This August I was able to finally go up and visit my folks and spend some time working on the truck project again. The first order of business was removing the bed from the green truck to allow us to better see how fuel and brake lines were being routed, and setup for dual tanks.

 

 

 

 

 

We recently purchased the tail housing and output shaft for a C6 transmission that allows bolting the married transfer case directly to the transmission. It was bought sight unseen, and we were glad that the shaft is correct, and splines into the input of the transfer case.

We were able to pull out the transfer case from the orange truck as well as remove two of the cross members from it to mount things correctly in the new build. pulling out the cross members was much more time consuming than expected. Drilling out rivets is not as simple as you may imagine. They will need to be cleaned, and painted and re mounted, but for now we are going for test fittings. making sure everything lines up correctly, and mounts in the new frame right. As the truck originally had a smaller engine, a manual transmission and divorced transfer case, some drilling was required.

 

 

 

 

With the engine, transmission, adapter and transfer case in, you can see it goes from just behind the radiator, to back just short of the rear cab mounts, and is all connected as one piece. eventually things will need to come back out to be rebuilt but this allows us to measure for fuel tanks, run brake lines, setup steering and a ton of other things.

 

 

 

 

 

We had a custom built gas tank created, that will fit between the frame rails at the end of the bed. It will hold 20 gallons once done. We still need to add in the fill neck, and fuel line outputs and float. We will also be building a side tank that will hold between 20 – 22 gallons once done, and upgrading from the manual fuel tank switch to an electric solenoid switch.

 

 

 

 

 

While hard to see in this picture (try clicking it so its bigger) you can see the beginnings of new brake lines on the axle, and new brake and fuel lines in the left side frame rail. Its getting all new brake and fuel lines (as well as new or rebuilt more or less everything)