1976 CCSB Duramax Project #trucknamedsue

[SCOTI]

Originally Posted by LT7A

Thanks SCOTI. You quoted me before I edited my post. I think that transmission hump post was a repost with a question added at the bottom.

I tried messaging him earlier but it wouldn't go through. I just sent him a message & it appears to have went through this round.

[LT7A]

Cool, well hopefully he'll see that he's still got a loyal following over here. I need to pop on my IG account every now and again. But I would rather spend my time here and get more in-depth information.

[RADustin]

Man! I didn't realize there was this much interest over here. I have a ton of pics I can add, that are not posted over on IG.

It is true, the truck is running/driving and has about 1000miles on it. But, I can go back in time and continue this thread from where I left off. It is alot, so maybe I'll try to keep the updates small and frequent until caught up. The big updates get really annoying because the hosting website re-orders all of them during the upload.

I'll get you guys updated.

[RADustin]

Picking up where I left off-

I cut off the LB7 water neck and machined it to fit the LML water pump housing. Then welded it all up. This is so I can use off the shelf LB7 hoses.



Look at how much shorter the engine became with the LB7 parts:


vs LML parts-


The factory LML low pressure fuel lines run under the turbo and are kind of annoying. I redid everything to delete the factory filter housing and lines. Both the low pressure feed and return needed some special T fittings. So I ended up buying some 304ss JIC and nipple parts and cutting/welding as needed to make the lines as best I could.



fitting weld setup. fully back purged to keep it clean inside.



first setup of ac fitting adapters I tried. But they would be too tall-



I drew and machined (and later remachined) a heater hose adapter for the LB7 coolant neck. This goes straight to AN.







started dreaming up the induction side of things to clear everything. The turbo mouthpiece and y-bridge adapter will be multi-axis CNC from aluminum and coated black. Not sure if mentioned, but I'm running an SDP 5-axis y-bridge for LML.



printed a bunch of iterations of the mouthpiece. It mates to the turbo, hooks a turn, offsets, and expands in diameter and in one fluid cross-section.



transfer pump mounted to the frame. with integral stainless heat shield. I think I posted the 3d printed bracket before. So the plastic 3d print went to a bent piece of carbon steel to the frame. And a stainless shield bolts on, with heat reflection on that. Stainless doesn't like to conduct heat, so it works as a good shield.



ABS module mounted on the frame. used the factory LML truck bracket and welded tabs on it, since it floats on this bracket in rubber. I don't think I got a piece of it final cleaned up, but it was and powdered satin black.









Lift Pump mounted inside the drivers rail, close to the tank-





installed the slip yoke eliminator.

[RADustin]

sorry about picture size, I'll work on getting future uploads right..

after I machined the rear hub bores and sleeved them, I had to redrill the pattern. Luckily a friend of a friend builds top fuel dragsters and let me borrow his jig-bore bridgeport for the afternoon.

Put the hubs in a nice rotary table, lined up everything and piloted, drilled, spot faced, and reamed each hole in the gaps of the existing holes.





I didn't control the spot face depth well, on purpose, so to make all the studs fit the same I machined individual thickness spacers for each spot. The lugs normally fit through the reinforcement ribs on the hubs. Since they are in the gaps now, I needed to make up this thickness.



all installed and on the truck. I had to make new ABS tone rings as well, 60 tooth instead of 48. I'm not sure I have pictures of this handy. If anyone wants to see how I made them, I can dig.





machined a plug to plug up the factory oil return from the pcv filter. I had to ditch the pcv filter to clear my tie bar on the coil buckets.

[RADustin]

cover some sheet metal fab on the cab.

Pictures the blast guy sent me-





the cab came back super nice. Minimum rust, rockers were perfect. Little bit in the cowl and a few pin holes in the floor board and one spot in the roof.





with cab removed I planned out what I wanted the firewall to look like.



3D scanned everything and drew in the fillers I wanted, using a simple AC bulkhead. I want symmetry side to side without doing much to the drivers side. So adding in some beads at the top would do that. I also wanted it to look very stock when done, with panel overlaps and visible spot welds. I'll get more into this later.



started working on some patches-

















The upper piece is just beads, so I bought some dies and ran them myself.

The ac buckhead was mounted by stamping the sheet metal. So I made a stamp, and popped it out.





starting to take shape- I wanted to leave the factory seams and wrinkles in the firewall. Again, I wanted a very 'stock' look.



regarding the ac bulkhead, I wanted to use AN fittings for the heater lines. I'm not a fan of ac fittings for this, so I machined some AN bulkheads to fit in the bulkhead plate. Worked pretty cool.

