Restoration of a Rusty 1948 GMC. Full Rebuild From Start to Finish

yeah go for it whoa [Music] well it's another beautiful day in Saskatchewan and this raging pile of trash is still sitting on my lawn right where I dumped it about a week ago and normally that'll be fine but I've been getting all kinds of strange looks from passersby and I can only assume that's out of extreme jealousy understandable but it is gonna parked partially on city property and I don't really want to push my luck because I'm already on a first name basis with bylaw guy so uh we gotta at least get this thing moved back a little bit which easier said than done I got the brakes freed up uh look at that terrible so to begin our archaeological Journey I'm using this handy dandy shovel featuring an olive drab handle for stealth scooping it's also extendable for doing sedans and other large body vehicles should mention that it's extremely important to do all of your scooping collaterally or against the grain the reasons for this will become clear later on in the video once you finish scooping you can then move on to sucking away any of the remaining particles extreme care should be taken at this stage to avoid disturbing the natural habitat of the bacteria and spiders present within the vehicle thank you so after careful inspection we determined that the engine that was in the truck was no longer usable and the cab on it was also rusted Beyond repair so we needed to find a donor truck for an engine and cab and all the other ruined pieces my uh mom sent me uh pictures of this truck which was on uh Facebook Marketplace and I'm not on Facebook so uh got in touch with the owner and uh this thing followed me home so great to have family that enables your recording but anyways I haven't even looked at this thing yet that's an interesting old repair I would uh I would rate this uh Fender as poor so I'm not sure [Music] it needs to be saved well so it needs cab corners of course and it's not looking too good need a little patch there I don't know if I'm saving this cab yet or not I think probably fix this cab up and floor I mean it's it's there but um at least this part for sure is gonna have to be replaced it's looking looking pretty pretty thin especially through here and of course all of these trucks all rest out in here garbage but look at that I got a battery and uh oh okay that's uh oh I look at that as uh there's less bolts to take out what we got going on in here oh yeah that is all pretty terrible but uh not surprising on one of these trucks another little ding back here in the cab corner good on the inside of the door here oh great you can see we got a little bit of more than the factory tolerance there for uh door pillar movement so that's got to be yeah this is all pretty bad up in here and you can see here the way the floor itself is actually collapsed there's a brace under here how can you guys didn't remind me to disconnect the choke cable come on you know they make a Sawzall blade specifically for exactly what we're doing here which I would have known about these earlier I saved myself a fortune on wrenches and things over the years all you really need is this look at that even tells you where you can cut it's basically what we're doing we're cutting away the front and the back just keeping the center very good let's get to it foreign foreign you may have guessed by now that this 261 is not going back in that [Music] [Music] [Music] what's up [Music] thank you [Music] so it's a better look at the damage there so I'm going to tack weld in the lower post and as I'm tack welding it I'm going to constantly be checking and rechecking the measurements and also that the pillar is straight up and down basically every attack I make I'll constantly recheck it and I want to get attack weld in all the major corners or points on it once it's all tack welded in at those points then it can't really go anywhere and then it'll be ready for final welding [Music] oh foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] foreign foreign foreign [Music] foreign foreign foreign [Music] so now that I have my Edge ready for a butt weld I'm going to lock in my door Gap by placing attack weld on the top and the bottom edge of the cab corner and the rest of it right now is just overlapping uh the uh the old cab corner or what's left of it now I'm going to take my zip wheel and I'm going to cut through the bottom layer of the old cab Corner this is going to allow the new cab corner to relax into place and I'm just going to work it a little at a time and push it into place and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to align it all for a butt weld so I push it into place make sure both the panels on the joint are flush and I place the tack weld about every inch or so and that's just going to hold it into place uh it helps do this a little at a time and not just cut the whole thing at once for a tighter Gap you can also use a reciprocating saw and it works a little nice a little more accurate but the zip wheel of death makes a lot of Sparks and it's a lot more spectacular for YouTube and this is just meatball surgery we're not going for Perfection here so it works just fine thank you if you're new here I already have videos of doing the passenger side several videos showing everything in great detail and you can check those out on the 1948 GMC playlist on my channel so if you have any questions on what I'm doing or how I'm doing it please go watch those videos because I explained everything in that and it's not really a good use of your time or my time for me to just explain things that are already have already been done this side was rustier than the passenger side however by time you're done cutting um you end up replacing the same amount of metal as I did on the other side so you know the only benefit to this side was it actually went faster because I had less to cut out because it was so Rusty so that's kind of how that worked and here I am doing the inner call panel which went in reasonably well now I'm flattening out the Factory lead seam on the outer call panel the reason I do that is so I can butt weld it and eliminate the need for that Factory lead seam there's no reason for that anymore and now I'm going to test fit the door before I weld the outer cowl panel on well I now have the outer cowl panel fit to the door the way that I want it so I'm going to begin to weld it now I'm going to put in a few of the plug welds and then I'm going to begin butt welding the seam along where the lead seam used to be and we're just using the old Cotton butt technique there to splice