Grandpa's Fishing Truck

Hi Folks,

I've been lurking around the forums for awhile and I figured I'd get around to updating y'all on my truck and what I've been up to.

In August my wife's car was totaled and it turns out it's a terrible time to try to buy a new car. Meanwhile, my grandpa's old fishing truck has been sitting for at least a decade and my mom has been trying to get it out of her driveway forever. So it seemed like a good time to get it running and try to get a reliable daily going.



Here's the pickup as I found it. It's a 1984 S10 Tahoe extended cab with a 2.8, automatic, and the fancy jumper seats I remember riding in when I was little. It's been parked and hasn't run since at least 2009. Notice the massive oil leak underneath it - we'll later figure out that this is mostly power steering fluid pouring from the steering gear.

This is the mess I found under the hood when I found it:



It was super dirty. Battery was dead. Dirt and leaves everywhere. The field mice had built a pretty impressive nest under the air filter. The oil was overfull, pitch black, and full of gasoline. Plugs were fouled something fierce. It was clear that the gas in the tank had turned to nasty varnish and folks had been trying to start it and flooding the motor with the bad gas from the tank. The upshot was that since it was in the desert and sitting under a car port it's got no rust and the paint is mostly intact.

First order of business was a new battery and deal with the bad gas. I replaced the fuel filter on the carb:



The old one was pretty foul and gives you some idea of how gnarly the gas in the tank was.

Bought the 7 dollar Harbor Freight siphon, a handful of garage sale gas cans and started pumping.


I'm generally skeptical of any harbor freight tool with moving parts - but this thing did the trick. Pulled about 10 gallons in five minutes without making a mess.

In this picture you can see the nasty varnish gunk from the bottom of the tank. When I pulled the siphon it left this on the filler neck:


I forgot to take a picture of the gas itself, and there's no describing how orange brown it was and how bad it smelled. It was time to drop the tank. Here's the tank out after some cleaning on it. Every rubber hose and vacuum line on the car are toast so these lines got replaced.



This picture of the sending unit will give you some idea of what I was dealing with.


You can see how nasty and rusty everything was on the sending unit. The filter sock was fouled and the float was dyed orange - but since it's a mechanical setup I figured i could clean it up and make it work. I do like that GM used color coded clamps on the fuel lines so you can keep track of them under the car. I've found that the color clamps are also found under the hood where the lines leave the frame rail and meet up with the mechanical fuel pump and smog canister etc. Green is feed, red is return, and the yellow is a smog vent line.

No one had a part number for the Filter sock / strainer at all. I had a really hard time at the auto parts store explaining to the folks that I wasn't making this part up. Eventually I convinced the kids at O'Reillys to do a search for the sending unit sock for any Chevy pickup of that year - since most of that stuff is interchangeable. If anyone else needs this thing here is the part number from parts store computer - you'll want the one for a 3/8ths fuel line.



Cleaned the tank out using a box of fancy gas tank cleaner and an afternoon of elbow grease, and then it went back in.

I've seen a bunch of folks pulling their beds off or cutting the beds to get to this stuff. But I'd say once you get the hang of it, it's relatively easy to get the gas tank in and out without resorting to any sort of theatrics. One trick I found was if you lift the gas tank just high enough with the filler neck still removed you can see clearly all the line connections you need to make through the filler neck hole while also being able to reach up under the fender to make the connections.



Just before I buttoned everything up, I stuck a universal clear filter inline at the frame rail so I could prevent any left over gunk from the tank getting to the fuel pump. It's paid off over the last few months. These filters have caught a bunch of garbage I wasn't able to get out of the tank / lines and are really easy to replace at 4 bucks a pop.


That's all I can manage for tonight. I'll catch up more on what I've been up to when I get a chance.