Paintman: I did consider your suggestion as well. I have access to tons of old agricultural equipment, including sheet metal with the exact same patina as the truck, so I could have made a box that would have looked like it came with the truck. I am keeping that idea in the back of my head for when I deal with the gas tank filler neck.
Tempest67: I thought that big drive shaft was aluminum. Can those things be shortened?
After playing around a little more, I opted to try the under-fender spot for the battery. My build recipe calls for using everything possible from the S10 and avoiding buying stuff unless absolutely necessary.
With the battery issue decided, it was time to get to work on it. Before I could do that, I had to sort out the inner fenders as the battery would sit near one of them. I thought they were gonna give me problems, but it turns out I just needed to remove the forward lower corner from both. They are not perfect, as they were originally meant for that flat frame of the Fargo, so the lower edges don’t offer as much protection as I’d like. I may add some bolt-on extensions to improve that, and I will add some sort of rubber skirting in the area of the upper control arms.
Once the inners were in place, I could see that there was still bags of room around my new battery spot, so I fabbed up a mount. I oversized the mount and moved it slightly forward to allow for a wider range of battery sizes (I just use wrecking yard batteries). The wiring gods smiled on me here! By snipping just one factory zip tie, the positive lead had just the right length to reach the battery perfectly. The negative lead (which is grounded to the front of the block) was too short, but I found that there was an identical threaded hole at the rear of the block right where the battery sits. After running a tap through it to clear out the crud, the negative cable was installed without having to alter the length at all. There’s still a couple of wires I have to extend, but I’ll do that when I lay out the final routing of wires. Here’s the fabbed up parts (tray, hold downs and protective shield):
And here it sits in place. I can easily reach in to attach booster cables if I ever need to, and the battery can be removed with just a 3/8ths wrench. The tray can also be unbolted. The negative lead is not hooked up as I have wires everywhere and didn’t want a fireworks display:
I also took the time to fab a quick bracket to mount the ECU on the firewall. I think this spot gives me some decent options for running those huge bundles of wire that feed it:
More to follow!