it in pretty fast and simple and straightforward and gets the job done nothing too scientific there and once I get attack weld at about every inch I'll begin uh final welding it and by doing that I'm basically doing uh three tacks at a time three welds at a time half inch at a time whatever you want to do and then immediately grinding it and uh just going along like that and keeps steam relatively straight and uh yeah and we'll go ahead and finish all the plug welds which there's a pretty decent amount of on these uh trucks in the cowl area I'll start welding along the bottom and uh welding the outer cowl to the inner to Outer cowl panel as I believe it's called they're just using plug welds to attach that as we showed on the other side I like to kind of clean the metal up before I start welding it obviously so we don't have any contamination we've also got this massive dent on the back of the cab thank you foreign I want to get the new cab Corner welded on so I start by getting the door jamb fit to the door and then I slowly work my way along and uh kind of do the cotton butt technique again and Tack it as I go and I'm just continuously working things back and forth trying to get the best possible fit as I can because you want to get that now before you weld it because if you don't fix that now and then you go to weld it well the welding is only going to make any fitment or alignment issues worse you only get to see the last bit of welding across the back here but again same thing as as we did to join the cowl panel we're uh I've got a video on this already I think it's like uh MIG welding is there a faster easier way to mig weld a panel or something like that so you can watch that if you're interested well now I'm just uh dismantling the GMC to prepare it for the new uh cab to get swapped on and in order to do this I basically go to tear the entire truck apart and uh that's okay because uh I just love Rusty bolts and Rusty garbage and taking stuff apart so this is uh just just a lot of fun here and most of it's in time lapse so that you don't have to experience the painfulness of it in real time so you're welcome foreign so I'm sure a lot of you are probably still wondering uh why we're not using this cab so uh we'll just kind of give you a quick uh tour here and see if you can figure it out for yourself if not then well I don't know what to tell you [Music] [Music] thank you and then along this lower edge here I'll get that open I'll just drop that all right [Music] that was a disgusting amount of plug welding and grinding and messing around I don't really want to ever do that again but uh now we have the problem of trying to fit the glass in here I really really really hope the glass with [Music] all right I'm gonna attempt to uh spruce up this Dash a bit I don't really want to paint it but it is looking pretty uh scummy so I don't know we'll see if we can clean up first and then if that doesn't work then we'll uh regroup and reevaluate so I'll start by just cleaning it up and scrubbing it down I had pretty low expectations at this point but I figured it was worth a shot as uh repainting a dash is a fair amount of work and uh doesn't really add a whole lot to it now at this point I forgot to hit record and lost a bit of the footage of cleaning it up but then we kind of moved on to polishing it and uh doing some uh hitting with some rubbing compound and what have you to uh try and shine up a bit and we're starting to notice that there was a bit of potential in this old dash yet so we're glad we kind of went with this decision and now we're reinstalling uh reconditioned gauge number two and uh I kind of figured this might happen as things were going way too smoothly so there's always got to be an issue somewhere and I'll put the speaker Grille in and the trim pieces and look when you look at that the whole uh Dash is really starting to come together foreign [Music] foreign smooth out there with some lead so it's a little uh a little better transition there before it had quite a swoop to it and then uh where we welded it we just left that low and then we filled over that with lead so that we weren't uh trying to you know over stress that area which is already seen its share of stress throughout the years and deal over here we got this whole let it out there warning the next segment is painful to watch at least more painful than usual foreign [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] thank you foreign thank you foreign [Music] foreign foreign [Applause] foreign [Applause] here behind this project was not to create a Flawless showpiece but rather what I would call a blank slate for someone else to take to whatever level that they choose to so all we really did was just made the body structurally sound and then get it running so it at least can move itself around other than that like the Defenders the hood the Box still has a bunch of you know old repairs and and dings and and imperfections but we just wanted to get rid of all the large massive uh horrible damage that we could and uh so uh that's kind of the theory there and then uh I just left the Mechanicals as is it all needs to be gone through in fact I didn't want to go too crazy with any of that because there's a lot of people that like to do the hot rod thing or whatever and upgrade all that so you know I start replacing uh brakes and all that stuff and then the next thing you know uh some the next owner is just gonna rip all out throw it away and put in modern stuff so as left it as is and you know for me I think it would be pretty cool just to go through the Mechanicals on it get it on the road kind of as is and just use it as for its intended purpose which is a truck I do like the fully restored trucks that are all Flawless and everything that's cool to look at but you know what's even cooler is an old truck that's still being used as an old truck and uh you know whether it's 70 years old or or 10 years old you know a truck can still be used as a truck so that's really cool and uh again I don't have any control over what happens to it when it leaves here this is just kind of a blank slave for someone to uh to do with as they please but this is the last time you're gonna see this truck um it has been sold and it's going to be sounds like it's going to a great new home the gentleman who purchased it has been looking for one of these old trucks for quite some time so it sounds like it's it stands a good chance of actually uh going back together if it if I was to keep it it would never get finished or anything beyond what it is now and I would have just used it for pushing