C10CJ: A Pro-touring '71 Stepside on a No Limit Pro-C10 Chassis

[1971_c10]

Originally Posted by gringoloco

What a pain, but worth it in the end

Yes sir! You know it!

Originally Posted by solidaxel

Well Chicago to So Arizona was by the mile and not weight and size!!

That might be a cheaper deal provided you only pay mileage one way otherwise that could get pricey at $0.35/mi.

[kehstr]

That trans hump patch turned out amazing! Actually kind of jealous LOL

[ripdog28]

Amazing build

[1971_c10]

Originally Posted by kehstr

That trans hump patch turned out amazing! Actually kind of jealous LOL

Originally Posted by ripdog28

Amazing build

Thanks guys!

I've been a bit disconnected lately. I spent 4 days cleaning up my shop from an unfortunate mess made by some help. It bordered on disaster. I have a clean area and the help forgot to make sure the dust shield was closed, so my clean area was full of debris. That's where I mix filler and paint. Grrr. So looking to build a bit better dust shield this weekend.

I've been doing bits of bodywork as well. I may try to get some primer sprayed this weekend, but the temps here in CO took a plunge and I prefer to paint with the metal at least 70-75 F. So right now the cab is sitting around 76 F but the lows are in the low 50s and it was 46 this morning. Fortunately my shop is insulated so the temps don't drop too much. I do have a heater, but it's a kerosene heater so it's put away and I won't use it when I'm painting since the crap from the heater increases your chances for fish eyes or other defects. Hopefully some more pics soon.

[1971_c10]

So it begins ... the path to painting that is.

I finally got to a point to lay down some paint. Started with the bottom of the cab. I went simple flat black from a spray can. Sounds cheap, but it's this VHT Epoxy Primer/Paint that seems to work pretty well so far. I'll see how it holds up under there as the bottom of the cab takes a beating. So this will be a good test for the paint. I just didn't feel like dropping some $500 on lizard skin at the moment knowing I'll probably repaint the truck in a few year.

Here's a before shot. Wasn't cleaned to bare metal, but good enough to paint.


The final product after 2 generous coats.

[1971_c10]

And then it was on to the firewall. After nit picking with the glaze, I said screw it, just shoot it and let the primer tell me where to fix. So I did. Primed the firewall tonight. Also primed the area for the driveshaft notch and a cab corner that needed some serious rework from a previous owner botch job I was supposed to fix some 18 years ago and never did, until now (long story).

Before shot of the firewall


After shot of the firewall. Yep. My plan worked. I know where to focus on with some more glaze during the blocking phase. Then probably another round of primer.


The two spots on the back of the cab before


and after


Oh ... and that's roofing felt on the floor. It's like $16 per roll at Home Depot. I used 2 rolls and covered my entire floor where I was painting (essentially a 2 car garage in size). I even wetted the felt down to help catch the overspray. It seemed to work pretty well. I rolled half of it and my floor underneath looked untouched from the nasty catalyzed high build surfacer/primer. Not sure where I got this tip but figure I'd pass it along.

[1971_c10]

Hey guys, after chatting with one of the other board members tonight (via that old school telephone thingy) and discussing raised bed floors on step sides, I realized I had some shots simulating a raised floor I did from way back when, so I figure I'd post them to give some insight what a raised floor might look like.

Here is the floor at the stock level. I hadn't taken all the floor bolts out yet so the strips are still there.


Here is the floor raised about 6". It was a simple raise. I just set some 2x4s on the angle strips and then took the 2 "loose" cross members and used those to support the floor. Also note, that since I pulled the edge pieces from the floor, I put a small section of 3/4" wood I had in both front corners where the edge board would normally provide support between the angle strip and the cross member that ties in with the steps. This small piece of wood (or something similar) with need to go there even when the floor is permanently raised to provide proper support for the front cross member that mounts the bed to the frame. Sorry for the not so quite same camera angle and yes, I should have placed the bed strips in there in hind sight.

[1971_c10]

Made some more progress on the paintwork in the last couple days.

I got through the 1st round of blocking and glazing. So here you guys can see all my "dirty" work.


Here's the firewall after getting shot with 2 more coats of primer.


