Some details I forgot to mention about the disassembly-
I didn't take any pictures of It but I removed the lower ball joints from the control arms while they were still mounted to the frame. I rented a ball joint press kit and pickle fork kit from Advance Auto Parts for around $210. I used advance because they didn't have a limit on the rent time and they had a full refund. The other stores in town had time limits on the rental periods of 48 hours.
The toughest parts of the disassembly were the idler arm removal and the removal of the U-bolts holding on the control arm shafts. The idler arm took a rotation of my dad and I swapping hits on a pickle fork with a sledge. It finally surrendered. I ended up cutting off one of the U-bolts also to remove it.
The next big task while the primer dried was cleaning up the front crossmember and the frame rails up front. I removed the old P/S gearbox because it made a nice groan when turning and leaked profusely. I bought a re-man box from O'reilly along with some new U-bolts.
That blue bucket was empty before I started taking the gunk off...
The U-bolt replacement I feel is worth sharing, I found this thread before I started my build:
http://67-72chevytrucks.com/vboard/s...d.php?t=543800
I discovered that my u-bolts were loose during the removal and feel pretty lucky that one didn't break earlier. I replaced them with Dorman Help part #13503 as pictured. These are grade 8 replacements and are the thicker bolts made for a 73-87 truck. The man from the thread had to drill out the holes for the new bolts, but mine fit without any modification (maybe a difference between body styles?). Either way I wanted these on the truck.
At this point I wanted to preserve my clean up with some paint, so I spent some time covering everything up.