Cool McCool's Garage

WOWIE!  I’m a little ahead of myself here, but I FINALLY got the firewall painted, and put the 6.0 in!  

Yesterday morning I got a quart of “Dimension” 2010 Chev. pickup “Basic Red”, some clear, and another gallon of 2K primer.  I’d initially been going to use Sherwin Williams color, but in this particular color, it was $260 a quart.  Yikes!  The “Dimension” brand, which I believe is also made by SW, was, get this, $44 a quart.  I guess you know how long it took to make that decision!

I went right home, DA’d the primer on the firewall with 220, then 320, did a little blocking on the recess for the engine, and shot the color and clear.  I stopped at the hood lace channel, and will simply mask and drape the engine bay when I shoot the rest of the cab.  Hopefully, that’ll be in a short time, because I am really fired up now about getting it in color by fall.  Should be a reasonable goal at this point, there’s really very little body work to be done, at least on the cab.

The engine looks REALLY good against the shiny red firewall, and I only made one HUGE scratch in the new paint.  This I’ll cover up with the Diamond T trademark plate I found in the cab, painted over (from the factory) that has the trademark information in about 20 different languages, including Russian!  It’s very cool.

I actually like the engine as is, with the aluminum parts raw and unpolished.  It looks purposeful, so I’m going to leave it alone, aside from an acid wash to remove some of the oxidation from the castings.  With the fenders on, not much is visible but the valve covers anyway.

I had a moment of indecion about what to do when I was changing flexplates.  The engine had originally been buttoned to a 4L80, which uses a different flywheel than the 4L60E I’m using (the 4L80 case is HUGE and would have eaten into the flat floor of the already cramped cab).   A short time of “Now what’ll I do?” with the obviously different flywheel configuration, and I simply used the shorter bolts that’d come with the 4L60’s flex plate, tossed the spacer, and I had it together quickly.

The recess is a little asymmetrical, a result of it being originally made to clear the TBI 350 I had in it first.  There was some component which needed a little room on the right side, and, the distributor of course is at the rear, so it needed to be accessable.  It actually looks OK,  even though there’s nothing at the rear of the Vortec 6.0 that needs access, so I left the metalwork as is. 

Today, I’m headed out to the shop right now to mount the master cylinder and power brake booster, the pedal assembly, and get started on the wiring.  At least, find a place to mount the ECM and the fuse panel so the actual wiring can begin. 

So, from pile to pickup, it’s finally looking like it has potential again!