Grants get the fuck out of towner

Hey y'all I've been reading this forum for a while now and now i can contribute! Last tuesday(5-21-19) my girlfriend and I are flew down to San Diego, Ca from Portland, Or to pick up this beauty.


She's a 1997 with the 3.4L v6 4x4 with 217k. A little backstory on the truck. My dad was looking for a smaller truck to drive around town cuz his work truck, a GMC Sierra 2500 4 door with a long bed is kinda inconvenient. He spotted this rig down the street from him and asked the lady it belonged to one day if she'd ever get rid of it cuz it had been sitting in her driveway for a year+. A little while later my pops buys an 06 taco with a bro lift and he hates it. takes the bro lift off and it still rides like shit lol. a few month later the lady calls up my dad asking if he could come get the cuz she's moving that day and needs it gone. My dad goes and buys it for a price i won't say because it just never happens lol. The catch is he can't get the title from her and she's hard to get ahold of and it turns out she never even had the title to begin with. Meanwhile I'm living up in Oregon and looking into new cars to turn my 2002 chevy trailblazer 4x4 into a project truck but I'm too indecisive to pull the trigger on anything in my price range. So i ask my dad one day if i could buy this off of him and road trip it back to oregon so i can get to work. He gets a lean sale on it and puts the title in my name and I head down. Before heading down he took it to our mechanic friends and gets it in good enough condition to make the trip back up. she gets new water pump, timing belt, starter and all the fluids changed with a disclaimer to do the radiator soon.

When we arrived in Ca I come to realize that the shell is missing a window, so here's the first project.

dad had some left over plexiglass so we made a template and used some silicone to keep it in place and hopefully water tight.

not the greatest photo but you can see the window in the back doing its job lol

anyways we make it up from san diego to our place in mammoth mountain to stay that night and went to hit some hot springs. next stop was the umpqua national forrest in Oregon for some camping then on to Sisters, Or for some more next is the fun part. as we left Sister I started getting a strong coolant smell and next thing i know the radiator is steaming. We pull over and I discover a rather large crack in the radiator and find the nearest mechanic. Unfortunately it was memorial day weekend and no one was open and no one near by had the radiator I needed. The closest place was in Bend, Or a 20 min drive away that had the correct radiator. So I call a tow truck(thanks AAA) and we are on our way. We get to the store, i buy the radiator and get to swapping it out. All i had was a shitty loaner tool kit from the store but a few hours and a semi broken grill later I had the new radiator in and then I started adding the coolant... and wouldn't you know it, it all started streaming back out above one of the A/T house lines. at this point it was getting late in the day and we both needed to be back in Portland for work the next day. Got an uber to the airport, picked up a rental car and we were on our way back home leaving the truck in the parking lot with a promise they wouldn't tow it.

5 days later we headed down with the trailblazer, got the new new radiator installed and a few short hours later I got the baby girl back home.

Today I ordered some bilstein 4600 shocks to put on while i save up for OME and some other parts and looking for new wheels and tires next. anyway thanks for reading and will update soon. sorry if this is super long i just wanted to get this on here