What I learned from buying a sixty year old truck

The backstory

in winter of 2024, I bought a truck. A 1966 Chevrolet C10 fleetside long bed, to be exact. It was a bit of a basket case (I drove it home without working lights) but it was $4000 which is a pretty good deal for a running, driving 60-66 C10 that doesn’t need major drivetrain work.

I am as my father before me, for better or worse

I have very little patience for things that are built poorly. Do it well or don’t do it. I learned that I have an aerospace engineer’s tolerance for ill-fitting parts, which is to say very little at all. This has made me good at my job and deeply un-fun to be around in many situations. The hard part is figuring out what to do with this information.

Mending is worth it, perfect is impossible, and improvement counts

When I pulled that truck into my garage, I had never fixed a car before and was still unboxing a hydraulic jack and stands. Always learn the thing. Definitely learn to FIX the thing. Knowledge compounds. Knowledge cannot be taken from you.

I took a barn find classic that hadn’t been on the road since 2009 and got it inflated, plated, and 100% street legal with largely my own two hands. It will probably never be 100% fixed. It will never be show-quality without thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars of work. And that is OK.

Marge works. She has a job.

I’ve donated bookcases. I’ve moved ~1200 pavers. I took probably 5000-6000lbs of yard waste to the transfer station. All of our gardening topsoil and my 72” Harbor Freight toolchest and hutch came home in that truck.

I like tool/skill proficiency

I did my first all-by-self oil change (and change the oil in the truck myself)

I learned to diagnose automotive electrical faults.

I can tune a carbeuretor by ear.

I can diagnose, replace, and flush a radiator, though it is not an experience I am eager to repeat.

I can design, from nothing, specialty parts to run old engines with rare or obnoxious properties on cheap, widely available parts.

I have fixed a car, more than once, with a hand tool kit that fits in a trunk.

I learned enough to be comfortable fixing my Very Modern and Fancy daily driver, with tools I already had, in my driveway, in an hour.

Addendum

stupid shit about 1960-1966 Chevy C10s with four-on-the-floor Muncie transmissions you might want to know

  • No, you’re not crazy. No, that reproduction battery box is not square.
  • When you replace the radiator, also replace all the dry-rotted rubber seals around it. They’re stapled to the radiator supports. I used baling wire in the staple holes when remounting to make them less awful to pull when they dry-rot a second time.
  • the OEM horn grounds through the housing/bracket to the engine bay. When it gets old and corroded, it will stop grounding, but it will still pull enough current to kill your battery overnight. Replace it with a more modern air horn with an electrical compressor (and a proper ground wire). Your parasitic drain problems will disappear.
  • plate lights are whackadoodle due to C10s not coming standard with a bumper from the factory, so every C10 has some kind of custom job, either dealer-added, somebody’s fever dream, or anything in between. If you end up with a simple angled bracket plate light with a half-moon cover over a bulb, that also grounds through the bracket, and the rear harness has a tendency to snag. Tuck/ziptie those suckers hard, and make sure your bumper to frame ground is solid.
  • The OEM airboxes for first-year Turbo-Thrifts with closed PCV systems are damn near unobtanium. This STEP file is a conical adapter to fit any $20 4-barrel 5 1/8 pancake filter to a Rochester Monojet carburator (the OEM unit for the inline sixes on this generation). Print it in nylon or other high-temp filament, slap a rubber o-ring in to seal against the flange, and bolt that sucker on. Is it dumb? Yes. Does it look silly? A little bit, yes. Does it make running a Turbo-Thrift on an OEM carb DIRT CHEAP? You betcha.
  • The OEM drain plug bolt on the Turbo-Thrift 292 is a ONE INCH SOCKET I kid you not it’s a BIG boi. Replace it with a normal-person drain plug bolt.