Let me cut straight to the chase:

Today we took the front off. Like... all of it.

This took the entire afternoon, for two main reasons. One is that there are more pieces to the front end of a 1966 Chevrolet pickup than one may assume. The other is that most of the fasteners we had to undo in order to remove those pieces had probably never been removed since the truck was assembled in 1965*, and many of them were underneath.

This in-progress shot gives a sense of what's in there:

I took this when we'd only removed the grille and the passenger side outer fender, which comes off in two pieces--the main body of the fender, and a sort of "shoulder" piece filling in the corner where the door meets the bottom of the windshield. With those gone, you can see the inner fenders, radiator support, and... uh... front-end piece that goes between the radiator support and the grille, I don't know its name.

The problem we ran into from here is that once you get the outer fenders off, all of the other structures are interconnected, so you can't get any of them off until you've freed the radiator support from its mountings--but you can't do that until you've taken all the bolts out of all the other pieces first. It's a long slog without a lot of sense of progress, unless you get such a sense out of keeping track of how many rusty old bolts you've broken. (We broke seven, out of approximately 132 million, which isn't a terrible ratio.)

Oh yeah, also, the "shoulder" piece on the driver's side has the radio antenna mounted on it. Dad sort of forgot that the antenna does something...

"That's not going to come out until you unhook it from the radio, you know."

"This has a radio in it??"

(it's been a while, OK)

Still, we persevered. And used the crane. It's kind of becoming our favorite tool.

Also: I think I've mentioned that this truck has been many colors. When we bought it, it was mostly red primer with a couple of green patches. Sandblasting revealed that it was previously green, yellow, and possibly white. We were never sure what the original color was, though, until we got the outer fenders off. Since we don't think they've been off before, we're reasonably sure the color revealed underneath them is the original.

When I got home tonight, I dug around a little and found a color sample card for 1966 pickups online, from which I think I've determined what the original color actually was.

So that's neat!

Even considering the state of the fasteners, we found surprisingly little significant rust in the parts we removed, given that they were subject to Maine roads for decades before the truck went into storage. They may need some repairs, particularly to the lower rear corners, but they're better than we expected! On the other hand, the original engine bay wiring is pretty crunchy, so, as I suspected, the whole thing probably needs to be re-wired. (Also, a certain someone dropped one of the headlights, which promptly smashed into a million pieces on the floor. But old-timey sealed-beam headlamps are cheap. :)

Probably should look into upgrading the brakes, too; as you can see in the first photo, in 1966 Chevy pickups still had single-chamber brake master cylinders, which is... not ideal. (You may recall we addressed this same problem on the Impala back just before the plague shut us down.) Might as well throw a vacuum servo on there while we're at it.

(Also, note in that photo that in this model, the heater core is on the outside of the cab--it's in that box thing on the passenger side of the firewall. It likely needs to be replaced. It's been empty the whole time, but they still don't take well to sitting unused for 30+ years.)

Next time, if the weather's good, we plan to take out the seat and remove the body from the back, then get the chassis-cab assembly down off the dollies, roll it outside, and power wash the lot. It needs a thorough cleaning before we start sanding off rust and sealing/painting. Also, every single one of those threaded holes needs to be re-tapped. That'll be fun.

--G.
* model years haven't lined up with calendar years in a long time
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.