1956 Chevy Pickup Project

Well, I finally did it. Decided to start a thread showing the deconstruction and resurection of my 56 Chevy shortbox project.

I bought it from a fella in Puyallup, Wa last April. It spend the summer under one of those Costco carports before I got the drywall done on the shop and the truck inside.

When we arrived it was in pieces. After an hour and a half we had it zip tied together and on the trailer. It came with a TCI front cross-member kit, new grille and a bunch of other new parts.

that truck looks in aufull good shape nice start!!

Good post Gavyn. Nice to see pics. It's a shame that Bob had to be bungeed into the truck box for the ride home, but a guys gotta do what a guys gotta do.

Great looking truck, I like the 55/56 Chevys, should be a fun project

..that will be a pleasure to work on...seeing all that good solid steel makes me dizzy...

.... nice pickup!! ... looks like she's almost ready for paint hahaha ... great start for a project ... decent tin can sure save lots of time an $$$

Yes, it has been nice, working with such good tin as a starting point. It came apart with very little effort (but then again, most projects do come apart easily, dont they). Here are a couple of other before pics...



Luckily, the steps are in real nice shape.




Once stripped, this is where I will focus my attention...



Obviously, this stock suspension will not stay long.

Nice truck !! I'm a big fan of the 55,56,57 I'll be watching this thread closely.

They are a nice model and that should be a good project, looks like a good thing, good for you, That would make a top shop truck for me at the shop.

nice project....a guy down the road just finished his 56fleetside and his shop , then they both burned to the ground....poor guy....i look forward to the build pics, thanks

Thanks for the support. I have never done a "frame-off" before, so I am wading into uncharted waters. Even as I strip the truck, the final concept of what a clean, comfortable, modern daily driver is, is still forming in my mind. I'm reading lots and looking at other peoples build on the web. I seem to know more about what I don't want. I know I don't want stock, nor full on show-car/billet, but something in between. Nor do I want to get sucked into the "catalog car" black hole and spend myself out of a finished truck or something in the weeds (the PTPer's on this forum understand why after this winters crop of pot holes, craters and lakes). I have a few friends who have been along this path before, and a few with good fab skills to keep me on track and grounded. More to come...

Getting a little behind in the posts, but thought I'd show a few of the deconstruction photos. The truck was really quite solid. A little rust to deal with in one cab corner that I didn't notice at first, and one of the back fenders as well. It came apart pretty smoothly, especially since I did all that stuff on my own. It's hard to get my teenage daughters out in the shop without some form of manipulation or guilt trip. Boy, I miss my son - he's married now and on his own in the Kootenays - he'd always be beside me, my shadow, with any project I had on the go in the shop or on the house.

Anyways, here's where she's at...







Once the box was off I had a little surprise awaiting at the back of the cab. Oh well, can't expect it to be a lego set:



Here, the front sheet metal has also been removed:


I finally got down to the frame and now can begin to make a few changes.



The differential is off, the dropped axle is axed and the leaf springs are gone. All unneeded brackets were removed. I must've removed 100 rivets during this phase! Went through a bunch of drill bits and grinding discs as well. Air chisel didn't do squat and the punch only took out rivets when the frame was good and solid. When there was anly flex, the rivets wouldn't budge and needed to be drilled out with progressively larger bits untill they just about fell out. I did get faster at it as the process progressed.

How much is the axle dropped?? And how much $$$ for it??

Mr 57 - PM'd you.

HEY WOOD!! i have a camaro clip here that would suit you just fine willing to swap for somethin?and its here in town

MR HANEY said:

HEY WOOD!! i have a camaro clip here that would suit you just fine willing to swap for somethin?and its here in town

Click to expand...

Thanks MrHaney, but I have a TCI Mustang II cross-member with dropped spindles, etc that is going in it. A buddy of mine is doing a 57 truck, so I will let him know about it, though.

Its been a while, so it was time to get some new pics up. I decided a while ago that I was going to put the gas tank behind the diff and bought a new 57 Chevy car gas tank. It has the filler neck in one corner rather than in the middle. It will better meet my needs for what I have in mind later on. My youngest daughter took this picture while I was working.



The next step was to remove the original front cross member. Leadfoot was over the day we did that. We removed the 18 or so rivets holding it in place and then used a zip cut and sliced the cross member in half. It literally just fell out...



You can see from the pic above that the frame flares wide where the cross member joins, so this needed to be trimmed. It was a little difficult to see the marks where I needed to cut the flange off with the grinder, so I used a trick that we teach kids in grade 8. You guys probably all know this one anyways. After you mark the line with a scribe, use a center punch and mark every inch or so. So no matter what angle the light is coming from, the punch marks will be visible and you can grind with accuracy. Much easier that way.




So there she was, stripped as absolutely bare as possible. I spent several hours with a flapper wheel and grinder taking all the paint and crap off the frame. I was going to send it down to be sand blasted in the areas I couldn't get to, but decided to get the new cross member in first so that I can paint the whole thing at once. Unfortunately that requried waiting for a certain someone to get his S-10 project out of the shop at school so we could use the big welder (my puny little one is definitely not up to the task).

Good looking build, Gavyn. By the way, are those Toyota wheels and tires for sale? Looks like they're just gathering sparks and grinding dust. LOL.

Bgbkwndo.

Thnaks! The wheels in the background are factory 18`s off the family car - an `07 Hyundai Santa Fe. Sorry, not for sale. I did mock them up on the trcuk before teardown and liked what I saw. Of course, the truck will be sitting quite a bit lower, but the 18`s fill the cavernous wheel wells nicely! Not quite the styling I wanted (in terms of rim design) but it gets a guy thinking big wheels.