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[Drizzle]

Hey everyone,

I have been on this forum once or twice but never said anything. So I'm going to get it all out of the way now. If you have time and half way interested then here is my story.

I'm 32 and never really worked on any decent vehicles ever but always wanted to. So when I got the opportunity I bought a 86 C10 SWB for 3k or so. I thought it would be a easy"er" vehicle to start figuring crap out on. It's had a 400 bored to a 406, 350 turbo, I think a 290 cam "Flat Tap", edelbrock 600 carb, double hump heads and was lowered some front to back. I drove it 3 hours home which I thought was a good sign of a decent motor and for the most part it was. However. It started to overheat here and there. Checked the oil, no soup. Went through cooling system, all was good. Came to conclusion that a head gasket must be messed up. Well keep in mind I have never done any of this before. The power of Google and YouTube were my instructors.

Thank the lord I had a new neighbor next to me that saw me pulling the heads and came over to introduce himself and figure out what the heck I was doing. He is a pretty good car guy with a cool Monte "383 ect". Anyways. Feeding him beer, he watched me and made sure I didn't screw up too bad. After pulling the heads we found that the gaskets looked decent. So we looked at the heads and sure enough, Crack! Well crap now what... So I started looking around and researching 400 sbc heads. I found that you HAVE to have steam holes for the 406 to cool properly and that was probably the problem with the double humps as well as the incorrect gaskets. So me being cheap and read a TON of info as well as calling businesses, I decided on the NKB 200 64cc heads from Skip White. http://www.skipwhiteperformance.com/...tem=NKB200272S. I tell you what these heads are clean. Now that I halfway know what to look for these things looked port and polished out of the box. I also decided that now would be the right time to replace the ENTIRE top end while I was at it. So I went with Comp Cams roller rockers, guide plates, 1.6 push rods, Polished Cross plane intake and a Holley 750 4 barrel. I also sanded and polished my valve covers and air filter cover. "Shiny" My neighbor drinking and pointing out my mistakes the whole way.

After all said and done, we got it back together and it runs like a charm. Of course every once in a while something catastrophic happens and we have to tear something else apart on it like the starter wouldn't catch and we found that the flex plate was toast. New flex plate and high torque mini starter was ordered. "Summit is my friend" So we had to replace that and in my head I figured "while we are pulling the transmission back, we should pull it out and put a shift kit in!" Transco shift kit it was! Laptop on the shelf watching transco youtube instructional video the whole way. So we got that all back together and everything was happy happy.

For about a month when the alternator power post grounded out and fried all the positive wires under the hood. So here I am, re wiring a truck, 4 months ago I had NO idea what I was doing and reflecting how far I have come in such little time. Of course neighbor hanging out drinkin beers with me. Anyway I got everything re wired, new yellow top battery and fired right back up. "Put safety glasses on for that" New high torque starter is toast but works for now until I get around to putting another one in. In between all this I found time to put new vinyl on the seats, new carpet, and paint the tailgate. "only tailgate for testing purposes" put about 40 hours in tailgate alone between sanding, priming, SANDING, priming, SANDING, painting, clear coat and sanding again! Worked out pretty well if I may say. Really look forward to doing the rest of the truck in the spring. But now it is interior season so NONE of my gauges worked properly except for temporary oil pressure and water temperature gauges I had stuck in it. So after a ton of research I decided the to go with Dakota Digital VHX Black with blue lighting on there way with New bezel and cover. Can Not Wait for that to show up. I lost a ton of pictures I took on my journey but I will post what I got as well as a little video I just made. http://youtu.be/rfvR588jnmM

I hope I didn't bore you too much with all this but I love my truck and am finding appreciation for older vehicles in general.

Thank you for your time and glad to be here.