What we ended up with was certainly humble. Our search turned up a ’68 C10 shortbox that was rough, rusty, and had been slowly decaying next to a South Dakota barn for who knows how long. The box, engine, transmission, and most of the interior had flown the coop ages ago. But it was a real shortbox and had that cool ’67-68 front sheetmetal that we were looking for. We fell in love at first sight with what many would consider to be a lost cause. You know how that goes.

The first phase of our mission was to literally drag the truck out of a snowdrift. It was so buried that the right rear was packed full of snow and wouldn’t roll. We winched it onto the trailer and hit the road back to our Lincoln, Nebraska, shop. We had a few hours on the road to daydream about the new project that was bobbing around in our rearview mirror. Our vision was to transform the crusty C10 into a clean driver with modern power and an updated suspension that we could drive anywhere, but it was also important that we respect the truck and not compromise its character. We love C10s and it was very important to us that it retain the soul of a classic truck with no wacky modifications that would screw up that soul, just tasteful updates to make it capable of hanging in modern traffic and look good doing it.

Once the snow melted and we had power washed off most of the dirt and moss, we pulled our new project into the shop to make a list of what we would need to bring it back to life. This truck had started its life in the military and still had some of the original olive drab paint hiding under the yellow rattle-bomb job. It had been used hard and had dents in places we had never seen dents before. The cab had rust in all the usual places as well, but we had certainly seen worse. It was important that the original chassis was straight and rust-free since our engineers would be using it to prototype new parts to add to our line of Speedway Motors C10 products. Fortunately, the chassis was the best part of this truck, with the notable exception of a terribly torched and stick-welded rear crossmember modification. Not a problem for us since we planned to replace it with our G-Comp rear suspension.

With the damage assessed and a battle plan made, we got busy ripping everything apart. Everything was just as rusty and stuck as you’d expect, but there were no surprises. We sent the cab out to the media blaster and stripped everything off the frame. The frame was then blasted as well and treated to a coat of semigloss urethane. We were thrilled to be done with the rusty parts for a while and ready to start bolting up some cool suspension pieces to lower the truck and make it perform better than ever.

Stay tuned as we get busy transforming our project truck. Next up we work our way to a rolling chassis with a lowered suspension and a hopped-up junkyard 5.3!