Grason Hargreaves is a Junior at Ukiah High School who has been working on a huge project. Two years of sweat, coaching, and skill-building have resulted in Hargreaves successfully installing a 1986 Corvette engine in his 1959 GMC 100 Series truck that he built piece-by-piece.
Hargreaves began building his truck around the end of March 2020. He was just looking for something to do during quarantine without expecting anything to come out of it.
As to what inspired Hargreaves and his massive project, he told us:
“I have always loved American muscle cars, and to me, there is nothing better than the sound of a big displacement American engine, so I really just wanted to have a car that sounded good, and I felt cool in, with the added bonus of burnouts and going fast. “
Hargreaves went into this project not knowing anything about do-it-yourself car projects. He told us he didn’t know how a combustion engine worked, how to work on them, and had little idea of what he was doing. But after a lot of guidance from people he met at auto shops, parts stores, and YouTube, he was able to complete the project. By the time he was finished, he knew his engine “like it was the back of my hand.”
Hargreaves’ favorite part about this project was seeing the results of his work: “I remember the first time I got to actually start my engine for the first time after months spent creating things and troubleshooting trying to get it to work or the first time I drove it down the street, unregistered, with no exhaust.”
These sorts of “victories”, as Hargreaves called them, gave him a “ huge feeling of accomplishment and made up for the amount of work, money, and busted knuckles that went into that project.”
One big challenge he had throughout the project was not the individual defeats themselves, but making sure he didn’t give up when things did not go as planned.
He has many future projects planned, such as getting into drag racing and building high horsepower cars. But for now, he is just looking for any cheap old vehicles that he could get his hands on. He says, “ one of my dream cars would be a Chevelle SS wagon. They are pretty rare and expensive, but I absolutely love the wagon design and hope to get my hands on one someday.”
