It's my turn, 47 S10 build

[dsraven]

That works great. I did the same thing g on a rail buggy I built a few years back.

[Cautrell05]

Originally Posted by _Ogre

just noticed your mc pic. i had my tank under the floor for a couple years, had to check/fill the reservoir from under the floor, that worked fine until i had a leak. found this little item on a cobra replicar site, they mount the mc under the fender where it's hard to service. find a nissan quest or mercury villager and get the tank and mc adapters from one to convert to a remote reservoir. teflon lined hose is pricey, i got lucky and bought the end of a roll from a gearhead

Generally I'm not a big fan of master cylinders under the floor mainly from a service standpoint but I get it. Most of the builds we do have it on the firewall but we do put some under the floor depending on what the customer wants.

I was kinda the same way, I wanted it clean under the hood. I hate filling the little cast master cylinders. Mines not much better but the huge 1 QT+ res is see through and has a low level sensor that I will eventually hook up when I get to the gauges. Makes it a lot easier to check and I have plenty of warning before it runs out.

The remote reservoir is a good idea. I'll have to keep that in mind.

How do you like the Ramjet? I put one in my 68 Impala with a 700r4 and 3.08 gears and I was super happy with it. Ran smooth, insane torque at lower rpm, tire smoke at will from a stop. Put another one in the bosses 64 Chevy pickup. I think that one still had the deep gears from the 6cyl in it because it wouldn't even try to hook up.

[Cautrell05]

Originally Posted by dsraven

That works great. I did the same thing g on a rail buggy I built a few years back.

The tunability is a huge bonus. Because the master cylinder is huge, 1 3/8" I believe, there is practically no extra pedal travel but the booster makes up for it and it stops great. Right now the pedal is a couple inches lower than stock and I might drop it a little lower just for comfort since I don't need the extra travel.

[Cautrell05]

Both pictures are engine running, second one is with pretty firm pressure on the pedal.

[Cautrell05]

Going through my list. Cab and front clip is mounted, steering and brakes are hooked up, throttle and shifter hooked up. Getting the bed mounted was the next step. I cannot express how lucky I am to have a full Fab shop in my disposal after hours to work on this thing. Most of the work was done on the one far hoist that we weren't using at the time. With it up on the hoist and leveled front to back and side to side within an eighth of an inch I started getting the box in place. I have about a half a dozen of these trucks within a hundred yards of the back door of the shop for reference measurements so that was nice. I also mocked up the running boards in place to make sure everything seemed about right. The front mounts are some 1 1/4" square 1/8" wall tubing with a piece of inch and a half angle on top. The back one is a section of I believe it was three inch square tubing that I cut in half lengthwise to make two L brackets. If it was a work truck I probably would have went heavier on the mounts, but let's be real here. It's working days are done. It's getting the easy life from here on out. The heaviest load it might have is a motorcycle and luggage from our place up to the Black hills which is 8 or 9 hours. Other than that it's going to be coolers and lawn chairs. It won't be hauling firewood or scrap iron.
For the two middle mounts, I used a set of standard 47 Chevy bed cross bars, both of them to the box with a piece of wood is a spacer so they're at the right height and then bent and welded an ear on the crossbars that bolted to the top of the frame rail. That may end up being a pain in the ass later, as my intention when I blow it apart to paint and powder coat everything is to fully box the frame. But I'll cross that when I get there.

[Cautrell05]

Couple more pictures of the middle bed mounts.

[Cautrell05]

