49 GMC Five Window

[e015475]

Good catch Mongo. Will reverse them

[oldman3]

That's going to be one slick ride...Jim

[ChuckDriver]

Looking good!

[e015475]

So where was I? Oh yea.

Sold my 1980s GM truck seat a couple of months ago after the wife had a hissy fit about the upholstery I'd selected. Had to admit I didn't much care for the workmanship or materials selection either.

Decided to go back to original but with foam instead of springs. Here's the seat frame with birch plywood installed to accept the foam. Upholsterer called today and said the first attempt at seat foam is ready to try (he's done this many times but wants me to try it to see if its comfortable for me)

Hung the Jag diff for what I hope is the last time. Shimmed the rotors to center in the calipers and filled the thing with gear oil. Plugged the hole in the cover with a slug of aluminum held in with JB weld and hope this doesn't turn around a bite me.

Had the shortened half shafts welded and balanced after I verified I could shim them for correct camber.

Built some radius rods to plant the Jag IRS - salvaged from a sandrail upgrade five years ago - don't ever throw anything away!

Decided not to use hood springs so I needed a prop rod. Made this out of chromolly scraps. Truck is being cut and buffed - almost done but I need the rear end together so I can hang the bed

Had a nice painted grill I was going to have plated, so I took it apart and sent it to the stripper. Came back with copper strike on it so now I'm wondering if it was a painted grill to begin with. In any event, history tells me that the more prep I put into the parts before I send them to be plated, the better they turn out, so I'm bumping the grill parts with a hammer and dolly and filing the part to get them as perfect as I can. Here's some tooling marks in one of the slats. The brown stuff is copper and shows the low spots.

Here it is after bumping and filing

Another eight or so hours to finish them all

That's about it for now. Will report how the seat foam turned out next time

[oldman3]

Nice update, truck is looking great...Jim

[joedoh]

this is looking amazing, your patience is enviable.

[e015475]

Well I'm running out of money, so patience will have to do!

[e015475]

Seat came back from upholsterer

The yellow stuff is fairly hard foam. His suggestion is to add soft foam to this till I hit a happy medium between comfort and legroom.

To do that, I'll need to install the seat riser back in the cab. I modified it so I can get a drawer under the seat and Ill need to reinstall it in the cab to test fit the seat



He supplied some soft foam to experiment with



My diff is on its final install in the chassis. Now I can finish the gas tank installation


Emergency brake and strut brace are in too


Looking for a simple hand operated e brake for the cab. A junkyard run didn't produce what I was looking for. Going to try the forklift junkyard in town next week. The Lokar handle is nice, but too spendy

[LEEVON]

Nice build! I just did the same exact thing with my 50 seat, very happy with the results. Only complaint is that it's pretty upright, thats more inherent to the frame though. I'll put some updated pics in my "popeye" build thread.

[mongocanfly]

I'm liking the seat foam mods...

[iowaboynca]

I just realized that your rotors are right next to the diff...interesting. gotta love british engineering, always a different approach to things.

Man I want to try a C4/IRS install on a project...they just look so cool!

[e015475]

I'd read somewhere that the Jag IRS is an American design the Brits bought and at one time in the 1960s it was even considered for the Mustang. It is basically a Dana 44 differential.

It seems that every proper hot rod plastic kit I built when I was a kid and a lot of the custom cars in the magazines had a Jag IRS. Nowadays there's a lot better rear end solutions out there than the Jag, but for me it is all about the nostalgia.

The inboard discs were all about reducing the unsprung weight at the wheels. but I'd heard they'd actually moved them outboard in racing applications because of the heat load on the diff. The later production versions of this IRS actually have the discs outboard. On the inboard design, the heat eventually cooks the output seal and it leaks.

More to come on the seats as I get the riser installed and the seat fitted so I can see where I'm at.

[e015475]

Finally got the seats in for the trial fit of the foam.

Here's the support for the seat welded into the cab. The middle of the seat riser was pretty badly rusted so I cut it out so I can slide stuff under the seat. Thinking about making a door to cover it up.



Here's the front of the seat- it's 6" tall including the wood base

[IMG][/IMG]

The bottom cushion slopes back to 4.5" at the back



The back cushion has 2" of hard foam at the bottom that tapers to nothing at the top



Both the bottom and the back cushion will get additional soft foam. The bottom cushion will get 1" and the back will get 2"
I'm 6'3" and about 240 pounds and here's a picture of my torso in the truck - this is with 2" of soft foam in the back cushion. I couldn't feel anything hard at my shoulder blades with 2" of the soft foam on the back cushion

With the door closed, the height of the seat seems right. I have a pretty large steering wheel from a '59 Eldorado Cadillac and belly clearance wasn't a problem. No tilt wheel just a straight column.

Installed the Camaro gas tank after fabing some straps out of 18g sheet stock
Filler neck will be under the license plate on the roll pan

Snagged this emergency brake handle at the local forklift junkyard. Will try to extend handle another 6" or so to get it looking a little more proportional to the gearshift lever and mount it on the floor next to the shift lever. Should I have any safety concerns about an emergency brake lever that just goes over-center to engage the emergency brake?



Finished up the metal work on the grill slats and polished them to make sure i had all the tool marks out of them before they go to the chrome plater this week. (propped up on a cheap HF flashlight to show the reflection from the fluorescent lights) I bumped out the dents with a hammer and dolly, sanded them with 180 grit, then 320 grit and finished them with the buffer.



Wyatt's polishing lathe is a beast and commands respect.



