Mexacali Express ('72 K10/LQ4/TH350 Retrofit)

[jpstaub]

At zero dark thirty a ring tone pierced the quiet of the night and jolted me awake.

"Damnit! I need a pack mule. Something with guts that never looks for glory. My shipments keep getting clipped and I am not a charitable man. The base of ops is a ratty '72 K10. Do it right or don't do it at all." Click.

I wish that's how this whole thing started but it wasn't although I'm already fond of the intro so I may carry on the white lie as long as nobody gets hurt. The truth is, my girlfriend's boss liked the job I did on my '72 C10 so much he wanted the same done with his '72 K10. The only real problem was that I was starting with this:

In the end the boss wanted something that looks like this:



I'm getting a community repair/repurpose/fabrication shop started (see example here) so I signed on to do the mechanical work for the project.

After $30k and 700 hours of labor Mexacali Express looks like this:



Had the owner done all the work the project would have cost about $15k which is still a large chunk of money to blow. The intent here is not to consider why people spend time/money the way they do. Instead I'd like to offer solutions to technical problems I ran into during the build. This is about giving back to the community who's assisted me, many times unknowingly, with problems I've encountered along my path to resto-rod glory.

My goal is to give plenty of documentation and relatively in-depth explanation to the unique hurdles encountered on the project. I'm going to leave beginner stuff alone since there's plenty of material out there and as much as I like technical writing, time is limited. If additional explanation is desired to fill in gaps that I'm leaving because I've become too familiar with this stuff let me know.

Cheers,
Jake