gstubbz's trucks

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gstubbz

Hi I'm Gavin and I have an OBSession
Joined
May 12, 2014
Messages
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Location
CA ⤖ Eureka, MT
Here's my monthly update!

In terms of life, things have been going decent enough. I have another gnarly Tinder date story that actually was totally bizarre, and my coworker told me I need to write down the entire thing while it's fresh in my memory lol

Work has been okay, and at this point I have only ever driven the c20 to work once since owning it, besides that I've been driving and abusing the 07 daily and it's been holding up. I'd like to take the c20 all the time but I'm constantly hauling trailers and take my tools home every night so they stay in the 07.

My GM 3500HD group has now crossed 1600 members, it reached 1000 I think back in late March, so that's another little accomplishment of mine! If you are interested the page is here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/3500hd/

I also picked up a door locally and installed it in my shop last weekend, I think it turned out nice and it's nice to have a tiny bit more of natural light in my shop during the day!

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Bought a Google Pixel 4 128gb, happy with the phone, nice to upgrade from my vintage iPhone 6!

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Okay, more sad news about the Army Truck. A few days ago I received this snapchat from a friend back home and I was actually a bit heartbroken and all I could say in my head repeatedly is "I'm sorry army truck!" and man all the time I wasted on that thing lol

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So CayenneCheyenne/Army Truck is now officially toast. I am actually kind of sad about it but at least I still have the lightbar and bumper from it. I learned a lot with this truck and I'm glad I was able to keep it on (and off) the road for four years. And all to think this was a $500 CL find with a bad 350 and I only bought it because it was a manual trans truck.

However I do know it's the lifecycle of a vehicle and it survived 31 years, so I can't be totally bummed over it!

But that tweaker shouldn't have spray painted the black over the green it was just fine!

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Onto the 07.

The truck really did squat and sag ass every time it had a trailer connected to it, and at work we have a huge enclosed trailer full of house cabinets that is extremely heavy. Long story short, it squatted my truck so much the first time I connected it to my truck, and unhooking the trailer when we were done was a disaster. I broke the trailer jack in the process. This caused me to spend $650 at Rockauto that same evening for new springs, so I went with a 3500 SRW pack rated at 3300lbs per side with a total of 8 leafs on each side rather than the five the truck has currently. I knew this truck sagged constantly but I wasn't irritated until that stupid enclosed trailer that I spent half an hour unhooking from.

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I installed these at my coworkers house and on the same day we swapped over the gmt800 parts onto his son's denali (parts that I traded for the c20).

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The truck pre-new leafs was 1" lower at the rear wheels than the fronts. Now at the rear tire it is 3" taller than the front so it has a serious rake!

So the other day I had to move the cabinet trailer and my truck squatted two inches. We had to use the gradall to lift the trailer on and off of my trailer hitch lol

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Anyway, I'm happy with the improvement and I won't feel so bad when the time comes that it will be tugging a 25ft gooseneck trailer. However the springs were truly shot. Truck lived 13 years toting around a big welder, air compressor, generator, tools, etc so the springs were shot. #nomoresquat

I bought another tailgate and cheap tail lights for $75, and the new tailgate is a total PITA to close but looks better. Painted the top to match the sides of the bed. The tail lights on the other hand, well they lasted two days. The left side popped out and I had to electrical tape TF out of it to stay. I have a set of cheap $45 tail lights on the way, didn't want to buy fancy tail lights since the bed is toast and I want a flatbed anyways.

Installed a compass/temp mirror I bought from @Z71Hobbs too, I'm super happy with it! Hopefully he comes across some more nice stuff that I can buy for my truck.

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Also have some white color match paint for the k2xx mirror caps and the ACDelco ignition kit for a new lock cylinder I still have to install. Maybe this weekend I'll get around to doing some stuff with this truck.

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Well the c20...

I've been going crazy painting stuff on it and had the front end looking really nice, and one day last week I hit a deer ruining the grille, radiator, and the lower chrome surround for the grille. So what a wonderful time to buy a 73/74 grille like I said this truck may get on my post from a month ago.

