1970 K20 Z62 Full Restoration

[tim71]

Originally Posted by IronCanine

Feels like we're really getting close now. Looks like some nice weather in the week ahead so maybe the mat gets painted....who knows, maybe we'll crank it. Fun times.

I think your comment "fun times" hits the nail square on the head. In retrospect, I'm sure the entire build will be remembered as fun, but these late stages really are fun times. Everything looks awesome, fantastic....but I can't get past just how great that paint color and paint work looks. Stunning!

[IronCanine]

Originally Posted by tim71

I think your comment "fun times" hits the nail square on the head. In retrospect, I'm sure the entire build will be remembered as fun, but these late stages really are fun times. Everything looks awesome, fantastic....but I can't get past just how great that paint color and paint work looks. Stunning!

Thanks for the kind words. I think the paint is the best part of this truck too.

[IronCanine]

I got a factory style underlayment from Pete a couple of years ago. It had been rolled up in a box for a while and a couple of the layers hadn't aged great. But the thin foam bit was good. So we separated it from the sandwich and used it as a pattern for some generic sound deadener. Then we put the white foam layer on top of that...so it would appear factory-ish if you pulled the mat back. It is only under the mat as it would have been from the factory.

[IronCanine]

Thankfully Joe had done the work of color matching a factory blue mat some time ago and very generously shared the recipe and even procured the paint for us. The weather was agreeable this week, so Eric got the mat prepped and painted. I think it is a very good factory match. I think we have had pretty good adhesion too. There is one spot on the driver's side that will need a spot of touch up. Hard not to fold and bend it when your wrestling it and the seat in.

[IronCanine]

Eric also got the seat frame and foam prepped to cover. I ordered the correct Z62 Custom Cloth seat cover from Carsinc.com. They use the factory SMS fabric to make these covers. They are build to order and mine took about 6wks. The quality is very good and I can highly recommend them. Of course it's always a bit of a struggle with the new foam to get the cover on there and achieve a factory appearing fit.

I should note that I had always intended on having this seat with the truck as a show piece, but put buckets in the truck. We set up the floor of the truck with bracketry and fasteners for both the bench and buckets (as they sometimes came from the factory). The bench seat holes were blocked out before paint with Phillips head (pan head) bolts...again per factory. But as we got closer to being done and recognizing the amount of effort put in to making this factory correct...I felt like it needed to start off with the bench. Maybe next year we'll swap the seats. But for the first round of shows, she's a bench truck. So that meant we had to move the pan heads to the bucket seat mounting points.

[IronCanine]

That big couch is heavy and fun to wrangle around paint. Got the horn button and wheel final installed. Seat belts were restored by Ssnake-Oyl.

[IronCanine]

This truck came with DG4 mirrors which are generally the same from 69-71. There are some particulars to know about these mirrors and their hardware and that's pretty well fleshed out in this thread:

https://67-72chevytrucks.com/vboard/....php?p=8672240

One of the low points of the build was realizing we'd misplaced our six "P" head bolts that mount the mirror brackets to the door. These are chromed large sheet metal screws and one of the few things we recovered from the original truck in good condition. I was able to source more, luckily...and get them refinished. I got the nylon washers from the board and the acorn nuts from an online hardware supplier. I do not think the acorn nuts or metal washers had a special bright finish from the factory. But I do think they were brighter than these dull zinc covered examples I procured. Eric did a light polish on them and they stood right up. See the comparison in pic 2 below.

I ran a die on the mirror elbow (which is an OE rechromed example) to clean up the threads. And boy the light chrome on the threads ate it! I guess that's why they put it on hydraulic cylinders.

I should also note that I do have an NOS mirror head (what's pictured is the TruckLite reproduction). But the glass/mirror in the NOS example lets it down. I may take on restoring that in the future, but I don't have much of an appetite for it now.