Thank you. I don't have any photos of my old 74 C10. That blue 79 GMC flatbed was my pride and joy though.
oh man are they! I actually had this one custom built for the 74 2WD because the bed on that truck was pretty much unsalvagable, or at least at the time it was way more cost effective to get the flatbed built than it was to restore the bed. A friend was working for a local welding shop and he built it for me and worked in some really neat features. I had an expanded steel motorcycle ramp another friend's stepdad had given me so my welder buddy built a spring-loaded handle mechanism for stowing the ramp under the flatbed. It had bowtie taillamp cutouts and a big aluminum diamond plate bowtie mounted to the front bulkhead/headache rack. It was slightly shorter and narrower than a standard flatbed, he recessed the side marker lamps into the bed sides, and he broke the edges all the way down each side so it was smooth diamond plate everywhere. Most mass produced flatbeds use a piece of channel iron for the sides and a diamond plate sheet is welded on top of it. It was a slick unit. All this for about $2000 in 1993.
I bought the 79 GMC from my dad in 1999 and went to work restoring that truck. I had it painted the same color as my 74 except it had big RS stripes on the hood in silver. The flatbed got repainted and put on the 79, and in the early 2000's I put a Progressive Suspension 4" lift kit under the 79 and rebuilt most of the chassis components that didn't get replaced in the suspension swap, along with 33x12.50x15 Cooper Discoverer STTs and black steel wheels. Everything was cleaned and repainted. That just left the rebuilt 350 and the original Th350. The truck was an original full-time 4x4 so it had the NP203 which was fine by me. I didn't do and hard core off roading, and while the gear driven 205 was definitely more indestructable than the chain-drive in my 203, it never once gave me issues.
I hauled alot of crap with that half-ton GMC and about the only issue it ever gave me was it needed a fuel pump every year or 2. Before that my dad used it to haul cord wood every spring for weeks on end, and hauling a camper up and down the Montana highways all summer long and hunting duty all fall. It was a hell of a truck.