How it looked with the painted 76 grille:

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The new radiator showed up and installing it wasn't bad. Said it was compatible with a 76 c20 but that is not the case, its like an inch too tall so I had to modify the bracket a tiny bit, no big deal.

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I was stoked to see my new GM restoration grille and come to find out it wouldn't work. I need some additional brackets and the 75/76 have a one off external hood release handle thing so I need to find one off a 77+ or a 73-74 truck. However there is a shop in town that has a 73/74 truck sitting in a field so tomorrow after work I'm going to see if maybe the guy will sell the parts I need, so for now my $170 grille is wall art. Gas is currently $1.77 a gallon so I filled up both tanks on the c20 last night (and fortunately the pass side tank works properly!)

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My plan for this c20 is to list it for sale in a month or so that way I can have a little bit more extra cash for a down payment on the 25ft gooseneck I want. Although on the other hand here I am throwing over $300 into the thing due to a stupid deer.

It could become my keeper battle wagon truck! I like it a tiny bit.

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Gambler S10:

I decided to just send this one to the dump. I yanked the nv3500/np241 out of it and even putting this truck on it's side was a massive pain.

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Even with this S10 (yes it was a little far on the tongue), the truck still sagged like crazy and it annoyed me. When we unloaded it at the dump it was like the easiest experience ever. I put air in the tires and it rolled itself off!


Funny enough, James went to the dump one Monday morning (exactly a week after we dropped it off) before work and it was on the transfer station's gooseneck being mounted by a first gen 4runner on it's way to who knows where.

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That's it for now. Going to try getting this gooseneck at the end of June, and in that case I need to spend a day preparing the 07 for it too. I'll be excited when I can post a pic of that future trailer behind my truck!
 

gstubbz

Hi I'm Gavin and I have an OBSession
Joined
May 12, 2014
Messages
1,122
Reaction score
668
Location
CA ⤖ Eureka, MT
Time for a two month update now!

As far as the Tinder story goes, in addition to the wild one I referenced back in May, I now have an even crazier one from the last couple weeks. I do plan on sharing these, and in that case I actually am looking into creating a podcast with various guests and that's where I'll tell these stories so that will be soon. This latest one is my craziest one.

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Onto truck stuff! I've got plenty of news here.

I'll start with the sad tale of the 1976 C20. I traded this for a 2002 YZ125 that needed a few little things but runs and rides fine enough for now. I've had it a while and I've rode it up to the mailboxes twice and that's been it. The kid was disappointed to find out the truck was 2WD but I guess when I list things for sale I have to define the difference between C/K to people. I did get the 73/74 grille to work and it looked good, I liked it!

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So a month or so later I was looking at facebook on my lunch break at work to see this photo posted in the local community FB page, and was sad to see it. Here is what the comment was to what had happened: "someone took a ball bat to the windshield stole keys and stickers off license plate. Keyed f you on rear panel and keyed the doors"

Not sure what the motive was behind this but the truck had a clean windshield with no chips or cracks so that was sad to see. AFAIK the truck is still sitting in the same spot with damages, kind of sad.

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Okay so the 07.

I've done a fair amount to the truck in the last two almost three months where to begin.

One day I decided to paint the mirror caps to color match and at first I was iffy about it, however I grew to like it pretty quick. I picked up a set of clean doors from a 2000 Yukon XL and used a 3M eraser wheel to strip the door moulding off and my goodness what an amazing tool, made the job effortless! The white door handles from the Yukon immediately went on my truck. I proceeded to go around and remove all of the door badging on the truck after I finished cleaning the doors. I also bought some crappy leather seats, center console, and wrecked power doors from a 2000 Suburban with the intent to swap my truck to power windows/locks but that never happened. I put the seats and console in and ran those for a tiny bit. I did the ACDelco ignition switch too, actually really wasn't bad. The worst part was removing the tumblers to get the key code for the new tumblers.

