I bought my Tahoe, dubbed Ol’ Bessie, July 10th 2010 from a family member of my then wife after a nasty rollover accident of my previous vehicle when it had 198k miles on it. When I saw Ol’ Bessie I fell in love and had many plans for her, in my book I have always been a Chevy guy from day 1 and I thought she needed a lot of TLC! I wasn’t wrong about the TLC part one bit! At 15 years old and having 5 previous owners before me she was highly neglected and wasn’t properly cared for the few years that the last owner had her, she was trashed from having kids in and out of her all day every day, the oil was sludge, she ran like she was never cared for, and the exhaust was half missing so she was loud and woke up the whole town of 700 that I lived in when I had to leave to go to work at 3am.

The first couple years I owned her I never really got a whole lot of work done to her that I wanted, was always working and traveling back and forth to my family over 800 miles away (at least 1-2 trips a month). I did on the other hand make sure she was taken care of and properly maintained on a fairly regular basis. It wasn’t till a few months before my son was born that I was actually able to get some much needed work done to her to give her a fresh and more updated look. I orded over $1300 in parts from LMC Truck for the look and had the engine and transmission rebuilt when they both had 217k miles on them. Spent a whopping $10k for a new look and a better running truck!Last summer I had a whole completely new Magnaflo exhaust put in and had some more engine and transmission work done after a few hiccups she had when I moved over 1,100 miles away from Sioux Falls South Dakota to Las Vegas Nevada. The mechanic I paid a lot of money to and trusted with my baby did me very wrong and was a complete rippoff and was with out the trusted services of my faithful truck, spent many months trying to fix and trying to reverse the damage done to her my the shoddy mechanic, mostly to no avail! Then I happened to meet the most awesome mechanic that changed everything! While waiting for most of the overhauls and repairs to the engine and transmission and the transfer case I took her and completely changed how she looks inside and out, other than the money spent from LMC Truck for the wonderful parts they sold me. She was completely gutted on the inside of her seats and original carpet and padding, the carpet and padding were completely replaced, the seats went from the reddish leather to a white boat vinyl for easier cleaning and durability, plus it was a nice offset for the black carpet and headliner that was installed. She also got a completely new paint job with Rustoleum Spray on bed liner after the dings and dents were pulled and filled and smoothed out. When all that was done then me and my new mechanic put all the drive train back in, made sure everything was working as it should and to spec, made sure there was no trouble codes and got her fired back up, the first time she had ran in almost 8 months!

Had a lot of bugs to work out especially after finding out that a lot of after market parts were failing time and time again, mostly because they were reman parts from various parts stores in the area, found that some parts were just complete junk and had to revert back to the original parts, and she seemed to run a lot better with some of those original parts vs. the new or reman parts. Guess she likes to be original as can be…. Then came time for all new front and rear suspension parts, bushings and things like that. When the old and all original parts came off you could tell it was only a matter of time before most of them would have failed due to age and wear and tear, especially considering that at the time those parts came off there was over 250k miles on them, the ride was sloppy and she didn’t handle very well because of how aged and worn out those parts were.

So almost 5 years into this investment I have spent well over $20k for parts and labor plus having the interior done, all together she is about 80% completely rebuilt from the inside out. I still have a laundry list of projects I want to get done, things have been on hold due to some unforseen financial problems, but I have not and will not give up on my dreams of having this truck completely rebuilt and looking and driving the way she should be or better! Speaking of better before I close out of this long story of my strong willed beast, The average gas milage for the 1995 Chevy Tahoe LT with the 5.7l V8 was a whopping 10MPG or less, with all the upgrades and work I have done to her she gets as much as 15MPG or as little as 13.5MPG, That is one hell of an improvement for a vehicle with nearly 300k miles on her today!