As usual, everything is taking longer than I ever expected, but am never surprised by. Since the last post, my old house finally was officially sold. I got married. Since I finally got out from under the second house payment I bought enough steel to do the roofs on all 3 garages and finished doing that a couple weeks ago. Started getting house windows replaced even though winter finally decided to make an entrance. In a big way too. I finished parting out the 90 burb and traded the empty husk for a vortec cylinder head (I bought the 2nd one).
And another bit of big news... The previous owner of this place finally finished removing all of his stuff, so as of 12/4/16 everything that is on the property is mine. No more sharing.
As you can imagine, there wasn't much time for car/truck stuff. But I did add to my collection of miscellaneous vehicular projects in the midst of this hurricane of activity. A guy I used to work with needed to clean out one of his sheds and I ended up with a 1979 kawasaki KZ1300, 1983 Datsun 280zx, 1969 (I think) Honda 90, a car dolly and then a 2000 Jeep Cherokee. The last one was his wifes daily and had a good title. The rest of it will take me a couple months to get registered.
As for this project, I had been accumulating the parts to mount the engine and connect it to the truck controls, but mainly it sat in front of the garage. With a winter storm brewing and me being tired of being a part time carpenter, the boy and I dropped the engine/tranny into the truck. It fit, but I have to work on the mount alignment and nothing is connected to it.
Then I took my 71 out of the 1 car garage that has been its home the past year and moved it to the machine shed. We did a quick clean out of some of the junk in that garage so the 22' behemoth would fit inside. We used the plow truck to pull and push the farm truck into the garage for the first time in only God knows how long.
It's not ideal, but it fits and I have room to work on it. That garage has power and lights but no heat or insulation. I'm attempting to change that. I bought a heater the other day. I still need to get a propane tank moved to this garage and hooked up, and I ordered a blower fan for it to help. If it can't keep up like this I'll have to get some insulation in there.
I do have a propane fired bullet heater that works alright too. I bought a couple more lights to brighten the place up. I bought a shelf/workbench to use in there. This will be better than many people have to work with or in. Hopefully I'll get the time to do something more than a quarterly update. I still want to drive it and have it painted by early summer.