Keith Stephens had his eyes set on a Fleetside shortbed C10 for several years, in fact the truck passed right through his small town of Rowlett, Texas, to get to an auto shop where it would then sit outside. Keith stopped by the auto shop where the truck was every couple of months to ask the owner if was for sale. The owner always refused to sell telling Keith he was going to restore it one day. Keith never gave up on the truck and every once in a while he would leave his business card on the truck hoping the older gentleman would sell it to him. Keith is from Texas and happened to make the trip out to 2010 Nashville Goodguys to show another truck he’d recently finished. For some reason, Keith couldn’t sleep one night while in Nashville so he logged onto the hotel’s business computer to check out Craigslist to pass some time. Keith found a listing for a ’67 C10 in the same small town that he lived but it had no picture, so he was not sure if it was the same truck. Keith emailed the guy right away hoping it was but since it was late at night he knew he had to wait until the morning for a response. The next morning Keith checked his email and the C10 owner had responded with his phone number and asked Keith to give him a call. A deal was made over the phone that morning and Keith was anxious to leave Nashville so he could go pick up his new truck.
Keith said the first thing he did was to perform a quick airbag job on the truck thinking he would be happy with the results, but when he drove it down the road he kept dragging the front crossmember on the ground. Then Keith made a call to Nathan, the owner of Porterbuilt Fabrication, who just happened to have the parts he was looking for to fix the frame dragging issues. After having the truck on the road for one day Keith pulled the C10 apart all the way to the frame. The more Keith worked on the truck the deeper the project got and before he knew, his pickup was in bits and pieces. Keith only had time to work on the truck during the weekends but thanks to a good friend, Roger Lynskey, of RPL Customs in Rowlett, Texas, who let him use his shop to store the C10 (along with all his tools) he was able to move the project along.
By this time, the bodywork was complete and Keith wanted something that he could drive without worrying about an expensive paintjob, so he decided to paint it himself inside a pop up tent. Keith said it was not one of his brightest ideas but it got the job done and the Patina paint job turned out better than he expected. Keith set a goal to drive the truck to the Kansas City Goodguys show but the only drawback was that he had eight months worth of work to do and only two months to do it. At one point in the build, Keith said that every fitting seemed like it was leaking. We all know that feeling when you’re in a hurry, mistakes happen because you are moving too fast. Keith finally slowed down a little and gave his C10 extra attention to detail and that’s when things started to flow better, or so he thought. With the deadline of the show approaching Keith didn’t have wheels that he liked on the truck so he spent some time on the Internet searching for wheels that would look good on the truck and found a great set of Billet Specialties that were perfect.