All Grown Up

This is What Happens When Dreams Come True

- Mike Self

DREAMS ARE FLEETING, most are usually forgotten by the time we wake up and rub our eyes, but there are some that stay with us and eventually become an obsession. For Omar Delgado of San Jose, California, one of those dreams involved trucks, specifically, C-10s.

Since he was just a kid, Omar wanted nothing more than to own an old Chevy. At 19, he finally made his dream come true,although it would soon become a nightmare. Omar bought a’70 C-10 short-bed, but he was inexperienced and didn’t realize that he was buying a cleverly disguised rust bucket; its only saving grace was a nearly pristine bed. As Omar described the ordeal, “After really inspecting the truck after I bought it, I was pretty much just forced into parting out the rest of the truck and just keeping the short fleet side bed.” In over his head and short on funds to fix everything required, he unbolted the bed and sold the rest at a loss.

It was three years before Omar could afford another C-10, but this time he was much better prepared to find a solid build candidate. After a lengthy search, Omar discovered another ’70. It had minimal rust, but far less than the first truck. As a lot of us know, “minimal rust” in the C-10 world is about as good as it gets. “Finally, in November of 2009 I bought another project. I learned the hard way, but it was on from there,” Omar tells us.