AS THE PRICE OF TRUCKS CONTINUES TO INCREASE, FEWER PEOPLE ARE HEADING TO THE DEALERSHIP TO BUY BRAND NEW VEHICLES. Sure, a 2019 Chevy Silverado LTZ with full leather and all the new gadgets would be nice, but for the cost of something like that, you could almost buy a house! On the other end of the spectrum are the classic trucks. The C10s are more popular than ever, but if you need the room of a crew cab, they don’t really fit the bill either.
So, what do you do to have a nice, reliable truck to drive every day, plus be able to transport the family or pick up supplies from the local home improvement store? Well, one option that won’t break the bank is to find a used truck and do some light restoration—and, of course, some upgrades.
A while ago, we picked up a 2005 Chevy Silverado 2500HD 4×4 with a crew cab and short bed. This truck checked all the boxes for us. It was cheap enough that we didn’t have to take out a huge loan to buy it. Being a crew cab, it has plenty of interior room and comfort inside, and the 6-foot bed length provides ample cargo room as well. The truck does have more than 100,000 miles on the it, so some wear items will definitely need to be addressed. However, this is Street Trucks magazine, and we aren’t going to just replace worn parts with stock replacements. We have to go bigger than that.
Our first order of business was to adjust the worn-out suspension. Because the truck is four-wheel drive, we decided to give it an updated appearance by installing a new lift kit. As I’m sure you already know, this required removing of a lot of the front suspension, which gave us the opportunity to replace those worn out stock parts with brand new parts as well as upgrade the look of the truck. We know from past projects that Summit Racing has just about everything we could ever need, so we reached out to them for some help on our new project, and they had us covered. We placed our order, and a few days later we had all the parts to improve the truck.