Howdy Guys!
I've been dormant for a while on the truck forums, spend most of my time over on the 67-72 side, where I still have two projects that are currently on hold (and have been for quite some time.....life happens lol)...but over the weekend we picked up this '81 C10 for my 12 year old stepson to have as his first ride in about 3 years! I figured that would give us enough time to build it, with him learning about everything all along the way. He's just recently began to show interest in mechanics & cars in general, so it seemed like the perfect time to kick this off, and give him an end result that he can be proud to drive when he gets his license, all while learning the ins and outs of everything along the way. This particular truck comes to him as a hand me down from grandpa, and was the truck his uncle drove throughout high school (which probably makes you just as surprised as me as to how straight the body still is). His uncle didn't have any interest in keeping it, so it was passed down to him for this project!
Truck is an '81 C10 Long bed, originally a diesel equipped truck, but swapped over to gas with a standard issue 350 sometime in its life. Body seems to be in surprisingly good shape with minimal rust and just a few dings here and there. It was painted at some point along the line, but I've only been able to find minimal signs/sounds of body filler in the passenger fender. It is in pretty rough shape mechanically, which really makes it perfect for a complete work over, and for my stepson to have the opportunity to go through pretty much every part of what makes a truck work. Standard "this doesn't work" stuff and signs of hacked up leftovers from the diesel to gas swap are left over, but nothing we can't handle and get cleaned up for him. It runs and drives at the moment, we just had to put a starter and battery in it to get it home, but the engine has oil pressure issues, steering is sloppy, brakes aren't awesome, it's the exact sloppy, noisy, squeaky 40 year old truck you'd expect it to be, so we have work to do, and then some!
I've been discussing and coaching him for the last couple days about making a plan for what he wants to do, and what he wants the end result to be. Sounds like we're going to get pretty serious about it, which is really what I was hoping for. I think a short bed conversion, paint job, interior and entire chassis re-build are going to happen. Going to try and keep it on somewhat of a budget of course, I'm hoping to keep the entire project under $10k....but I've never been good at keeping to a budget on a build of anything really...so we'll see how that goes. It's not going to be a show truck, track ready, or stupid fast, just a nice clean daily driver that he can be proud of and enjoy, maybe pass down to his kids someday.
I wanted to start this thread for anyone interested to follow along, and to have something both he and I can go back to look at over time. This won't be a fast build that we'll be working on every day or anything, I fully plan for it to take the full 3 years to complete, but I'll keep the thread updated as much as we work on it, and hopefully keep it interesting to follow along. Questions and comments are always welcome along the way, this is my first square body endeavor, so I'll have to learn the ins and outs of them as we go along too, starting with the most daunting task of the project I think....the short bed conversion. I'm going to browse the forum and interwebs for details on the process specific to these trucks, but I'll gladly take advice and info from anyone who's done the swap before!