When building a car over a period of time, some days will stand out above the others, and among the best is when the new body arrives in your driveway. After KIT CAR decided what type of kit it would like to build and showcase to its readers (a '41 Willys pickup from Active Power), the work began like an old steam engine getting started. It slowly chugged and spurted to life and, once the project got rolling along, things began to pick up speed.
KIT CAR debuted this buildup in its Jan. '06 issue, with subsequent articles showing what the Chevy S-10 chassis looked like when we got it and what we had to do to strip it and clean it. The last part of prepping the chassis is to remove the chassis mounts from the former cab that would otherwise prevent the new Willys cab and bed from being dropped onto the chassis.
Three areas need to be addressed for this to happen, and the first two are highlighted in this chapter (the third will be featured in the September issue). The S-10 chassis has several points where the stock Chevy cab and bed mount--two forward cab mounts, and two rear cab mounts that double as forward bed mounts, too. Additionally, the chassis' front horns must be clearanced, but we'll show that information in the next installment of build-up articles, as the cab and bed can be mounted without doing that work.
Active Power designed its stout steel bed to drop right onto the S-10 chassis without any modifications, so the following set of photographs illustrates where the old cab mounts were located and how they were removed. Some folks may opt to lop off what isn't needed and leave the remnants of the old mounts on the chassis, but we didn't want any evidence of the former mounts left behind, so we did a little extra work to clean up the chassis as we went along.
