I had a little time this weekend to work on the truck, and I got a few more things done. First, I bought a cab mount kit from Energy Suspension, and got the front cab mounts swapped out. I am working on a simple fix for all of us guys with the C-20 rear cab mounts that are always broken. I am still in the planning stage, and I have the material I need, so when I finalize it, I'll post up pictures. The fix will be cheap
Because my truck originally came with a 4-speed, and I am going to go with a 700r4, the original crossmember was not going to work. I didn't have a factory one to install, so I looked through my parts pile and found an old '70 Camaro TH350 trans crossmember. The width of the crossmember was workable, and the design is such that it lays flat to the bottom of the framerail. I had some old angle iron and welded it to the edges of the Camaro crossmember so it fit snugly into the frame and also gave me the provision to drill more holes to secure it. I could have just drilled 4 holes into the bottom of the frame rail and it would have been sufficient, but I decided that I wanted the crossmember to be a rigid part of the truck's chassis, so I decided to add material where it could be fastened to the vertical portion of the truck's chassis as well.
In order to get that accomplished, I had to mock up a motor and trans to determine where the crossmember needed to be. Luckily, Brad had an aluminum Donovan block and another buddy who owns a trans shop let me borrow an empty 700r4 case. We bolted them up, and had it set in place in about 5 minutes with no cherry picker! Once they were in place, we bolted on an old set of heads and plopped the intake on to see what angle the engine needed to be at. Once that was determined, the trans crossmember was slid into place, and I drilled the attach holes, and it was done.
A while back, a friend of mine decided that his '65 needed to be restored so he tore it down. He decided to go with a big block, so I bought his entire exhaust from him. He had just recently had it done, and it's 2.5" with Magnaflow mufflers and Sanderson blockhugger headers. I would have gone with a full-length header, but other than that, it's exactly what I would have gone with anyway, so it worked out perfect. The exhaust was cut in 4 places total to get it out of his '65, and now, I have to get it all back in place. Not as simple as it sounds. Instead of trying to weld it back together, I might just buy 4 v-band set-ups and make it where I can remove it in sections if I ever need to again.
Next step is to finish the cab mounts, the exhaust, build spacers for the motor mount stands (I used the stands and mounts from a '79 Suburban), and finalize the pinion angle.