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Updates from January, 2012

  • One of my favourite vehicles is actually a Dodge truck, not a car. When I first started working around vehicles, I fooled around with old military trucks and Jeeps. The reason for this was that they were simple, extraordinarily rugged off-road vehicles and pretty cool. (When I was much younger, my sandbox had been littered with military Dinky Toys.)

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    My favourite truck, the civilian Dodge Power Wagon, was a thinly disguised military vehicle that rose from the heavy-duty ¾-ton and one-ton trucks of the Second World War. The first generation was produced from 1946 until the mid-1960s. These trucks were massively overbuilt. When they were more common, it was not unusual to see one customized and festooned with all kinds of equipment such as massive plows, winches or drill rigs that would break the axles of most modern pickup trucks.

    A few weeks ago, a wonderful 1966 Power Wagon arrived at my facility. I was delighted because, as much as I love these trucks, this is the first one that had ever arrived here to be worked on. Funnily enough, while it is the first Power Wagon through my shop doors, it is so familiar because of all the Dodge M 37 military pickups and other Second World War Dodges I have owned and worked on. It was rather like an old friend had arrived.

    Its condition was excellent although unrestored and, if it was mine, I would keep the old, weathered yellow paint and blacked-out frame and just keep driving it.

    When I asked my general manager what the truck was in for, he told me the job was strictly utilitarian and that the owner wanted a modern powerplant installed and a newer transmission with overdrive for the occasional time the truck would be on the road. The frame was to be cleaned, prepped and repainted with a special black anti-oxidizing paint as well.

    It turns out this old truck’s working life is not over. It is being prepared to clear land and ready a building site for the owner’s new home. To be better prepared for this, he felt a modern diesel engine might be in order.

    I have to admit some personal reluctance here because the flathead six-cylinder that was in the old beast was one of the best-working motors ever built. In some of its incarnations, it was known as the Chrysler Industrial engine. This family of motors powered cars and trucks from the 1930s right through to the ’70s, when they could still be found in tow motors, Zambonis and other heavy equipment.

    The engine chosen to replace the original is a Cummins QSB 4.5. This is not a street diesel designed to push a chrome-bedecked urban powder-puff pickup. It is a very serious working motor designed to power heavy agricultural equipment. It would be as happy harvesting thousands of Prairie acres or even sitting at the bottom of a mineshaft pumping out water for a couple of decades.

    The installation of this engine and a rebuilt overdrive transmission has caused some trepidation here as they are far from drop-in. The re-engineering of the truck is daunting for the simple reason that we don’t want to change its outward appearance or modify it beyond the point where a restoration back to the original in the future would be next to impossible. That said, among the things we have to do is re-engineer the steering system, since the new engine will occupy the area where the old steering box was located. We also have to radically alter the whole front end, so there will be a number of factors that come into play in creating a new front suspension and steering gear.

    The unit that puts power to the front axle and PTO is found on a frame crossmember and is far too close to the new transmission, so we have to create a heavy-duty load-bearing crossmember and move the whole assembly backward about 38 centimetres or so. This will mean we have to make a new front driveshaft as well.

    The injection pump on the engine is in the wrong place and the truck’s frame cannot accommodate it at its point of attachment, so we will have to work with engineers at Cummins to relocate that unit.

    We have to move the truck’s firewall backward. This worries me as the Power Wagon doesn’t have a lot of legroom to start with. The truck will be no good if the owner can’t get in and out of it and operate the foot pedals easily — especially in a working situation — so we are going to have to be very clever in solving this problem.

    As the project progresses, there will be many challenges both large and small that crop up. Cooling is always an issue when blending old and new technologies.
    The electrical system in the Power Wagon will have to replaced with a brand new harness and we will have to install all the computers and high-tech required gadgets to run the turbocharged fuel-injected Cummins diesel.

    When it is finished, it should be a magnificent truck capable of another 50 years of heavy work and, if we have done our jobs properly, it will look no different than when it first poked its nose into the shop.