[RADustin]

as seen above, I ended up cutting out the outer and inner cowl panel on the passenger side. I'm using the haymaker AC from restomod. Its massive, and I didn't want it in the center of the dash. To make room, I pocketed the passenger kick panel and cut out the fresh air vent and everything. This opened up a ton of space.

nice box it arrives in-



pictures of the pocket forming-













ac evap mounts-





took a break on the firewall for a bit. The main big panel I wanted deep beads in, so I sent drawings to a guy out in Utah and he ran the piece on his pullmax. This took a little time. So I moved on to mounting up the condenser and the transmission cooler to the core support. Alot of tweaks to get this fit and behind the grill.



used an LML transcooler and will hang it off the bottom of the core support between the frame rails, behind the bumper.









I wanted to use the 2014 wiper motor so it worked with the 2014 BCM and such later, for 7 speed wipers. Made a bracket and adapter for this-



this machined adapter bolts with the motor and pokes thru the firewall in a grommet.



installed, you can also see the 2014 wire grommet hole I installed in the '76 firewall.

[RADustin]

Tackled filled the transmission tunnel hole. To get ready for my lokar shifter.



started working on the doors. My doors were rusty. I wanted to patch them prior to blasting in some spots to make it easier to me later, and so the patch panels were all sealed in the epoxy.

test fit some skins on the front doors, they looked ok.



always premeasure the window opening.



with the 2014 cab vents, the door vents got filled. Lots of work over 4 doors.



















getting the front door skins off



I cut the bottom out of one of the doors, but it isn't in this upload. Catch it shortly.

[RADustin]

at some point I got tired of waiting for the firewall panel to come in, so I put the cab back on. This allowed me to work on some underhood fabrication.

one of the first things was to get the inner fenders fit around the coilovers. With how cheap repo panels were, I cut a huge hole in the passenger side one, made a template, then correctly recut another passenger piece and the driver side.







then started on intercooling piping. It's all aluminum, with bead formed ends. Lots of bends but they can be installed or removed without touching anything else.



















again, starting at the bottom most layer of stuff under the hood, I then went to the washer fluid tank. Which will be below the passenger battery. Press broke up some aluminum, added a tube and a machined bung/cap.

[daddyjeep]

Thanks for thinking of us over here. I know forums aren't the cool thing anymore, but they are still relevant and fantastic resources.

Fantastic work as always

[RADustin]

Originally Posted by daddyjeep

Thanks for thinking of us over here. I know forums aren't the cool thing anymore, but they are still relevant and fantastic resources.

Fantastic work as always

haha, the build threads are very useful. Especially for the builder. I go back and look at my '49 build every now and again trying to remember how I did something.

biggest PITA with forums is getting the pictures uploaded and hosted. Where IG is just shoot and post. But I'll try to keep adding pictures on a normal basis. Out of time for today.

Yall let me know if I passed over something too quick, for every pic I post I probably have 5 more still on my phone.

[tinydb84]

Man the level of detail and skill here is so great.

[SCOTI]

x2.

Sofa-king cool!

[RADustin]

Thanks guys.

here some pics of working on the door shells. These are all the pics I have currently uploaded for the door repair. I may have some more, there was a ton more work than shown here.

the drivers door was very rusted out on the bottom. I cut the skin off before I had it blasted. After blast, I fixed the rust and put a new skin on.

some before pics-





I made my own patches as I could get them to fit better easier than working with aftermarket stampings. Also I worked very carefully around the stock drain holes in the door, to ensure they looked as stock as possible. The aftermarket stamps are not even close to OE.

fixing the front corner.









after both corners were fixed, I cut the rust out the bottom and put the bottom in.



final door bottom. Looks like some adjusting still after this.








before the skins went on, I setup for the mirrors and panel bonded heavy 'washers' to the backsides of the skins. To try and stabilize the mirrors and prevent sheetmetal cracks.



skin set on door shell. The only exterior body mod on the truck is shaved door locks in the front doors. The skins were shaved prior to installed, ground flush front and back.





passenger inner door was hacked to hell from the previous owner. A member here was kind enough to send me a filler piece. so I was able to install that. You'll never see it, but we all know its fixed.









final inner primer pics of the rear doors in the booth- with the small door panels this truck essentially has 8 doors. 4 inners and 4 outers. The doors and their body work and such were definitely one of the largest challenges and time consumers.

