McDevitt Machines

In early 2021 my friend George and I found a 1986 pickup that had been sitting in a barn in east Texas for somewhere around 10 years. We decided this would be our first major restoration, as we had both just graduated college and only done smaller scale automotive work until then. We trailered the truck back to our house in the DFW area and started tearing her down. So far, nothing is in horrible shape, but it is obvious that the truck sat for a long time. We never tried starting the motor before pulling it, but believe it had a blown head gasket when parked. The previous owner said the truck smoked out the tailpipe the last time he drove it, and when we pulled the drain plug it looked like a well-mixed chocolate milk (coolant/oil mix).



We have decided to do a full restoration and motor rebuild on this truck and bring it as close to factory condition as possible (maybe with some slight upgrades from stock, please recommend your favorites in the comments so we can do it right). We started by pulling and tearing down the motor. We measured everything and found out it had previously been bored out .020 over and still has straight cylinder walls. The crank had been ground down .010 under. We honed the cylinders, cleaned the block very well, and reassembled the motor with new pistons, rings, and bearings. We also had a machine shop deck our aluminum head that was showing some pitting.



At the time of posting this (Jan 2022), we are almost done with the motor, and then will move on to the transmission before re-coating the frame and sending the body out to a body shop. We both have jobs and responsibilities outside of this truck so are moving relatively slow but hope to have most of the restoration done in 2022.



I plan to document as much of this build as possible and continue to post it all to my YouTube page (McDevitt Machines), as well as updates on here when I can. I have linked the video playlist for this series below,



86 Pickup Restoration Playlist



Thank you very much for reading and I hope you enjoy the videos, any feedback is appreciated,



-Nick