I was looking at various Sweptside tailgate and wagon tailgate pics today. It will definitely take some doing to make the wagon gate work. We might have an easier time of it with my buddy's truck. As his truck is right now, the fenders are extremely rusty. He does have a good left fender from a wagon that we can replace and he has found some patch panels, but, the truck is pretty rusty. So, his truck would be a good candidate for the station wagon tailgate experiment. After all, if it went horribly south and we really butchered it, we could always put a standard bed on the truck. Not a perfect solution, but would still have a functional truck. I'm glad you started a build thread. Its going to be fun to follow along with your progress. I really like the direction you are taking Bobby
I spent most of the day working on this old fire extinguisher. I'm really like all the old Mopar accessories and always thought the fire extinguishers like this one... ...were cool but they don't show up often and always go for more than I am willing to give. I ran across a guy that makes a decal like this and I thought I'd try to make my own out of the easy to find Pyrene extinguishers. I wired wheeled it off and polished it up a little. Then I applied the decal which was just the right size. Not the real thing but I've got about $40 dollars in the whole thing and that's a little bit more my speed! I am thinking about maybe mounting it on the flat spot on the inner fender in the engine bay. I'm not sure what time period the Mopar extinguishers were available as an accessory, probably not the 50's, but I do like the look of them.
@bobbytnm yeah I'm definitely not going to do anything to the side panels or the bed box that couldn't be easily reversed since it's the one thing that makes the truck. Maybe I'll get the flat tailgate off tomorrow so I can get a better look at things.
Extinguisher looks right at home in the engine bay. I'd probably used it as a bourbon decanter and mounted in the cab but to each their own.
Yup, gate looks best upside down. Love the gold engine with the braided plug wires. Going the same colour with my straight 6.
Thanks @slayer! That'd be a cool idea too @gene-koning to turn it in to something functional. That will look really good. Like I mentioned earlier if you go with Duplicolor 1604 universal gold it looks real good but it shoots really thin and flakes real easy so make sure if there are any bolt heads that will be sprayed with it wont have to be messed with soon after because that's where I ran in to trouble. That being said I'm no painter so it could've been a prep issue but I'm just more used to engine enamels being thicker and most of the time not being so easy to come off even on bolts that have to come back out or tightened up some more.
I got this old Pyroil Upper Motor Lubricator a few days ago not knowing what I would do with it but just thought it was interesting. I got to thinking with a little modification that it would be a pretty neat oil catch can for my PCV system instead of the cheap one I was using on the stand. I removed all the oil metering internals. From what I've read on here about these old top end oilers they don't serve any purpose. I don't see how this particular unit would've drawn any oil into the engine because the pickup tube is full of cotton packing that air wont even pass through and there's a hole in the top of the tube, where the red paint is, right were it was drove into the housing. Looks to me like it would've just been drawing air with little to no oil. Then I added another hole for a pipe fitting in the raised boss on top for an outlet. Got it painted and mounted on the firewall. Now all I need are some fittings so I can hook it up. I think it should work pretty good. Now that it's got some distance from the valley pan it might not draw that much oil vapor up to it but I still like the looks of it.
You are really getting some cool items attached to your firewall and engine compartment. Also the truck is very cool looking. Nice job!
Thanks @NashRodMan and @CME1! Got the tailgate off today and messed around with the wagon tailgate a little bit. I also mounted the bumper so I could see where everything should be. While it looked like it might have worked better upside down when I first leaned it up against the regular tailgate, it looks like it would work a lot better right side up. The tailgate tapers towards the bottom and when upside down doesn't match up vertically with the side panels and leaves a large gap at the bedside. This looks a lot better and shouldn't be hard to make a sheet metal piece to bridge the gap. To get it to start matching the curve of the side panel it has to be raised above the bumper. Here it's still not matched up perfectly with the side panel curve but I was having a hard time keeping everything balanced. I'll have to make some kind of temporary hinge or something to help hold it in place. This is with it raised 2-1/4" above the top of the bumper. The bumper pads could be easily moved inward since they're kind of set pretty far out. Here's a picture from the inside of the bed. Right now I'm wondering if maybe something like a large diameter barrel style hinge could work on the bottom of the tailgate that would also help take up the gap at the bottom between it and the bumper. What do y'all think?
Also took a picture of my shift knob in place today. I actually started another thread about these shift knobs thinking they were old but they're actually just made to look old. Had me fooled! I cleaned off all the fake patina, repainted the engraving and clear coated it. I machined this plate out of a 1/4" piece of aluminum in the cast car club plaque style to go along with it for the front bumper. I machined out what I could on the Bridgeport and finished the rest with a pencil grinder. I got all the exhaust buttoned up today. I'm not sure what the general feeling towards side pipes are around here but from a search of some older threads it looks like they might not be too popular so here's just a few pictures from underneath.
