Welcome! Great story on the truck. I think the first thing I would do while you are waiting for your truck is order all of the factory owners and service manuals for your truck. I got mine at The Filling Station and Ebay. If it is running with fresh gas you are a step ahead but if the oil pan has not been removed and cleaned in many decades I would pull that to clean it and the screen before doing much running around.

I always stick as close to original as possible so I don't have to re engineer what the excellent Chevrolet engineers developed years ago. Six volt works fine when the connections are clean and the cable is the proper size.

There should be lots of threads on similar subjects so you can search past posts but everyone here is very helpful answering your questions.

Good luck, sounds like fun!

Dave