Unlike most , I actually drive and work my old '69 Chevy C/10 shortie stepper . About 800 miles every 7 days when I'm not doing any traveling . To - morrow is Father's Day and my Son has told me we're going off to Johnson Valley , Ca. (Landers) to look for properties to buy so to - day I'll go home and grease the whole font suspension then de grease the engine and chassis so the sand & dust from those back roads will have nothing to stick to. Maybe (polly not enough time to - day) I'll remove the right inner fender and open up the heater , fix the heat flapper so the dang heat isn't always on ~ it's been nearly three years so no hurry I guess . Darn DPO/DPM's .
Sat. 6/15/2013 O.K. ; As it turned out I did work on the truck before heading out to the middle of nowhere , good thing too as here's what I found when I removed the front drums ~ this is the right front , look closely at the trailing (rear) shoe and you can see it's *very* thin in lining .
Left Front Had lining left but it was cracked clean through at the rivets ! . This could have failed and gone metal to metal at any moment .
Later ~ I was pleased & surprised to find new brake shoes at my local NAPA Partshaus . Made in China (?!) they charged me $6 core charge , I kept my old shoes and will have them relined locally , prolly go with riveted linings again as they're much better and last longer . This pic. is the right front just before I greased the spindle and installed the hub & drum again . it stops on a dime again but I'm not done with the brakes just yet .
Then ; As long as I was already filthy I figured I might as well fix the dang heater as it was forecasted to be 100? F in The Lucerne Valley . I went to remove the right inner fender and discovered this :
More Horror The bottom edge of the radiator core support followed by the bits of broken off core support and inner fender leading edge :
It Gets Worse ! After I removed the hood and right hood hinge , I took the heater proper , off the firewall to discover this :
What Fell Out I've owned this truck for nearly three years now and have been assiduously cleaning , vacuuming and blowing leaves , sand and flowers out of the cowl & heater plenums but this fell out when I removed the heater from the firewall :
The Good News ! The heater no longer blows hot air all the time and as soon as I find another heater control , I'll clean it up and transfer my good levers & fan switch into it so i have air control l fresh as well as temperature . The truck of course , ran flawlessly , didn't miss a beat nor burn any oil I could tell . It even did very well when I drove through several really bad spots of sugar sand , my Son as certain we'd get stuck but it soldiered on though . We had a nice Father's Day all in all . There was more misery I found when working on it Saturday but I didn't have the time to take any more pix . .