1971 Chevy Suburban Redux

The significance of the date in the title of this post, is that after removing the 1971 front clip, this classic Suburban will never look like at 1971 again. When I put it back together, it’s getting a 1967 front clip. That’s not the topic of this post though… the reason I’m removing the front clip right now, is to make it easier to pull the gasoline powered Chevy small block 350, and replace it with a diesel powered GM Detroit Diesel 6.2 liter engine. Since my garage is small (for a Suburban at least), and since I don’t have any axles under the truck right now, pulling the front clip makes things worlds easier.

Pulling off a front clip on full-framed trucks like this is pretty easy… just a lot of nut and bolt work. My older son even spent some time helping run bolts out with the air ratchet.

The hood came off first…

Then the grill and bumper…

The grill is actually in pretty good shape compared to a lot of these that I’ve seen. The aluminum grill frame isn’t great, but if you were creative, you could fix it probably (which is what I was going to do before deciding to go with the 1967 front clip). The egg-crate grill insert is really nice, with no missing sections, which seems to be a problem with these older inserts.

Moving on, then came the fenders. Most of the nut and bolt work is here — on the fenders. Each fender mounts to the radiator support with several bolts, and to the cab, and to the fender liner. Then, once you’ve got them off, you still have to remove any accessory brackets, and the hood hinges (which I’m doing here)…

The radiator support comes next, but I’ve left that attached for now.

This weekend I’ll pull the radiator support off and get the engine out. I have yet to confirm whether the radiator support for the 1971 is the same as the 1967. I have one from a 1967, but the lower half is rusted out, so I may end up cutting and grafting the two together if I need to.

When I get a chance, I’ll also post some side-by-side comparisons between the 1971 and 1967 Chevy fenders and hood when I get a change. It seems like I see a lot of questions online about interchangeability of these parts.

Otherwise, that gets us pretty caught up. I loaded a bunch of the extra parts into the back of my pickup to get them to storage…

And E helped me move the hood back in the garage for the time being…

He needed to take breaks every few feet, but he’s still a good assistant…

All of the parts from the 1971 Chevy Suburban front clip are for sale, by the way. I’m also going to sell the front fenders from the 1967 front clip. Make me an offer if anyone is interested. None of the parts are perfect, but all of them are workable. If noone wants the 1971 hood, I’ll probably make some wall art out of it… which might be kind of cool…

This weekend the motor and tranny come out, and things will get really interesting. Here’s a little teaser: body-off…