Projects My '33 PU, a truck, a build, a story *Done For 2016*

2012, The meat truck

I have always thought the 32-34 Ford trucks to be the best looking HotRod truck, and have always wanted one, but never found one in my range.
One came up for sale about 3 hours north of where I live, and although it was a BB 1 1/2 ton, it was a '33, my favorite year. So a deal was done and brought it home. It was really rough, and missing lots, but I was real happy to finally get one. So, I got the body off the frame, and started gathering parts for it as a future build, since I was building a 39 GMC COE at the time.

Gainers was a meat processing plant, this had been one of their fleet many years ago, so I called it the meat truck.

So the parts hunt got under way, 34 frame, hood, grille, 40 banjo, 35 wires,rough box sides, 51 Mercury flathead, yeah, the parts pile was coming together.

 

Part 2 Lone Star Round Up's a hell of an event!

My plan was to get the COE done and drive it to Austin in 2014 for LSRU, knowing that the amount of work I still had to do, '13 wasn't a possibility.
My friend Adam and I were having a discussion about LSRU and he put the idea out there that we should fly down for 2013, rent a car and be there. It really didn't take long and the flights and hotel was booked.

So here we are in Austin during the Round Up, surrounded by an amazing amount of traditional HotRods, everywhere you looked, our hotel parking lot was a show in itself with the Hiltons, and Steadfast in full effect.

So while sitting in front of Joe's Coffee on South Congress, watching all the late 20's and early 30's HotRods , which are my favorite type of HotRods, cruising past, I'm drinking a Lone Star, and smoking a Camel, I had this three part revelation
1, I need to be back next year
2, I need to drive to Austin in something
3, I'm working on the wrong project



So, literally, the day after getting home from Austin, I put the COE on the back burner and got into tearing the '33 cab all apart to start the rust repair.
It was a roach!!! But i'm going to make RoundUp 2014!

 

Part 3 Start with the best truck you can.

This is good advice
So now it's May 2013 and I have been working on the meat truck about a month, still looking for parts on Kijiji, which is like craigslist, I find a really nice, in my opinion '33 pickup for sale in lower B.C., a way better truck than what i'm working on!
Not really sure how i'm going to pull off buying it, I commit and three days later, i'm heading west with a borrowed trailer to bring it home.

Nothing is as cool as a road trip in a Hotrod, but pulling a trailer with a future Hotrod is pretty cool too!
This truck was a non running banger, and the frame was heavily rusted where the X meets the rails, it did come with another 33 rolling frame which was very nice.

Brought it all home, and the tear down began.

 

Part 4 80 Years of use and abuse

This truck was far from mint, but way better than the meat truck.
I was and still am, very happy to have found it.
After 80 years of use and abuse and farmer repairs, him using a 30 Model A
as a donor, it was time to tear it all down and make things right, build the Hotrod truck I have always wanted.

 

Part 5 The vision

I wanted this truck to be what someone would have put together in mid to late 50's, kind of, got grampa's old truck and built a Hotrod out of it using all or mostly old Ford parts.
The parts I would have to fabricate would have to look like if you were in a Ford dealer, say late 40's early 50's and they had a catalogue HopUp your early V8 Ford, these parts would have come from that. All had to have a cast appearance.

There are so many talented builders and builds here on the HAMB, but the ones that really stood out to me, for various reasons are @CTaulbert @Chris @NealinCA @hot rod pro @Dennis Lacy , there are others as well, but these were my major influences in this build.

The truck would be flathead powered,with a transmission, 40 banjo rear, 40 juice brakes, reversed eye springs, minus some leaves, dropped stock axle, split bones using early tie rod ends.
Initially built as a highboy with the definite possibility of fenders in the future, or not, or maybe, so none of my work could block the factory holes.
Full hood, commercial headlights, ........

 

Part 6 Once everything had been torn apart and the banger sold, the rest organized, the real fun began.
A lot of sandblasting, yay!
I knew I wouldn't be happy knowing there was rust between the frame rails and inner X, so all the rivets got drilled out and all the parts were seperated.
Once all the sandblasting was done, the wheels got epoxy primed and painted with U Tech single stage black. I had to have Firestone dirt trackers, they kind of get the big and little look I wanted nailed down.

Then the frame mock up began. I sent the axle to Greg Haynes to be dropped,
Then I built motor mounts, split bone mounts, transmission mount, rear bones using 40 radius rods, rear torque arms also using 40 radius rods, brake master mount
I'll let the pictures speak

 

Part 7 More pictures

I used the '33 spindles and dropped the steering arms, used the stock perches
and decided to leave the mech brake tab on.
I didn't want to drill any additional holes in the frame, so everything I built
had to work with that constraint. Also, most of the brake linkage was original 33 mech brake parts. I also rebuilt my pedal assembly with new shaft, bushings and brazing up wear areas. Did the full rebuild on the 33 steering box as well.

 

Part 8 Whistling past the graveyard


Now it's September 2013 and the truck mock up is very close to being done,
the train of motivation is full steam and LSRU 2014 is a very realistic goal.
Then life derailed me, I was diagnosed with stage 4 MCL cancer and given 16 months without treatment, and during testing for stem cell transplant, it was discovered that i've had a massive heart attack that was misdiagnosed as bronchitis.
Projects and life in general got put on hold for 6 months while I went into chemo and figured out how things were going to pan out.
The cancer went into remission and the heart is, for lack of a better term, fucked, but at this time, still being on chemo complicates what they can do about that.

But hell, lets talk Hotrods, not health, they are way more fun!!!

