1973 Chevy K5 Blazer – Kylie C.
I bought my 1973 Chevy K5 Blazer from a guy on Craigslist when I was 15 years old. Over the course of two and a half years, my dad and I began the process of restoration. We drew up a plan for what I wanted the end product to be, but I never imagined how it would turn out. In the beginning, we began with the idea of just cleaning it up until I could afford a motor and trans to get rid of the original ones (which, by the way, I drove home with two bolts holding it together). Thanks to a friend of my dad’s, we were able to get a donor vehicle. A 1991 Suburban. We spent the next 8 months or so tearing my Blazer apart and cleaning it: scraping off the years of road grime and mud that had never been dealt with, cutting pieces off of the Suburban to replace rusty areas on the Blazer, painting the entire undercarriage, etc. We took as much as humanly possible from the Suburban and crammed it into the Blazer: the driver and passenger doors, equipped with power windows, locks, and side-view mirrors, the entirety of the dash (instrument cluster, steering column, etc), the two front seats and rear removable bench seat (we took the brackets out of the floor of the Suburban and welded them into the floor of the Blazer for easy access (as opposed to the original bolt-in seat that was pretty torn up from the years), the engine and trans (5.7L engine and an overdrive trans for my 4WD Beast), the gas door with a locking cap, and the center console.
For the doors to work on my Blazer, they had to be cut to work with the full-removable top. The two front seats sat far too low in the Blazer on the new floor pans, so my dad and I fabricated custom seat brackets that also hide the amp and sub for the stereo. We made the mistake first off of spraying bed liner on the floor of my truck for a temporary seal. Over time, we learned that bed liner is not heat-resistant, and as it sat on a metal, non-insulated floor, it melted and became gummy. As if a hot, sticky metal floor in a place where temperatures reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit wasn’t enough, the exhaust below was loud as hell.
When I bought it, the exhaust had completely rusted through in many places. The genius who owned it before me did a quick fix job using a cut Coors Light can and some hose clamps. Needless to say, that wasn’t going to work. My dad and I went to a metal warehouse, bought tubing, and made the exhaust ourselves. I had gotten Magnaflow Glasspaks for Christmas that year, and welded the whole thing together with my dad. In about six months, they blew out. I drove it like that for another six months.
The outside of the truck took as much work as the inside, but was so rushed, that it came together in a matter of weeks. When I bought it, my Blazer had a cheap silver paint job that wasn’t laid properly. After we did the patchwork to get rid of the body cancer, we primed it with grey rattlecan primer from Home Depot. For a month or two, the new doors from the suburban didn’t receive primer, so it was a real eyesore for anyone passing me on the way to work. After that sad time period, we finished priming the doors, and I reapplied black paint to the chipping wheels (temporarily until I can afford Micky Thompson classics, and all in the same size. The owner before me had really frustrating ideas of “fixing” things). We bent up a roll bar and attached seat belts to it so I could have more than just a lap belt, and began mapping out the rest of the roll cage.
The fiberglass top is a horror story to anyone who has ever restored a blazer. The inside was flaking and cracked, and the dome lights were broken beyond repair. The outside was an awful faded black knockoff rhino liner that never looked clean and was chipping. It took two days of layering paint stripper, three days of scraping the entirety of the thing with an inch-long razor blade, and another two full days in the hot summer sun of body filler, fiberglass patches, and LOTS of sanding. I then purchased Raptor Liner that I tinted white and sprayed on in a matter of hours with the help of my dad’s friend.
While that was going on, my truck had just gotten back from said friend’s house in a new coat of paint. 1990 GMC blue and white inside where the trim used to be. Dash, door frames, around the windshield, and everything. We even removed the cracked windshield for the paint job (after a full week of sanding. Not a business week, a full week). After the top was taken care of, I returned to the inside of my truck.
My dad and I scraped the melted bed liner from the floor pans and sealed them using POR-15, then covering it with Juke insulation and a black rubber floor mat. We took a few days to put it all back together, with new accessories from LMC (headlights, park lights, markers, a rear bumper, and new window seals). The last steps were getting a new windshield installed by a local auto glass shop and putting the top back on. The paint and top were done in a time crunch of three weeks due to the fact that we were moving, and my truck had to be shipped to the new location.
It is still unfinished. I have many repairs that I would like to do to make it a more comfortable ride, and with my dad’s back injury, it hasn’t really been easy. But people stop me all over San Diego to tell me how beautiful Beasty is, and I know every last bit of work has paid off.
