Doug, my father-in-law, and I had been wanting a truck to haul stuff to the dump and get lumber and gravel and stuff. We looked around for a while, but didn't really find anything that would work. We decided that it might be a good idea to get something that needed an engine. You can get a brand new crate motor for about $1400 and Doug is highly skilled at engine swapping, so we asked around about trucks with dead engines.

Boozhound Labs staff member Brian found us one in his hometown of Lordsburg NM so we went after it one weekend. Any excuse to drink barleywine at the High Desert Brewery in Las Cruces. Too bad we never got around to playing hackey-sack with the brewmaster - but that's a whole other story. Unfortunately the truck had about one good tire on it, including the spare. We installed a couple of the better tires out of the tire heap, filled up the differential and transmission oil and we were off.

Gearheads will be interested to know that this is a 1977 Chevrolet C20 3/4 ton 2WD pickup. The motor is a GM Goodwrench Crate 350 with no internal modifications. It has heavy duty suspension and full-floating rear axle. It has the heavy duty 4 speed manual transmission and a 14 bolt 4.10 locking rear differential for all out granny gear stump pulling. Yee Haw!

Here she is at the new Boozhound Labs Global HQ.

Although the hard work is all in front of us, why not celebrate? :)

Goofing off with a couple hundred pounds of suspended iron is probably not a good idea. Lots of potential inujry, I mean energy.

Evidence that this engine might not work so well.

Doug.

Boozhound Labs Mobile Command Center

Doug using a bit of his trademark "napalm" cleaning solution. Gasoline and liquid soap.

The Glamour shot.

Boozhounds contemplate the impeding installation.

A thing of beauty.

Another day of work and we are ready to rumble.

The reason we look so happy in these photos is because we have yet to discover that the Quadrajet carburetor we got for $50 is a peice of crap. After managing to make a trip or 2 around the block (with headers only, no mufflers - oh yeah) we left the project for a week and when we next started it up to pull it out of the driveway to turn it around the carburetor ran like complete ass and flooded the enigne with gas. I don't mean that it ran too rich, I mean that gas was literally flooding out of the carburetor all over the engine and stripping the nice orange paint on the intake! We got as far as the street and threw the wheel chocks under it for a carb replacement. We slapped the ghetto 2-barrel that was on it originally back on and it still wouldn't run. Well, it ran well enough to get back into the driveway, but that was it. So Boozhound co-conspiritor amm donated the old Holley that used to be on his 1970 Bronco (the Urban Terror Mobile) and that seemed to make it a little happier. We had to use a squarebore to spreadbore adapter, but it seemed to go together pretty well. We also used a small phenolic spacer under the carburetor because amm had mentioned some trouble with fuel percolation.

The Holley finally got the beast going, but it was still not quite running right and the throttle linkage didn't go together, so we let it run in a while with manual throttle tweaking and then took off the distributor for an overhaul.

We had a hell of a time getting the (mostly) new distributor in it. We ended up having to move all the plugs forward one post on the distributor to get number 1 to line up correctly. Weird, but it runs great. We spent a fair amount of time setting the float and the idle mixture on the Holley, but now it runs just fine. No smoke, no weirdness and it pulls like crazy.

There was so much dirt in the floor of the cab I am suprized nothing was growing in there (like there was in the bed). Just as you would expect in a ranch truck, there was fine Lordsburg dust covering every inch, .30-06 shells in the heater ventes, and several old rolls of toilet paper under the seat :)

The maintenance policy on this truck seems to have been "gas and sometimes oil". Grease seemed to be a luxury the poor truck didn't deserve. This is a closeup of the passenger side lower a-arm we replaced. The bushing had worn completely through and the arm itself had worn into a nice oval shape.

Q: What happens when you have loose bumper bolts for 20 years?
A: See photo.

Nice new shiny grade 8 bolts. Notice the feeble attempt to weld the bumper to the frame. I am betting the jumper cables and coathanger stick welding technique was used.

At the risk of confusing things, I am going to talk about carburetors some more. I really should have formatted this as a timeline because it really is an ongoing process. Maybe next time. Anyway, the Holley continued to leak and not act right. It would sneeze on acceleration as if the accelerator pump was not working correctly despite the fact that we had replaced it and replaced all the gaskets. I think Holleys take a bit more finesse than we have at our collective disposal.

So out of the blue we were offered a near new Edelbrock 750cfm for $25. 750 is way too big but we bought it anyway with the intention of trading it for exhaust work. Eventually it made its way onto the engine and after some frustration, fouled plugs, a dead battery from unsuccessfully cranking it to clear the plugs, a new accelerator pump, new jets and rods, and a full cleaning to unclog all the little bitty passages... It runs great. I know I keep saying "it runs great" and most of the time this is meant in a relative sense meaning "better than it did before we fixed the latest problem", but this time I think I really do mean great - so far at least :)

With the truck in some sort of running order, no immediate problems to fix, I decided to build an under-the-bumper spare tire carrier to get the spare out of the bed. Unistrut is a truly wonderful thing.

The spare tire carrier is basically 2 lengths of unistrut bolted between the frame rails to existing holes (using slightly rare 3/8" unistrut bolts) and 2 pieces of 1/2" thread-all. One length of strut holds the tire via the thread-all and the other length simply allows the side of the tire to rest against something. The other side of the tire rests against the rear frame brace. Note the cotter pins (lynch pins? what are those really called?) that will keep the tire from falling completely off if the bolts work thier way loose, as I suspect they might.

Oh yeah - we figured out the problem with the distributor being one plug off. The distributor shaft has a helical gear on it, and the oil pump shaft has a slot in it. We were under the impression that because of the slot we could only have the distributor on correctly or 180 degrees out. After talking to some savvy mechanics, we discovered that you simply line the distributor rotor up with plug 1, drop the shaft into the helical gear and turn the engine with a wrench on the crank bolt until the distributor drops into the slot. This way you can make any plug on the distributor cap number 1, but the convention is for the drivers-side frontmost plug to be number 1. This lets the plug wires lay as neatly as possible.

Stay tuned...