1998 C1500 Street Truck in the making.

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So, ive always loved working on vehicles. however, its always been of the 4x4 genre. my friends and i used to bog and it seemed like we told ourselves how much we liked it, but we was always complaining, and having bad times. i loved creating the vehicle but hated taking it out just for it to get dirty and broken and then quickly, i lost interest in them. although id still like to get back into that, im taking a turn and building a street truck. this is my 1998 C1500 that you have probably seen if you ever check out the introduction area. i picked it up about 3 years ago and this is the first vehicle i have ever had this long. i absolutely love it and its an awesome vehicle. this is also my first chevy, lol. well, i picked it up in west virginia for $2500. it had just over 300k miles on it when i got it, and right now its at about 325k (i think). i had to change the gauge cluster out, so right now my truck says 150k, but thats wrong. anyways, here it is.

all thats done to the exterior at this point is the wheels. it had nasty looking chipped paint and i couldnt deal with that. i sanded them all down and painted them black. it actually made the truck look so much better, but i dont have any pics of before.

you can also see in that picture that the drivers side mirror has some paint spray on it. i didnt realize how much i hated this till i fixed it. ill post a pic later on of it redone.

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when i was still living in WV, i hit a deer doing about 75mph. i had to replace all the lights, the grill, the core support, radiator, air conditioning condensor, and the water pump. when i got the grill, i wasn't aware it didn't come with a badge. anyways, i ended up finding a black one on ebay and snagged it up. its simple, but i think it really stands out. also, i dont have the hood adjusted correctly. i need to work on that, but it just hasnt been a priority as of late.

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i also got the windows tinted to 5%. ive only been pulled over for it once. yea, i know its illegal, but it looks sick.

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obviously, i couldn't deal with that stock radio. within a month i had put a new deck in. had to be able to pick up pandora on my phone, lol. my dash is disgusting there... since then, i have also taken the stock cd player out, and replaced it with the aftermarket slot? idk what its called, it just a little hole that i can put junk in...

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when i got it, i was driving about 40 miles on way to work. i noticed that when i would get to work, my back was killing me. i got to looking and noticed that one of the braces on the bucket seat was bent just a little bit, and caused me to sit a little crooked. anyways, i always prefered a bucket seat, so when i found this for $35, i really couldn't pass it up. no, it doesn't match, but it gets the job done. really hoping that i can find a nice set of buckets to go in here later on down the road.

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alright, so i know im going to catch a lot of flack for this, but whatever, i dont really care. i decided that i want this to be flat black, all the way around. the wheels will eventualy be 18" chrome, and ill have a flat black roll pan instead of that huge bumper thats on there now. anyways, im doing the body work a little at a time. i know the correct way would be to do all the bondo and sanding as i go, but....no. this is how im doing it, and its working, so if you dont like it, please keep it to yourself. oh, and i also have a LED 3rd tail light, and smoked out tails in the bed.

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well since my last post, a friend of mine (Heavychevy83) and i pulled the front clip apart and got looking at it. the core support is bent up pretty bad and in all around rough shape. after seeing that, we put it back together the way it was, and decided i needed a new front clip. remarkably, after talking about that, he told me he had a friend that had a truck sitting in his front yard that needed to go. he got a hold of him, and about a week later, we drive it home and start tearing it apart.

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so as soon as we got it back to his place, we tore into it. his friend had a pretty sick deck unit installed, but requested that he gets that back. with the price we paid for the truck, it really wasnt a big deal. soon as i pulled the deck out, this is what we found...

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it was quite disturbing, but we found about 4 more nests like this in the cab. Heavychevys daughter was helping us, which was adorable and awesome, and while she was in the cab she kept mentioning she was hearing "scratching" behind the dash. i think she was just being a little dramatic, but idk, lol. anyways, she helped take the rear view mirror off and other stuff, but it was great having her around helping, i really cant wait till my daughter is old enough to help me out. this is heavychevy and his daughter working on the mirror.

