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Dads '66 Suburban

CarterKraft

CarterKraft

Red Skull Member
Joined
May 21, 2020
Member Number
892
Messages
4,175
Loc
DFW
Truck was my dads, he bought it from a collector at Pate Swap meet.
Its pretty rough both mechanically and cosmetically but is solid and reliable.
It came with a 283 power glide that was tired.
We put a '01? 5.3/4l60 in it and converted it to square body (I think) power steering and power brakes.
The wheel tire combo and ride height was done by the previous owner, more or less it seemed like a "flip" but the work was done a long time ago.

We put seats from a chevy mini van and a rear bench out of a van, it seats 7 pretty easily which is really awesome.
Vintage air AC makes summer tolerable, it needs a rear mount secondary unit.
So far I've drove it to his celebration of life and to a Christmas parade about 100 miles away.
It has a pretty wicked drive line vibration not sure why he didn't say anything about it. It also doesn't handle the 7 people payload very well...

Getting ready for the same parade I bought some AirLift Dominator 2600lb air bags. Going to attempt to just swap the rear coils with the bags and plumb fill schrader valves to the gas door and just load it up and then fill it with shop air at my uncles and dump it when we get back home.

Ultimately I am going to bag the front as well but I will try to put in a C-notch when doing the rear air bags to gain some up travel.

More pix etc. to come, this gets it started.

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Rttoys said:
looks good. That’s my favorite body style too :smokin:
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Nothing about this was my fav when he bought it but it grew on me and the ability to load up your whole squad and cruise is pretty fucking awesome. I didn't even realize that would be a feature but it's fucking awesome.

In those pix we were loaded up we drove to Dallas to market hall visited my uncle Bob at the knife show then loaded him and my aunt up and drove to Rodeo Goat for a burger then dropped them back off at the hotel.
It was really bad ass and for days after I smiled thinking about it.
 
Nice. I have a love for that body style because my grandparents had a 65 step side they bought new in 65. It was retired to our farm truck when I was growing up. I always wanted to make a hot rod out of it, but my grandparents wouldn’t part with it (so they say). Ended up selling it to a friend of my dad’s that made it into a hot rod. Nothing like “you are not smart enough to fix it, but this other random guy is” :shaking: Anyways. Still love that body style.

Cool stories remembering your dad too. Hopefully you and the kids keep it going as the years go by. :smokin:
 
Rttoys said:
Nice. I have a love for that body style because my grandparents had a 65 step side they bought new in 65. It was retired to our farm truck when I was growing up. I always wanted to make a hot rod out of it, but my grandparents wouldn’t part with it (so they say). Ended up selling it to a friend of my dad’s that made it into a hot rod. Nothing like “you are not smart enough to fix it, but this other random guy is” :shaking: Anyways. Still love that body style.

Cool stories remembering your dad too. Hopefully you and the kids keep it going as the years go by. :smokin:
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Those types of family deals suck, about the same as the 85 year old collector that is "gonna get to em soon" .

My uncle is a collector of this body style too, has a complete organized barn full of parts, I guess it's his retirement, retirement fund l :idea:

I want to do a more lumpy cam (so it doesn't sound like a '01 Silverado and just generally better dial in some of the stuff we never really got good enough to my liking.

But... As I look at it and how.much I really enjoy driving it it might need more love than that, maybe some little twin turbos and a full chassis I would build.
A little day dreaming but I like to have a plan so I don't have to do things more than once.
 
I did have a 64 (I think) GMC I bought with no title about 30 years ago. It was going to be hard to get the title so I sold it to someone that made a drag racer out of it (didn’t need a title for that ). I still have the grill for it I think. Can’t remember why I kept that. Should make wall art out of it. :laughing:

It’s good to dream. It keeps ya thinking and sooner or later it’ll come to you what path you want to take. There’s so many directions you can go with that one.
 
Rttoys said:
I did have a 64 (I think) GMC I bought with no title about 30 years ago. It was going to be hard to get the title so I sold it to someone that made a drag racer out of it (didn’t need a title for that ). I still have the grill for it I think. Can’t remember why I kept that. Should make wall art out of it. :laughing:

It’s good to dream. It keeps ya thinking and sooner or later it’ll come to you what path you want to take. There’s so many directions you can go with that one.
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Something about Grills...
I had a grill from a '95 OBS that i put on its lid for 20 years in my shed, it was plastic and not painted or chrome...
Maybe I am just a hoarder :lmao:
 
Anyone know how well air ride ride height equates to pressure?

In other words if I set the bag up to mimic the same ride height as the coil spring and I add 800 lbs of passengers does the pressure go up and the ride height go down?

I've always said I would use semi truck manual ride height valves for this but I'm game planning all the options.
 
The airbags (towing type) I have on my truck do. If I set them around 40psi, then hook up my toy hauler, the pressure goes up to around 60psi.
 
Wouldn't it make more sense to establish ride height to top of fender opening on wheel centerline, then load everybody up and air up until the fender lip is at correct measurement? At least that makes sense in my mind so fard as chassis dynamics and handling? Or am I missing something? :homer:
 
jhama78 said:
Wouldn't it make more sense to establish ride height to top of fender opening on wheel centerline, then load everybody up and air up until the fender lip is at correct measurement? At least that makes sense in my mind so fard as chassis dynamics and handling? Or am I missing something? :homer:
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Thats what I intend to do for the parade, just make it same/same.

But as I think about building a air ride controller (Fuck buying a $500-1500 controller) I was wondering how it would work.

Like was said above if you used a pressure only setting it won't compensate for load, not what I want.
 
This is probably what I will use for leveling but I will incorporate it so that it can be disabled and the bag(s) manually inflated.

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