A little selfie on safety. I am not a professional painter, but I take personal safety seriously. I work for an OSHA VPP approved company, so I try to continue that thought into my amateur work. For paint work, I've got a 3M 7502 mask (exhaust vents down, perfect for under the welding hood) with swappable filters shown here with organic volatile filters with a P100 pre-filter, some safety glasses, a $10 body suit (with elastic cuffs - it matters!) from Home Depot and nitrile gloves. I can't say enough about protecting yourself from these nasty chemicals. I wear the respirator and nitrile gloves when mixing paints as well. And when not painting, I have just a P100 filter on the mask (since the organics are life limited based on time exposed to air) which serves as a dust filter and mild vapor filter (i.e. body fillers, welding fumes, etc.). Oh and the nitrile gloves protect the fresh metal/paint from my finger tip oils, so the gloves work both ways.


In case you are wondering about if I will be testing color match, the answer is yes. I chose one of the front inner fenders as the test subject.


Here it's been wet sanded and will sit for at least 24 hours before I apply any color. I'm not a body shop looking to make a buck so I can afford the extra time to be sure everything is dry. Plus I don't have a heated paint booth to help dry things out.

[gringoloco]

Nice work. Wish I'd been as careful with painting/welding when I was younger as I am now...

[1971_c10]

Originally Posted by gringoloco

Nice work. Wish I'd been as careful with painting/welding when I was younger as I am now...

Thanks man! I'm not so young myself, I just look young I've had plenty of young and dumb learning to go off.

[crakarjax]

Originally Posted by 1971_c10

Hehe ... it's been a long time coming! Most guys start on a build then work as budget allows, taking many years to finish. I started on the budget and waited on the build and trying to do this thing in under 2 years.




Oh man, this is one of my "open item" yet to really define. I will probably get the truck running with the battery sitting in the stock location. However, I really desire to get it somewhere in the back on the passenger side. With a stepside bed, the common spot just behind the cab is out, and things are really tight back there otherwise. It's going to be a "decide as I go" once I get the bed on and start on the floor structure. I'm eyeballing right on top of the passenger rail between the bed mounts. The battery would most likely need to lay on its sie but that's not a problem for Optima batteries (which is what I run). The biggest question is how much space I wind up with once I get the floor installed. When I mocked up the raised floor on the factory frame I had about 10.5" to the bottom of the wood, so once I get a subfloor in it's probably like 9.5" (The No Limit chassis isn't any different height wise, in fact I may gain a little more front to back room as they don't kick up the rail as early as the factory chassis). The trick is what I decide to do with the cross members. That's where I may make a custom cross member with an integrated battery box. Who knows...

I've also toyed around with putting it in the cab behind the seat if there is enough room (I plan to mock this up in the coming weeks). No matter where I put the battery, I'll have a large junction over on the driver front side where I'll tie the alternator in and then also the relays for the fans and the power for the fuse box. So I'll at least have a monster cable running over there. I'll then obviously have a monster cable running from the battery to the starter. That's still all up for debate at the moment and one of the reasons I haven't patched the 2 feed through holes in the floor from the old gas tank. I'll still ground everything to the chassis.

Cable routing I'll just use some well insulated cable (pricey stuff) and some of the standard insulated cable hangers you get at the big box stores (that stuff works well). The battery cable would most likely run along the passenger rail with one of the fuel lines. Sounds crazy, but look at a newer car and where they run the battery lines and not much different, other than some of those battery cables are scary huge. So stay tuned on that one!

According to this guy,

I like to set up a car so that it has equal left weight front and rear; that is, the portion of the left side weight on the front wheels is the same as the portion on the rear wheels, by percentage. If the car has 52% front left weight, then it should have 52% rear left weight. Why? So there's no diagonal bias and no static twisting moment. It seems to keep the car more predictable.

Due to this I'm thinking I want to move my battery to the driver side rear... probably right behind the tire. I'm not sure if the same considerations are important for pro-touring, have you looked into this yet?

[1971_c10]

Hey man, I generally agree with what they guy wrote that you referenced. For those that want the synopsis, the guy is talking about the axle split, not to be confused with the weight split even though he refers to it as 52% weight on the front left. He really means 52% of the front axle's weight on the left side and 52% of the rear axle's weight on the left side.

His main point is that you want the cross weights to be the same. So FL/RR to FR/RL should be equal. Most scales these days will give you cross weights in addition to corner weights. This helps to keep the car balanced in both turning directions, so applicable for any handling situation, be it auto-cross, road coarse, mountain fun, etc. The left turn only boys bias this to help the car turn left only, in addition to some other tricks like wheel base (e.g. sprint cars, modifieds).

