Paint

Asking for a little participation from all two of you who read this blog. What do you think of the color scheme? The current plan is to paint the lower pieces (fenders, running boards, rims) black with the bed, body and hood in rust color as shown here.

meh?

btw, I think I have it set now that you will not have to log-in or anything to post a comment.


I think the paint removal is going pretty well. I have resorted to manually scrapping the old paint off with a spackle knife. Sanding was a mess and I realized that this is probably leaded paint, and that I have exceeded my lifetime lead exposure when I removed the leaded paint in my last house... without gloves, eye protection, respirator or brains.... or did I lose the brains during.... not sure, not sure it matters anymore.

The aircraft paint remover was kinda effective, but SUPER stinky and generally a mess. In the end I stopped using that stuff cause it is yucky... ewy yucky.

After scraping off the paint and sanding out the rust spots, I think it is looking pretty good.

A little catchup

Scraped and primed the rear and passenger side of the truck bed.
The bucket contains the old part of the truck that may have eBay value. Clockwise from the left are the beehive oil filter, horn, and 6 volt generator.

This is a $29 hose fitting.... seriously, no joke. I needed this to connect the new oil filter to the engine block. The 90 degree angle was necessary because there is not a lot of space between the block fitting and the primary belt.

Hiatus is over - on to electrical

So it has been a long time Since I have posted. For a while I was not working on the truck, but I am back in full force now. 

Last time I posted I was sanding off the old paint and rust. Now I have decided that if the truck does not run, it does not exactly matter what it looks like.

This photo here is the new wiring harness. I was tinkering around with the truck one day and !POOF! there was a massive cloud of smoke and the strong smell of burning plastic. What had happened was the wiring harness, (or at least some of the misc wires) had rubbed through the insulation and were shorting on the fire wall between the engine compartment and the cab.

It was about this time that I coincidentally decided that I would be served well by upgrading some of the wiring.
In the end this truck will have a 12 Volt alternator system. So the first thing to do was to remove the 6 volt generator and replace it with an 12 volt alternator.

Thanks to Mr. Anderson, who donated a modern GM alternator I was able to install the first piece.

This picture is of the new alternator where the generator used to be. It is much smaller and cleaner than the generator and is wired up to the new wiring harness... sort of.

In order to get things to work there are adapter brackets to the alternator and a new belt pulley. Considering that I have no idea what I'm doing, things went very smoothly.
This is a picture of inside of the cab. These loose ends are the wires that go to the dash board and gauges. An interesting piece of work is finding out which wire goes where. The wiring harness came with a list of numbers and equipment, but no diagrams. The existing wires are not color coded and there is no clear way of determining which wire goes where.

Arne had a great idea of using a generic multi connector to connect these wires to the gauges so that in the future, if I want to remove the dash there will be only one connector to deal with... genius.

(That is the oily transmission in the back ground and the drive shaft coming off the right side)

This is a hard to decipher photo of the battery tray. What I wanted to show here is incredibly hard to see, but is that the right side of the battery tray is held together with wire.

Behind the black ground wire (for the battery), on the right side is a length of wire wrapped around a long bolt and under the battery tray to the other side and around another bolt. awesome.

I have a beautiful new battery tray from Jim Carter's Chevy Trucks. All stainless steel and has sweet welds and in general will be the nicest, and substantial piece of steel in the whole truck.