Day 46 - The Beast rides again after 25 years!

Friday, 07 October

Today we celebrated the completion of the restoration of my old 1953 Chevy Pickup, which I gave to Jayson a little over 7 years ago... It had been in restoration mode since 1986 when I gave it to a friend of mine to do the body work and paint, which never got done due to my friend losing his shop space... consequently, it sat in storage until Jayson showed an interest in restoring the truck... I let him take the truck back to school with him during his sophomore year at BYU... unfortunately, it had a major engine breakdown on the way (looong story)... due to money and time, it went back into storage in multiple pieces.

This year, I told Jayson about a guy that I met at a hotrod cruise-in about 5 months ago.  He looked him up and the restoration completion commenced... today we picked it up and drove it to the muffler shop for the final step of adding glasspacs and pipes to the new headers... they turned out nice and they sound great.

On the way home, it became apparent that something was wrong with the way the engine was running... the truck died a few blocks from home and we discovered that the fuel filter was obstructed because of rust in the fuel tank that was flushing out into the fuel line... after clearing the line, the truck would not start due to a dead battery (typical 6 volt problem), so we compression started the truck to get it home, where after a few frustrating hours of trying to locate a 6 volt charger (nobody seems to have one anymore and the one found at NAPA was $160.00), and performing some diagnostics, we determined that the generator was burned out!  This was very disappointing because Jayson wanted to drive the truck in the BYU Homecoming Parade tomorrow... We may be able to run off of the battery for the duration of the parade, but it will take about three days to get the generator repaired. 

Despite the setbacks, the truck looks amazing and sounds fantastic!  It was awesome to drive it again after all of these years... I hope I get to take Deb on a date in it just like the good old days before we go home!