Covid-20
2020 saw the Covid-19 pandemic and we found we had a bit of extra time on our hands with fewer child activities and Matt having less work at his day job, so we built this 1982 C20 Silverado, it needed a little love to get it back to a rip-roaring fun truck … the Covid-20
We picked this up from a friend in Tucson and trailered it back up to the house. It ain’t pretty but it ran and drove and only had minimal dents and dings.
We wanted to limit the mods and custom work on this build, so we decided to paint it the factory GM Linen White and restore the interior to stock Silverado trim in black.
Not much to fix, couple dents and just a minor touch of rust. Had to use the Stud Ease little on the back of the cab.
We don’t really do full restores so we made a few mods, guess that’s why they call ‘em Resto-Mods. On the body we made a custom grill and shaved the drip rails and trim. The rear bumper was replaced with a roll pan and we added some running lights to the roof. Then we thought, we really want some wide meaty tires on the back, let’s put on some dually fenders.
Stock height was way too high, so we did a 6/8 static drop using springs and drop spindles upfront and an axle flip and c-notch in the rear.
In order to fill that new wheel well we bought some Detroit Steel Wheels Delray’s in 20×14 with a 3.25 backspace, that’s some dish – I now understand that Lone Star State style, it’s bad ass.
The Covid-20 VIN showed the engine was originally a 454 but when we bought it someone had stuffed a lime green 350 in it, meh.
Since we had 15” Mickey Thompsons on the back we needed more grunt to do a burnout so we found a Mark IV 454 on Craigslist got it machined at Gene’s Engine Services in Phoenix (great prices, fast turn-around, good guy) and rebuilt it with new pistons to make 9.75:1 compression and a .502/.501 lift 218/228 duration cam from Summit.
On the interior we replaced just about everything with interior parts mostly from LMC. We refurbished the factory air and factory power windows. Bell Auto Upholstery in Phoenix (always a great job at reasonable prices) recovered the seat with a factory Silverado black vinyl and cloth cover and new foam. We changed the headliner to an ABS piece that also mounts speaker in the ceiling and put 10” sub under the seat.
It sure was fun to build this one, and it was nice to have it completed so much quicker than the C10 Roadster, but it’s time to sell it and move on to the next project …