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So more recently, I won an eBay auction on a Trailblazer SS steering wheel which is leather with perforated holes in it, which IMO feels nicer than the stock GMT800 leather wheels. It also has steering wheel controls so maybe one day I'll tackle the clock spring to make it work but for now I don't care. I picked up a set of gray leather seats from a 2003 Quadrasteer ex-cab truck for $150 and swapped those out and I like them a lot, these originally were the seats I wanted and someday I'll redo the drivers seat properly. I didn't score the console though, so I'm still using the 2000 Suburban one. I did remove the front half of the console as the tan/very dark pewter/grey interior colors look all bad mashed together. In addition that part of the console rubbed the 4wd shifter pretty bad and I didn't care enough to solve that issue, but I will whenever I find an 03+ console.

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Also newer wheels and brand new tires. I picked up these wheels off FB marketplace for $200 back in June (which has an odd role in this recent tinder story, she was who listed them for sale but I never met her, matched on tinder then she told me that she listed the wheels I bought, kind of crazy), and the tires were shot. So I ordered the same 295/70/17 Mastercraft tires and had them mounted so the truck looks better, and now I don't have to worry about tires for a bit! Best part is that they don't rub.

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And latest that I've done was finally swap the passenger door with the clean one from the Yukon. The door bushings were shot so it doesn't close perfect right now but I bought new pins/bushings and the tool to do it for both doors. I'm $200 into that alone, each door hinge thing for the passenger side was $36 a piece and there is two! The drivers side was a little cheaper but the tool to make it easier was also $50. The drivers side rocker had some rub marks from getting in and out of the truck so much so I used more color match paint and painted the whole thing and it looks much better.

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Added some truck tramp stamps too.

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Then I have more on the way. Today I have the stuff for an oil change to be delivered, new rear brake pads, and new rear door speakers on the way. The other day I went and pulled a few things off that same QS truck my seats came from, which is a cleaner rear bumper, interior grab handle, and a few other little things that I'll get after this weekend.

My next planned things for the truck is a new windshield, color matching some more stuff (grille, fenders, fix up the bed a bit, etc), lots of front end work, and then maybe I'll finally dig into performance. I've been slacking on swapping the front diff out too but I'll worry about that a lot more when it gets closer to snow season.

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Yeahhhhhhh I ended up with another S10. I don't have time to post about it right now but I'll come back in a bit and talk about that. But here's a photo of it!

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There's my updates for now, as always if you read through my entire post, thank you. I know they are long!! I also have a little story about trying to fix a 1993 K1500 RCLB 4.3/4L60 truck that was a pain and it was mainly due to a temp sensor. But I'll post about that later too.
 

gstubbz

Hi I'm Gavin and I have an OBSession
Joined
May 12, 2014
Messages
1,122
Reaction score
668
Location
CA ⤖ Eureka, MT
I try doing my best to deliver! These posts take forever to type and trace the photos down, I'm two hours into this post alone!

I did three things with the 07 this weekend, finally did my second oil change and I'm actually stoked that I never had to add oil to the truck over the course of the last 5k miles. I ordered 2x 4x6 Pyle speakers to swap into my rear doors, so now the truck has all new speakers. For the first time since my 98 I'm planning on adding a sub under the rear seat in the future. I also swapped the rear bumper from the QS truck onto mine, and I feel that the truck looks a tiny bit nicer without a smashed up bumper but the back of the truck definitely looks worse than any other angle. It's a bummer the bed is so jacked up I like clean trucks!

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The other thing I needed to do was swap the rear brake pads. I pulled the rear wheel off and come to find out the slide pins are actually a T55 bolt. Unfortunately I didn't have anything bigger than a T50 so I ordered a set of torx bits that goes up to T60. I also was able to find new bolts that replace the T55 bolt with one that has an actual 3/4" head on them to make my life easier in the future. However now I need to wait a few days for all of this stuff to show up.

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The little K1500 story.