I have been looking for ideas for the bed floor for a while. I knew that it was going to be in patina for quite a while. Before I started at a restoration shop I knew that it was a lot of work and expense to go through and do all the paint and body work on this truck. But after being here for a year now and seeing the process up close I never realized how much I did not know. It will be an absolute buttload of work when this thing transitions from patina to shiny. So for the time being it's going to stay in patina which is fine because I've had a lot of people compliment me on the look and personally I like it. The different layers of paint and the old body shop lettering really set it off.
Because of that, to me, a brand new refinished bed floor in a full patina truck would just look really out of place and odd. I didn't want to put just rusty sheet metal in there and go for the rat rod look because I'm not interested in the rat rod look. No offense to the guys that have it and love it, it's just not for me. Then I decided to use old barn wood with the existing original well-weathered bed strips. On the back of my property there is an old corn crib that has probably been standing since about the time that truck was new and in the last 20 years has been attempting to fall over on itself but can't quite do that. The color and the weathering on the wood look like it be about ideal. When it actually came time to try and find enough straight sections of wood to use bed floor the South side that was well weathered only had five or six fairly good strips in it but they were narrower than a standard bed strip. The north side of the building still had some of the original red paint that I to be honest never realized was on there in the first place. I took what I had for good boards and I laid them out in my garage floor and after looking at it for a few minutes I came up with an idea. The combination of faded red boards and faded white ish boards looked like a really good foundation for a faded flag. Before I started just throwing boards in and painting stars I did a little bit of research to in planning. An official flag has 13 stripes, a 47 bed has nine boards. If I go 13 boards with the original bed strips it almost ends up with as much bed strip as there is wood. So I compromised and went with 11 boards but rather than just make an improper flag, I went online and found out there's actually flag calculators that you punch in any one of the dimensions and it'll give you every single one of the other dimensions as far as star size and spacing and stripes spacing and whatnot.

[Cautrell05]

After I got the boards cut to width and length, not fun when you have never installed a wood bed, and changing the number of boards affects spacing, I pulled the box off and put it on jack stands. At that point there was just 4 bolts and gravity and I had an overhead crane.
Based off the stripe width I started laying out the blue. For those that take American flags really seriously, yes there is only 11 stripes and I don't know how many stars there are but I know there is not 50. But if you take a picture of the bed crop out everything but the flag and lay it on top of a picture of a full flag it matches up if that makes sense. The red boards in that area got VERY lightly sandblasted with a small handheld blaster to try and even out the color. I spent probably two hours at home cutting out stars while I watched TV. Then it was at least an hour of laying stars out, measuring and adjusting. My laser level got used a lot for that. OCD didn't help me there. When I finally decided they were close enough I stapled them down masked off the border and then put down three coats with the airbrush of mostly water with just enough transparent royal blue to tint the area but not cover completely. My end goal was to try and make it look like it has been there for years. Not days.
After that the bed strips were next. I got lucky and one of the parts trucks out back had a couple decent bed strips since I went from 9 to 11 boards. For the bolts I used new carrige bolts, sand blastet the zinc off of the top and then dipped the very top in fertilizer to help them weather in a little better.
The end result turned out really well. I had a lot of people did not believe that at the time that Bedford only been in there for 2 weeks. We'll see how well the blue holds up if I have to touch it up or recoat it next summer. But for the most part it sits inside.

[Cautrell05]

The filler neck worked out real well also. Stock 47 neck with as short hose to the stock s10 tank.

[Cautrell05]

Quick rant. When I registered my other truck the plates 53-1947 were available. 53 is the county number and the 1947 was just luck. The plan was to transfer that over to the 47 when it became road worthy. Then the county changed their number system and all plates now have a letter followed by 3 numbers. So much for cheap personalized plates. I don't care, I still ran it around town and to a couple car shows with it on there. The correct plates are in the pocket behind the passenger seat if I need them.

[Father&son56project]

That was some cool work on the bed floor wood. It looks like that flag has been sitting out in the weather for decades. It really matches the look of the truck. It's an absolute blast watching people come up with fresh ideas on their builds. Keep the pics coming!

Stephan

[6DoF]

holy chit, that bed floor is amazing! well played!

[Hey Dude]

I'm going to steal that bed wood idea for sure.

[6DoF]

Originally Posted by Hey Dude

I'm going to steal that bed wood idea for sure.

not if my wife steels it first

[Cautrell05]

Originally Posted by Father&son56project

That was some cool work on the bed floor wood. It looks like that flag has been sitting out in the weather for decades. It really matches the look of the truck. It's an absolute blast watching people come up with fresh ideas on their builds. Keep the pics coming!

Stephan

Thank you. That was was my vision for it and I'm glad it turned out as well as it did.

Nick

[Cautrell05]

Originally Posted by 6DoF

holy chit, that bed floor is amazing! well played!