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we went in half and half on this truck. he needed stuff, and i needed stuff, so it worked out and luckily we didnt need the same stuff. after about 4 hours, we was about ready to pull the motor.

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finally got it pulled and what an amazing surprise!

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after we started inspecting the motor, heavychevy found a tag right behind the starter with the Jasper logo on it. upon further investigation, we found out this was a re manufactured jasper crate engine. since were selling the engine and tranny, this was awesome news. so, thats about it for yesterday. i got some trim pieces that im going to paint up and hopefully ill have my new front clip installed on my truck, within a week or so. this truck sat for awhile, so there is a lot of surface rust all over. im going to sandblast the core support and paint it before it goes in.

 

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so i took about a week off. i wasn't necessarily getting burned out, but i just needed some time away from it. i didn't wanna get to the point that i wanted it done so bad that id get in a hurry and mess up on the body work, so i just took a breather. pretty much decided that since it was so nice out today, id jump back into it. just taking my time, and get done what i could. i am not in a hurry to get this done. at this point, im wanting to take it for a cruise next fall, so that should give me pleanty of time to get it the way i want. if i get done before then, sweet, but if not oh well. ok, so on with the build. i started by removing the rest of the trim today. ive been dreading that the worst, so i figure lets get it going. all the chrome trim came off easy, just as i expected, and the rubber trim wasnt bad either. however, the adhesive that they use to hold that stuff on was a different story.

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i started on the cab corner, and the 3rd door. i sanded for about an hour and got it pretty good, but that adhesive is a nightmare!

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i got some more spots fixed higher up on the 3rd door and some on the passenger door as well. ill get some pics of that tomorrow. im pretty happy with the progress i made today.

 

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alright guys, got a little bit more stuff to put in here! after i got all that sanded down, i went home for the day and just relaxed. i didnt feel good probably from breathing all the dust, but none the less, later that night i went back out. i ended up doing a lot more body work on the third door than i expected. i didnt take any pics of that unfourtnatly, but i do have a finished product photo.

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ive been dying to see what the matte black was gonna look like around the tinted windows, and i fell in love. im definatly keeping it this color. i had some stuff going on with the front door too, and had to put some paint on that just so that the bare metal wouldnt be out. ill hopefully finish that door later this week. however, the next project i got going on his the front clip. i pulled the core support off of the donor truck along with the trim that goes behind the bumper. the core support had a small hole about 2"x3" at the bottom of the passenger side pillar. we cleaned took our time getting all the flaky rust off and assumed we would find more holes, but we didnt.

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after we got that all done, we started sandblasting it so that we could get it clean enough to weld, and paint later.

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with it all welded up, i left my grandfathers (he has all the tools in the world i could ever imagine, so if i have an intricate job i go over there). i came home and wanted to make sure to get the core support painted, as well as all the trim that will be going behind the bumper. i already had the 2 small pieces that go under the fenders done, but i needed to finish the big piece that stretches the whole width of the truck. i thought it would have taken me longer, but it was only about a 5 minute job.

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once i got that done, i continued on to cleaning the core support up for paint, and painting it. i think it turned out damn good and almost looks new. if you look at the bottom right of this pic, you can see the patch we needed to put in the pillar.

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and here are all the pieces, waiting to go onto the truck. ill post before and after pictures when we get going on this. i cant wait to have my front clip straight again.

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so we installed the core support yesterday. i wanted everything installed perfect, so it took awhile to get it done. this is about half ways stripped down. you can see that everything was just put in there to make it work. when i hit that deer awhile back, it was all about getting it running again and i didnt care what it looked like.

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sorry about the glare, it was really bright. anyways, we got it all tore down in just a couple hours. this is about half way through the re-constructive process.

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the fenders were bend down about 2 inches in the front. in order to even get the core support under them, a good friend of mine that helped with this job, had to lift with just about all he had while i slid the core support under, after we had loosened all the bolts. after we got it in though, all the body lines and everything came back damn near perfect. the only thing that needs a little work still is the passenger side where the hood comes down. the hood is still about half an inch high on that side. here are the finished photos.

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