Ol Blu Project - Part IV

Now that I had an operational rolling chassis, I got to move forward with working on the cab. I removed it (again), scraped 40 years of crud from its belly and had it mediablasted.

When I had the LS-based engine, which is inherently ugly (unless you spend a lot of money dressing them up), I was not going to spend much time making the engine bay pretty. But now that I had a good looking engine, I decided to put extra effort into the engine bay. This meant routing all of the hoses and wires so they would be minimally-visible. This is where being mildly OCD really pays off. I decided to route the AC/heater lines & wiring under the fenders, which would enable a smooth firewall. I painted the belly and lower firewall with Chassis Saver black paint, the firewall Soul Red and had Scot Kohler do some lettering for me, in honor of Dad and Brent.

Next up was assembling the engine bay. I spent many months creating the wiring harness, 3D printing an enclosure for the ECM and relays, custom making AC & heater lines and ways to mount them. It was quite fun. By the time I had gotten the inner fenders, radiator support and other engine bay items painted Soul Red, I was repeatedly asked about the blue dash. I was going to keep the dash blue for several reasons... I wanted to pay homage to the color the truck once was, I was lazy and didn't want to deal with it and - perhaps most important - the dash turned out to be the last thing I painted with Brent. While chatting with my father-in-law Dennis one day and explaining the red truck will have a blue dash, he simply sang the line, "Devil with the Blue Dash". Perfect! Now I have something to put on that awkward angled panel at the bottom of the glove box door when I'm done.

Engine was installed, engine bay was painted & assembled, this was starting to feel good. Remember when I said that space would be limited with the big block? I wasn't wrong... by the time I got the radiator and electric fans installed, I had - literally - no extra room. They recommend at least a 1/2 inch between the water pump pulley/fan and anything in front of it. I have a 1/4".

You might notice the "Cadillac" valve covers. There's a story behind these. Because Brent was installing a Chevy engine into his Cadillac, he thought it would be funny to have Cadillac valve covers on his Chevy engine. He found some and his friend Eric surprised him when they showed on the Brent's doorstep one day. Sadly, as far as I know, the Cadillac valve covers never made it into the Coupe, even for a fitment test. But now I have Cadillac valve covers on my Chevy engine in a Chevy truck. No, I am not going to correct that. The story is better than the accuracy.

On a related topic - I now have a 10 Liter engine in my C-10 truck. I really doubt any other C-10 owners have done this, and I did it by accident. I think that is the very definition of kismet.

By this point, it should be obvious that this project has once again gone off the rails. It transformed from a decent daily driver to a full-blown show truck, or at least my attempt at a show truck - whether it's worthy of that declaration is somebody else's call.

It was inevitable, I had run out of ways to avoid doing bodywork. The engine ran, the HVAC was installed and the air suspension worked. 

Ugh. Here we go.

First-up... Metal Work.

I stripped the rest of the cab (btw- not mediablasting it when I did the firewall and belly was a dumb decision), and spent the next several months doing all the metal repairs and custom metal work I could think of. This included:

• Repairing gutter damage caused by Dad's 5th Wheel camper.
• Adding rolled edges on tailgate (the factory tailgate had raw edges).
• Customizing the taillights, based on the factory reverse lights for 65-66 C-10s.
• Customizing the hood & adding a modern double-catch hood latch.
• Adding aftermarket rear rollpan.
• Welding all box panels together (sides, header panel, rear crossbeam, rollpan, etc.).
• Filled-in all stake pockets.
• Making exhaust ports in the box sides.
• Welding the hood panels together. 
• Creating a custom front rollpan, made from a heavily modified aftermarket rollpan for a squarebody. Then I had to lengthen the front of the fenders to match the rollpan.
• Making custom bumpers based on split bumpers for a 1970 Camaro RS (I bought 8 of them total).
• Many, many, many other custom details that are either too trivial to discuss or I've forgotten about them.

This ended with a coat of epoxy primer and Optex high-build primer.