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My '60. I built it almost 20 years ago. When I found it, in a junkyard, it had its original 3/4ton suspension and a 400M Ford ( a low RPM high torque smog era engine ). To get it as low as I wanted it I had to make some changes to the frame.    |
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At the front, I clipped it with a early Camaro/Trans Am subframe.   That got me the rideheight I wanted, with added handling & comfort..   T/A bigblock springs on the front, T/A quick steer and swaybar. |
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It was my daily driver for a number of years. At first I had a 351W in it with a C4 automatic, that I swapped for a small journal 327 SBC & 350 auto after a while. ( a much nicer combination which I liked better...) And Halibrand wheels.   It didn't lead an easy life. It was my daily, as well as tow truck ( trailering Hot Rods & Racecars ), hauling engines, gearboxes and whatever else needed to be moved.    |
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It was pretty much the perfect truck for me, at the time. It did what I needed it for, was reliable, quick, and I loved the way it looked. I even had it in a car show.  After me and a couple of buddies rattlecanned some flames on it, that same day. ( shiny black on satin black )   |
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When we moved out of town, I did the entire move with it ( of my stuff, everything in the house was done by movers ) But I then had to do a lot more highway miles. Which exposed the real achilles heel of the truck. All the doorseals are sun damaged or gone, no insulation or carpet, no headliner, etc. So plenty of wind noise, buffetting ( black truck in Arizona, no airco, so windows down ), and droning against exposed sheetmetal. Which is why this became my daily.   The opulent luxury of doorseals, air & heat, a working radio, etc, spoils a guy, and the black truck was used a lot less. After a long battle with packrats ( a real problem, but expected when you live outside of town ) over a number of years, they won by disabling the truck after chewing through its wiring. Which of course meant they were able to do even more damage. |
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Over the last couple of days I've spent some time on it.
Pumping up the tires.
And starting to get rid of whatever the packrats have drug in there to build their structures.
( the truck has no rust, but there must be a hole somewhere...)
They will use pretty much anything they can find: leafs and small sticks & branches, cactus needles, rocks, and a special building material my dogs provide them with ( they produce some of it every day, in a manufacturing process not unlike extruding metal )
I Filled an entire contracters garbage bag so far, and I'm not done yet...
Being very careful, because the packrats may or may not be gone by now, and replaced by rattlesnakes.
( another inconvenience of living outside of town)
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So what are the plans? It really doesn't need much, after its thoroughly cleaned, to get it back up and running. But for it to be more useable, it needs a bit more. I'll have to take care of the things that made me park it in the first place. So those are the " must have's" I'd also like to change the dash for something more stylish ( and working gauges, kinda nice to have too ) Change the back of the cab to the more desirable big rear window ( I have the parts to do it ) I found a much better P/U bed for it ( also a long bed fleetside ), which will have to be modified to fit the modified frame. Shave all the trim and emblem holes that are no longer used, and probably give it a fresh rattlecan paint job. ( or real paint, if I'm feeling ambitious) So that is where this project is headed. Soon. Probably. ( I still have a spaceframe Fiat 500 racecar to finish... ) |
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A little bit of Ford Truck trivia... Basically all of them have been Hot Rodded. The usual years of '20s, '30s, and '40s trucks are popular, and pretty much always have been. Like this 1923 Roadster Pick Up I used to own ( and built )  Pretty much the holy grail of early Ford pickups ( besides the '32, '27, etc) is the 1956 Truck. Its a 1 year only, and its the first one to have a wrap around windshield. ( random pic off the internet)  After what most people thought as the high point of Ford Trucks as Hot Rod material came the '57-'60, and people hated them. They thought they were too boxy, and just ugly. And gave them the nickname "fridge", probably as an insult. They were so unloved people would buy them for the 9" rear axle and scrap the rest... When I found mine, they were still pretty unloved but just beginning to claw out of that. And they now have a following of their own, while the 56's have moved on to unobtainium status. Personally I really like the Fridges, and I think the '57 and the '60 have the best looking grilles. Another thing (which doesn't mean much, but its kind of funny). The movie Easy Rider starts with a '60 longbed ( but I didnt realize that until much later, when I re-watched it ...)  So there you have it... More info about '60 ford trucks than you'd ever hoped to know... |
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Excellent.
