1987 Chevy K20 – Jon L.

First I want to thank the LMC team for all their support throughout the build of this truck for my daughter. Being able to get almost any part for this truck in one place has been a huge help. Luckily I am only about 45 min from your warehouse. Your catalog was also a huge help. Being that this truck when we first bought it had a 1979 frame with a 1982 cab and eventually a 1987 cab made figuring out what parts to get for what area of the truck difficult. It would have been very difficult without being able to see the diagrams for each year group side by side. So again…THANK YOU!!!!

My daughter Bella, started sending her mom and I pictures of square bodies when she was 13…It was her dream vehicle. Lifted, big wheels and tires, a loud rumble going down the road. She just hadn’t decided on short or long bed. Finally with the long bed decided, in Feb. of 2023, we bought the first square body, a 1982 bed and cab but was on a 79′ frame with a small block 350 and 4 speed manual behind it. It had been a mud truck, but it ran and drove and she was so excited. The truck sat for about a year while we collected parts including a 2001 chevy 2500 donor truck for the motor/transmission, lift kit, wheels and tires as the original plan was a motor/trans swap and a lift kit and send her down the road. On Feb. 18 2024, we started the tear it down and she took the first bolt out. But with most restoration projects things spiraled out of control very quickly. Before we knew it we had the frame completely cleared and were heading to get it blasted. The plan was to have the truck ready for her to drive on her 16th birthday, 11/20/2024, now dad is in a panic state. We thrashed on the truck almost daily with my daughter right there by my side. Cleaning, grinding, sorting through LS wiring, everything. It made me so proud that she shared my love for the build. On days I didn’t plan to work on the truck she would also ask me, “What are we working on today dad?” By April we were back to a rolling chassis, all new suspension, brakes. Every bolt was either cleaned and painted or replaced. Now we couldn’t just put that old dingy 6.0 is back in the new chassis the way it sat…so apart it came. Bella worked hours with a steel brush, cleaner, sandpaper, whatever she could find to get 20 plus years of grime off the engine block so we could paint it. By early September we had it freshly painted with a custom stainless 3″ exhaust with X-pipe and sealed engine/trans and transfer case back in the truck. I also fabbed a K5 blazer tank into the frame rails at the back of the truck with the plan to move the fuel fill door back to that location, which worked out great. Now it was time to figure out the body of the truck. Everything else was new but the plan was always just a clean interior and engine bay and the rest rough. Well, my philosophy is if you are going to do something, do it right. So we couldn’t just leave it rough. We knew at this point the November date was going to be hard. The cab and bed that came with the truck were pretty rough and it would be a ton of body work to make it right. So then came two more complete square body trucks I bought out of a hedge row but in much better shape than what we had and a plus, it had a tilt wheel and sliding rear window which were requirements for her. So we saved time and money there. We started cleaning up the mouse infested cab, cleaned and started fixing rush and pulling dents, filled and moved the fuel doors in the bed. The mobile sandblaster for the bed was a life saver for sure. By mid November the bed was back on the truck. Before I mounted the bed I wanted to start to tackle the nest of a wiring harness. I gave the harness to Bella with a diagram and said here, pull it apart and label everything. She had no complaints and got it right and got it done. I spent hours, and hours, and hours on shortening, extending, researching the wiring needed to bring this thing to life. The cab was back on the truck in the first week of January and finished up the wiring. Again, hours of wire looming everything. I used the mounting bracket of the original EFT ECM from the 87 to mount the LS ECM to and ran most of the wiring harness into the cab, it was a much cleaner look. I built myself my own bend ECM flash setup and with some free tuning software I was able to get the Vats and other check engine triggering setting turned off. The truck fired to life for the first time by mid February and that 6.0 sounded amazing coming though the x-pipe through the Carven R-Series mufflers, such a deep tone. After another month or so of more painting and finishing up the odds and ends she took her first test drive on April 15th, she was so excited and all smiles, I couldn’t be happier. A few more finishing touches and she drove it to school for the first time on April 21st. She loved seeing all the high school boys drool over her truck. A year and 2 months from complete truck, down to bare frame and back up to a pretty much new truck. I never thought it could happen but I had a lot of help from friends and neighbors along the way. I learned so much and now on to my youngest daughters’ first vehicle, a 1999 Chevy Tahoe.