Well, life got in the way and I haven't been able to make much progress on my truck. I did have some time last weekend to get some stuff done and ended up getting the rest of my donor frame mostly stripped down and got the engine removed. I'm still debating if I'm going to go have the frame sandblasted or just take a wire wheel to it to remove the rust and scale before painting it. I'm leaning towards just using a wire wheel on what I can reach and hoping that a hammer and compressed air can remove what is loose on the boxed portion of the frame.
Now for some pics
got the front end pushed into the garage so I could pull the engine. I needed it in my garage far enough so that my cherry picker would be on the concrete as my driveway is **** falling apart asphalt
got the engine removed, it went pretty quick because I only had a few bolts and the power steering lines to remove. Notice the pieces of angle iron I have clamped to the frame... I didn't want it to buckle on me again when I was pushing it around to get it in a spot I could work on the engine
Here it is all removed! It only took me about 25 minutes from the time I had the frame pushed into the garage to having the engine in the air clear of the frame
Next up (hopefully tomorrow) is working on getting everything pulled off the engine so I can work on getting it all degreased and install the new gaskets that I bought for the common leak areas. One of my buddies is sort of a LT1 guru so I've been talking with him on what my steps should be on getting this engine freshened up and what gaskets to replace. I've also been throwing around the idea of putting a more aggressive sounding cam into it while it's sitting on the stand in my garage.
That's all for now! hopefully I'm able to make some continuing progress, I went to a car show this weekend and got some renewed motivation from seeing all these restored 40s and 50s trucks (even though I have no plans on making this truck shine like everything I saw at the show)