Hey everyone,
It's Josiah from Coybilt, Inc. It has been a while and I figured I would post what we are up to these days.
After moving to our new location in Modesto, CA, a few years ago, the shop has become a busy hive of activity with multiple builds. One of the first projects for the new shop is "Just a harmless C10". The truck started life as a 1969 C10 short-bed pick up, originally built at the Fremont, CA, plant. The truck has lived in Northern CA its entire life and is currently owned by our loyal customer Matt W. The funny thing is he used to manage shipping and receiving 10 years ago in the very same plant the truck was built in 50 years ago. Talk about a small world! The truck came to us looking decent for a driver, but upon closer inspection, it was obvious that it had some issues: body filler cracks, HUGE door gaps, cracked chassis from an improperly done C notch, dated drivetrain, etc.
The original plan was to ditch almost everything on the truck except the body and some misc parts. First priority was to blast the truck in order to see what we were dealing with. It was immediately found that this old girl had been rode hard and put away wet. The truck had been skim coated in a 1/4 layer of bondo, the bed was rendered useless, the floor was rotted by the rockers, the floor drawing was rotted away, the kick panels were wasted, the tail gate had a filler panel layer over the original Chevrolet letters to make it flat then filled with bondo, the hood looked like a relief map and the fenders looked like they had been shot with bird shot. All in all we kept the cab, doors and misc parts. Talk about a bad day at the blasters.
There is hope in this story though. Matt and I knew this may be the outcome and planned for it. This is when things got really going. A plan was made to use some good parts from trusted vendors. It was decided a GM performance parts 525HP LS3/ 4l85e was needed for power, Budnik kinife 20x10 front and 20x13 rear wheels were needed, a chassis from our buddies Roger and Blake at Speedtech Inc. We then contacted our buddies at Currie enterprises for a stout Ford 9 inch and to keep this combo cool, Mr.Ron Davis of Ron Davis racing products supplied us with a beautiful aluminum radiator/dual fan combo .Then a call was placed to to Mike Grey over at AMD sheetmetal for all the replacement panels that were needed. We also called up Andy over at Hilborn for a induction setup that would make tails wag when the hood was up. I got a call from John over at Classic Instruments who learned of the project and he supplied us with a custom set of one off gauges and low and behold John mentioned the project to Rick of Vintage and we had an AC plus a front runner accessory drive system. It really started to happen in a hurry at this point. I would like to Thank the following for there support: Chris at ARP for hardware for the entire truck, Doug at WILWOOD for front and rear brakes, Brain at CURRIE enterprises, Andy at HILBORN EFI, Jack at Dublin Ca chevrolet, Ron Davis of RON DAVIS RACING PRODUCTS, John McLeod of CLASSIC INSTRUMENTS, AMD sheet metal,Rick Love of VINTAGE AIR, Jason at Budnik wheels, Tavis highlander of TAVIS HIGHLANDER CONCEPTS, Darr and John over at AEROMOTIVe, Audre of MAR-K PRODUCTS and MATT W. for letting us build his dream truck.
The truck body was brought back to the shop after blasting. I assembled my frame table, leveled it and threw the speed tech chassis on top of it. The chassis was then leveled and semi assembled. The plan was decided to repair the cab first before installing it on the frame. The floor, rockers, kickpanels and one cab corner were replaced. The next step was to install the cab on the chassis and assemble the bed to determine how much the bed floor needed to be raised. The bed was higher than the cab by 5 1/2 inches. It was determine the bed floor needed to be raised 5 1/2 inches, then the bed was narrowed 13/16 of an inch to make the bed flush with the cab. The rear cab door jamb was then cut and moved inward 1/8 inch per side to take some of the curve out of the cab. This promoted a flatter appearance when you look down the side of the truck. If you look down the side of these trucks it is easy to see where the fender, door, cab bed start and stop.
Raising the bed was a time consuming job as narrowing it turned into a bigger project than initially planned. Now we are modifying the tail gate in order to use a 99-07 GM truck hinges and latches. I did not like the original home door style latch assemblies or sloppy hinges.
We hope you follow along with us for this ride, as we build this harmless old Chevy pick up. You can follow this build by adding us on Instagram and Facebook. I will be posting things on here as well.
https://www.instagram.com/coybilt/?hl=en
https://www.facebook.com/pages/categ...8189171562868/
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Just a harmless C10
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