So I dove back into the project in late February 2014 and finished the mock up that remained, then blew it all apart and started epoxy and painting batches of parts.

My friend Adam and I talked about flying to Austin for Round Up, but I couldn't cause I was in chemo,and wouldn't do that, The only way I would go to Austin is if there was an epic road trip in the rearview mirror.

These are a couple pics of the end of mock up, I needed to do some shoehorning to get the stock 33 fan to run off the generator, and have the hood fit as it should. I wasn't going to alter sheet metal to have clearance for the engine/fan

 

Part 9 Pull the trigger


I am in the restoration industry, and have been a painter for a lot of my career, did a stint as a paint rep for Sikkens, as such, I know a lot of shop owners and was able to use a friends booth on weekends. I typically do a lot of priming and blocking and priming and blocking on my customer projects, but the vision on this wasn't that, so, it was kind of hard to just blast, buzz down, ep and paint all this stuff, seeing things I felt should be surfaced.
So I just pulled the trigger and made it all black.
The batches of parts piled up, and every weekend another batch came home, being a single dad, why wouldn't I lay it all out in my house?

I remember my daughter standing there, looking at it all and saying " are these parts going to be here much longer?" I replied, "define much longer?"

 

Part 10 The frame

As mentioned before, I totally separated all the frame parts and sandblasted everything. During mock up, I used bolts to hold it all together.
I ordered a pile of nos rivets from Roy Nacewicz and geared up to put it all back together as Ford did. I laid out all the parts and brushed a liberal amount of epoxy primer on, then I brushed a bunch more on.
I took a few chunks of the old frame and set about practice riveting.
Within 8 rivets, I was getting the result I wanted.
I Looked the parts over and knowing I was going to run the exhaust through the rails, I did a slight modification to the front of the X structure for clearance. I really didn't want to modify the frame, but I wanted the exhaust hanging below it even less.

My friend Adam came over one night and we talked about how it was going to go riveting, and each persons role. We had a crazy system of doing it and we had about 25 rivets done in an hour and a half.

I made this little rivet jack to go up in the rails to hold the rivet up while we formed the head. He would take a bolt out, and put a rivet in, I would place the jack or bucking plate in place, he would heat the rivet, I would grab the air hammer, 3 shots of heat and air hammer, on to the next one!

Once the frame was all riveted, I epoxy primed all the areas affected by heat and surfaced the sides of the rails that you would see if it had fenders on it.

I got frustrated with the logistics of taking it to a booth to paint, so I ended up hanging a ghetto booth in my garage and painting it in there.

 

Subscribed, nice work so far.

 

I agree subscribed can't wait to see how this comes out Great story Jim

 

looking great so far..love the brackets you're fabricating. They look like factory casting,very old timey look!

 

Yup, nice.

 

did you design these?
they look great! have another set?

 

You got me hooked. HRP

 

great pics...more please

 

Nice to see a build thread Kelly. Really nice stuff so far.

 

I love the direction this is going. Very nice!

 

Thanks everyone!

I built the bone mounts out of the original '33 mech brake cross shaft pivot mount,
Don't know if designed is the right word as much as just saw them in something else.
@cadillacoffin

 

Wow very nice work!!! I'm excited to see this come together

 

Enjoying this!

 

Wow - great project & great to have so many details & pics

 

Bout time you did a build thread! Great to see it all together with pictures bigger than Instagram.

 

These are my favourite Ford trucks as well. Nice to see what yourve been up to, but found reading this hard, after reading about the cancer.
That really sucks buddy, your doing a great job of this ol truck, keep up the awesome work, fuck the health issues, this will keep you going.
Subscribed.

 

Thanks guys! and yes @Speedy Canuck , it is about time.
I wanted to reach a significant milestone in the build though.

 

Awesome post, great pics, and story. Sorry about your health issues. Love those trucks, too.

 

Part 11 Just put it all back together. Drill bits and cotter pins

When I bought my 51 Merc flathead, I fired it up on a stand, it ran really nice, had good oil pressure, compression test showed well. All I did to it was re gasket it, including head gaskets. Checked to make sure it was 4" stroke, yup! My father had some old Fords and the gasket set I used was new unopened that he had bought in the 70's. That was cool.

I cleaned up the engine, scraped what little bit of carbon it had, found an engine rebuilder tag on it, it's been bored .030. Bought rebuild kits for the water pumps, and installed them. Painted it and the transmission black.

The 40 banjo was at my differential guys place getting reassembled with all new bearings and seals.
It is a 3:78, he was amazed how nice all the gears inside were, I was pretty happy about that too.

So all the parts were black and ready to go.
The vision for this build was to use all fine thread fasteners and castle nuts with cotter pins.
A lot of drill bits and cotter pins were used, and I can say, i'm pretty much over the cotter pin thing right now. Some things I made a jig to drill the bolts, others just got clamped in the vice and drilled.
Bit by bit, bolts got tightened and cotter pins bent over and it started to come together.

 

A few more pictures, sorry about the randomness of them.

 

Part 12 Exhaust

Once all the brakes and engine, transmission, and rear end were all bolted down, I built my exhaust system. The plan was to run 1 3/4" straight pipes, and as mentioned before, the were going to be within the frame and not hanging below, except at the back beside the tank.
To me, it just seems like the right way to do it.
I bought 4 combo U and 90 degree pipes from Speedway and a length of 1 3/4" pipe from a local parts place and started cutting and welding.
Pictures are of it all tacked, I tig welded it all and installed it for good.
I don't know what it is about steel exhaust pipe, I had a hell of a time trying to get nice beads.

And with that all done, it was time to get a cab back on this heap.