My dad had a 1989 GMT400. Chevy C2500. Red exterior, red interior.
We called it Old Reliable. Sometimes the Red Bull.
Growing up, that truck was just part of life — it was always there, always running, always the thing we were working on. My dad is a utilitarian person. We both are. It wasn't precious. It was the truck. You drove it, you fixed it when it broke, you upgraded it when you could.
I was the kid standing to the side watching, then handing tools, then doing the work myself. Timing system upgrades, distributor troubleshooting, stereo rewires — keeping all the original dash controls intact but adding bluetooth and an aux port underneath. Practical stuff. Nothing flashy.
There was one project I'm almost embarrassed to include alongside those.
I was burning my hand on my coffee every morning driving to work. Kept setting it in my lap, kept forgetting, kept grabbing it wrong. Eventually I went looking and found that the OEM cup holder feature existed — it just wasn't installed. Tracked it down, put it in.
Problem solved.
That's the kind of thing that sticks with you. Not every fix is a timing chain. Sometimes you just stop burning your hand on your commute.
When I started driving, my dad assumed I'd want the Mustang.
I chose the truck.
Years later, I was driving back from a bouldering gym with a friend. Rainy day. Waiting at a red light for my turn to cross.
Then — impact.
T-boned. Five cars totaled. We were at the center of it.
Old Reliable was the only one that drove home.
The frame was bent. The damage was real. We spent months trying to figure out if there was a path forward — any realistic repair, any way to keep it. There wasn't. The insurance payout wasn't close to what that truck was worth, not to us. Eventually we had to let it go.
That one took a while.
I found a 1995 GMC Sierra K2500 for sale. Beat up. Fit the budget. Ran well enough.
Same generation truck. GMT400. Different year, different brand, four-wheel drive this time — but close enough that when you're sitting in it, something feels familiar.
I got it.
I've been working on it since. Slowly. Core stuff first — water pump, brakes, master brake cylinder, distributor, timing. A small audio upgrade because I can't drive without music. And I swapped the front seats out for a bench, same as Old Reliable had.
Now it sounds like that truck. Feels like it. Looks close.
But it's not the same. The year is different, the color is different, and no matter what I do the original is gone. I know that.
So I stopped trying to restore it to something it isn't and started building it into something of its own.
I call it the Green Beast. Sometimes Wagon Wheels — there's a song, it annoys my best friend, I play it every time.
The first real upgrade project: the headlights.
I had some guidelines I wasn't willing to compromise on.
They needed to be genuinely bright — I need to see the road. I wanted a modern look that still respected the original lines of the truck. And I was absolutely not going to be one of those lifted trucks blinding everyone on the highway because the owner never bothered to aim them properly.
That last one matters to me more than it probably should.
After a couple years of looking I found a set that hit everything on the list. Ordered them.