My daily driver/beater : How I turned lemons in lemonade

[Tx Firefighter]

A lot of folks have asked me to give some details of my daily driver and how I came to build it.

I have to say right up front, I'm not really a square body guy. Ironic I know, since I have two of them currently. My favorite trucks are 67-72 and 88-94 body styles. That said, here is how I came to build a 78 model square body.

My stepson screwed me over on a deal and took my 89 model truck. The very afternoon we transferred the title, he got in the truck and drove off and never returned (joined the Army). He never held up his end of the bargain. He got the truck and I got nothing.



So, I got mad. Raging, horrible mad. That lasted for months.

In an effort to make peace, my wife gave me the title to his old torn up 78 model truck that he had abandoned and encouraged me to do something with it to try and salvage some of my losses on the deal. It was just a junk pickup and in no way worth a fraction of what I had lost, but it was the best she could do.

Here is what I had to begin with.





Notice he had kicked in the door and ripped the sport mirror off in fury because the door wouldn't latch well (striker bushing was gone).





He's a slob. The rotted food inside of the cab made me wretch, and I'm a paramedic who sees some bad stuff often. Maggots and flies. It was overwhelming.



But the main heartbreaker of the truck was the engine. We had gotten it from our neighbor who is a GM dealership mechanic. He had just put a new Vortec 350 crate engine in the truck. Within a few thousand miles, my stepson had overheated it badly enough to crack both heads. A nice valuable roller cam engine wasted.





It even had the valuable 400 dollar GM Performance Parts brand Vortec carbureted intake manifold.