Repairs and Maintenance

	Sign In Sign-Up

"Route 66"
The official homepage of
B'Ellana
Lon Christopher Teter's
1966 Chevrolet Pick-Up Truck

http://Lons66Chev.itgo.com/repair.html

REPAIR #1 - AUGUST 2001
One of the first things I did on my truck was fix the rear turn signals. The problem: When you turned on the right turn signal, the front right, and dash right indicator blinked... but so did the rear left. The rear right didn't work at all. So I disassembled the taillights and set to work.

The bed offered enough ground clearance that I had no problem climbing underneath and reaching everything. Tracing the wires was a bit difficult however as most of them had been sprayed over with blue primer and therefore I couldn't trace the colors. After two hours of clipping my tester on to different locations and turning the signals on and off and clipping the wrong wire FOUR times (note: there were only four wires to begin with) I finally had the turn signals repaired! At some point the wires all converged inside some little box where apparantly there were being crossed. So I bypassed the box and with some thick guage wires and some wire nuts and had the signal going where it was supposed to.
Testing the right was easy since the switch works just fine, however when turning on the left signal you have to hold the lever down- I ended up hanging a weight on the lever so I could run to the back of the truck and see what was blinking. At some point in the future I will fix that lever, but it's not that important right now.
NOTE: Back-Up Lights do not work. I set that asside for a future repair.

DRESS-UP #1 - AUGUST 2001 -
The first thing I did in dressing the truck up was open the driver's door and pull out the old door sill plate.

The sill plate on the left came out of the truck. It was replaced with the sill plate on the right. For the time being I used the existing screws which were old and dirty with a miniscule amount of rust. In the future I will replace them with brand new shiny screws. I then opened up the passenger door to replace that door sill plate...
... however there wasn't one. I still have the new plate to install, but I will wait until I have screws.
DRESS-UP #2 - AUGUST 2001 -
After finishing the driver's side door sill plate I moved on to something noticeable from the outside. The rims.
These are the rims that came on the truck. Nothing real fancy. They are not 1966 factory, but rather a Chevrolet rim from the 1980's that has been used on vans and trucks. Looking at it, it's not necessarily ugly, but definitely not what you would want when customizing a truck. Therefore I added the Beauty Rings and Centre Caps that Bill included with the truck. As you can see from the picture below...
... it made a world of difference. One of these days I may try to locate 1966 factory rims, but for the time being these look pretty damn good! Although these are definietely cleaner, they are the same wheels (w/ rings and caps) that are on my Mother-in-Law's 1985 Chevrolet van and our 1991 GMC Safari minivan (which is funny since it's a GMC, but it has the Chevy centre cap).

ON TO REPAIR and MAINTENANCE PAGE 2