1972 C10

Got my exhaust finished up, I believe Im back to where I need to be with my tips so my box will fit. I got all of the exhaust back together only to decide to tear it back apart in order to install a couple additional o2 sensor ports for tuning purposes. Im planning on doing that sometime this coming week. All these little rework projects are adding up to a lot of time

I also sent off my injectors and got word back they cleaned up good. He said cylinders 6 & 8 were stuck, with the others showing flow loss. All of that has been remedied with the cleaning so I am glad I sent all of them as a set. Im pretty excited to get it back together and try running it again, I think its safe to expect quite a difference.

I started and finished buffing the inside of my box. I sanded it with some 2000 and then buffed, in hindsight I should have maybe gone a little more aggressive sanding as I have a little urethane wave. I wanted to stay on the light side of things as its a pain to buff with all the raised body lines. All things considered it looks pretty good for the inside, I plan on going more aggressive on the outside since it will be easier to work with. I set my wood in to see how it looked and I have to say Im thrilled. It finally felt like all of the hard work Ive put into this box has started to pay off, it feels like Ive been working on this box for a lifetime, lol, still have a long way to go too.

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Thanks

This truck is going to have the easy life now. I always thought I'd haul a couple folding chairs back there sometime. I'm not sure I even want to do that, going to need a blanket.
 
Tied up some loose ends over the last couple weeks.

I started off reassembling my engine and working on my exhaust. I added an o2 sensor port for a wide band o2 sensor in my drivers side header. Once I had that welded in I installed my wide band sensor and wired it up in more of a temporary setup. The gauge for it just sits in a cup holder, but the main use will be interfacing with hptuners. With all that completed I fired it up and as expected it sounds much better. Running a bit lean according to my new gauge so plenty of tuning work to come.

After that was operating without any major issues I moved on to completing the front end of the truck. I started off assembling my grille, and then installed it. Talk about a pain to install, it eventually went and I got all the bolts in. From there I moved to the bumper. I bought a premium chrome bumper, which I think is a reconditioned original, and I have to say the chrome is really nice on it. Im really happy with how the front end came out, couldnt have asked for much more.

I completed my parking brake cables. It is a Wilwood universal kit for the rear, and an oem replacement for the front. It doesnt work too bad but Im not impressed with the oem replacement cable, I might try finding a better one.

I also sprayed the inner fenders for my box with raptor liner

If all goes well I should be able to install the box next weekend. I cant wait.

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You are doing a great job. Truck is looking killer. This forum is such a great reasource.
 
Figure I would bring this up to date in what has happened with my box over the last week.

So starting out last week I was working on some final touches to the box after we had it on once. I had it on and found some clearance issues with my rear sway bar, so we decided it would be best to take it back off and clearance a cross sill. I had all that done and was re assembling when I got tangled up with a floor jack and tipped it into my box side. I was pretty upset about the whole thing, I was going to put the box back on the next day and now that was out the window.

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I was really concerned in my ability to try and fix something like this. I feel alot more comfortable starting with bare steel and working up from there. I asked for some advice on here about how to fix this and received some great info. My first idea was to try paintless dent repair and just touch up the chip. That idea was out once I measured the distance between panels and figured there was hardly any room between the inner and outer skins at the top of the box side. Chris brought up a good idea on using a stud gun to pull most of the dent out. I liked the idea but I dont have one and have never used one, at this point I didnt really want to start experimenting to that degree. So I figured the next best option for me with my skill set was to sand it down and use a little dolphin glaze to fill in the dent.

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I sanded a little more after this picture but thought it was kind of neat to see all my layers

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From there I put down one coat of epoxy, and then after it sat overnight some dolphin glaze and then sanded.

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Once that was sanded I sprayed more epoxy on it and let it sit overnight, blocked the next day and then put it in the sun.

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After it had sat again overnight I set out today to mask and spray everything. I really wanted to split it up a bit more but I was worried about leaving the tape on over night so I decided to make a long day out of it. I was really almost more nervous about masking than I was about anything else. Ive only masked a couple times before and they were lackluster. Since I had the inside of the box buffed already I really wanted to do a good job of masking. I masked anything next to where I was spraying with paper and then completely wrapped the box in plastic. I was able to lift the box and slide the plastic underneath and then tape the seams where my bottom piece of plastic meet the top piece.

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Once it was ready I sprayed my base, this is after the last coat. I kind of tapered off a little bit more after each coat.

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I let that sit a few hours and then cleared, and then pulled the tape after it sat for another hour or two. I am thrilled with the results so far, the true test will be putting it in the sun but I have high hopes. Thanks everyone for all the pointers.

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Looks like the jack incident never happened! Nice work sprint. I don't know about everyone else, but I'm dying to see it on the truck.
 
Ive been lacking heavily in updates. I turned a huge page with my project and got the box on, bolted down, and installed the floor. Everything went pretty good putting all that together, mock up pays off huge on a lot of this stuff.

A few things that seem trivial but I spent a lot of time on was my inner fender/splash guards and my fuel filler. I was really happy with how splash guards bolted in and turned out after a lot of rework. The next thing was my fuel filler, I wanted the filler to be in the middle of a board and not on a board and stainless hold down. For whatever reason my tank had the filler landing so about a third of it was on one of the pieces of stainless. My cousin helped me customize the filler, we turned it down in a lathe, cut away what wasnt needed and rebuilt it so the filler was offset as much as possible. I did a little repositioning on my tank and in the end it ended up working out with just enough wiggle room to fit in the middle of a board.

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With the box on I worked on assembling the floor. It was more of a job than I thought it would be, there are alot of bolts holding everything together and it did take some fine tuning to get everything even. In the end it came out better than I had hoped it would, Im glad I made the choice of black wood.

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I mentioned turning a huge page, well I was now into a new chapter. If you notice in the last pic above the scenery changed.

Now that I had the box on and had mocked up pretty much everything else, all that was left was the rear bumper, and a quick inspection of everything. Ive been going over a lot of stuff making sure it was road worthy for the last month or two so it was pretty well ready to go. After fixing a rear tail light, I was ready for the maiden voyage. We put enough gas in to make it downtown to a gas station, and from there cruised up home. It felt incredible to finally be on the road, dad and I had a great little cruise. We made it out of town and had ran it through all the gears, I was really babying it at this point. We were going up a pretty good hill and my dad wanted to make sure it would down shift out of lockup alright, so I went about 1/4 throttle, holy cow did it down shift, and sound good doing it. We both looked at each other and started laughing, one of those holy shit moments.

I keep meaning to stop when Im out on one of my tuning drives to snap a couple pictures but I get wrapped up in watching stuff and forget. That and up until today the thing was running like crap, I finally had enough time to do some research and make some changes to get it running better. Ive got my Maf sensor about dialed in so that is helping as well.

In the meantime I have a couple garage pics.

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