Apparently I took some time off. I'm not sure what happened, I guess that I just got so danged slow that I was embarrassed to post how little progress I made. Did you ever have a task that you thought would take a couple of hours that ended up taking days? That is what happened with cleaning and painting brackets. Honestly I'm ashamed that this stupid, pointless task took so long. Keep in mind this truck will be a working ranch truck, there are no plans for a flawless body and paint job. Why I spent so much time cleaning and painting what hardly anyone will ever see just reinforces my suspicion that "the boy just ain't right."
Enough self analysis, now on to the little bit of progress: when I last posted I had just installed the repainted intake and valve covers. Here are a few pics to catch up including a before and after and one with the carb and air cleaner back on. An interesting note (with no photo documentation) when I bought the 89 it had a new Edelbrock performer carb. The truck still had the choke knob on the dash so I assumed that he had bought the manual choke version. Along the way I was frustrated that there was no fast idle with the choke on but I assumed bad gas problems from sitting around. When I dug down to the carb it turned out that he had bought an electric choke carb and disconnected two small linkage rods to "convert" it to a manual choke. One of the rods that was supposed to engage the choke butterfly was laying on the intake the other one that was supposed to give it fast idle with the choke on was just dangling.
Sooo. I bought some clips and reinstalled the linkage. I hope the electric choke works, I'll find out when I get it running again. OK enough for this post.
-Richard