First ever C10 project

[Alex41]

First I'd like to say Hello, my name is Alex and I'm an alco....sorry, wrong forum, I'm a long time car guy, first time C10 owner. I recently purchased this 1981 monster from a guy locally who bought it for his son when he was only 15. They fixed it up from it's sad stock state to what you see in the first pic, only the wheels, bumper, mirrors, and door handles were plasti dipped black. It sports a mildly cammed 350 with a long tailshaft 350 trans and a 2.73 posi 10 bolt...more on that later.

So far I've taken about 5 pounds of under glow lighting off of it, removed a rear leaf, rewired most of the missing comforts, bought new wheels, and replaced the entire rear end.

Funny story about that 10 bolt...it's supposed to be plenty strong but one or two wheel hopping burnouts will snap an axle in a heart beat. I had the wheel and half the axle pass me last Saturday when we tried to do a small burnout coming into our housing complex. My son was worried but I just laughed hysterically for about 5 minutes. I tell people all the time not to keep in it when it wheel hops but what do I do?

So I took the rear end apart only to find the rest of the axle is very stuck in the carrier. This forced me to buy a whole rear end. The local junk yard sells me one that LOOKS like it will work but turned out to be 3 inches too long. I went back and spent 3 hours trying to find a suitable replacement with no luck. The owner tells me he will have one pulled from his other yard and brought over the next day. Well...I get there the next day and there's a rear end that measured up correctly but had a few extra bolts on the cover. I quickly grabbed it up and went home. Dude sold me a 1974 30 spline 3.40 geared 12 bolt.

There will be more to come of this little project to include more of a drop and maybe an engine and trans swap soon.

Big thanks so far to this community for a fun and informative place to learn about C10's. Alex.