For the battery, it all depends. The battery is a fraction of your weight, well at least my weight. I'm a tad over 200 lbs. So if you treat the battery like ballast, then you could do some iterations on the scales to find the best place. Essentially, have a helper set the battery in various locations with you in the truck and see how things change. You may find the driver side rear is best, you may find right behind the driver best. Without scales to optimize, it's probably more personal preference. I'm not sure we'd see the benefit of the optimized location just because our trucks are over 3000 lb, some well over.

I have thought about behind the tire, either side. The catch there is you would want a pretty stout box to put the battery inside. That area will get beat to crap with pebbles from street driving. Maybe if it's a low milage/year truck you wouldn't need as much armor. But my goal is to make the truck so fun to drive I put more than the usually 2000 miles on it per year.

With a raised floor, you actually get quite a bit of room up near the front bed mounts between the floor and the top of the frame rail before it turns up for the axle notch. It's around 4 inches lower than the rear frame rail section behind the notch. With the simulated raised floor I did, there was around 11" vertical space in there. Enough to almost mount the battery "normal" versus on it's side. That's the custom cross-member with an integrated battery box I'm talking about. Tied in with the 2nd cross member from the front of the bed. That cross member is no longer much use to the bed mount since the floor is up 6", so there is opportunity there to optimize. My neighbor even joked about putting a live well box in that space if I did a full tilt floor.

[1971_c10]

Oh the ups and downs ...

This is definitely an up and a down. I got color on the firewall last night. I hadn't sprayed automotive paint in close to 20 years, let alone a metallic. But that's not the down. The paint came out gorgeous. The problem, some scratches are showing through (the down). I saw 3 scratched when I was spraying the color. I thought, I can live with those. They aren't too bad. I didn't notice all the other scratches until I'm into the clearcoat. So I just sprayed 2 coats of clear and wrapped up. Serves as a good preview of what it will look like at least. The scratches are only on the vertical surfaces too, and only in one direction even though I cross hatched 400 wet then 600 wet. These scratches almost look like 320 scratches. They are very hard to see in a photo, so not even going to try, but because of the metallic, they show right up in the sun.

So re-work it is. Bummer for sure, but it happens. Hopefully I can just stick to the vertical surfaces (sand down to the color, then wet sand the color with 600 until the scratches go away, spray more color then re-clear).

Here's some photos for fun though:

This is where it all started. To clean up this mess:


The after


Passenger side angle shot


Driver side angle shot


You can really see how wrinkly the firewall is from the factory and why many custom shops just chop the whole firewall off and start fresh. I wasn't about to go there.

[gringoloco]

Looks good from here!

[SCOTI]

Originally Posted by gringoloco

Looks good from here!

Agreed. Maybe it's not a Ridler contender.... but it doesn't need to be when the smiles per gallon accumulate.

[crakarjax]

I like the color, but now that you mention the wrinkles I might plan on doing a matte or satin black on the firewall to conceal some of those imperfections.

[stenbrin]

Cool build! #gottalovesteppers

[1971_c10]

Originally Posted by gringoloco

Looks good from here!

Originally Posted by SCOTI

Agreed. Maybe it's not a Ridler contender.... but it doesn't need to be when the smiles per gallon accumulate.

Originally Posted by crakarjax

I like the color, but now that you mention the wrinkles I might plan on doing a matte or satin black on the firewall to conceal some of those imperfections.

Thanks guys! I hear ya SCOTI ... I know it looks good in the photos and it does look good in person until you get close enough. So I tend to judge paint by distance. Essentially the distance where the paint job turns from looks good to uh oh. So not when I see the first defect but the overall appearance. You guys have probably done/heard the same ... "looks good from 10 ft away" - That's what I call a 10' paint job. A Ridler would be a <1" paint job (which if I can convince one of my buddies on an idea I've got for a Ridler car ...). My firewall was a 2'-4' on the spots with the scratches. The rest of my truck is about a 1' paint job, maybe a little better on the bulk of the exterior body, so I want to at least get close to that. I thinking mainly about the guys that lean in to get a closer look at stuff. Well, actually, more about myself. I just couldn't see myself not fixing it at some point, so planning to fix it now.

