[Northwest Outlaw]

February 11th Update: Transmission tunnel repair time.
At some point in the truck's life, a blind 5 year old with a chainsaw tried to open up a place in the trans tunnel for a shifter. Needless to say, that workmanship was less than sub-par and needed to be addressed, aesthetically and for the fact that i'm not Fred Flintstone and don't need to put my feet through the floor! Once again "that buddy", Hotrod Erik, came down to help me fix the problem. We borrowed my neighbor's welder, cut out the hacked up mangled mess and replaced it. Hotrod Erik's previous life as a fabricator/metal worker came in quite handy as he recreated the step flange to match the cab floor's shape perfectly. After tacking it in he let me handle filling the seams around the patch panel. I haven't welded in years, and even back then it was minimal and well supervised by smarter people. I'm please with the result though.
Finding a high hump trans tunnel isn't the easiest, or cheapest, thing to do so i figured that I'd make my own. The truck is no where near a restoration project and i like the idea of putting my own touches on her. Using what we believe was part of an old car's roof, I traced out the template Erik made and cut, bent, trimmed, drilled, bent, re-bent, trimmed, cut and massaged the tunnel replacement into place. I wanted to retain the ability to access the top of the transmission/shift-linkage and made the new tunnel to fit and bolt into the same place as a stock tunnel would. The large radius just happened to be a match to the driveshaft i had just got back and the smaller curve was made with a pipe from an old chainlink fence gate. Who says you need the "right tools" to get a job done!
With this work done and a new driveshaft on hand there is very little standing in the way of driving...