The first year of the Square body was 1973. It is a body style for the Suburban and the Pick-up Truck that ended in 1987. The truck getting discussed today is a 1977 Chevrolet Custom Deluxe.
This classic is powered by a Chevy V8 Small Block, making around 300 HP, paired with a 4-speed manual transmission, so there’s no telling how much torque we are pushing until we put it on the dyno.
The truck is basically how it would come from the factory. Besides its age, the car has stock wheels, which are steel wheels, leaf springs all around, drum brakes all around, and a short box, so it has a 6.5-foot bed.
You can see the age of the truck when you look at it. Some might say you get tetanus just by standing by it. The truck is super rusty and has a few rust holes in it. The floorboards and the whole underside are also rusty, to the point where I’m scared to work on it because I don’t want to break a bolt.
The interior is excellent. It has a few aged parts and a few parts I can quickly fix, such as the dash and the instrument cluster. The dash is cracked, and the speedometer and RPM gages are fogged, so you can’t see them. The bench seat is nice, but it has a little rip on the driver’s side, and the windshield is cracked.
The truck has a cool backstory as far back as I am aware of. For me, it starts with the junkyard. No one knows how it arrived; it was just there for an excellent price. My great-uncle needed a new truck since his car got rear-ended, so he bought the truck and did a drivetrain swap into it. He drove the truck for a few years, and then it just sat there off to the side, rotting away until I got my hands on it.
“The square body chevys are sick, man; they are so easy to work on and look amazing. They are one of the best classic trucks around, and yours is super cool because it’s been in the family,” said Justin Childs, a sophomore at Lakeland High School.
Square bodies have a lot of potential, and this truck has a great base from which to start. Its short box makes it even better. The plan for this truck is to get it running and then slowly build a new motor and transmission with a whole new underside to replace all the rusty parts. The Chevy will make a lot of power and sound fantastic in about three years.