I first saw my truck in early fall of 2009 while visiting my cousin. My Uncle Danny owned the truck and had done a little work on it but it was still nowhere where it needed to be. It ran decent and had been sanded down and was in primer. I expressed interest in the truck, but at that moment my uncle was still holding onto the idea of fixing it up himself. However, after thinking about it, he decided restoring the truck was more than he wanted to realistically take on and after seeing my excitement over the truck, he offered to sell it to me for $700 in November 2009. While I loved the truck, I knew a project of this size would need to be one I did further down the road, so for the time being it became a truck I drove several times a week.

I knew it needed some maintenance to be road safe. The tires needed to be replaced, so I was not surprised when I got a flat tire hauling a load of wood from Indianapolis (where I worked at the time). That week I added 4 new tires and American Racing rims. Seeing the truck with new rims and tires was the catalyst for the project. The interior of the truck was great, except the glove box. It was a disaster and I looked for a replacement. That’s how I stumbled across LMC. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes that everything I could ever want or need for this truck was available. My fiancee is actually the one who made the first purchase from LMC. In December 2009 she bought the glove box for me for Christmas. That winter my Dad and I tinkered around with body panels a bit. My Dad used to work at GM and knew a lot about body work, so while I was laid off from my seasonal job he helped me take off and fix the fenders. He helped me remove the body filler and replace them with metal patches. I kept buying parts whenever I could and for birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas and even Easter once; I’d direct my fiancee to LMC for whatever new part I’d had my eye on. The “one piece at the time” mentality continued for the next couple of years.

While having regular maintenance done at Cummins’ Auto Center, my longtime friend Chris warned me that my crankshaft was eaten up pretty badly and I was headed for trouble very soon. So in 2011 I replaced the engine with a 1992 5.0 liter EFI. It was bored out to 306 and significantly increased the horsepower. It wasn’t something I had planned on doing, so for the next few years I had to put any major restoration on hold, but I continued purchasing parts from LMC and trying to decide what color to paint the truck. Pretty quickly I decided I wanted to have the truck repainted as close to the original color (Chestnut Iridescent) as possible. In late 2017, I was finally in a place financially where I could have the truck painted and have the bed switched out. The body work and paint were completed in March of 2018.

I would like to thank my Dad, fiancee and Cummins for always supporting me in this project. I would also like to thank LMC for making a project of this size easy by having every part you could want or need to fix up or fully restore an older vehicle. Since 2009 I’ve worked on this truck and always had a copy of the LMC catalog on the seat of my truck, in my garage and on my nightstand. Thank you for allowing me to share my story.