The 1947 - Present Chevrolet & GMC Truck Message Board Network







Register or Log In To remove these advertisements.

Go Back   The 1947 - Present Chevrolet & GMC Truck Message Board Network > 47 - Current classic GM Trucks > The 1947 - 1959 Chevrolet & GMC Pickups Message Board

Web 67-72chevytrucks.com


Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 08-20-2009, 02:18 PM   #1
dumbfarmboy
Registered User
 
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: chapel Hill, NC
Posts: 79
Miss Alice, or my 47 rebuild adventure

Let me start this thread by saying I have never restored any vehicle in my life. My only experience even close to this is maintaining my farm equipment when I was farming more than two decades ago. But, I have a great shop, and three boys in college, so I had some time and some help. My quest to relive my youth began.
I grew up on a farm outside of Moweaqua, Illinois and my dad had a 1947 1 ton with a grain box on back that we added stock racks to to haul cattle. Since I graduated in 1977, the truck had already seen a lot of use, and while I had a lot of friends, it was pretty hard to get a girl to go out on a second date when the truck you drove her to dinner and a movie in smelled like cow ****, and you could see the road underneath you. I was so glad when he bought a new truck in 1978 so that when I came home from college I could at least have a decent shot a second date. Little did I know how much I would end up missing that damn truck.
Fast forward 30 years, and I now own a farm outside of Chapel Hill, NC, and work as a venture capitalist. I sat on a board with a guy by the name of John Mumford at a company in California, and after a visit to his incredible shop (they were working on a 49 for Eric Clapton) I decided what the hell...I can and should do this.
I began searching on Craigs list and Ebay for a suitable project truck..low and behold, one came up for sale on Ebay in Western North Carolina. I called the guy who was selling it since I couldnt drive all the way over to the other side of the state for a peek...hence my first mistake...the conversation went something like this. "Hey, I saw your truck on ebay and seemed pretty solid from all the pictures..is it? "
"Oh yeah, only a little rust on the cab corners, the rest is perfect."
"So I really dont need to replace anything other than the cab corners right?"
"Yup, you should be good to go."
I happily won the darn thing for 700 bucks. I thought it was only missing two fenders and a drive train.
I couldn't make the trip to pick it up since I was tied up for the next month, but I was able to convince a guy who was staying rent free in one of my houses (long story) to go and pick it up. he left on a Friday afternoon and headed out for the 6 hour drive to pick it up. I was hosting a party that night and my cell phone rang about 11.
"Greg, this is Brad, I think I may be in trouble?"
"What's up?"
"Well, I started coming down the mountain, and believe me, this is a mountain, I think the grade is like 13% or so for like 5 miles, and I don't have any brakes left. I just about ran over the edge of the road and finally got it stopped here on a side road"
Having faced the same problem before I told him to just sit and wait for a half hour until the brakes cooled down and then progress the rest of the way down keeping the truck in low gear.
"But hows the truck look"
""it's not much of a truck,I think I could have lifted it on by hand."
I was a bit puzzled by that statement but willing to let it slide...
"Uh okay, its getting pretty late, why don't you stop at a hotel and I will pick up the tab, come on home in the daylight."
"I'm about two hours from 40, but as soon as I get on I'll find a place and stop."
The next morning started cool and crisp but sunny. I was lucky to have all three boys home for the weekend, and left instructions for them to help take the cab apart and off the frame when the truck rolled in. I had a Saturday board call and had to work on some financing stuff for one of my portfolio companies.
Son Peter called when the truck pulled in..."Doesn't look like you got too much for your money dad, the truck had a lot of surface rust they just painted over with some kind of black spray paint."
I didn't worry too much about that, in fact I was glad they had done something to stop the rust. "Go ahead and pull it apart Peter, I'll be back over in a couple of hours to help."
15 minutes later the phone rang, "Pete, I am really busy here, just keep taking the truck apart and I will be over in another hour and a half."
"Dad, the truck is all apart, and we have the cab sitting on a couple of sawhorses. There were only three bolts holding the cab on, and two bolts on each door. The fenders had like two bolts each in them. Thus began my adventure. More to come...

