Ok, here is a quick update from the past week...
I needed to make a gasket for the exhaust elbow so I stopped at Napa and picked up a sheet of this Felpro material. I was originally looking for the 'silver' gasket material, but the parts guy assured me this would work...

The material has a metal core so I wound up using a Dremel with a cutoff wheel to cut it. It worked fairly well... I did use a hole punch for the 1/2" mounting stud holes...

After we mounted the elbow to the manifold, my Dad gave everything one more coat of the Eastwood manifold paint. You have to wait a week between coats so it was good to go...

We then moved on to the starter. I did bead blast and paint all the parts and while I was reassembling it, I noticed that someone had scribed 9-19-1986 on the housing. I know the truck was taken out of service sometime around then, and all the parts inside looked good, including the brushes, bushings, etc...
Here is all the hardware we started with (along with the hardware to mount the exhaust manifold)...

And after a quick trip though the blast cabinet...

After painting the small parts, I chucked the armature up in the lathe and quickly cleaned it lightly with some emery cloth...

The ends to the main housings are fit with 'O' rings to keep out dirt, water, etc. and of course they were tired when we took the starter apart. So I had my Dad stop by the hardware store and pick up two new ones. They had a huge assortment of 'O' rings for pool filters and sure enough we were able to find the right one...

I also took Mike P.'s advice and bought a new solenoid. So after assembling the starter and installing the new solenoid, I set it off to the side and started off on something else...
That's it for now, more to follow!