bkahler

Based on that drawing 78-1/2" is the original design height. Looks like mine is sitting about 1/2" to tall but once the sheet metal and bed are install I should be pretty close to design height. That's cool

Yep, that's it

Hmm, one of these is not like the others....

I just measured my 51. Currently the truck is a rolling chassis with the cab installed and all of the drive train and radiator. No sheet metal, no bed, etc. With that in mind it sits less than 80" to the top of the cab, probably more like 79". Also, for reference I have 7" between the top of the front leaf spring to the underside of the frame rail. Those numbers should give you a good idea. Oh yeah, the wheels are 16" with P225/75 radial tires. The diameter of the tires is very close to the original bias ply size.

My 51 B3B just fits under a 7 foot garage door.

My experience with Carter pumps have been just the opposite. They are the only ones I've found to stay running.

Here's where I mounted the electric pusher pump. It's a Carter P4070 pump. (Should have mentioned, it's a 12 volt pump)

That truck sounds great! Getting the stack over to the driver side definitely took some plumbing. Could you post a picture of the exhaust side of the engine?

It's a round muffler. I've been struggling a little in orienting the muffler. For one thing the down pipes provide a fixed point in space for where the inlet to the muffler needs to be. The way I currently have it with the inlet lower than the outlet keeps the tail pipe up closer to the frame. I'm not sure if that's good or bad and at the moment it looks like the hangers might not fit properly, i.e. to short. Until I get the down pipes welded to their respective flanges it's kind of a juggling act to get things to fit together. Once they are welded I'll have a fixed point in space that is solid and I can actually hang the muffler and play with the orientation of the inlet and outlet. Basically once the welding of the flanges is done the rest should sort of fall into place. That's the hope anyway

Taxes makes sense. I guess even though I never noticed any Gross Weight tags on the sides of trucks in Nebraska doesn't mean they weren't used, I just don't recall ever seeing any. Brian's point about getting pot holes filled is valid but I often wonder just much of the actual taxes collected to fill the holes actually make it to the pot holes ?

Yes and no. You can't feed it a straight 12 volts but you can use a ballast resistor to drop the voltage to the coil.

Interesting. I wonder what the reasoning was behind having the gross weight labeled on pickups?

Ok, welder is in place, just need to hook it up

Thanks, I appreciate that My truck came from your neck of the woods, Hailey Idaho. I don't know if it's true or not but I was told trucks in Idaho were required to have their weight rating written on the sides. To my knowledge we never had that kind of requirement in Nebraska where I grew up or any of the surrounding states for that matter.

Almost forgot. The muffler has the following markings. I'm assuming this means the muffler is bi-directional.

The weather hasn't cooperated much the past week or two but I've managed to make some progress on a couple of fronts. On the lower seat cushion I opted to add one of the seat air valves so that necessitated disassembly of the lower spring cushion. That was a pain but I got it done. Welding the valve in was easy but the reassembly process was just as much a pain as the disassembly was. Lately I seem to be forgetting to take progress shots of the work I'm doing. Not sure of this is an old guy thing or I'm just to busy to keep up I've also made more progress on the exhaust install. I'm more or less ready to weld the down tubes to the flanges so as soon as I can get the welder moved up to the garage (maybe this week) I can take care of that task. After that the rest of the install should be relatively straight forward. When I bought my truck it had a couple of 6,000 Gross Weight tags screwed to the front fenders. Back when I sent the sheet metal to be painted I was torn between putting the plates back on the truck or welding the holes shut. I eventually decided to leave the holes as I figured the tags were part of the trucks history. Fast forward to present day and I'm now one step closer to being able to installing the tags. I had my nephew recreate the tags from an image that I sent him and this is what I received. The plan is for me to clean up the metal plates and then apply the new vinyl stickers.

Ha! I bet it was expensive as well

I can say with confidence you're delving into an area I know NOTHING about! Do you have a picture of what the repair looked like before you melted all of the lead out?

Mark, I'm not sure who you're sourcing your glass from.....but you might want to find another supplier, the tinting in that window is just way to dark....?

Ya know, that's a darn good idea! I never really needed it before but it's simple enough to do so why not

Respray of the body panels has not really taken off as yet due to excessively cold temperatures. He can't get his shop warm enough without leaving the furnace on for extended hours and it's just not worth the cost. However it looks like there might be a slight break in temperature this week so some painting may take place. I've made some progress with the exhaust system. Unfortunately I did make one mistake. I took the two down pipes to the local shop (the one I figured would be the best of the bunch) to have offset bends put in the horizontal runs to bring them into alignment to enter the 2 to 1 adapter. That turned out to be a big mistake The mistake was in thinking they could put in a 1" offset accurately. That turned out to NOT be the case. I ended up with almost a 2" offset in the outside down pipe and a 1" offset in the inside down pipe. And to make things worse they weren't parallel to each other. What I've ended up doing to get around this mess was to cut off the 1" section on the inside pipe and I tweaked the outside pipe so the offset is more or less running parallel. This meant I had to order a short section of straight pipe and I'm having to splice the inside pipe Once the replacement section arrives things should go together rather quickly. The only tough part is bring hauling my Mig welder from the shop to the house garage where the truck is and then I have to temporarily install a 220 outlet for the welder. Here's a shot of the down pipes temporarily in place. At the moment I think I'm behind schedule on what needs to be done to make the trip west in March. I haven't given up hope though

Mark, is your division bar stamping press still functional? If so I've got another bar I would like stamped......

It's nice to see a youngster interested in those old vehicles Looking forward to hearing that engine run!

Yeah, I have a similar problem. I'll buy "spare" parts for something I have even though I have spares already.....I think it's some sort of disease

Thanks Ken. I hadn't really thought about the dynamics of how the exhaust works in that area. Makes sense though. Your comment prompted me to dig out the remains of the exhaust system I had with the truck, here's a picture of what you're referring too. Currently the flanges aren't fastened to the down pipes. It looks like I'll need to use baling wire or something similar to hang the pipe in place while I'm trying to fit everything. Not the end of the world, just a minor inconvenience Thanks! Brad