Are you planning on having a working tailgate, or can you live with a fixed-in-place gate? If it doesn't have to operate, I'd take a look at adding that panel to a fabricated tailgate that bolts in. Make the panel fit wherever you want it, add extensions to the sides of the panel to blend into the fins better, away you go. Make everything removeable so you can return it to stock, as this truck has more value than a run-of-the mill farm truck. Good progress on a cool project!
Thanks @straykatkustoms! @'28phonebooth I've thought about something like that too because once all the wood is in the bed I wont be hauling anything in there anyways so I guess I'll give it a shot at making it a functional tailgate and if it just doesn't work out I might go that route. As requested @Bandit Billy! I like the look of them a lot. They are what I was using on the run stand and I really like the sound of them too.
That's right! Thank you! The plaque is one of those things I wish I had taken pictures of along the way. I didn't really figure it was gonna work out like I had planned so I just started in on it. A couple of years ago I worked at a factory as a CNC programmer, and if I had still been there I would have cut the plaque on one of those machines when we weren't too busy and it would've only taken a few minutes. Since all I had to work with was my manual mill at home I downloaded the Mastercam home edition software for free on my computer and designed the plate on there to the dimensions of the piece of aluminum I was using. Then I printed it off full size and super glued it to the piece of aluminum. I figured it would flake right off when I started cutting but it actually worked pretty good! Every once in while the paper would try to peel off and leave me in the middle of nowhere not knowing where to cut but I'd stop and glue it back down.
what a great job on such a rare truck.Love the engine bay. You do fantastic work love all the details. The new tailgate will look a lot better than what was there. Subscribed!
Excellent pics of the mock-up on the tailgate. I've been studying pics of the sweptside trucks and the Chevy Cameo trucks. Buddy and I have been talking and have a few ideas. His truck is a bit rougher than yours so we have a bit more wiggle room on customizing it.
It's funny that they slapped quarter panels on and left the bed sides. It seems that taking the bed sides out would be a way to use the wagon tailgate. But maybe that'd ruin the authenticity of the truck.
Thanks @Ford52PU and @ccain! @bobbytnm It'll be interesting to see how y'all come along with the tailgate as well, and also like you said since y'all already have a good bit of body work to do anyways you can get a little more radical when trying different things with it. @sgtlethargic I think even if you were to just cut the very corner out of the top of the bed at the back to match the curve of the wagon panels that it would look cleaner with the wagon tailgate but I like the truck so much both with the original style flat tailgate and the wagon tailgate that I'm just going to try to work in the wagon tailgate with some panels to bridge gap between the tailgate and the wagon quarters. Might look a little weird with the bed box still on top but it being weird was kind of what drew me to the truck in the first place!
Just for thought. With all your creative work, maybe you can come up with a bed cover to "hide" the top of the bed sides that would blend into the top of the quarter panels. A bed cover would be a great addition to your truck. Then some of us more uncreative people can see how we might be able to adapt what you make to use as a bed covers for our old simple step bed trucks. My truck doesn't have the wagon quarters, but a bed cover would be great. The people that offer a custom bed soft cover that "might be able to work" with the Dodge beds want a lot of money to make something that might work. The way they word it makes it sound like if it doesn't work, too bad, its still yours, no returns on custom bed covers. Gene
@gene-koning I hadn't thought of a bed cover. Is one like this that wraps around the rolled edge of the bed kind of the style you're talking about? I have some ideas about making the inside of the bed look a lot cleaner. While I like the exterior of the truck I don't care much for the inside of the bed looking so rough. I'll try to get some pictures today of what I have planned.
So a while back I got this tolex material in beige and alligator skin from a guitar amp building supplier thinking I could maybe use it inside the bed of my truck. It's waterproof vinyl so I believe it would hold up well. I did a kind of rude mock up of what I had in mind when I bought it. The material has been rolled up for a while so it didn't exactly want to lay right. I also laid the aluminum strips for the bedwood to kind of help visualize. I've already bought some rough cut oak boards I planned on using but a friend of mine has his own small sawmill and some nice wild cherry boards that I think would look really sharp finished. I had planned on only doing inside the bed but after Gene mentioning a bed cover that went around the rolled tube of the bed box I thought I would see what it would look like if it was also covered. I'm not sure about any of it. It's kind of hard to visualize. Of course it will look better when it's all pulled tight and stuck down but at that point removing it would be pretty messy if it didn't turn out like I hoped. I've also never worked with any material like this. The videos of the guys doing the vinyl roofs make it look easy but I know that's just because of the experience they have. Do y'all think it would look better that the inside of the bed looks now or that I need to go a different direction?
The Jalopy Journal