When i finally got back over to the shop, I was horrified. The floor on the cab was non existent, the doors looked like they had been shot with a shotgun, filled with bondo and then shot again. Every window was either broken or cracked, and there were no cab corners.
The rolling chassis kind of rolled with the front end so loose you could push the frame back and forth a good four inches without disturbing the tires. If i would have had any sense I would have quit right then....
A curious thing happened, the boys who had been strangely silent during my evaluation, began to talk about paint designs and colors, and my oldest, Martin started doing research ona new front end. By the end of the night, my enthsuiasm was back even if my pocketbook wasn't.
Over the weekend, I purchased a front end kit from "Grandpa's attic" on Ebay. This outfit based in Iowa had good feedback, and I felt pretty comfortable buying from them, even at well over a grand. After all it was supposed to "weld right up".
It arrived a few days later, and I have to confess, I was back in the doldrums. It just didn't look right. No matter how I tried to fit it up, it just didn't. I had carefully removed the old front end and welded up the holes. I called them for some help, and was promised a call back. I waited by the phone but no response. Then I called them again and emailed them....as my sons say "all you could hear were crickets". So much for service after teh sale. I was clearly on my own. I left them scathing feedback on ebay, on email and on voice mail, but to no avail.
I had a good friend come over who had knocked around cars some and he was just as puzzled as I was....the damn thing didnt even look like it was close to a fit. Finally we mapped out a plan and welded everything together using filler blocks we made from the tongue of an old mulching disk the farmer i bought the place had left in the weeds. When I tried to put it all togehter though, it still didnt fit, and even worse the front spindles were about 2 inches wider than the rear spindles (note to builders...always check that when you dry fit...I didn't and it cost me weeks of work and hours of sweat and lots of sleepless nights thinking about it.)
I hauled the whole thing to my buddies at Hillsborough Tire and they looked at the thing with me, and were as puzzled as I was. They clearly had shipped me the wrong axle, but with the frame cut, I had to improvise.
We spent a few weeks looking at it back at the shop and finally recut and rebuilt the frame connections, pinched a little here and there, and got it down to an inch wider on each side..good enough to cover with special order rims.
I now knew I was hopelessly outside of my area of expertise. The whole cab had to be rebuilt, and I ordered all the parts from LMC, measured door post spreads, and cut the floor off. By now it was Christmas and the boys were home again. For the next three weeks we cut, steel brushed, welded, filled, welded some more, cut some more...but by the end of Xmas break, we had a solid cab again. The doors were another story.
I should have learned my lesson from the start...when in doubt buy new.
I spent two months trying to rebuild the doors so they would work. Somewhere along the way one of the door frames got pinched an extra 3/4 of an inch, and it was just tight enough that nothing wanted to fit.
Damnit...was I ever going to do anything right with this truck?
Finally the cab went back together we we primed it up, and put it aside. Time to start on the drive train.
I bought a motor from a guy who had a 216 listed on Craigs list in Cali that was a fresh rebuild. We struck a price of 300 and I paid a hundred bucks shipping. I had wanted to put a four on the floor like we had in the old ton truck, but had a heck of a time finding one. I finally got one from a guy who listed it on EBAY and true to his word the darn thing was super tight and nice.
I decided while it was this far down to put a new clutch in. Ordered it, and much to my surprise, it slipped right in, time to bolt up the tranny.....oops. The 4 speed needed a different bell housing than the three speed. Back to the shopping list, I finally found the right bell housing, and put the whole thing together.
A few days later I tried to drop it in the frame....nothing fit. I had bought engine mounts from one of the resellers along witha transmission mount. I spent at least two weeks staring at it and trying to figure out how it could all come together. Finally I gave up and headed for the phone. Several days later I was rewarded when Wayne McGhee was persuaded to stop over and take a look.
Wayne is a long time rodder and owned a salvage yard at nearby Hillsborough. He took one look at the frame, the motor and tranmission and summed it up in three words. "Yall gottit wrahng." Little did I know then how valuable that 80 year old man was.
After laughing and showing me in three minutes how to fix it, I bid him farewell but not before getting his promise to show back up in a month or so when I was ready for the next step. Suddenly everything seemed to make sense. Amazingly things fit like they were meant to. Since my only major modifications from original were taking place inside of the cab, all of the other modifications were just simple changes to take it back to original.
It took a lot longer than I thought it would...seems simple enough to drop bolts in and put everything back together, but it wasnt. Three months later I was ready to paint the cab and bed. In spite of the best effort to keep everything original and aligned, nothing fit quite like it should, and it took us another couple of weeks to figure out brake pedals, clutch adjustments, etc. Nothing was simple including such archane things as moving the emergency brake from the left of the cab to the center. Finally the cab was fully mounted and ready to paint. When I put the doors on, somehow we had pulled the cab together at the bottom on the passenger side. I had night mares about it for a week while on the road. When I got back home, a friend who had a lot of body experience came over and with a few bangs on the door, a little work on the cab had it all fitting together. It's amazing how much you can make metal move with a couple of hammer hits.
After painting the cab, it was time for assembly. Wayne reappeared to get the engine running and bleed out the brakes. I watched in amazement as he timed the engine by putting his finger in cylinder number 4, waiting for it to hit TDC as he slowly pulled it through from the fan belt. Then he set the distributor, and put new wires and plugs in without ever consulting a manual. It was amazingly fun to watch. Then for kicks he dismantled the carb without a rebuild kit, took it apart down to the last ball in the accelearator chamber (he had some secret voodoo method for blowing it out) and the damn thing started after rolling over for a minute without putting any gas in the carb.
It was worth all of the hell I had endured to that pooint to watch a true professional at work. He had started his career rebuilding those engines as they wore out quickly in the red Carolina dust, and his expertise showed. The thing was running like a well oiled sewing machine when he finished.
He stood back and looked at the cab and chasis, then giggled a little bit. (You converted that drive train from a closed tube to an open tube didnt you?" I had, and had built a plate and shackles to hold the real axle directly over the center of the springs. "Well that'll look pretty funny 'cause the rear axel is up about 2 inches form where it should be then."
Sure enough when we put the bed on it, the rear axle was up too far. But still I was done and it drove down the road pretty damn well. I had made more mistakes than most people did things right, but now the damn bug has bitten me. Now my son is looking for a five window to rebuild.
It feels pretty good driving down the road the other day I even had a guy get off his bike and bow down in front of it when taking it into Chapel Hill a few weeks ago.
Attached Images
     