Crakarjax - on the wrinkles, I actually never noticed them until I did the paint work. On a fully assembled truck, I'm not sure you'll really see them since the hood will shade that area of the firewall. Guess I'll be able to tell for sure in a few weeks. I hope to get the paint work wrapped up by this weekend and get the cab back on. And also, the metallic does not help that situation. A solid color probably wouldn't show as much even in a gloss.

For the firewall re-work, I probably made it sound worse than it really is. I just took the DA and only touched areas I could hit with the DA and some 320. I avoided too much hand sanding since that is time consuming. Here's some shots with the scuffed clear, pretty much down to the color. I don't need to go any farther as the clear I did spray filled the scratches, so it's really just making a new surface for the new color. Don't need new primer/sealer since I didn't expose any body putty/glaze and it's the same color underneath so it won't bleed. I then plan to hit the scuffed areas with 400 on the DA then do another 600 wet on the whole firewall. This will get rid of the tiny amount of orange peel (that I would have cut and buffed anyway) and put a new surface for the new shot of base color. Then I'll re-clear. So not too bad. I also plan to paint the 2 spots on the back of the cab when I redo the firewall paint so that will finish up this round of bodywork/paint. Left over on the cab is the fuel neck hole. But I've got 2 pinstripes right next to that hole so that will be a separate project maybe this winter after I've played around with pinstripe colors. Just need to temporarily plug the hole. More on that later.

So hopefully color again Friday night. Cut and buff Sat night. Install cab Sunday night. That's the goal. I've got some bodywork to finish up on the cab notch I did and so I plan to get that done tomorrow and shot with primer. The cab corner just needs a round of 400 / 600 wet sanding and it's ready for paint.

[1971_c10]

Originally Posted by stenbrin

Cool build! #gottalovesteppers

Thanks boss! and you know it!

[1971_c10]

ok, a little behind my plan, but not much. Still have a shot at getting the cab on tonight. I didn't get paint done Friday night due to weather and me not being where I wanted to be due to well, work. Work pays the bills so getting keep those priorities straight! Anyhow, I'm calling the cab paint work DONE!

The scratches are gone! My only thing to fight is orange peel because I went ahead and sprayed a 3rd coat of clear and that 3rd coat was with a faster activator (that's all the paint shop had in stock, doh! It's summer!) and it was toasty, so I figured I'd get some orange peel. And I did. No big deal. I'll color sand that out. Hopefully the clear is hard enough by dinner tonight so I can at least color sand and polish the concave section of the firewall. The rest I ran do after it's on the chassis.

Firewall baking in the sun. Some left over clear in the PPS liner sitting on the dolly as a hardness check.


Side shot with the door. The color is very close. In this pic, I'd say it's hard to see a difference, but I know a handful will.


The back where this was more of a repair on the cab corner and the addition of the notch.


Close up of the heater area. Some orange peel to contend with, but nothing major.


And for those wondering, how did I handle the clear on the back? The problem with a C10 cab, is with a catalyzed clear, you aren't supposed to break in the middle of a panel and always break on an edge, so with our C10 cabs there are no panel breaks that are continuous to another break. So in following the break on an edge guide, you'd have to re-clear the whole cab. Uh, I'm not doing that. No way. So I chose to put a break in 2 spots that weren't along an edge. Just to the right of the notch and right on the corner where that bottom edge that comes from the door disappears over to the other edge below the panel insets. I may pay for that down the road. Oh well. To be clear, I DID NOT paint the entire area show in this pic. I only painted the cab corner and the bottom area over to the cab notch. All that was sanded with 600 wet. The rest of the area was scuffed with ultra fine scrotchbrite. Of course it was all cleaned, then cleaned again, and again.

[gringoloco]

Looking good!

[1971_c10]

Originally Posted by gringoloco

Looking good!

Thanks man!

[1971_c10]

BIG day for the C10 today ... the cab is ON!

There was some re-work I had to do, nothing too major. I then decided to cut and buff the front and the entire rear before I put it on the truck.

I must say, it does look good. Now time to get things put back together. I didn't do much to the interior so most of that will go back the way it was. That was by design, and by that I really mean budget. No budget for anything major in the interior.

IT'S ABOUT TIME!








Gotta love when you can see your suspension in the shine. I still remembered how to cut and buff (haven't done it in many years).

[knomadd]

The firewall looks really good! Heck, it all looks good! Nice work on everything so far.

[gringoloco]

Very nice!