Getting ready to do a full resto on my '78 GMC,I have nearly everything in boxes and a brand new set of unicrons,gueniune NOS GM front fenders and inner fenderwells not that china-crap.
This truck also has a T-400 with heavy clutches and a shift kit,the 454 has headers and an edelbrock intake with a mild cam,she's got 4:56 gears so no gas miser. lol
My daily is a '99 Silverado 1500 4X4 with a 5.3 4l60e and 4:10s. It's a nice comfy rig for a hillbilly biker living in the sticks and commuting to the city for work.

 

Yeah! A 2-truck guy! Wow! My best friend from the mountains of North Carolina used to go back packing with me, and we always packed in a filet and potato in foil and ear of corn each for the first night. After that, trail mix city. Anyway, after we ate steak and potato and corn, and laid back on the hillside to look at the stars, Don would always say, in his southern drawl, "Son, some people just know how to live." Clearly, given your brand of ride, and their state of affairs, you do. Oh, by the way, just visited Ricky, and checked out the repair to clearance the HEI cap. Look at this:


The area above the mustache is dished in about an inch or slightly more, but when you stand in front of the car, you would swear that is the way the firewall was made. No issue now with breaking HEI caps out in the middle of nowhere. Thank you very much for the heads-up. Although they all said it was obvious, as the pics I placed above were taken with sub-frame bolts in, so positioning is accurate, and it was obviously ungood.

 

Wow... these guys do good work. Wish I had them do the welding on mine. Not 100% happy with there work, but better than if I did it myself. Was looking back at the picks of the the replacement of Ricky's undercarriage. That's a lot of work and you've gone a long way. Ricky is in good hands.

 

Looks great and you're most welcome.
Actually I'm a 3 truck guy ha ha.
The '72 on the trailer my dad bought new when I was in high school,I got it from him in '88 a couple years before he passed on and drove it for 10 years.
At almost 200K miles the throwout bearing went bad and it was having some rust issues so I took it to central Oregon and put it in a barn at my folks place.
It sat there from 1998 until summer 2021.
My mom passed on and my sister and I sold the home so I had to go down and get it last summer.
It's under a tarp now but in the spring I'm having a shop built and it will go inside with the '78,once the '78 is done I'll get started on the '72 and hope to have it done sometime around my retirement.
The '72 is all original,it needs a complete restoration but it's a numbers matching original truck and never been rebuilt ,350 4 speed/205 t-case/ 4:10 gears.

 

I find myself often quoting Bob Dylan, first, because I came up in his time, and second because I am jazzed that a dude from my side of life can win a Nobel Prize in Literature as a reward for really understanding how the world works. And so, relative to Ricky Camaro, Bob D said "He not busy bein' born is busy dyin'"
So the birth continues, and in some ways, the plot sickens, or at least thickens. Long ago, we decided to install frame extensions due to the increase in torque and the generic strangeness of the marriage of sub-frame to uni-body construction. All of our understanding was that the extensions would be bolt-ons, attaching to the rear bolts of the subframe and the front of the rear spring mounts. Imagine our surprise when they were unboxed last week and they are weld-on units, whose installation process is NOT simple. When all the dust settles, they are welded to the frame in front of the rear spring, welded to the new pan for a distance, and once the sub-frame rejoins the body, will be welded to it. At that point, Ricky will have a frame for his big block animal power source. Needless to say, this stalled the paint job, which is now slated for this coming week. Here are a couple pics of the installed frame extensions:



The things we do to have fun...
Anyway, we are ready for paint, doors and front fenders on, looking very good:

 

So how does that work... are the extensions then welded to the subframe making a solid continuous frame? I understand the purpose of doing this, but I need a little education on the dynamics. How does that work with the flexing of the body bushing at the front and the solid connection at the back? Where is there flex in the frame between the front a back?

 

Basically it connects the front and rear subframes making it similar to a full frame car,what it does is limit flex.
Too much power to a unibody car can ruin the body.
I have subframe connectors on my '01 SS but it's a bolt on set.

 

So, let's go to the source: https://www.detroitspeed.com/67-69-c...irebird-010101 and also find install instructions at https://www.detroitspeed.com/img/pro...Connectors.pdf for what they call "Subframe Connectors". Having made my living for most of my employment years in the world of digital electronics, I really like their part number: 010101. What we used to call "nones and ones", the only two numbers in binary math that computers speak. So, yes, the Subframe Connector is welded to the new subframe as well as the rear frame in front of the rear spring and so effectively, Ricky will have a complete integral frame like cars of yesteryear, distributing stress from the big block to prevent the driver-side body from trying to move forward or back relative to the passenger-side body. The difference I see here from the bolt-on equivalent is the fact that the Connector is also welded to the floor pan as an additional point of rigidity. All of this (weld-installed units) is news to me, (as I thought we were adding bolt-ons) but I am not unhappy. And as always, Jerry's welds tell of "years of practice". I feel like an Allstate commercial...

 

Wow, a '72 that's original. Last year of a CLASSIC body style! I'm envious. So, I see you're building a shop. When I lived up the road from you, I built a 32' X 42' pole-girt shop and the girts were 2X6's spaced 2 feet apart vertically, in horizontal bands. Once the metal was on the outside of them, I capped each girt with a 2X4 nailed to the top of the girt and spanning from 6X6 timber to the next. This created a horizontal space that I could stuff with conventional fiberglass insulation, then cover with vapor barrier, and finally, after running an absurd amount of12-2 w/ground romex to an equally absurd number of outlets, half work-bench height, half floor level, I covered the entire interior with sheet-rock and heated the shop with a 120,000 BTU propane unit heater hung in the air at one end. All powered by a separate 200-amp electrical panel. A Boy's Toyhouse, indeed.. Along with 3 man-doors, I had two vehicle doors across from each other at one end, so I could drive through if needed. I paid a bit extra for tracks that hugged the ceiling, so when the vehicle doors were open, they didn't stick out into the room. That's where Ricky Camaro lived for many years. I was smarter with this shop, which was my third, and stopped vertically when it was 10' to the eaves. Easier to heat then my previous 16 footers. Plus, again feeling smarter from previous shop builds, I added 2' overhangs on all four sides. I really truly miss my shop. It would have been a great place to restore a '72 Chevy pickup truck!

 

Well I'll be having one built,no time to do it myself but yeah.
Looking at a 24'X40' with three garage doors but not sure I can do that where I want ,may not have enough setback from the county road as I think they want 50'.
That's just stupid as at 40' it would still be 20' inside my fence line and the county road is a narrow winding dead end road,doesn't even have any fogline stripes.
If I can't do that where I want I'll have to get another driveway punched in on the lower part of my property (5 1/2 acres),if that's the case I'll probably go a little bigger.
It would get expensive,clearing a site and building a road and getting power to it so I hope I don't have to go that route.
The '72 is indeed all original,it's a GMC 2500 4X4 with a 350 4 speed/205 t-case and 4:10 gears.
Back in '84 when it was still dad's and he came up for a visit from central oregon,I got the truck 4 years later.