Thank you

[Cautrell05]

I suppose drivetrain is next. I knew from the beginning I wanted an old school small block in it because I wanted the vintage look, and I had a 400 block that I've been dragging around for close to 20 years waiting for a project to put in. But unfortunately I found out the hard way that the hood on these trucks is not waterproof. And by that I mean the center strip it covers the seam between the left and the right halves just has tabs to go through holes in the hood and are twisted to hold it in place. There's no actual weather strip, and when you get steady rain it follows those tabs down and it drips right on top of the intake manifold. Now if you have a complete sealed engine it's not a super big deal other than you get water spots and it's kind of pain. But, if you have an engine block, heads intake and valve covers bolded together for mock up with no gaskets, it will drip on the intake enough to eventually run down the intake ports and into the cylinders. I found that out the hard way when I got the engine down to the machine shop and we started tearing it apart. There is several cylinders that had really deep pits from water sitting in them. So rather than go through all the work of cleaning the block and everything like normal, we just put it right on the boring machine and punched the two worst cylinders out to 30 with the intention of if they cleaned up we'd knock all them out to 30 and then backtrack and throw the block in the parts washer. But even at 30 there's still some really deep pits that I don't think 40 would have cleaned up and 60 over on a street motor I just didn't really feel like dealing with it.

So to backtrack a little bit farther last Christmas my wife surprised the hell out of me and she got a hold of a friend of mine who runs machine shop that actually happens to be right next door to where I work now. She picked up the bill ahead of time for all the machine work on my engine. She been working a bunch of extra shifts at the hospital through the big covid rush last year and she wanted to help out and try and give my project a little boost. I think the labor Bill ended up being somewhere around $1,000 between going through the block, going through the heads, assembling and everything. I didn't have the heart to tell her right away that that was just labor and that parts were still additional on that but hey it was still a pretty cool gift.


Bottom end of the engine is a 4 bolt 400 .030 over, I got lucky and one of the guys I was working with at the time had a 72 Chevy pickup that had a 400 in it. So 200 bucks later I've got another block. That one cleaned up good over at the machine shop. Rotating assembly I priced all over, most of them for decent parts were a little over a thousand to 1200. And then from there it could go up to wherever you feel like spending money. The hard part for me is I keep thinking about what I put in my race motors back when running Street stocks, and it keep telling myself do I really need that in this? It's not turning 7000 RPM night after night. I highly doubt it'll ever see 6,000. Speedway motors in Lincoln had a pretty decent deal on the rotating assembly. The standard weight cast steel 400 crank, set a $350 H-beam rods that were probably Overkill but why not, and I believe it said Keith black dished pistons. Compression ratio with my heads should be about 9.5-9.7 to one with the standard head gasket. Cylinder heads are set of cast iron Dart iron eagles that I picked up for $450 assembled. 2.02,1,6 valves, the intake ports are only 180 cc's which if I was looking for all out power they would be choking it out on the top end in that 6,000 RPM range. But because I'm looking for low-end mid-range power the smaller ports will give me a little better velocity. I really wanted to send them out to brezinski's and have a set of camelbacks milled on the end of them for the overall look but they wanted another 400 bucks for that so I opted out. You'll see why in a little bit. For camshaft I don't know if I'm just getting old or what combined with the numerous posts I've seen in the engine forums about flat tappet lifters self destructing. But I just have no patience to break in a flat tappet cam and hope it survives considering the amount of work that I need to do to clean all the metal out if it fails. Ignoring protest from my wallet and maybe that one card that the wife doesn't watch that close when I make payments on I went with the Howard's retrofit roller cam. spent several days looking at different cams doing a lot of reading trying to decide on what I wanted. There's more to it than just left and duration. The big choppy idle sounds nice but they don't always perform that well at lower rpm. And then when you're listening to video clips on YouTube of people that are nice and poster cam specs you got to take into account a smaller engine will respond more to a cam than a bigger one. I'm pretty happy with the cam I picked out. It's got a very solid lope at idle that in gear or out of gear you can't mistake. But in the 50 or so Miles I put on it it's very drivable it doesn't struggle at low RPM that much. And it runs really well through mid-range and top end. Instead of Comp cams push rods and some 15 roller rockers around everything out. I don't remember the length right off hand but the stock length pushrods for a 96 to 2000 vortec 350 are the correct length for anybody else wanting to run one of the retrofit roller cams.