My coworker JD's landlord has a 93 K1500 RCLB 4.3/4L60e truck that is pretty beat with 180k-ish miles. It had a huge problem with kind of running, then randomly dying, and then not running again so I was asked to come out one day to take a look at it. I looked at it quickly one time before and we discovered it was having an issue not having spark and just dumping fuel into the engine.

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We went out to mess with it at the landlord's property, and was able to get it barely running with my foot on the throttle 100% and then it died and that was it. So we ended up dragging it back to JD's house 10 miles away with a chain and then once we were on more of a main road I just used the front my my truck to push him every once in a while which was actually kind of fun. After getting back to his house I continued on my crazy tinder date story. This was a pic from that night with the tinder girl:

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I came out again like two weeks later to mess with that truck, and JD did some stuff throughout the week with it. Everything that we touched the truck needed as everything was rusty, crumbly, old, etc. New coil, module, pickup coil, plugs, wires, cap, rotor, fuel filter, tbi rebuild, oil change, and I'm sure a ton other things but the truck still was not having it and not even running. We fought it and fought it, drained all the oil out (which had a ton of gas in the crankcase too), did a compression test (each cylinder ranged from 145-155), fuel pressure test (12psi), and just about everything else you could imagine including checking timing. Turns out it was the coolant temp sensor which I had a similar problem with after doing head gaskets on a 95 350tbi truck back like 3/4 years ago with Tyler but I didn't think that was really the problem with this truck but it needed that too. Now the truck runs great and the owner is back to driving it. I guess they bought it 10 years ago and didn't do any form of maintenance to it so it finally received the love it needed!

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On my promise about posting the S10!

This S10 was also at JD's house and it was supposed to be what his youngest daughter was going to drive when she gets her drivers licence later this year but he didn't want her driving it as it wasn't 4wd and not really the safest vehicle. So we agreed on $300 for the truck.

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It's a 96 with a 2.2L four banger and a 4L60e transmission. No real options but does have a 4.10 rear axle and a green fiberglass ARE bed cover. The reason I ended up with it for $300 was because it needed to be finished being put back together, supposedly had some head work done and a new timing chain. All I had to do was check fluids, bolt the alternator back on, and put a serpentine belt on it. So I did those things... Also had the original window sticker which was super awesome, I've never had one to anything before.

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I decide to take it on a drive down to the dumpsters and back which is a 10 mile round trip and the truck was running really good at first although the transmission seemed off. I make it to the dumpsters and the truck really seems like it's starting to not run right, but oil pressure was still over 40psi and I figured I could make it home and mess with it when I got back. I make it two miles away from the dumpsters and it's apparent that it is going to blow and it's too late, the knocking has already began. At this point I just hope I can make it to my house and then it can blow up.

Well I make it exactly one mile away from the house and boom it's time came. So I had to walk back to the house, grab the 07 and the black trailer not made for cars, and go load it up and take it the mile back home. Would have loved to drag it home but there was no way I could do that by myself and there are two steep steep downhill and uphills so using the trailer made sense. Made it home and cylinder one and two blew a hole in the block.

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Also I'll throw in now that I still do not have the title to this truck. JD was supposed to get the title from his oldest daughter who moved to South Lake Tahoe, CA back in like October, but of course that's a weird family situation where the title is *supposedly* in her ex-husband's aunt/uncle's gun safe and she still has yet to get it. I trusted JD enough that I would get this title as he has been good with every other time I've bought something from him, however I'm salty about this truck. I honestly should have stopped here, but I had only had the truck like a week so I figured I would get the title very soon and putting my time into it was no big deal. This is now over a month without anything so we will see how this turns out.

I am now on the hunt for a 2.2L engine. From what I found out I needed one from either a cavalier or a 94-97 S10 as the 98+ trucks used a Vortec 2200 that was slightly different. This is late on a Friday night (June 19) and I can't find anything even remotely close to me on FB marketplace, CL, offerup, etc and I come across a guy parting out a 96 Sonoma with a 2.2 in Yakima, WA.

