[lowrollin70gmc]

Well, this project escalated quickly once I finally pulled it into my garage. I have some decent pictures of all this progress, but my phone is temporarily out of commission due to a recent altercation with my car door and a patch of asphalt.

A quick rundown:

I had to drop the front differential. The pressure plate fingers wouldn't clear the input shaft of the transmission and I was able to slide the transmission back far enough to remove the engine, but I wouldn't have been able to align the input and clutch with the pan hitting the front diff.

As long as the front suspension was removed to pull the front diff, I figured that I should do a quick rebuild due to it having 130k miles on the original parts. It's also easier and cheaper to do everything at once so it received a new pitman arm, idler arm, tie rods, ball joints, and lower control arm bushings. The upper arms were replaced by a set from Rough Countrys 2.5" kit as well as their shocks. I bought the kit mainly to lower the front differential and buy me some oil pan clearance both now and in the future if I decide to swap a 4.8/5.3 in a few years.

Included in the RC 2.5" kit is a set of rear shackles and shocks, so those were installed as well. Only problem being rusted rear bushing sleeves to the shackle bolts on the passenger side. After a few hours of cutting the stock shackle to pieces and drilling/pounding out the stock bushings I tossed in a set of poly bushings I had from another project and bolted on the shackles. These leveled up the rear decently, but I may add a leaf in the future, depending on if I end up with another parts rig.

Oh, and the 16x8 Camaro wheels fit fine with stock upper control arms but not the RC uppers, so I have a 1.25" spacer on the front. I'm going to step down to a 20mm (.78") as the backspacing is only 5/8 (.625) more than stock s10 wheels.

I'll add some current pictures shortly, but I'm really happy with the overall height on 255/70/16 (30" tires) and how the truck performs. Next fall I'll step up to 265/75/16s (32s) and do some fender trimming if necessary, but that's down the road.