C10 front end under an AD Chevy truck

[Steve@OldSub.com]

I have a C-20 IFS under the front of my 1-ton. However its not finished.

A couple years ago I went on a mission to find finished and driving trucks with this swap, and discovered pretty quickly that very few of these conversions have been completed and are under trucks that get driven.

Yes there are some out there, but a lot more people start the swap than finish it.

[winchster]

Originally Posted by Steve@OldSub.com

I have a C-20 IFS under the front of my 1-ton. However its not finished.

A couple years ago I went on a mission to find finished and driving trucks with this swap, and discovered pretty quickly that very few of these conversions have been completed and are under trucks that get driven.

Yes there are some out there, but a lot more people start the swap than finish it.

I have driven mine. My son drove it to school his senior year. I did this swap in '99 Back when S10's were a new thing and I couldn't afford a Heidt's, Fatman, or MII

[Steve@OldSub.com]

Originally Posted by winchster

I have driven mine.

I am aware of yours but was not when I started my search for completed and driving examples.

In asking questions I had discovered that the guy most often quoted on the Stovebolt as the expert on how it is done had never finished his conversion, and in fact was going back to a straight axle on his. That scared me some because at the time I didn't know anyone who had done this swap and was driving it.

He lives only a few hundred miles from me and I managed to meet him and get a tour of his shop and projects. He has since updated his web page explaining what problems he encountered and why he had abandoned the approach on his own truck.

This is his suspension when I saw the truck.



One time on a road trip I passed a '50 GMC 1-ton with a camper body running down the freeway at about 60 where its posted at 70 and so I didn't look it over very hard. The next day I spotted that same truck in a parking lot in Oregon so I looked it over. It was Cummins powered and had a pickup IFS. No owner around so I didn't get to talk to anyone.

A couple years later I found the same truck at a truck show with a name card in the window. Still couldn't find the owner but managed to take quite a few photos including one of that name card. It took six months more to get from having the owners name to finding him and arranging to meet him only about 100 miles from where I live.

Turns out he is (was) 78 years old and had built the truck 9 years earlier and had driven it tens of thousands of miles since. I liked hearing that he had drive it many miles and figured I'd found my expert.



He had not kept much record of the build and what little he had was old photographs. This was the only one that really showed any of the IFS swap part of his build.



Fortunately he remembered details of the build and I crawled under it with my camera and was able to take pictures and ask questions.

Then I saw him again at another truck show six months later and we've become friends.

Based on his truck and his experience with the finished truck I decided to go ahead with a similar swap on my own project.

Insisting on seeing at least one finished swap that was on the road and working well means I also got to ask a lot of questions about how it was done successfully. Those answers better prepared me to think through how to do my own.

Just a month or so after seeing this truck I met a guy who lives only a couple miles from me who had also done the same swap, but who has not ever quite finished it. Last time I talked to him he had driven it about 20 miles and was still working out bugs.

This is mine back in August.



It hasn't advanced very much because shortly after this picture was taken I was diagnosed with cancer. Beating that has become my priority project and this one has moved pretty slow as a result.