junk vehicles around the yard and I never would have done anything more with it so the best case scenario is it goes on to someone who actually uh actually wants it and is going to hopefully enjoy it and for those who want to know what it's sold for that's between myself and the new owner it's uh if you want to know what these trucks are worth you can go on Google you can check out Hemmings your local classifieds Craigslist Marketplace wherever and you can do your own research there um this is an autocar flipping Channel this is a car fixing Channel I just happen to sell these things when I'm done work doing my part on them now I'm sure you're wondering what we were actually able to save from the original truck and actually quite a bit the only things we didn't save was the cab doors bed and the engine this running board and half of the other running board um actually the Cal vent and the corner windows not the glass obviously but the metal around them was all actually harvested from the original cab no uh uh upon some investigation the Box doors and engine that were actually in that truck were not original to the truck to begin with so there wasn't a whole lot of original truck there even to start with but we were able to save the tailgate I believe that is the original tailgate to the truck it the Box had been changed out at some point and I had this box which is not perfect but it's considerably better than what was on the truck and I believe it is still fairly workable in Canada here to buy a complete box it's like five grand Canadian so you can do a fair amount of work to get this box uh back into shape for that kind of price so uh it just made sense to swap it out and the fact that the box that was on the truck wasn't original so it anyways made sense and the truck did have the wrong doors on it it had the layer style doors with the vent window so we swapped it out for the correct doors and yeah we basically saved as much as we could I just wanted to give a few shout outs and thank yous before we leave here they just shout out and thank you goes to Scott and Colin for actually uh rescuing this truck digging it out of the Bush and setting aside until I was able to come pick it up um this truck was literally going to the Scrapper if they hadn't rescued it the land that it was sitting on it was getting cleared out and if you want to see the recovery videos on this truck I'm going to put a link in the description to Scott's channel here on YouTube it's called Cold War Motors and I highly recommend you check it out uh not just for the recovery videos but he has a lot of interesting projects and I know a lot of you have uh wanted to see you know nice shiny Bodywork and full Restorations and stuff like that well if you want to see that go check out Scott's Cold War Motors Channel particularly the 1960 Fury project um that car there that he did makes what I did on this drug look like Child's Play so please check again check out cold war Motors and thank you again to Scott and Colin for rescuing this truck for me ever since I was a young boy growing up in a big city I've had a dream of buying a 1948 GMC and then flipping it at a huge loss so Scott and Colin were able to make that dream come true so again thank you to them and while we're saying thank you so I just wanted to say a huge thank you to all of you because you folks watching my videos sitting through the ads and commenting liking sharing all of that has really made this project actually possible to help grow the channel it's helped make uh it's helped me take this truck further than I had originally anticipated taking it none of that would have been possible without you folks actually sitting down and sitting through my videos I know they're painful to watch but I sure do appreciate it and I think the truck also appreciates it if you told me a year ago that we would be doing uh something that's ambitious on on a Channel or even just me fixing it in my garage um there there's no way I would have thought that would be possible but it did it it worked out okay well I mean from a distance it looks okay you know if you actually crunch all the numbers I think uh I basically made minimum wage on the whole deal between uh making the videos and actually working on the truck but uh that's okay because I'd be just welding up Rusty drunk anyways so I figured you know I might as well film it and some of you seem to enjoy it so that's cool and the other major major contributor to actually bringing these videos to you is the people doing the super thanks and the super chats and of course our our monthly contributors on patreon those folks have really been the only reason that I've continued doing videos on a somewhat regular basis their donations are what actually enables me to set aside time to film and edit and upload and whatever do all of these videos a lot of the the bigger YouTubers will tell you that one minute of footage equals one hour of work and I didn't really believe that at first but once I started doing it I realized that I know it seems like you just set up the camera and and pointed and film it and then there's magically a video there but it really is accurate one minute of footage is one hour work and that that's between doing the work setting up the camera filming editing uploading um replying to comments and just everything that goes along with it once you really stand back or look at it there's there's a ton of work there so the fact that our patrons recognize that and want to contribute to me continuing with this is just really fantastic so if if you like these videos please thank our patrons and folks doing the super chats because that's that's really what's keeping the show on the air at this point as far as what's coming up in the future well you just have to stay tuned and see uh we have no shortage of rest and dents to take care of here and maybe some vehicular modifications or restyling or in our future as well but uh again stay tuned and thank you so much to everyone for following Along on this GMC series and I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I haven't that laughs

Channel: Carter Auto Restyling

Views: 1,395,477

Keywords: hot rod, rat rod, classic truck, classic car, autobody, bodywork, metalwork, metal repair, engine repair, engine swap, straight 6, stovebolt, antique truck, pickup, gmc, chevy, ford, restoration, restored, restore, rebuild, will it run, will it start, first drive, 1947-1954, advance design, mig welding, carter auto restyling

Id: gBMysgB3M7Y

Length: 53min 39sec (3219 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 04 2023