Last weekend gave me an opportunity to take out the '55 Dodge 'JobRated' truck for a little beating around a local parkinglot.
thanks to www.DragonDon.net for hosting the file temporarily)
This truck (picture gallery here)
, belonging to a good friend of mine, has been years in the making.
After getting a call from a friend at a towyard, we went to pick up this
semi-restored truck for next to nothing for a promise of not selling it.
After driving it for a while the brakes were getting bad so we dropped it off at Tartaglia Brothers shop in Hawthorne whose incompetent work lead to total
brakefailure on Topanga Canyon in Malibu. After that particular
near-death-experience we tore into the truck ourselves and to make a long story short, the owner decided to hotrod it.
After replacing the front subframe with the one of a '67 Chrysler Imperial we
could squeeze a 440 in the hole. This was fine for a little while, but then the subframe got notched, this allowed the engine to drop down a bit. Reshaping the firewall allowed it to come back a bit behind the centerline of the front wheels. Along with this the automatic got scrapped so in went the junkyard pedals from a mid-60's Dodge and a 4speed and it was rolling again.
Next part was a little hubris on the part of the owner and in went a
supercharger after which things quickly started bending and blowing up.
Everything came apart again, engine got repaired, frame got boxed and reinforced with crossbeams and the cab and bed painted. Now it's all together again with a proper engine (and 5-6 lbs of boost instead of 20!!) and all parts machined and balanced to match eachother. It would take up many more pages of ASCII to describe the levels of Dante's Inferno we reached in doing and re-doing a lot of the work. The 4 link suspension took a long time to get right. The powersteering leaked and in a moment of anger it was yanked out and replaced with manual steering (we now have popeye arms!), this move might be undone in the near future. Installing powerwindows and power doorlocks certainly was a monumentous task and so was the fuelmetering and installing all custom wiring and fuellines. The new paint and RhinoLining on floorboards, firewall and interior made a huge difference and now that the truck is on the road and running, the motivation to finish it is a lot better.
With any luck the owner himself can spend a few days to type down all the
remarkable stories we've been through with this truck. As it sits it's been
through six years, three relationships, four residential moves and three shop
moves.
thanks to www.DragonDon.net for hosting the file temporarily)
This truck (picture gallery here)
, belonging to a good friend of mine, has been years in the making.
After getting a call from a friend at a towyard, we went to pick up this
semi-restored truck for next to nothing for a promise of not selling it.
After driving it for a while the brakes were getting bad so we dropped it off at Tartaglia Brothers shop in Hawthorne whose incompetent work lead to total
brakefailure on Topanga Canyon in Malibu. After that particular
near-death-experience we tore into the truck ourselves and to make a long story short, the owner decided to hotrod it.
After replacing the front subframe with the one of a '67 Chrysler Imperial we
could squeeze a 440 in the hole. This was fine for a little while, but then the subframe got notched, this allowed the engine to drop down a bit. Reshaping the firewall allowed it to come back a bit behind the centerline of the front wheels. Along with this the automatic got scrapped so in went the junkyard pedals from a mid-60's Dodge and a 4speed and it was rolling again.
Next part was a little hubris on the part of the owner and in went a
supercharger after which things quickly started bending and blowing up.
Everything came apart again, engine got repaired, frame got boxed and reinforced with crossbeams and the cab and bed painted. Now it's all together again with a proper engine (and 5-6 lbs of boost instead of 20!!) and all parts machined and balanced to match eachother. It would take up many more pages of ASCII to describe the levels of Dante's Inferno we reached in doing and re-doing a lot of the work. The 4 link suspension took a long time to get right. The powersteering leaked and in a moment of anger it was yanked out and replaced with manual steering (we now have popeye arms!), this move might be undone in the near future. Installing powerwindows and power doorlocks certainly was a monumentous task and so was the fuelmetering and installing all custom wiring and fuellines. The new paint and RhinoLining on floorboards, firewall and interior made a huge difference and now that the truck is on the road and running, the motivation to finish it is a lot better.
With any luck the owner himself can spend a few days to type down all the
remarkable stories we've been through with this truck. As it sits it's been
through six years, three relationships, four residential moves and three shop
moves.
posted by The Reverend at 4:21:00 AM
0 comments
links to this post
