History WW II car to truck conversion

Are there any more out there?

 

The 1933 or 34 Chevy coupe is mashed up to about a 1928 Buick cowl, hood and radiator shell..

 

Here's one I got a few months ago.

 

The ones I have seen look just like that...chopped off with an axe

 

Do you still have this truck. It's really great! Surprised it has steel wheels. Wondering how that frame was adapted.
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I think there must have been a contest to see who could screw up a model a coupe the worse. About 1959 my cousin bought a A coupe that had a saw mill blade set up were the back half use to be.It cost 25 bucks.

 

I sold it to Jack Slaymaker about 8 or 9 years ago. He pasted a way about 3 or 4 years ago and I don't know what happened to it after that. The bed was just adapted the the original frame.

 

Cars were converted to trucks during the War so they could get more gas.

 

The 1937 ford had a box available that fit in the trunk after the trunk lid was removed . I don't have any pictures of it

 

"The owner wanted or needed a truck and trucks were probably at a premium during the war so buying a Model A for 10 or 15 bucks and chopping the back off made sense"

Yep, then they took the trunk lid and used them as rock skids for picking rocks out of the fields. Reason why they didn't survive too often and cost an arm and leg to get now.

 

I wondered what that noise was!

 

The first "car" I ever drove! It is still in the family, and operational!



This is it out at a car show in Worcester Massachusetts, a few years ago.

 

You are right on the price of a Rough Model A during WWII but the reason it was done was that if you registered it as a truck rather than a car you got more gas ration stamps and ration stamps for new tires that you couldn't get for a car. My dad told about people doing it.

The old couple who drove the one that I used to see around town that I mentioned on the first page of the thead years and years ago were a farm couple who had probably owned that car since before WWII. I'm thinking that she was one of the women who used to ask me to look in the back room at the crocery store to see if the pattern on the flower sacks matched a pattern on the one she had in the cart as she had a sewing project going on using that pattern. Normally you only saw them in town on Thursdays which was and still is sale day at the local livestock sales yard. I usually worked Thursday afternoons and put a lot of groceries in trucks for farm and ranch wives who only got to town on sale day.

 

The same urban myth exists here in Australia, more fuel ratio tickets for farm trucks. My Model A was a 4 door tourer (you can see where the back door hinges mounted) but was chopped and a timber back built. It has stepped sides to make a seat for the children or to carry long items which would run right through to the front and tie off on the headlight. The sign writing and canopy covers were done in the 1980s when it was restored.

 

I built one only it’s 1/24 scale !

 

V16 Cadillac

 

car to truck related but postwar… (delete if need be since it ain’t prewar…)

back in the early 60s my dad became obsessed with building a RV on a passenger car chassis. Having RVs built on car chassis such as 50s Cadillacs,Lincoln, packards was something that you would see once in a while and that ‘lazy daze’ campers in Pomona California would construct a RV on an post war large car chassis. most of the time the front clip, cowl area and dash and front floor area was the original car.

my dad wanted to do something a little different and bought a sideswiped 1956 Pontiac two-door hardtop for $35 and drove it home from Covina to upland. he put a lot of work into it constructing the back portion and lost interest in the project after a year. it still ran and drove but dad never finished it and eventually gave it away cheaply to a neighbor when my folks moved to Ventura from upland. The neighbor yanked the motor and tranny out (which never got reinstalled) and he wound up giving it to me in the late 80s and I moved it to Arizona where it still is at my house in kingman. I had plans of continuing the project and build a flatbed with stake bed. Well… I never got a-round toit. (pun intended). I need to put it up for sale someday soon because I’m greatly downsizing my ‘collection’. i’ll be back in arizona in a few weeks and I’ll try and remember to take some more pictures of it and post them.
personally I wish dad left the car alone. The sideswipe damage was repairable. but back in the mid 60s the car was worth hardly anything.