I saw this truck sitting on the side of the road with a for sale sign in the window and drove by it numerous times before stopping to actually look at it.
Once I did stop to take a good look I was pretty much sold on the idea of bringing it home.
Fortunately I waited long enough and the price went down on it by the time I contacted the seller.
I looked at a lot of these medium sized trucks for a wide variety of prices and this chev appealed to me because of the relative ease of accumulating parts for a complete rebuild.
I remember back last spring lo
oking at an International Harvester which had a good cab and grain box on it but the exhsust was so loud it covered the sound of the pistons slapping the cylinders. When I asked to drive it around the guys yard, he said “yeah, no problem!”. But there was a problem, an absolute and complete lack of any brake pedal reaction no matter how much you pumped the pedal.
I still drove it around his field, but stayed a long ways away from my car. When I got stopped, I asked him about the brakes and he said he knew nothing about them. This guy was playing dumb to everything I asked him. The truck was too far away from my yard to take a risk on quick fixing it enough to drive it very far.
The exhaust noise was simply loose bolts on the bottom of an exhaust manifold but I am sure he was keeping it loud to try and block out all the internal engine noise.
Another adventure was a big truck wrecking yard that always advertises equipment for sale. Lots of really nice looking heavy duty 
equipment of which some ran upwards of $250,000. The trucks we looked at there were complete disasters and there was nothing less than $7000 on the lot. Actually that is not true, there were a couple affordable ones which were totally beat to crapand were good for nothing more than parts vehicles as long as the parts you needed was a bolt or screw from somewhere.
Much like any other well used vehicle you are going to buy, a person needs to look around a lot and wait for a decent deal to pop up.
The Red 1981 C 60 was
that truck for me, the grill has some cracks, passenger door has some dings and bends in it. There is a small dent by the hood latch and the paint was a bit of a cover up job from years past.
Mechanically, it started, shifted gears with some severe grinding and chatter, the brakes work great and the rear diff and wheels looked pretty clean and free of seal sweating and leaks.
I knew that I would be looking for an automatic transmission and one could be scavenged from one of many old school buses if needed.
Chevy crate engines with twice the torque this truck had when it was brand new would be not too terribly hard to find and can be bought for pretty reasonable prices. I dont think it’s even worth the time to rebuild this engine that is in it.
Chevy small blocks are easy to find and I like the thought of a good 4 bolt main engine that has been built to deliver some real torque to the rest of the driveline.
There was a spare set of wheels and tire that came with this truck but I think all of them need to be sold off to someone who has a farm tru
ck in need of them. The tires are bit old, a bit weather checked and I do not want to drive down the highway on bias-ply tires very badly. I am pretty sure that someone who has a farm truck or field truck would put some of the tires i have here to great use and be able to get a lot of hours out of them. When it gets close to driving time, new tires will be a must.