[LT7A]

I'm glad to get to see the process, piece by piece. Thanks for posting. I like the fact that you're leaving the factory stamping and tooling and seams on the firewall. Not that I have anything against cleaning up and simplifying, but you have a goal in mind and you're sticking to it. Once you start fixing perceived factory flaws, it's hard to know how far to go down that rabbit hole. This will be one of the most customized trucks on the road, but your approach doesn't appear to include custom, for the sake of custom. Adaptation and installation of parts, requiring some custom work, but for the purpose of function. Not trying to state what your actual plan is, but that is my impression of the build. Makes it different, and it's something I really am enjoying.

[RADustin]

Originally Posted by LT7A

I'm glad to get to see the process, piece by piece. Thanks for posting. I like the fact that you're leaving the factory stamping and tooling and seams on the firewall. Not that I have anything against cleaning up and simplifying, but you have a goal in mind and you're sticking to it. Once you start fixing perceived factory flaws, it's hard to know how far to go down that rabbit hole. This will be one of the most customized trucks on the road, but your approach doesn't appear to include custom, for the sake of custom. Adaptation and installation of parts, requiring some custom work, but for the purpose of function. Not trying to state what your actual plan is, but that is my impression of the build. Makes it different, and it's something I really am enjoying.

it's funny you mention going down the rabbit hole. As I get to the finishing side of updates, you'll see alot of attention was placed in making things look original and OEM. For this build, I think the truck is super cool as-is. So any changes I make to the body/interior and such are just to enhance what is already there or add features it didn't have before, but could be plausible and sold in a way they don't stick out. It's about layering details of custom and OEM and finishing things out so when you step back and look at it- it looks like you didn't do anything.

The best comment I received so far was a guy was shocked I found such a clean original truck and put a lift kit on it. At first pass he had no clue the amount of modification. This was what I wanted.

[SCOTI]

Originally Posted by RADustin

it's funny you mention going down the rabbit hole. As I get to the finishing side of updates, you'll see alot of attention was placed in making things look original and OEM. For this build, I think the truck is super cool as-is. So any changes I make to the body/interior and such are just to enhance what is already there or add features it didn't have before, but could be plausible and sold in a way they don't stick out. It's about layering details of custom and OEM and finishing things out so when you step back and look at it- it looks like you didn't do anything.

The best comment I received so far was a guy was shocked I found such a clean original truck and put a lift kit on it. At first pass he had no clue the amount of modification. This was what I wanted.

You nailed it & then some brother!

[93M6Formula]

Originally Posted by RADustin

it's funny you mention going down the rabbit hole. As I get to the finishing side of updates, you'll see alot of attention was placed in making things look original and OEM. For this build, I think the truck is super cool as-is. So any changes I make to the body/interior and such are just to enhance what is already there or add features it didn't have before, but could be plausible and sold in a way they don't stick out. It's about layering details of custom and OEM and finishing things out so when you step back and look at it- it looks like you didn't do anything.

The best comment I received so far was a guy was shocked I found such a clean original truck and put a lift kit on it. At first pass he had no clue the amount of modification. This was what I wanted.

Back to your door skin install, where did you get the skins and how was fitment overall? Been thinking of going this route to save my OEM door shells.

[RADustin]

Originally Posted by 93M6Formula

Back to your door skin install, where did you get the skins and how was fitment overall? Been thinking of going this route to save my OEM door shells.

from Classic Industries.

The passenger fit pretty good, as good as stock.

The driver had a weird bow were you butt weld it to the door on the rearward side of the skin(door handle side, not mirror side), which made the window gap massive. When I worked the bow out to dial in the window gap, the entire top of the skin oil canned in. so that took some work to get back right especially because the door handle is there. I ended up taking off the door handle brace, straightening everything out- and putting the brace back on.

The door gaps end up being crap- but the stock doors were bad so that isn't a surprise. I didn't gap my truck to have perfect consistent gaps, but I did work them to be better and at least have a gap. When I first put the doors on, they hit each other and the cab in a few places. so lots of edge grinding and welding to make it all work well. The down side to all the edge grinding and such is the door edges get thicker- it looks like filler build up. so I'm not excited about that, but it is what it is- I wasn't going to build door frames and skins from complete scratch to be 100% perfect.

Overall I'd use them again. They fit no better and no worse than stock.