Vintage pickup is custom built to get the work done
Calgarian not afraid to roll up the sleeves on his 1971 GMC 1500 For a Dump run
Custom trucks are not often seen hauling trash to the landfill. Braxton Sickel, though, isn’t afraid to put his modified 1971 GMC 1500 to work.
“We recently redid the floors in our house,” the Calgarian explains, “and I loaded up all of the old carpet in the truck and took it to the dump. I’ll drive it to work, too, and the family enjoys taking it out to get ice cream.
“It’s a driver, and I believe cars, whether they’re customs or not, are meant to be used.”
Sickel grew up in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. He spent plenty of garage time with his grandpa, who had a number of older vehicles, including a Ford Model A.
“I’d spend time out there with him, just tinkering with whatever he’d give me,” Sickel says.
During high school, Sickel worked full time in the summer and part time in the winter at a local garage. He started off pushing a broom, before moving on to doing oil changes and brake jobs.
Sickel moved to Calgary to attend university, majoring in marketing and computer science. But after graduation, he changed his life direction.
“I didn’t really want an office job, and applied to work at Village Honda,” he says. “I apprenticed through them and took automotives at SAIT. I’m now the shop foreman at the dealership.”
All the while, Sickel was searching for an older GMC pickup truck, just like the one a friend drove during their high school years. He thought the trucks were stylish, and he would often search Kijiji to see what was available.
“It’s really hard to find one of these trucks in half-decent shape,” he says.
The history of GM trucks can be traced back to the turn of the past century, when brothers Max and Morris Grabowsky built their first prototype hauler. The brothers built their own trucks until 1909, when General Motors bought them out and rebranded the vehicles in 1912 with the GMC badge. Chevrolet, on the other hand, introduced its first production pickup in 1918, and by 1920 GMC and Chevrolet were essentially building trucks on shared platforms with differences mainly in grille designs and power plants.
In 1960 GM introduced the C/K series of trucks (C denoting twowheel drive and K four-wheel drive), and the design became a popular seller in the light-duty pickup segment. The second-generation C/K trucks with an all-new design were launched in 1967, and that body style, with quad headlights for the GMC and dual headlights for the Chevy, ran until 1972.
It was the quad headlight GMC that Sickel liked best, and in 2013 he found a running truck for sale in Airdrie. It was clean, and the seller had obviously spent time working on the truck over the years, having had it painted and equipped with a small-block GM 350 engine.
“I bought it and drove it the way it was for the first summer,” Sickel says. “But toward that fall, the engine went. I always had a bit of a plan, and that’s when I took the opportunity to build it the way I wanted it, with more power and better brakes.”
Before the snow fell that year, Sickel bought and installed a 383-cubic inch GM crate engine with fuel injection and electronic ignition. He drove it like that until the transmission gave up the next spring. To handle the extra power from the larger engine, Sickel built a stronger Turbo 350 transmission with a shift kit, and bolted it in place.
He’s redone the suspension, lowering the GMC four and a half inches up front using springs and drop spindles, and four inches in the back with springs. For better stopping performance, he installed Wilwood disc brakes at all four corners of the truck.
Because of the larger brakes, the rims that came with the truck would no longer fit, so Sickel bought a set of 18-inch Ridler 695s.
“I didn’t like the look of the 18s, though, so I bought 20-inch rims in the same pattern and sold the others,” Sickel says. “The smaller rims just didn’t fill up the wheel wells the way I wanted them to.”
Sickel has welded in some patch panels on the body and changed the hood, but the truck has not had a full re-paint since he purchased it. As well, he’s left the exhaust pretty much as he found it. However, after lowering the truck, a few alterations had to be made because the mufflers were hanging low and would drag over some speed bumps.
Inside, the bench seat is original, but Sickel has changed the door panels and added an aftermarket tachometer to supplement the stock gauge package.
Sickel says, “My daughters, who are seven and nine, think it’s a cool vehicle and they like going in it to get ice cream. They’ve also been out in the garage helping with another project, and I enjoy having them out there with me.”
With that kind of enthusiasm, it won’t be long before one of them is driving the custom GMC, making ice cream and landfill runs on her own.