Patience Built With Trucks

In this essay, I will talk all about one of my trucks and how it taught me to be very patient. So I own  a 1986 GMC C30. The GMC was my first vehicle ever and so clearly with the truck being 32 years old at the time I had acquired it, it clearly needed some work. The first thing we had to do to get it road ready was we had to patch a piece of the frame behind the cab. This can be a very particular process because the metal has to be bent and cut the right way, and the welds have to be strong enough to hold up to the vehicle flexing on roads. This tested my patience a little bit where it had to be perfect, but I stuck to it and I ended up just slowly taking my time and doing it right.

The next thing I did to my GMC was to build a body for it. The reason being was because we bought it being a cab and chassis truck where the truck comes with no bed from the factory. so my dad and I took a bunch of steel we had sitting around at our house and crafted a very nice 7 foot wide by 8 foot 5 inches long flat bed. We built this body like this because it is one of the most versatile bodies you could build on a truck. This process was actually easy because my dad used to weld for a living at a construction company on bridges so his patience was actually not tested that day (surprisingly). My dad just whipped that body together like it was just another day in paradise so he was very patient with the process of building that body.

One of the other significant things we had to do was get new tires. Getting tires can be very easy, but this truck isn’t normal. Where this truck is a C30, it means it has dual rear wheels so this truck has 6 wheels and tires. So as a 14 year old, trying to find 6 good tires was pushing my patience because I wanted to get that truck on the road as soon as I could, even though I couldn’t legally drive it yet. But eventually I ended up finding new tires with some help from my dad and then things went pretty smooth from there.

Now in the present day this truck is currently in my garage at home again because there is something going on with the engine. This is probably the most significant part of the truck and I have been really patient piece by piece, slowly removing the engine so I make sure I do it right. I have an engine to put in it but it is still in another truck so I will have to repeat the process of taking out an engine and then I will have to put the good running engine back into my GMC.

That truck is my pride and joy so I will always be patient enough to take my time and fix it right. To keep this truck going will most likely be a lot of work but I am willing to put the work into it just because of how much this truck makes me happy. My Patience will probably always be tested while working on this truck but I will never get too impatient to put the time into fixing the thing that makes me so happy.

Featured Image by: lmrobinson22