I do like me a pickup truck.
I am sure as you say, it needs very little to get recommissioned.
Looing forward to the evolution of this back to full functionality .
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Love the flames, black on black
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I've never really been into trucks but can definitely see the attraction,
I have to say the black 1960 truck looks brilliant, perfect stance etc,
I would definitely have to recommission that to as high a standard as I could, (which in your case obviously means very high !!)
Really looking forward to seeing future updates on this thread,
Nigel
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BMW E39 525i Sport
BMW E46 320d Sport Touring (now sold on.)
BMW E30 325 Touring (now sold on.)
BMW E30 320 Cabriolet (Project car - currently for sale.)
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Really cool bit of kit that, looking forward to seeing you get it back on the road.
A 56 F100 is at the top of my 'want' list, but as you say, they are fast becoming unobtainable!
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Thanks guys. Because it was my work truck it had to be a Gen 3 ('57-'60) or Gen 4 ('61-'66). The earlier ones are a bit cramped ( I'm 6'2"), and/or too expensive. And the later ones were just too new. ( I almost bought a '36, but it would have been too impractical. It was pretty rough too, which meant I would have been without a working truck for too long) So out of the 3rd & 4th generation F series, I was just lucky to find one of my favorite years... The fact that it was a F250 ( huge heavy duty suspension and wheels), and had a clumsy swap with a undesirable engine didn't matter. I was going to change that anyway. As long as the body and frame were solid... |
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For a while, we had 3 black Fords...  My '23RPU, my wife's '63 V8 Falcon, and my '60.  |
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Alright, down memory lane we go... ( hopefully you guys are OK with that...) I bought the '23 as a very rough body, mated it to a Model A chassis I found somewhere else, and a Cushman scooter PU bed I got from a buddy of mine. I built it along the lines of an old Speed Shop Truck ( when you look at very old pics of Speedshops, there would be a truck like that parked in front of it ) I built it to sell, but selling cars is not my strong point. And when you build it to sell, you cant get too esoteric with your buildstyle and inspiration. Eventually it did sell, but to a guy who ripped it all apart to build a regular "Kookie" Fad T out of. But it did get into a couple of magazines before that happened though...  The new owner was not interested in using the Ford Y-Block and 3 speed stick, so I bought that back to build a new car around. Which was this '27 Coupe.    |
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I really hope you are going to expand this story and give us a load of your old builds in the story.
Those pics of the 27 Coupe are mad.
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Thanks grizz. The '27 came out really nice. Mechanically it wasnt very different from the '23, but the "feel" of it was totally different. Because it was not chopped ( just a 4" channel over the frame) it had a ton of room inside. Enough to put a middle seat out of a minivan in it, which was really comfortable. The guy who bought it from me loved it, but he was forced to sell it at some point. Apparently it got damaged while in the care of a later owner, and rebuilt. I happened to come across a pic of it, in a magazine, looking totally different. ( but I still recognized it... ) |
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I like to put little personal touches into my builds. And around that same time I was working on a '32 5W Coupe for a buddy of mine. It was an old drag race car ( an old build, pretty crude, so no hope of ever passing tech at a dragstrip again), that I made safe to go on the street. Basically, rip the thing completely apart, completely rebuild it using as many of the original parts as possible, and put it back together so at first glance it looks like I was never there...  It had a deep channel over the frame, and to make the floor look like it belonged there, I took patterns off the floor in a original 1932 Ford 5 Window.  I made some tooling for my Pullmax, so I could recreate the bead pattern and layout in the floor of the ex-drag car.   Since I had the tooling ready to go, I did the same for the '27.     |
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What my back yard looked like, at some point...   As you can see, I also had a nicely manicured lawn... |
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