look at the truck before commuting to it.

From the road I was thinking it was a ‘72 for some reason, turns out it was a SUPER clean ‘69, despite the years of dirt, grime and cob webs. No (cancer) rust anywhere on the truck and very complete truck that was well taken care of. I haven’t pulled the seat cover off yet but it looks like the original upholstery underneath.

So I go back to the people’s house, talk to them for a while and agreed to buy the truck. I talked with them for a couple hours and they told stories about the old truck. It was the ladies dads truck, he bought it in the mid 70’s with the camper on it and they would take trips up to the “pot holes reservoir” to go camping and fishing in the summer, and that was it. After going through the camper you could almost relive the memories. I found that they were prepared for anything, a couple sets of tool, several jacks, any tool that you think you might need and several cases of oil and trans fluid.

Anyway…. I get the truck back to my house and there it sat since mid July. Fast forward until today, I got the camper off and pulled some of it apart to clean and inspect this weekend.

My goal with the truck is to keep it as original as possible, but to add disc brakes. At some point I’d like to add some better heads to the motor and replace the old smog heads. The trans leaked fluid out of the gear selector shaft just from sitting at my house, I’m assuming it will need rebuilt since the truck had a camper on it most of its life. Im going to get it running and cleaned up and reevaluate what it really needs.

So far I pulled the carburetor off and a friend is rebuilding it for me, I bought an HEI distributor and plug wires to get it going. I took the radiator, took it to a shop to have cleaned and tested, turns out it was leaking in a few spots and they didn’t want to mess with it, so I ordered a new aluminum radiator and it should be here by the weekend. Enough of the boring stuff, here comes the pics.
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