'69 Longbed Daily Driver - Project

[IvelDesigns]

Ok, so I haven't had a wrench in my hand in quite some time. Moved out of state, had a wife, who then had kids. Moved around a bit, etc, etc... and now i'm back in my home state. Ever since moving back, I've wanted to find a project car/truck to play with. Partly because I want to relearn what I knew 10 years ago, but also because I want something that I can do with my kids outside of video games. In the process I hope to learn a lot myself.

In Iowa, it's easy to find sweet rides out behind a barn. But 90% of them are rotted out and not worth the troubles unless you are a premo body guy.

Anyways, by pure luck (I was actually going to look at a different truck) I found what I was looking for. This was one of those situations where you see the truck sitting next to a house, no for sale sign, but you knock on the door and ask if the owner if they want to part with it. Long story short, I'm now the prowd owner of a 69 Longbed.

10 years ago it had a frame off rebuild. At that time it was a 3/4 ton, but they converted it to a 1/2. New body mounts, undercoating, replaced all rust and painted everything.

It's pretty solid. I have found only 3 places where there is any rust. P-side inner wheel well, P-side cab corner, and a decent sized spot in the D-side bed wheel well, at the bottom. Other than that rust, i have not found a single ding or dent in any of the sheet metal. There is one in the grill though. It runs great (30k on a rebuilt 283), brakes are awesome (disk/drum), tires, etc. The one bad thing is that to lower it, they cut the coils. So now everytime the truck leans to one side or the other, the front coils pop pretty loudly.

I will use this thread to post updates on the truck. It will probably start a bit slow, but once the holidays pass, it should pick up to a good pace. Goodguys is here in Des Moines on the 4th of July weekend, so I'd like to have something half way decent to enter by then.

Here are the pics i snapped when I got it to my parents house where it will be for the winter (they have plenty of buildings to work in [like the 40x60 that it is parked in], i have have a 1 stall garage )







Oh, I did pull the points dist out this weekend and dropped in a HEI dist from an 87? truck that my brother was junking. Now it runs like a top!