We’re in the middle of one such “boost” at one of the plants I’m working in, and although I wake up looking forward to going to work each morning with the same exhilaration a lot of us feel after making any positive change – it also makes it difficult to get much done around the home right now. A case in point:

Today is a day off and after having coffee & breakfast with the family, I decided to take The Old GMC out for a run since it’s just been sitting for a couple of weeks. Knowing that “around the block” here is a couple of miles and half-expecting the fuel system to give me an attitude, I hop in the cab on this beautiful, sunny morning and go for a spin.

Sure enough, about half-way around the engine starts sputtering and slowing down so I spot a flat gravel clearing a little further up the road and pull well-off onto it. Having been through this drill with this truck already, I reach into the glove box, pull out a few hand tools, and remove the filter stone from the carburetor fitting.

Yep. Just as I expected – clogged. I love these things. I have a clear-cased, plastic, disposable Fram in-line before the pump, but these old stones are much finer and this one catches everything that the primary passes and subsequently plugs-up first. I’d much rather have to deal with this than having the fines flow into the carb jets. So about 5 minutes later, I’m cranking ‘er back over and heading for home.

Happy to make it back without having to phone for “the recovery crew” to come get me, I walk into the back door and see my two lovely boys sitting at the kitchen table. From over by the oven Leigh asks, “Enjoy your ride?” but before I can answer David criticizingly interjects, “Your truck doesn’t sound like Mommy says it’s supposed to“. Jack then scoffs, “Yeah. It sounds like Donald Duck laughing!” and then they were on a roll, laughing and egging each other on, prodding their old man with verbal jabs and jeers about his truck until a small and fun-filled wrestling match ensued.

Enough is enough. I’m going outside to pull, clean and coat the inside of the gas tank. I just don’t know where they get their sarcastic wit from. Must be on their mother’s side. ;-)

When Mark H. & I were originally discussing my purchasing the truck from him, he sent some pictures; one of which showed these A/C vents under the dash. I thought it was cool (in more ways than one) but really didn’t expect it to be functional after all this time. When we got to where the truck was, he let me know that he had removed the compressor from the engine at some time in the past and further investigation in the garage today has revealed that the hoses between this under-dash evaporator/blower and the expansion valve & the rest of the system had been sliced clean through.

I also found that the lines to the condenser are either broken or missing altogether, so I’ve pretty much decided that this truck won’t have A/C (at least for some time) and I am in the process of removing all of the related components from the vehicle to clean things up. It’s still cool though. The bracketry will make it that much easier to mount some other belt-drive accessory to the engine like an air compressor, or a welder, a hydraulic pump, or or a three-handled skillet lifter.

I knew when checking out the truck that the floors weren’t in the best shape, but it’s only metal. After removing the A/C, seat, gas tank, floor mat, and insulation, I could get a good look at things to see what I’d be dealing with. The next couple of pictures show the “before” and there’s a few more in the gallery if you’re so inclined.

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The rolled pieces around the shifter hole are the floor. I understand that people do what they have to do at the time to get the job done, and sometimes all you have on hand is a can opener and a hammer.

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I was only able to put a couple of hours into this today since we had other things to do as a family, but I started cutting out the rust and didn’t stop until I hit metal that was good enough to weld to. This is what I came up with before stopping for the day:

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You can see that the cab floor structure is in sound condition with only the sheetmetal itself in disrepair – really not all that bad.

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Although I have some old hood sheetmetal left over from the tractor, I thought it would be too thin. Later in the evening Brian and Buddy Jr. stopped over to check on the progress and offered-up what appears to be some thicker shelving material they had in stock (it’s all inventory, Mike), so we tossed it into the garage with the hopes of filling the holes back in tomorrow.

I never did get to the dent in the hood, but Brian also lent me his slide-hammer. And since the hood is double-walled in the front, I’ll try that route before cutting out the inner panel to attack it from the inside and then having to put the inner-side back together too – but I suspect that’s the route I’ll have to go in the end.

We’ll see

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We figured we had about an inch to spare between the width of the trailer-rails and the width of the truck for loading and we weren’t far off. Since we were using a chain-fall and come-alongs, it was more than a bit of grunt work, but since everyone was chipping-in & cutting-up it went very smoothly.

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On the way back, we stopped at a couple of places a met some good people. One guy had this little Oliver and a John Deere “M” that he was trying to sell:

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Further down the road we met Robert and Randy Gilley “Old Iron Collectors” and just chewed the fat with them for a while. They seemed like really good people, friendly and willing to share; and we found out that they run a tractor pull every year on the 3rd weekend in August. Ping me for details.

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Since Mark H. had intentions of working on the truck at some time in the future when he parked it years ago, he said that he killed the engine by pouring ATF down the carb to try to keep the cylinders free. So after we got back home and unloaded the truck, we just had to give it a shot to see if it was free, let alone see if it would actually run. Mike suggested pulling the coil wire off and just cranking it over with the starter until we developed some oil pressure, so we threw a battery in it.

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Sure enough and much to my pleasure, after some cranking the oil pressure started to climb right up so we she ‘er back down and got ready to try to start it… No good. After some regular fiddling we found that we had no spark, so Mark A. went at it with a test light and discovered in short order that the wire from the points to the coil (out the back of the distributor and completely out of sight) had been chewed apart by some varmint to the extent that a good couple of inches of the wire were missing.

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All it took to get it running after that was to solder in a length of wire and crank it again. This time it started right up.

Later that day I took it out around the block and up the road a piece. She did quite well for not having been run in God-knows-how-many-years, but stuttered some going up the hills out here with the vacuum gauge dancing around, so I turned around and brought ‘er back to replace the vacuum hose (singular) and then went off on some other tangents like degreasing the engine, popping out a few of the bigger dents, and getting a good plan of attack for the one in the hood.

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All in all, it was one of the most fun-filled, relaxing days I’ve had it quite some time.
You just don’t make old friends.