My luck with chrome shops runs hot and cold, so this time I decided I'd prep my chromed parts myself. Wyatt recently had some work done at the shop I'm going to take the '49 grill to, and it turned out decent for what he had to work with. My hope is that if I give him my grill nearly ready to plate, he'll expend the hours he'd normally spend just straightening it in making it perfect. I talked to the plater and he was good with any prep work I wanted to do before bringing the grill into his shop. Fingers crossed.



I don't want to spend the time to get every square inch of the grill perfect, so I'm planning a trial fit to make sure I've got good metalwork everywhere you can see as you approach the truck. Color sanding the grill surround and installing tomorrow so I can trial fit the grill before it goes to the chrome shop.

Regards, Phil

[joedoh]

that polisher is a beast!

[e015475]

Got the grill slats and uprights back from the plater. The results were top-shelf -Thanks Pete! (Diversified Metals in Phoenix)

Here's the slats and end pieces


The GMC logo front badge


Assembled with some stainless #10 screws and loosely mounted into the truck


Another view


There's only two body parts that are reproductions on this truck - the side aprons between the running boards and the bed, and the inner fenders. Both have been a pain in the a$$. The passenger inner fender has the mount holes for the grill, but the passenger doesn't, so I have to pull the grill off again and drill them, and I hate drilling on freshly painted parts.

Rant over, but to anybody reading this and contemplating repop body parts, do whatever you have to for obtaining originals.

Weather here in Phoenix is gorgeous now. More shop time with the door open to the fresh air.

Phil

[Dan in Pasadena]

I don't know how I missed this thread for so long but man, I like everything you've done.

I really agonized long and hard about doing my '55.2 in sage green especially after finding an online photo of an AD GMC like yours in the color years ago. After that I saved all the older cars/truck pics I found in Sage. My truck was rattle canned in Rustoleum Sage Green while it was in its original shop truck mode.

I'd ALWAYS wanted a big window in red and ended up going that way but I LOVE the sage green too. Huge congrats.

[e015475]

Thanks Dan - I have that same picture of the AD in my ideas scrapbook too, and when I saw it and showed it to my wife, she said "that's it!"

The color on ours is from the new FIAT 500s, but comes pretty close to that AD you posted.


Enjoyed reading your posts on your big window on this forum and over at garagejournal.com

Phil

[Bkmoto786]

Great job on the build! How's the truck coming?

[e015475]

The color sanding and buffing is finally done and I'm starting assembly. The bed is on and I'm planning on hanging the rear fenders this afternoon. The running boards went out yesterday to get bed liner sprayed on the treads.

I should be able to push it out onto the driveway in a couple of days and get some photos of it to post. (my wife is complaining about all the dust from sanding and buffing that gets tracked into the house, so it will be nice to have it out of the shop to clean the floor)

I took advantage of some of the Black Friday sales and ordered the glass, instruments, radio, Newport wiper motor, bumper, RnD radiator and a bunch of other stuff. I also ordered upholstery samples so I can finalize the interior materials selection.

I've only been working on the truck a couple of days a week since July, but now that the paint job is nearly done and I have lots of parts, progress should accelerate. Will post more photos soon.

Phil

[e015475]

I also have a build blog over on the talk,classicparts forum. It is a couple of iterations ahead of what I usually post here.

If you're interested you can check it out here-

https://talk.classicparts.com/thread....22045/page-10

Phil

[joedoh]

thanks for the link!

[e015475]

Here's an update.............

Rolled the truck out of the shop to do a little cleanup after the color sand. Still needs a little adjustment and I'm not comfortable pulling the hood all the way into the latch yet.


Installed green welt that seemed to match the paint color well - picked up out
door vinyl at the local fabric store and had it sewn into welt


Put the running boards on and they seem to fit ok. Had the treads done in bed liner - we'll see how that works out.


Was going to make a front apron, but went ahead and bought a repro. Spent a couple hours getting it flat and will have to reweld some of the tabs, but I suppose it is quicker than building one.


Grafted a 30 ohm sender to my Camaro gas tank pickup tube so my original style gas gauge will read correctly. Will flare the pickup tube in -6 AN to tie into my fuel system.


I'm very attracted to shinny objects (they say this is because of human's innate attraction to water, but I'm pretty sure it is bourbon on ice with me) Here's some shinny stuff........


Installed a new stainless hood strip.....another hour of rework to get it to fit (was an inch too long) and a trip to the hardware store to buy a metric nut to fit the mounting stud. (it shouldn't be metric, but if it is, why not throw a metric nut in the box with the part?)



Starting to think about what to do with the interior. I have a 57-58 Cadillac steering wheel and column I'm going to use. The steering wheel was pretty cracked, having seen the Arizona sun for many years. I epoxied it back together, but I think I'll be chasing cracks forever on the rim of the wheel. Since it is so skinny anyway, I thought I'd wrap the rim in leather then select the rest of the interior colors to compliment it. Got these samples but don't really like any of them. Going to build a factory radio 'facade' for the dash to fill the hole - the stereo system will use a tablet or phone for a head unit.


Here's the rebuilt gauges in the dash.


Next step is to get the linkage all working with the bear claw door latches. Looks like the only way to get the door locks to work with the bear claws is to convert to electric actuators. I'm working on a scheme to be able to unlock both the doors with the key on the passenger side or from a key fob. Waiting for the brown truck to come with my electric lock actuators.

Best wishes for 2018

Phil

[Advanced Design]

Beautiful! Gauges came out nice too.

[mongocanfly]

agreed with Doug. ...gauges are sweet...I also like that fenderwelt..that turned out nice...

[lower50's]

Boy you have done an amazing job!!! The IFS/IRS on bags should ride like it's on a cloud. I bet your getting excited to drive it. I see your sand rail has KING shocks any pictures of it? What year MGTD does your wife have? This is my dads that I inherited last summer. Keep up the good work.