Road Trip!

[joeydurango]

Heading out for a 10-day, 2000-mile road trip this morning. Colorado to SoCal to visit family, then up to Salt Lake City for a trade show, then back home to SW Colorado. This will be the first big trip in our recently-completed K10 - we'll see how the regional-mountain-road-runner build does on the interstate! More photos to come...

[RenoKeene]

Beautiful Truck! Good luck on your trip.

[sboris]

Wow that's awesome! Beautiful truck. Make sure and update as you go. You going to check mileage? Love your state, going to be near Co. springs in a few weeks.. Good luck!

[CanadianK10]

Looking forward to the photos, recently did a 4 day 1350 mile trip with my brother in his Chevelle and had a blast. Fantastic looking truck.

[Mr Chevorlet]

Beautiful truck, keep us posted along the way and good luck.

[70cst]

Keep us updated

[Ol Blue K20]

Make sure to honk the horn and say hi on your way thru nor cal. Have a safe and pleasant trip

[Tinkermc]

Good luck, have fun.

[Lee H]

Not sure where your going to be in SoCal but if you run into problems give a shout and I'll be happy to help out. I'll PM you my cell if you would like.

[joeydurango]

Thanks for the compliments and well-wishes, everyone! Made it to SoCal. Along the way we stopped at the Grand Canyon, replaced an inline fuel filter, and became finely attuned to how a '72 4x4 with full leaf springs does on less-than-stellar Arizona two-lane asphalt at 75mph...

West of Flagstaff we realized the our fuel pump (Walbro) was screaming loud. Figured it was having trouble getting fuel, so stopped at a parts store and bought a cheap inline filter to replace our original one (we have gravity feed through a basic filter, then to high-pressure pump, then to nicer filter). Sure enough, after spilling a fair bit of gas on myself while changing the filter in a parking lot in 100+ degrees Needles, CA, the pump sounded a lot healthier. And yes, the original filter - at ~1000 miles - had some serious crap visibly stuffed in the intake. Guess the guy I had braze on the gravity-feed fitting didn't clean the tank out very well.

Otherwise the truck ran great. The ride is a little rough but that's pretty much what we expected. What I didn't expect would be that my cruising speed would be around 60-70, and my wife's would be more like 70-80... needless to say she burns through the gas faster than I do. But, we averaged 20mpg, which I was pretty stoked on, since we're running a 2" lift and 33x10.5" BFGs. Haven't had a solid tune yet either, so thinking of finding a HPTuners shop somewhere close to Santa Barbara - maybe we can eke another couple MPGs out of this thing. Either way, it does better than anyone's 4x4 Tacoma I know of...

Final note for now: Driving across the Mojave at 3am, I had ample time to check out the headlights, running on the relay mod with Silverstars. Absolutely zero complaints, that turned out to be an awesome setup! Thanks to everyone who contributed, knowingly or unknowingly, to our build - I probably spent 200 hours on here researching, easy.

Photos from this leg below. More to come as the trip progresses. Time to go jump in the ocean!

[joeydurango]

Made it home! Got busy helping with wedding stuff for my brother-in-law, and then with trade show work, and didn't have a chance to take many photos. But we covered well over 2000 miles and had no problems but the fuel pump issue mentioned above. Could be that I'm just too paranoid about different noises in the pump - maybe those Walbros have a range of sounds they make without meaning bad things. I'll start another thread to ask.

For anyone thinking of doing an LS swap into a 4x4 - you'll probably end up with a little lift for front diff clearance (like we did), and larger-than-stock tires. The worst mileage we got on this trip was about 16.5mpg, into a strong headwind with my wife driving ~75. The best was just over 20, with me driving 65-70. We ended up in the 18-19mpg range overall.

A couple photos from Cali - the second one is out in front of this 3.5-million-dollar house we somehow ended up staying in (vacation rental) with a bunch of family. This may be the first time they've had a '72 K10 parked on their lawn...

[yuccales]

Great pics, great mpg!

[No8Easy2]

man great to hear everything went well and the ol' girl didn't give you any "major" issues!
thanks for sharing

[derotoreut]

Awesome trip. Beautiful country out there. Love to hear more about your LS conversion. Do you have a build thread about it?

[joeydurango]

Thanks guys, was a good time out there. One thing I forgot - somehow we ended up driving through the Mojave, in the middle of the afternoon, TWICE! That was dumb. Our truck is factory AC but it's not hooked up, charged, or working, and you know it's hot when everything in the cab is simply hot to the touch. My wife was not stoked on those portions of the trip. But, I can attest to Griffin's radiator doing its job really well - never had even an inkling of a cooling issue.

Dan, I didn't do a build thread. Not very many photos either, sorry! But if you're thinking of doing the swap on your '70 and you have questions, just let me know. With your new lift on there it should be relatively simple... whoops, I just jinxed it.

[derotoreut]

Originally Posted by joeydurango

Dan, I didn't do a build thread. Not very many photos either, sorry! But if you're thinking of doing the swap on your '70 and you have questions, just let me know. With your new lift on there it should be relatively simple... whoops, I just jinxed it.

Nothing is ever simple. Ha Ha. That's OK that you don't have a build thread. I may take you up on your offer though. You just gave me an idea... I never really thought about doing an LS swap in my K10. I have been seriously considering looking for a 2WD SWB project to do such a build and swap, but maybe I should just do one in my K10.

[engineer_gregh]

Beautiful truck and great real world test. I'm jealous of the gas mileage, I average about 10 MPG;-). Thanks for posting.

[jlaird]

Great story. Thanks for sharing. The road trip is the culmination of what every guy who has been through a build dreams about. Congrats!