1964 C10 Project - Part II

In the summer of 2015, I finally made the decision to tear into Ol Blu and make some improvements. As mentioned earlier, it was clear the truck needed a new wiring harness. Also, the same Rochester Quadrajet carburetor had been on the truck since before Dad bought it and had roughly 400,000 miles on it, so it had to go (well, not really go, it's mounted as a trophy on my garage wall). 

Wiring & carb. No big deal.

The carb was simple. I bought & installed a Holley Street Demon. I was not really in the mood at this stage of my life to learn carb tuning, so this seemed like a good choice. Brent, on the other hand, hated that decision. He was an expert Holley tuner and said there's no reason to buy garbage like that. Anyway, it had accelerator pumps (something the Quadrajet had been lacking for many years), started & ran, so I was happy.

Anybody who has installed a wiring harness knows it's simple in theory, but involves every part of a vehicle. There's no better way to get intimate with you automobile than to install a wiring harness. Add a sprinkle of OCD on top of that and you've got yourself a game!

So, because the wiring is rooted under the dash, I decided to tear the dash apart. The easiest way to work under a dash is without the seat. With the seat out I might as well install new carpet. This is when things get interesting. Yeah, you guessed it. The floorboards had significant ankle vents, especially on the passenger side. Brent had repaired a lot of the rust on this truck during previous paint jobs including rockers and rear cab corners, but I don't think he had gotten to the floors or cab mount braces. After many weeks of panel purchases, cutting, bending, grinding & fitting, I finally had the floors & cab mounts rebuilt and cleaned up.

A quick side note about welding steel.... There was a day during the floor repair that had me in and under the truck welding floor panels for 7-8 hours. Later that evening I got violently ill including near-constant vomiting, delusions, no appetite and extreme fatigue. This lasted for 2-3 days and we concluded I had Metal Fume Fever. I didn't know it was a thing. I had never given much thought to ventilation during welding. On that day I had the garage door open, but there wasn't any other door or window open allowing for cross-flow or fresh air. If you are welding for any significant amount of time, open doors & windows and have a fan running.

YOU DO NOT WANT METAL FUME FEVER. TRUST ME.

Well hell. Now that the interior is all torn apart, I might as well paint it. It had always been in my plans to make the truck Bahama Blue again, the color shown in the panoramic pictures above, so I decided to rebuild and paint the steering column (getting rid of the key tumbler hole while I'm at it) and the dash blue while painting the rest of the cab a medium silver. I did this at Brent's shop because I needed his guidance and paint booth.

While painting the dash, I popped the cap off the spray gun and spilled blue paint on the dash!

With the interior painted, I brought Ol Blu home to start the arduous rewiring phase of the project. I must admit that tearing out crusty 50 year-old wiring was very satisfying.

The new harness from American Autowire, which I highly recommend, included options/provisions for rear gas tank, modern aftermarket gauges, electric windows, modern sound system, etc., so I installed all of those items. Getting rid of the in-cab gas tank allowed more room for storage, so that allowed me to dress-up the area behind the seat.

After many months nit-picking every little detail of every wire, I had a (technically) functional truck again. I custom-wired the halo headlights to serve as daytime running lights and the turn signals would interrupt the DRL function. This required some crafty relay wiring, but is very cool.

One of my goals while working on Ol Blu was to not only update it and make it my own, but to do it in a way that would make Dad proud. I always had a vision in my mind of Dad driving his - I mean my - truck after it was done. This did not turn out to be possible because Dad passed away in April of 2017 after fighting prostate cancer for 12 years.

Well shit. Now what?! I had a truck with a new nervous system and trustworthy engine. Do I really want to reinstall cruddy old rusty fenders, doors & hood? Not really. For a while I seriously considered slapping it back together with doors from Dad's other 66 C10 project truck, renaming it "Patches" and driving it. This is why "patina" is a thing... some hot rodders made lazy cool so they wouldn't need to do the hard work. But I couldn't let myself do that. After Ol Blu sat stagnant for a while (I don't remember how long), Brent said I could bring it to his shop and work on the chassis & body.

A quick side story about the doors... I had wanted to do one-piece side glass in this truck and many people have said it is very difficult because the door has a curve at the wing window post and there is structure inside the door under the wing window. So my first order of business was to cut away and reconfigure that structure. I made a "tree" to hold the doors so I could work on them in my basement shop. 30 seconds into this project with a little disc cutter inside the door (where I couldn't really see anything), the disc bound up and exploded. An hour later, I was in my first surgery. Here's a link to the pictures, if you really want to see them. Be warned.

I drove Ol Blu to Brent's on December 27th, 2018. It was 20°, I had no windshield and one of the 20 year-old tires went flat along the way (I didn't care and kept driving).