Penguins know how to make things shine

While others were sleeping in, BBQing, and watching fireworks, my driver and I (along with some friends) were working on the truck.

Ever since we bought the truck, the front chrome has been wrinkled and starting to peel.  

Even the light bezels have a bit of wear and tear from over the years.

A trip to the junkyard got us some clean parts to replace all of it, however, and today was the day to get it done!

The grille replacement was the easiest part.  There are just 4 screws on top and one under the Ford emblem and it slides right out!

It doesn't seem like it should be that easy but it is!

Two nuts on the back of the emblem hold it on so we got that swapped pretty easily too.

In less than 5 minutes, we had the nose done!

No more wrinkles here!

Next step is the light bezels. These were a bit more tricky since, on top of the two screws on top, there are two nuts in hard to reach locations behind the lights.  This means we had to remove the battery tray on one side and the coolant reservoir on the other to get to them.

But get to them we did! (Sometimes it pays off being small.)

With the blinker light housing transferred to the new bezels, it was time for reassembly.

Ooooh, shiney!

Rinse and repeat for the other side and voila!

With all of that done and the sun still not blazing hot yet, we decided it was time to do a little bit more work we've been meaning to do on the truck.

The intake on the Ford 460 is sort of restricted at a certain point and one of the popular mods is to cut that restriction out.  

First step was to get the intake cross pipe out.

Daniel found some binoculars!!

Time to break out the hacksaw and cut out the "horns".

You can see some of the size difference in the tubes.

A quick test run using the "seat of our pants" dyno, tells us there is a small but noticeable difference.  Next trip we will see if there is any MPG gains. 

I am going to leave off this post with a little teaser of things to come for our truck...