Update - Headlight Buckets - Wrong Radiator Support
This is where research really pays off. And writing down your plan on paper and then going over it and all the parts you have first before ordering new parts.
So my truck is a 70 with a 67-68 dog house. Turns out, the radiator support is different in those years.... All the parts I ordered I just defaulted to 1970 without even thinking about it. So GM got smart and instead of re-engineering the whole core support they just re-tooled their existing with a bracket to relocate the headlight buckets. You can tell that's what they did... More on this later.
So I found this thread and basically did what he did, but I did a few things differently.
http://67-72chevytrucks.com/vboard/s...d.php?t=399960
He gives you the basics, and enough detail to get it done, but he doesn't mention how DANG HARD IT IS TO ALIGN THESE THINGS!! And how many times your have to remove your grill and put it back on again. It's a LOT lol.
So, long story short. I ordered wrong radiator support(1970 version), and didn't want to order a new one($200 down the drain) mainly because I already painted mine and modified it. So I cut the bucket brackets off and modified mine to work. Took be every bit of 8 hours to do this....
Here is the original bucket setup for the 69+ models. You can see the bucket mounts to the added "bracket" they spot welded on the rad support.
I drilled the spot welds and removed the bracket. I then flattened that bracket and cut off all the excess I didn't need. I only kept the mounting points for the headlight bucket(2 square holes and the little spring hole). This is where I differed from the thread above, he cut all that off and cut into the rad support. I then marked and cut my center hole larger and moved it down and over to line it up correctly(install and remove grill several times when you don't get it right the first time.... It's a pain cuz it all has to be lined up just right. You know that means you gotta get all the other sheet metal lined up too(fenders and etc)....
Here is the bracket, flattened out and trimmed. This to me was much easier to just re-use rather than cutting new holes into the rad support. The guy above cut all that off, but yet he still used sheet metal screws to fasten to the rad support for that nice 4" round hole....
Here you can see how much of the original hole I actually cut out of the rad support. And I ground down the edge of where I was going to weld on the flattened bracket.
And here it is tacked on. I intend to go back and clean this up a bit, prime and paint. But you can see it's easier to keep this for all the mounting points, now I know it's perfectly aligned for when I go to install the headlight buckets back on later.
And here are the final results after installing everything again. The headlights of course not aligned to their final spot yet but you can see this works rather well. Good enough for me anyway!!
BEFORE pics:
AFTER pics:
