Hey Gary, great job on the door/kick panels. If I'd seen a panel look that bad at the JY I'd have passed it over, so it goes to show what can be salvaged. For a couple more Hamilton's you could SEM coat it, but that might be a good project for the NO too - now that you've already done all the cleaning.

Your engine swap will be very informative to watch, so I'm looking forward to it. Course I don't have to get my fingers dirty...


Luke

 

Totally agree. The panels do look rather faded though, shouldn't they be more tan, than off-white?
Of course, the SEM coat prolly wouldn't stick too well, with all the armor all on them.....

 

I didn't AA the kick panels as you don't usually touch them with your hands. But you do touch the door panels, and they are/weren't nice to touch given the dirty, mealy, awful look and feel. So, I put AA on to give them a smooth, clean feel and it worked. But, the SEM cleaner should take the AA off nicely.

And, I do think they originally had more tan or brown to them. But, white would be preferable to what they were.

 

What color are they on the backside? That's a pretty good indicator what color they should be on the frontside......

 

Just an engine swap? Are you sure you don't want to do an entire tear-down?


I have a .060/.030 block and pistons/rods sitting here that would love to make either of those trucks scream down the road. Can you say 408?

 

I just need to find a nice set of .030/.040 shallow dish pistons for a 460, I have a set of TRW L2404F ones that are the large dish. They're great if you have a set of early heads.

 

They are lighter than I expected them to be on the back side. I'll get a shot of one next time it is off.

I'm hoping to skip that step, thank you very much. Rusty steps out with quite some authority now, so it doesn't look like I'll need to do that. You'd better keep that stuff 'cause you are going to do a "build" one of these days and write an "8 page micro-analysis" thereof to boot.

 

Ehh, I'll probably be going with the .030 pistons, so this .060 stuff is worthless to me. About the only stuff that is worth something to me are the heads, the exhaust manifolds, the oil pan, the bracketry, and the engine/transmission divider plate. I don't know what I'm gonna do with the rest of everything else.

 

Well, I thought I had a brilliant idea, but it may not work out. Anyway, I've been keeping a log of things I've done to Rusty, mostly for my edification but somewhat so others could see what might be involved when you buy a pig-in-a-poke. And, it might help when I sell Rusty since the potential NO could see what's been done.

I've been keeping the log in Evernote, which is a freeware app I have running on this Winders machine in the shop, my Macbook in the house, and my iPhone. Evernote keeps things sync'ed in the background, so I can update any of my notes from any machine and not have to worry about version control. So, the idea was to "print" the log to a jpg on a periodic basis and put the new version in the opening post in this thread by editing. But, I've just looked and don't have the ability to edit my own post - unless that one was created by Chris by pasting another post in?

So, maybe that isn't going to work if I can't edit the initial post. But, you can see the thinking, that in the future someone could find this thread and see from the first post what all has been done w/o reading the whole 8-page micro-analysis. And, to show y'all what that would look like I've attached the latest version to this post. Things aren't in quite the chronological order they were done, but the last few were done today: I did swap out the rods (alright, already!) to the first step richer than stock 1406 jetting. And I installed the jack, handle, and lug wrench today.

So, what do you think of the idea of keeping track up front on a thread of what's been done? And, maybe what will be done, as I have some thoughts about that as well?

 

I like the idea of posting the log periodically. I dislike the idea of posting it in the 1st post.
I have an ongoing thread in the 73/79 section concerning the stuff I have done on dad's 74, and I do occasionally re-read it from the start, I try to avoid editing any of the early posts, aside from speeling errors, just to keep it all intact. I call it "timeline", like the faceplant "update" that everyone seems to hate.......

 

snicker,snicker

 

This was discussed fairly recently amongst the mods & admins, IIRC the decision was to set the time limit for editing posts to something like 30 days.

 

Was that an accident, or did I purposely include a "speeling" error? No one else will ever know for sure.......

I will say this much, a good portion of the mispelled werds I use, are intentional.

 

Ok, I can handle posting the list periodically. And, not being able to edit something after 30 days is reasonable. So, maybe that's the period for posting the update - one month.

As for an update on how Rusty drives with the new metering rods, I think it is a bit more responsive. And, maybe the touch of cold-bloodedness it had is gone. Again, I think. I've only driven it about 10 miles, all of which was around town, so this is all very subjective.

We are going to visit Dad tomorrow, but not taking Rusty. The high is supposed to be close to 90 and it will be windy. Without working A/C, that's not something my wife wants to tackle, so we'll take one of the DD's and travel in comfort. It is amazing how much easier that makes the trip.

 

Rusty's transformation started today. After what seems like years to me of working out the details, I finally decided I am close enough to having all the answers that I can get started.

If you saw the to-do list in Dad's Truck Build you know that the plan is to pull the transfer case, transmission, engine, radiator, exhaust system, and steering column off of Rusty to transplant to Dad's truck. Toward that end I got the drive shafts out, the t-case out, and am ready to pull the tranny. In fact, I've already pulled the shift lever, which isn't too bad if you remember how to do it on the NP435.

One thing I forgot to put on the to-do list is to patch the floor where the shift lever hole is and to swap carpet between Rusty and Brownie, the parts truck. Brownie's carpet isn't great, but it is better than Rusty's - and it doesn't have a big hole in it for a shift lever. In fact, it doesn't have a hole in it for the transfer case lever, so I will have to cut that. And, since Rusty will have Dad's C6 he won't need a hole for the shift lever.

So, tomorrow the tranny will come out and I'll start working on getting the engine out, which means I'll pull the grill, radiator, etc. Probably won't get the engine out until Saturday as Thursday is a run to T-Town, hopefully taking the t-case to Bruno's friend James (got that, Bruno? Is noon good?)