Dr_Snooz's 1986 C2500 454 AKA "Chester"

[Dr_Snooz]

Now that Chester is running well and smogged, I'll start a new thread to document his travels. My buddy and I drove the bikes up to Yosemite last Friday. I had to fix the heater before leaving. I swapped out the core and was surprised to find out that all the vent doors work as they should.  Took a couple hours.

Chester ran great but sucked down all my gas.

Random pics:



Bike's first time in the snow. I'm happy to report that it's easier to ride a bike over ice than to walk across it. Who knew?


This crow kept trying to bogart our lunch.


This hillside should be choked full of trees, but something is eating them all. Not good.








Quick pit-stop LOL.


This was my first time visiting Yosemite in the winter. I'm strongly in favor. It's beautiful and not clogged full of people. No shops are open, but that's a small price to pay for the peace and quiet.

[Layne]

Pretty nice pics, but wheres the truck? lol

[beastie_3]

Awesome pics. I love Yosemite. My mom lives at Bass Lake so I go up there all the time.

[SMiller]

Sweet pics! I have a F3 like your buddy's but in charcoal. Awesome bike!

[Grim 82]

That's awesome. Looks like a great time.

This crow kept trying to bogart our lunch.

Watch out for the garbage chickens, they'll stop at nothing...

[zieg85]

Breathtaking beauty, thanks for sharing your trip with us...

[Dr_Snooz]

My brother lives in Prather, CA. It's about an hour north of Fresno, up in the foothills. The city of Fresno is a pretty crummy place. The air is bad. The city council is corrupt and incompetent. The people drive like cattle. What's around Fresno is quite a lot more interesting.

Dad was a carpenter and left a trailer full of very nice tools when he died. My brother stores the tools and we all use them as we need them. I have a couple projects to do here, so I drove Chester up to get the trailer.

This is still on the valley floor. The air quality is pretty good today, but you can still see the haze of smog in the air.



Somebody here has a really good view.



The air gets better as you ascend into the mountains.





In these hills are a lot of epic singletrack mountain bike trails. Farther up in the Sierras is some great skiing.



Chester looking awesome.





I guess the bridge only gets used when the creek floods (which is pretty rare in drought-stricken California).





A bit of local color.





My brother lives up there somewhere.



Quail on the road up.



This squirrel was freakishly calm as I drove by with my noisy muffler.



The trailer lives here in this depression. Forget about getting it out without 4 LO. My brother rolled that truck years ago. It's sat there ever since.



Mighty Chester carries the load.











All in all, a lovely ride. Chester drove like a champ, but the muffler is way too loud with the trailer back there.

[Dr_Snooz]

Man, that autocropping really destroys the framing on my shots.

[beastie_3]

Love it

[bake74]

     Looks like you capture some good shots, nice clear day.  There is a lot of buetifull places in California, or as or old govenator would say kaylifornia.

[beastie_3]

Commiefornia...

[87454westernhauler]

sweet pictures!!

[1ATony]

That first picture of the snowy mountains is awesome.

[Dr_Snooz]

Hard to believe it's been over three years since I was driving this truck. Chester threw his timing chain not long after these pics were taken and bent all his valves. It was a sad, sad day for me.

Since then, much has happened. I sold the BMW, cashed out the 401k and bought some land in the foothills pictured above. There is a mobile on the property, filled with all my stuff. I live in a camper in the yard. Work is abundant; paying work is not. I do construction when I can, and fix up the property when I can't. I manage to eat and keep the lights on most of the time, which is good. I rarely have enough time or money, so progress on the homestead is slow. Things are much different from when I worked for a bank in the SF Bay Area. I'm a proper hillbilly now.

The upshot is that I'm stronger now at 42 than I have ever been. My health seems to keep improving and there is pretty much nothing I can't fix for next to nothing. I can weld now and solder, build a house, tune a carburetor, grow a garden and program microcontrollers. I work hard, sleep like a baby and am not asked to sell my soul to keep my job. I guess Victor Hugo is right: "adversity makes men, prosperity makes monsters."

Sadly, not much has happened with Chester. He's still sitting in the yard where he got towed in late 2011.





Removing the bed seemed like a good idea at the time... I had a project that involved the bed and me not freezing to death in the camper during winter. The bed turned out to be a million times heavier than I could have imagined, so it didn't get used. Nor did it get put back. How I didn't slip a disc removing it without any kind of hydraulic assistance is a miracle. I made a sled from scrap wood, levered the bed onto the sled and drug it where it sits now.





The cab is filled with random spare parts that I removed trying to diagnose the timing chain. The engine compartment is a rat palace of biblical proportions. It's a sad situation for such an epic truck.

I often look wistfully in Chester's direction, wanting to rebuild him. With funds being what they are, however, that just hasn't happened.

This is what I've been driving in the interim. It's a 1990, and another 1-ton, 454 (TBI), TH400, in much better shape than Chester.



Yet somehow, it does not bring the same smile to my face that Chester does.

Recently, it has developed a rod knock and now I'm really wishing Chester were running. I need a proper truck to pull my tool trailer to the job site, up the steep grades here in the hills. The good news is that work has been good and I might have enough money to rebuild at least one of these engines soon. My desire is to get Chester fixed, so I have at least two running trucks and not a yard ornament. Hopefully soon I'll have Chester back in fighting trim.

Read more here: http://forum.73-87chevytrucks.com/smforum/index.php?topic=29400.0

[bake74]

     You keep plugging away at it and you will be able to get him back together.  A lot of us on here have similar situations.  Mine is when I have the time I do not the money.  When I have the money, I don't have the time.  Oh well slowly but surely as they say.
     On a side note, the first pic seemed like it looked familiar.  I grew up in Coloma, CA. so that looked very familiar from the pic.  It does look like the foot hills, gotta say more toward Auburn than Placerville though.