I've decided for now to keep pressing on and at least fire this thing up before I go to extremes and tear the motor back out. Thanks everyone for the feedback. With that, I'm back to knocking things off the list. First up is correcting the rear pinion angle. I gave the details in my previous post on how I arrived at needing a 4 degree adjustment. This was easy enough with some 4 degree shims from Speedway. I realized that with these I will also gain another 1/4" of drop. Not much, but when you consider how low my truck is already it all starts to add up. When I dropped the truck back on the ground I noticed how low everything was hanging and feared I was way below the dreaded scrub line. The technical definition of scrub line is an imaginary line from the contact patch of one tire to the opposite rim (the flat tire). This is the blue line below and I am juuust barely in the good. Now, if both rear tires go flat (red line) then I am royally screwed but I may have much greater issues if that's the case.
Before I let the truck down on the ground, I threw some shims on the front upper control arms because I had a ton of negative camber with the 3" drop springs. Like, 9 degrees worth. I'm not opposed to camber, my R32 is running 5 degrees in the rear (Camber Gang); however, on my truck I want it to be close to stock alignment specs. I don't like the look of camber on the front of these trucks. Anyway, in doing this I realized that I had an oversight when I notched my upper arm for my steering shaft. I placed the notch BEFORE I added the shims. If you've ever aligned the front of a dropped truck you know you need a healthy stack of shims to get it back in alignment. Now, my notch is shifted compared to my steering column. I ran it through it's range of motion and it is close, very close. I may need to address this in the future.
Next, it was time to roll the truck out of the way and work on something I've been putting off for a while: prepping parts for paint. That's right, paint. I don't know exactly why the patina outside and clean interior/engine is really a thing, but I like that style as well. So, I had to do something about my exhaust and core support. For the exhaust I tried something that ended up looking really good. This is just mild steel pipe so it rusts pretty quickly, even after touching it with greasy hands. I decided to scuff it all up and give it a brushed look and then hit it with some high heat flat clear. The final result is plenty good enough for me.
For the core support, I was originally going to just leave it but when you get some natural light on it you start to notice how terrible it looked. Especially with the open grill on a GMC, this had to be addressed. With inspiration from KyleSeal and his recently completed core support, I decided it was time to tackle mine as well. I spent about two hours hitting it with a wire wheel and then sand paper. After that it was a quick bath and then set outside to bake in the sun. I used Krylon Fusion matte black and I really like this spraypaint. My old go-to paint was Rustoleum but that stuff takes an eternity to dry. The Krylon dries much quicker and looks better.
I have an aluminum radiator on the way and now I'm trying to decide if I should paint it black so the whole core support area looks uniform behind the grill. That's something I can figure out once I start test fitting the radiator.