    9:00 am on January 16, 2012
     

  • I get a lot of requests from seniors for advice on restoring cars they own that have great sentimental value to them. In most cases, the cars are not outstanding examples of automotive art. In fact, they are usually just old grocery-getters. Their appeal is emotional and, as heirlooms and snapshots of people’s lives, they are invaluable. But their value as heirlooms should sometimes be checked with the rest of the family before being restored.

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    The reason I say this is that I have far too often restored such cars only to find that, a year or so after the owner’s passing, his or her car is listed for sale. Too many times — after having had a king’s ransom spent on them — these cars become more of an albatross than a prized possession. The emotional appeal may be far less or even totally nonexistent to the children or others to whom the car is passed.

    Too often I hear, “Well, we just don’t have anywhere to store Dad’s old car” or “we never drive Mom’s old car” or  “we can’t afford to maintain Dad’s old car.”
    There are those who even willingly trade their parent’s old car for the money to buy a new kitchen renovation or snowmobile.

    There are definitely times where it is worthwhile to restore an old car as an heirloom — and, in some rare instances, it may even prove to be a worthwhile investment. But, most often, the opposite is true.

    I have had clients spend as much as $250,000 to restore a car that, when finished, was worth less than $10,000. In these cases, I certainly have spoken to these owners like a Dutch uncle, but the mists of nostalgia can blind people to the cold, hard facts of fiscal reality. Sometimes, they don’t care about the price, the end objective being more important than the cost of getting there. In other cases, people have entered into a project with all the appropriate warnings at the beginning, but they  choose not to listen despite the fact the project may end up creating real financial hardships — and, sometimes, strife in the family.
    I keenly remember one young woman sitting in front of my desk demanding to know why I was letting her father spend her inheritance. In fact, it may have been that the father in this particular case may have been doing it to spite her. Mind you, it seems unimaginable that someone wouldn’t want a pristine, black, three-on-the-tree, bottom-of-the-line six-cylinder 1954 Pontiac coupe.

    Another couple brought me the rustiest car I have ever worked on — and that is really saying something. When it arrived at the shop, it had lost more than 40 kilograms in weight, which had to be swept out of the trailer. It also broke in half when it was being loaded. Despite that, the owners plunged in and did a comprehensive restoration.

    There were some obstacles. For one, they did not want to use any replacement parts and went ballistic when I bought another car to supply bits and pieces. I actually had to cut the frames of both cars to bits and splice them together to keep as much of the original car as possible. The same thing occurred with the body and I had to splice pieces together from two or more donor cars rather than replace them. Even the air cleaner on the motor looked as though it had been peppered with bird shot — yet they would not approve a replacement and I had to rebuild the original.

    With that restoration, money was never a complaint and it clearly created no hardship. At the end, they stood, tears in their eyes, looking at the car. This was the car that the man’s father had bought new, given him to go to college, used during the couple’s romance and betrothal and during their first years of marriage. The cost of the restoration ended up being more than $200,000. The car was a 1967 Pontiac Catalina with bench seats, radio and trim delete. The price new was likely around $2,000; its value as a restored car would not exceed $10,000 if you could find someone who wanted a green four-door with bench seats.

    I am often approached by people in their 60s or 70s who have retired and who still own their old sports car or boulevard cruiser, which they have kept since their teens or 20s. Sometimes, it is realistic to restore these cars. But, no matter how much someone may want to capture at least a flavour of his or her youth, restoration is not a good idea if the owners are on fixed incomes or living off savings. Too much can go wrong — and even the best shop can run into unexpected problems that blow a budget to hell.

    This is not to say people shouldn’t invest in their dreams. I have had the good fortune to accompany many people on journeys into their past and, often, it makes for the most satisfying kind of restoration for the owners and me. But these projects should never, ever become a financial burden or affect people’s lives in a negative fashion.

    In some cases, it may be a lot more fun to sit on a beach in Costa Rica than pass on a 1975 Chevy Vega to the kids.

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    9:00 am on December 18, 2011