[Cautrell05]

I wanted the scripted valve cover no breather look for the engine. I had one of the old 327 cast iron intakes with the factory breather pipe and the four-barrel Holley flange. That would have functioned, but I felt like it needed to breathe a little better than that. Edelbrock still makes a performer RPM intake it comes with the oil pipe and it's machine from the factory. They're only 260 bucks on eBay but I still didn't want to spend that much. One of the extra intake manifolds they had from my racing days was Edelbrock 2101 just a standard aluminum performer. It was not drilled for the oil pipe but it had the area cast for it. Years back there used to be a lot of intake companies that did that. Now there's only one or two. So I built a jig at work from some leftover bits that held the intake up at an angle so that that filler pipe was straight up and down. Once the intake was mounted right angle I put it in the mill and with the help of my friend that runs the machine shop we bored the home in the front of the intake for the oil pipe. The next question is how to run the pcv. I could have just run a breather on that pipe but the downside of that is all your engine vapors are going to come out of there continuously as designed and be cleaning oil residue off the motor. And where I got a mile and a half of gravel between my house and the highway it would just end up being a constant mass. GM went away from a PCV valve and just went to a fixed orifice system probably a little over 15 years ago on most of their V8 engines. Did some reading on it and it's actually pretty simple to do. Basically you just got your intake vacuum port with the hose runs to the valve cover and somewhere in that passageway there's a restrictor with a small hole. Somewhere around 2:00 to 2 1/2 mm depending on the engine. That way you've got steady vacuum to the crankcase to pull out fuel fumes which also helps prevent minor leaks and compensate for blow by at idle. Pretty much the way you check it on mine it was easiest I took my vacuum gauge and I hooked it to the dipstick tube and I took my hand and I pulled it the end of the pipe on the intake. You should have somewhere around 3 inches of vacuum at idle. If you got more than that you need a smaller restrictor, if you got less than that you need a larger restrictor.
The restrictor was made from just a piece of aluminum bar stock on the lathe. Center drilled it through the middle and then cut the outside down small enough that it would be a fairly tight fit and the PCV hose. Which in this case is just a piece of 3/8 fuel line.

[Cautrell05]

The restrictor itself is the easy part. The fitting on the intake not so much. From the top side it seems simple enough, I picked a spot in front of the distributor, drilled and tapped it for quarter inch pipe thread and I've got an elbow fitting with a hose barb on it. That would work, but there's a lot better chance of it picking up extra oil that gets slung around the lifter valley. What I did for that was well the baffle on the bottom side of the intake. Being aluminum helped versus cast. The piece that I welded in is fit really tight all the way around except for the back edge there's a quarter inch Gap along the top and then behind that there's another piece that goes from the top down and overlaps around so there is no direct path at where anything can spray up to the fitting. My TIG welds as I've said are not Instagram quality, and cast aluminum especially one that has been run on an engine for extended time is not always well to cleanest but at least I know they're solid and ain't going to come off. I also took a small belt sander to the Edelbrock logo just behind the thermostat housing. Very carefully ground off the letters and then took it upstairs and put it in the more aggressive of our two sandblasting cabinets and hit that area really really hard just to put a little texture back in it. After it's painted if you know where to look and you get the light just right you can see the difference in texture but at a regular glance you don't see that area was modified. Just another thing to try and camouflage the upgrades.

The intake was upside down when I photographed it. I have no idea why the picture of the hose is upside down.

[Cautrell05]

The next hurdle is where to hook the hose up to the engine. The vacuum port on the number 8 cylinder would technically work except for all your oil vapors from the crankcase go into that one cylinder. The carb I'm running for now has no 3/8 vacuum ports. My end goal is eventually to go with a throttle body fuel injection weather fitec or another brand. So for now the simplest solution was carb spacer with a vacuum port. You can buy those pre-made for about 30 bucks or a little more. Or, if your cheap like I am and have a bad case of fabricator syndrome you order a $10 carb spacer from Amazon drill and tap it and put the fitting in myself. This way workef. Then I had to come up with a short s-shaped hose that tucks in real nice and neat that isn't kinked. I cheated and took a piece of 5/16 brake line inside 3/8 hose it looks like a molded hose.

[oldman3]

Nice work...Jim

[Cautrell05]

I also modified a set of oil pan reinforcement plates for a '96 to 2000 small block with a one piece main to use on my 400. I had a couple sets of them that I held on to years back. GM went the easy route when they did their oil pan rails. When they switched to a driver side dipstick they just reverse the two and tweaked the back a little. Flip them side to side and they match up for 85% of the pan. The back needed a little bit of reworking but it really wasn't that hard to do. I had maybe 45 minutes in the whole thing. I know if you get a good pan and make sure everything's flat you tight it up properly they generally don't leak, but I feel a lot better with these in there.

