1934 ford hot rod truck.

Loving this!

It’s mostly down to where they crashed them rather than where they were stationed 😆
Tbh you’re Proably more likely to find one over there than over here. Attrition rates were quite high in the pacific theatre.

So I put a wanted up for some doors.
I get a message ‘I’ve not got any doors on their own but I have got a complete cab with doors’.
I know the seller, ish. I know his brother better but I know he’s local. Like less than 30 miles away 🙄
So I go down ‘for a look’ and predictably I now have 2x pickup cabs.
I can’t bloody believe it. This one is better than the one I already have. Minor rust to bottom edges, a few dents in drivers door (which is a replacement, presumably better than the original) and a few badly welded up holes in the firewall. Other than that’s it’s all pretty much perfect and comes with plenty of the fixtures and fittings- Screen frame, has a dash rail but it’s a model A one. But I’ve got the dash out the other one. Plus the rear screen frame and a few other odds and sods. It even Has the original floor and seat riser in it.

So I pay the man and it gets dropped off a week later when a mutual friend is doing some further logistics for him with his truck.

Here it is-






I realise when it arrived I managed to not take any pics of the two most important bits- the doors! Here are some the seller sent me before purchase and before the blue paint-




I was stretching myself to the lot to buy this on top of the other cab, so I quickly sorted out what bits I was and wasn’t keeping, assembled the rest together and sold it immediately. It pretty much covered the purchase cost of the new, better cab.

I took the seat riser and floor panel out and included them with the other cab as I knew I didn’t need them.






So that’s how I ended up with one of the best condition 34 pickup cabs I’ve ever seen. Tbh from the build pics I’ve seen it’s better than the one mr. Shine started with....

There’s various documentary sources online showing identical seats recovered from well documented wrecks.
This one is one of the best pics-
pacificwrecks.com/aircraft/b-24/41-23908/2007/seat-spencer.html

There’s lots of collectors and enthusiasts of this type of stuff so it’s pretty easy to research.

In for this one Dez! I always love a well detailed build thread. I love hot rods and the work that goes into them but my knowledge is zero. I am happy for the explanations in your threads.
Will also keep an eye out for a seat, I sometimes visit crazy military car boot sales in Belgium with a friend and there is always that kind of tackle knocking about!

So I’ve now got 3 major ingredients. Motor, chassis(ish) and body.

The next step is to make the chassis more a whole, rather than a pile of bits of chassis.

The starting point for that is some paper.


I printed out blueprints for ‘32, ‘33-‘34 and ‘35-40 chassis, which are all easily available online, although they’ve been copied and reproduced so many times finding a set with clear, readable dimensions can be a bit hard. With the parts I’ve got I kinda need to use odd dimensions from each, but overall they add up to being something that’s pretty close to any of them.
The internet likes to make out that the ‘35-‘40 chassis are ‘totally different’ to the earlier ones, but they’re really not. The back half is nigh on identical. The ‘32 does have differences at the front, but the 33-34 is somewhere in between the two, and that’s ultimately what I’m aiming for.

So I decided to start at the back and assemble the back half of the chassis first, as the only solid reference I had was the rear crossmember section, plus the rails are straight and parallel at the rear so easy to jig together before you get to any tapering bits.

First I welded up a lot of extraneous holes, grinder gouges etc, as it was easier to tidy the rails up whilst they were in smaller sections.




Every cross is a hole that shouldn’t be there and every circle is a bit of damage that needed attention!!

I started out piecing it together on a bench with a return at the back, as it gave me a convenient vertical and horizontal surface at right angles. The cut and join lines were based around rear crossmember rivet holes as references.


The joins were deliberately placed in areas where I could use maximum amount of weld.




As I had a horizontal and a vertical to work to, the only thing I was really having to keep in check was the heights from surface of the various reference points, namely the bottom of the rear kickup(which was my zero point), the spring mounting surface on the crossmember, and the rear bumper mounts/rear body crossmember, all of which were well referenced on the blueprints.
Once I’d got one side set I turned it around the other way and did the other side.



Once that was done basically everything from the back of the cab rearwards was in place. It was all square and level so I now had something I could fix down to my (at that point makeshift) chassis table made out of 2x RSJs, and add to for the rest of the chassis.

I know what the chains are for, but I always thought it look stupid.

Fascinated by this, thanks for writing this up, I find it really interesting to see how you're piecing together all the bits and pieces to make a full vehicle. As with all of your threads, enjoy your words about the thought process and how you do things, as well as reading about the build itself.

I'm hoping to build my own hot rod in the next few years and very much in the researching stage at the moment. There is one thing I'm really getting stuck on though: where on earth are you finding parts for sale? I'm trying eBay, Facebook and various UK hot rod forums but turning up very little! Any pointers you would be able to share? It seems you're either a flukey curse word or have some good hunting skills, possibly both

So that was the easy bit of the chassis done. I had definite surfaces to work to and tbh anyone who can work a tape measure, square and spirit level could have done it.

From this point on it gets very complicated very quickly. Partially because I’m having to design and assemble a chassis table as I go that does what I need it to regards assembling this chassis, and also because all further chassis measurements are taken from imaginary baselines rather than tangible points. All height references are taken from a baseline that projects from the bottom of the section I’ve just put together, and all widths are taken from an imaginary chassis centreline. The chassis also tapers 3 times from here forwards and has a upwards sweep too.

I really didn’t take enough pictures of this stage either.
This is the first one I have, and what I’ve done here is blocked up my two 10” deep, 5” wide, 15 foot long RSJs that form the basis of my chassis table on the flattest bit of the workshop floor, then shimmed them to height and added a few odd bits of box section welded on to hold them parallel at 4’. I chose 4’ as it’s a nice round number, and the rear sections of the chassis sit about centred on the RSJs at that, being 44” wide externally.


I then centred and squared the rear section I’d already put together on the new makeshift table (I was happy with how the table worked so I later welded it together permanently). I also blocked up the rear crossmember to height, then clamped, checked and then welded everything down.
I could now start to build forwards from this, which you can see I’ve started to do in the pic above.

The next major reference point on the chassis is the firewall of the cab. What the rails do between the front and back of the cab doesn’t really matter much to be honest, as more or less nothing mounts to them. but they taper in and rise up to the firewall. I had the built-in rise set into the rails, but for the taper I needed to make a jig that set them in the right place on each side. The two reference points here are the front body mount bolt holes where the front do the cab bolts down at the firewall. They need to be level and evenly spaced.



You can see the jig above. It’s just a 4 foot length of box that has two uprights welded on for the sides of the rails to clamp to, which welds down to the table at the correct distance from the rear.
The rails are then welded to the rear section, set for height, and clamped to the uprights.

In this close up you can see how the rails sit against the jig (circled white). This holds the outer face vertical as well as at the right height. One rail had a slight twist so being able to clamp it down like this was very beneficial to removing that twist.


You can also see circled in red where I’ve repaired some not so good bits of chassis lip. It had so many grinder gouges, bits ground thin and holes it was easier to replace a few bits than repair what was left.
So those bits are now in the right place and solid. The chassis here is only an open C section with no inner boxing plates. You’ll see how that works a bit later.

Working forwards, next major reference point is the front crossmember. The jig for that isn’t that complicated, it’s more box section welded down, with more bits of box welded on top of that to get it set up at the right height. The only datum is the centre pin for the leaf spring location.

But the added complication here is I don’t actually have the right crossmember. I’ve got to chop up the wrong one I have to match the dimensions of the blueprints.