Mission Creep on a D-150

I started documenting what I thought - haha - was going to be a quick timing chain fix on my 82 D-150. I did so as a short - haha again - aside on my Start of a Dart thread. About five pages, nine months, and $6k later my $200 truck is back on the road. I hijacked my own thread pretty bad, so I'm starting this one to clean up the mess. I'm going to copy the truck info here and delete it from the Dart thread. I don't have a good way to do a 100% copy and paste, but I can get the text and photos pretty easy. There are side conversations on this but there's no easy way to copy all the quotes and so forth so I'm going to have to leave those out for now. Once I get done I can continue with the rest of the work on the truck, and the Dart can move forward on its own.