[Cautrell05]

From there came painting and detailing before I put the motor in. I have painted a lot of motors in my life, while I'm partial to the orange and black classic Chevy pattern depending on the build, orange is normally the hardest color to cover. They make engine paint in primer and normally I'm too cheap for this stuff but this time around I figured why not. Couple good heavy coats of Gray to get the color All uniform, let that dry over the weekend and then one and a half cans of VHT brand Chevy orange. The primer made a big difference in coverage with the orange. The pulleys, brackets and anything that's black was done in DupliColor semi-gloss black. The oil filler pipe was just a $10 Chrome one from speedway. But the Chrome wouldn't look right so I sandblasted it that way it had some texture because if anybody's ever tried painting Chrome before you know it usually flakes off sooner or later.
Probably the best thing that I didn't want to spend money on but I'm glad I did was the stencils for the valve covers. I got those off of eBay, I think they were around 15 bucks. There's basically three ways you could do the lettering on that. You can freehand it which I absolutely do not have the skills for. You can paint the valve cover black and then put a coat of orange paint over top of it and then very lightly sand through the orange on top of the letters just enough to get into the black but that's really sketchy if you're not experienced. Or you just order stickers. But, those stickers are not fun to put on. The ones I got did not come with transfer paper on them that is absolutely a must for something like this so they stay lined up. It's easy to put them on, but kinda hard to get them lined up straight on the raised letters. Some transparent low tack transfer paper is required. The end result was well worth it though.

[Cautrell05]

For exhaust manifolds I was originally going to use one of the original GM ones on the driver's side that has the alternator mount cast into the end of it. I had picked up a 2.5" one a couple years ago and was waiting to see what I needed for the passenger side for my AC compressor mount. Then it became a problem trying to find a passenger side only without any extra mounts car in it. The cheaper and easier way was to just order a set of the smoothie rams from speedway. I think it was $150 for the pair with hardware. I had used a set on a customers build and was really happy with them. Now I just need to eBay the original GM manifold I have.
The outside is then look really nice. The insides though were about what you could expect from today's casting standards. Think I spent about an hour and a half porting the insides until I was happy. After that it was several costs of VHT cast iron manifold paint.

A standard HEI took care of the ignition and I used a set of black Taylor cut to fit wires. I though for sure I got as picture of it on the stand before I put it in but evidently I didn't. The motor with the red wires is one I did on a customers build but it's the exact same way I ran them on mine.

[Cautrell05]

You can't have a vintage small block without a fuel pump. It just wouldn't look right. And because I planned on running an in tank electric pump regardless I needed something to hold the fuel line. Here's a something I used on a previous build that turned out really slick.
Take the cheapest small block fuel pump you can find that has a nice finish on it whether it's the aluminum and the gold or aluminum and silver or whatever look you want. Take the underside of it and cut the nipple off where the rubber hose goes, drill a 3/8 hole through the fitting directly in line with where the steel line would have originally went. I keep forgetting to get a picture of that part. and then carefully notch straight down on the 3/8 fitting area so the fuel line will go up in the same place but you can still thread the nut in. The idea is that the metal line will come in the front side of the pump where you can see it and then curl around the back side and become the inlet while the standard 3/8 fuel line nut holds it to the pump. I did the inlet fitting different on this one because, well to be honest I forgot to go look at my pictures of how I did the first one and tried going off of memory. Ended up being more work and kind of a pain in the butt. I would recommend version one, it's just a - 6 male and fitting on one side and a 5/8 thread female, 3/8 inverted fitting on the other. You take the inverted flare nut from the top end of the line at the car when you just turn it around and put it on the line and that's what screws into the pump. And from there I'm not going to say how long it took me because when it comes to fuel lines I have OCD and I spend way longer than I should to make sure they're what I feel is perfect. I think the line we used we got from Napa cuz it does not come zinc plated or have that green plastic crap they put on a lot of them. Went over the whole thing when I was done with a rag and some brake cleaner and just went lengthwise like you would with a Scotch-Brite pad and it polished it up to where it had a nice steel look and then I hit that with some clear coat.