[Another 72]

Thanks, Jeff. My build isn't going to be anywhere near as detailed as yours, not yet anyway.

The first thing I did with my Blazer was lose the crappy, homemade half-top and sheet metal wall behind the front seats. Now I wish I would have kept the front part of the half-top - I saw a thread on here recently where someone used the front of the top to attach soft top snaps without drilling the windshield frame. It looked a little odd but was probably great at keeping out leaks and precluding a PITA soft top/hard top transition.

Before I ditched the half-top, I located a usable fiberglass top in southern Pennsylvania - it's a double-wall so it's a bit heavier than I the single-wall was on the Blazer I had in the 90s. Then again, I was 22 years old back then.

I didn't trust the bottom wall of the top to hold the top down if I ever got the Blazer up to speed with the windows down, so I drilled holes in two pieces of 1/8" thick, 3/4" wide, 3-ft long steel on each side with 3/8" nuts, bolts, and oversized washers underneath (grade-5 or maybe grade-8).

On another note, the bedside holes didn't line up properly, leading me to think my truck originally had a single-wall top. Then again, I may have read somewhere that trucks assembled at different plants might not have had the holes in the same location, but this seems unlikely as the original hardware (heavy captive rectangle nuts) was more or less permanently attached. I'm sure someone else here knows way more about that.