Last edited by dumbfarmboy; 09-15-2009 at 06:14 PM.
dumbfarmboy is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 08-20-2009, 03:16 PM   #2
IL boy
Registered User
 
IL boy's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Nashville, TN
Posts: 54
Re: Miss Alice, or my 47 rebuild adventure

this sounds like it could be interesting. welcome to the board it is full of useful info and helpful individuals. I used to drive thru Moweaqua on US 51 on my way from Carbondale to Bloomington.
__________________
55 1st Series 5 window, getting an s10 frame and 350 sbc

Keeping it LOUD and ROUGH - just like BOONEMAN

IL boy is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 08-20-2009, 03:50 PM   #3
Bigblue29
Thanks 'til you're better paid
 
Bigblue29's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Posts: 257
Re: Miss Alice, or my 47 rebuild adventure

Interesting story. post some pics of the "truck" when you get a chance!
__________________
-Luke

1950 Chevy AD 3100 pickup
2000 GMC Sierra

1970 Jeepster Commando
Bigblue29 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 08-20-2009, 09:42 PM   #4
mr48chev
Registered User
 
mr48chev's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Toppenish, WA
Posts: 15,640
Re: Miss Alice, or my 47 rebuild adventure

welcome to the board. It seems that every truck has it's own story and that is quite a story. It looks like you did a nice job with it.
mr48chev is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Bookmarks


Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -4. The time now is 02:30 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.11
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions Inc.
Copyright 1997-2022 67-72chevytrucks.com