Hey Guys. When I was 16 I purchased this from a property eight miles from our farm, my parents had divorced a decade earlier and rather than have it out at the old man’s place, I wanted it at my mother’s place in town. Neither location was ideal as neither had a garage or shed for me to store it in, but since I lived in town it made sense it would stay there. Sadly I did not have the maturity or motivation do anything with it and when I turned 18 and needed a car to get my licence, my mother gave me an ultimatum, if you want a car you will need to sell the truck, you can’t have both. Money was tight and I needed a licence, so sadly I sold it, and always regretted the decision. Fast forward to 2017, I had a place of my own and a couple of early projects, but none really inspired me. I had always wanted another 1934 BB Truck, and knew of a yard with several.
I ended up purchasing this one, along with a cutdown 28 Model A Tourer from the same yard. The plan was to build this one along with The Model A which I was going to turn into a hybrid Sport Coupe Cabriolet by mating up a 29 Cabriolet body I had to the tourer chassis. It would have been more sensible to ditch one project, sell it off and use the money to fund the other one. And from a practical point of view it would have been easier to sell off the truck and concentrate on The Model A. Instead I chose to put the Model A project on ice and concentrate on the truck instead.
I was pretty disappointed with the truck, the front and rear ends were locked up so the chassis sat out in the yard while the cab went into the shed. The game plan is quite ambitious, I want to use the original frame, more or less unaltered, I have a 302 Cleveland I want to mate up to a T5 Transmission. To anyone who says there is no such thing as a 302 Cleveland, they are real and they were produced by Ford Australia, Google them.
After years of procrastination I finally got around to starting on it last year. Anyone unfamiliar with these trucks, that would be most people, I’m guessing, would be unaware that the cabs on these are completely different to their American counterparts. They were manufactured in Geelong Victoria from locally stamped panels, only the cowl is interchangeable, the doors, floor, roof and rear cab sections were framed in timber rather than steel.
Even the sub rails were timber and sadly, they were long gone from this one, so I had to figure out a way to make a new floor. I want to replace every remaining piece of timber with steel.
So I squared the cab up over a large piece of cardboard, traced around the cardboard cut it out and this became the template for the subrails.
At the same I was doing this, I was trying to figure out how I could get the frame into the shed, minus the bulky rear end, a nine inch will replace it. The bolts in the shackles are right up against the frame, so I couldn’t punch them though.
So I decided it would be easier to sacrifice the U Bolts instead. I also uncoupled the front end at the same time.
I like your goal. Here is my destroked 310" Cleveland. 351 NASCAR XE Pillow block cast in Geelong for Ford Motorsports. (it's not one of the poorly cast ones that ended up in Aussie street cars). The big Motorsport A3 aluminum heads, dry sump oil system - just over 650 hp. (It's in my GT1 Mustang which is the SCCA club class that uses the same rules as the pro TransAm series. I'd be tempted to put a 351 crank in your 302 for some free horsepower. Small chamber heads and a big carb - these things use a lot of air at 8,500 rpm. .
Hey Guys. I got a little bit more done yesterday and today. The cab had sunk down about three inches over the frame after the back of the subfloor had rotted away. Here is another view the day it arrived at my place last month.
There are several different ways I could have attacked this mess, the most obvious one would be to buy a bunch of lower patch panels, place them over the damaged areas, trace around them, cut out them out and weld in the new ones. The second and easier option would be to make my own, easier because I would not be waiting around for new ones to arrive. Instead I choose to attempt to repair what remained by pulling the bent up sections back down and stitch welding them. It’s been slow and tedious as the metal is very thin and avoiding blow through is not always possible. Where it occurs, I have been cutting off strips of sheet metal and pushing it into the holes to weld in. I’m using a very simple $200 gas less Mig to do all the repairs, it has just two settings and I have them on the lowest setting for both. The results are ok, there is still a lot more grinding back and in filling to do on the welds.
I think Ford originally built that plant to build the Model T and closed it about 10 years ago. Almost a century of Ford history.
Not only was it missing a large chunk of the bottom swage, the deficit had led to the whole edge being bent in.
In order to get the shape of the patch panel to matchup with the missing area, I made a cardboard template then traced it around the folded patch panel.
There’s still a lot of work to finish them off. Because the metal is so thin, I have been building up the welds on both sides before grinding them down. One thing I won’t be doing is using any filler, so the extra metal will be ground down to the profile swage in the areas where it got flattened out.
Looking good! How far are you from Geelong? Don’t forget to drill out the end of the cracks to prevent further cracking....
They quit building cars there in 2016 and sold it in 2019. Melbourne-based development company Pelligra Group emerged as the winning bidder for the sites at Broadmeadows and Geelong, purchasing the properties that were valued at about $75 million when placed on the market last year for an undisclosed sum.
I like your project and I like the idea of saving as much of the original steel as possible, instead of just replacing everything with new panels. I will say though, MIG with shielding gas is so much easier to work with, it would be well worth the investment for the amount of time you'd save and the cleaner results you'd get.
Geelong is 557 Kilometres or 345 miles from Batlow. About a 5.5 hour drive on good freeways and toll roads. We have very strictly enforced speed limits in Australia.
Hey Guys. Thanks for all the feedback, I had overlooked some important information about the truck, so I have included a couple of images as clues.
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