I get ahold of him at 10pm Friday night and he told me $200 and come yank it and that I could take pretty much anything else I wanted from the truck. Well the next night there was a birthday party I was supposed to attend, so in my crazy head I thought I could go to bed now, wake up at 3am, grab everything, drive the 8hrs to Yakima, pull the engine, and come back in time to be at their party for a tiny bit.

Well I wake up at 3am, load everything up, go into town and grab gas station food and drinks, stop by the ATM to grab cash, fill the truck up, and start my first long journey in the 07. As I leave the gas station my window was down and I started to hear this weird noise on my left rear tire so I pull over and my lug nuts were loosening up. Not sure what the deal was with that I torqued all the wheels when I put them on two nights before (June 18) but luckily I caught it at a slow speed and had all the tools in my truck to pull an engine so I was able to take care of it, but I was skeptical for the rest of the trip checking it every once in a while but didn't have problems again.

Here was the sunrise that morning like 15 minutes after my wheel fiasco. This is the Koocanusa Bridge which is the longest and tallest bridge in Montana.

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I made it to his house literally at 10:14am PST when Google Maps estimated 12pm. I made some time during that drive for sure. Here's how the Sonoma looked when I started.

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It was an all day thing to pull the engine, trans, and all the other stuff I wanted. Unfortunately the truck was a 96 and not a 97 like it was listed, and the reason I wanted it to be a 97 is HPTuners supports tuning on the 97+ S10 2.2 trucks but not the 96 so my plan originally was to swap the harness when I did the engine swap.

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The guy (Josh) had a 06 2500HD crew cab that was lifted that I thought was cool af but it's a 2wd truck.

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I make it home at 3:03am, exactly 24 hours after waking up and never did attend that party. I was beat, the last hour of my drive home was miserable. So the next day (Sunday) I slept in until 3pm and then unloaded everything. Broken GMC sonoma grille, headlights, front bumper, headlight harness, transmission, engine, engine wire harness, computer, fan shrouds, radiator, front doors, header, and the exhaust for the header is what I came home with for $200.

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Over the course of the next couple weeks I cleaned up the new engine and put all new gaskets in it (with the exception of the head gasket) and swapped the two out. The truck runs good, but the transmission still has a problem where it jumps between 3rd/4th gear constantly at 60mph which I was told is the TCC valve thing so I did order an updated one along with a new filter and gasket for the 4L60e, but I haven't done anything with it lately. If I was smart I would have just swapped in the other transmission too they both had 138k vs the 180k-ish on the S10 already. Also the new engine had a starter bolt that was broken in the block, I was fortunate enough that I could use vise grips and run it through the top, cutting it in half and continuing taking it out through the top so that was both awesome and easy!

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So there's the S10 story. I am waiting on any form of paperwork at this point before I do anything else with it. Every time I drive it I have to be ballsy so I've only put on 70ish miles in the last month driving it around here. And I have things I want to do with the truck, I really want to drive it and see what kind of MPG the little 2.2L can pull with my lead foot (anything over 20mpg is good in my book lol). I actually have been wanting a ex USFS S10 blazer instead the little SUV sounds appealing to me but I can't sell this S10 yet either. My plan is to sell it, I think it will just end up sitting.

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Also in the middle of this helped out my friend James do an A/C compressor on his girl's 2004 Yukon XL and it actually went extremely smooth, no needing to jack up the engine to do it unlike 3/4 ton trucks.

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That's it for now! Time for bed, I feel a headache coming in from looking at the computer too long this evening lol
 

gstubbz

Hi I'm Gavin and I have an OBSession
Joined
May 12, 2014
Messages
1,122
Reaction score
668
Location
CA ⤖ Eureka, MT
So many promises to post stuff later, you are a busy man lol

I try to fit everything in but some days it does seem like a lot to catch up on haha

Damn I’m finally caught up lol, pretty interesting stuff lol

210 posts is a lot! Especially when mine are a chapter just about every single post! I find it crazy to go to the beginning and see how things have changed for me over time, it's the closest thing I have to a documentary about any part of my life! Although reading and posting some of the stuff I did years ago makes me cringe nowadays.
 
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