This afternoon, after our Memorial Day cook out, one of the Sheriff's Deputies who ia a good friend of mine spent about half an hour looking at my 1959 F-100 trying to help me find the truck's serial number. We never found the data plate. we looked all over both doors, the metal on the door openings, the kick panels, the inner front fender wells, and the firewall.and found NOTHING!! The last registration was out of State, We live in Texas, and the had a 1994 Wyoming license plate. There are NO holes where a data plate would have been screwed or riveted into place, H-E-L-P !!! Brie
And usually the VIN number is on top of the passenger frame rail near the cab mount. Sometimes though it can be on top of a crossmember..... Don't ask me why.
I did a srearch on Ford trucks.com Look on the left frame rail near the steering gear box for the hidden VIN number. or.. aluminum tag on the inside of the door of the glove box I found the number just forward of the cab on the right frame rail and one under the cab on top of the frame rail between the cab mounts.
The day I bought my 59 F100 from a Junkyard in North Carolina (Richard's), I had to be at work the next morning at 7AM. I tinkered on that thing all afternoon before thinking I could drive it home nine hours from the Junkyard. I used 13 quarts of oil on that trip (but just barely "used" it). I got pulled over in the Mountains of Tennessee at night in the rain for hauling ass. I told him I just bought it from a junkyard and had the title, which I did. We both looked all over with a flashlight for about 30 minutes before he just took my word for it that I really owned the truck. We never found a VIN anywhere. Not even in the glovebox, which had been chromed at some point. I assume it was on the frame somewhere. Maybe not. You gotta REAAAAALLY need it to bother looking that hard. I never got pulled over again.
Have your cop buddy contact NATB (national auto theft bureau). They have a huge database that they allow Law enforcement to access with locations of public and private (hidden) vin locations.
When I was having a Nova subframe installed on my '55 F-100, the guy doing it said he found the VIN stamped into the top of the frame rail, just ahead of the cab, under about a pound of road grime. He cut the frame just ahead of that, so as to leave the number in place.
Check post 27 for VIN on a mid fifties pickup frame. Larry T http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=267946&page=2
Thanks Guys, The data plate was riveted to the inside of the glove box door as you said. This color listed is "D", where would I go to find what color that WAS IN 1959? BRIE
if the glovebox matches your registration you should be good but i would dig deeper and locate the stamped frame vin. glovebox doors are switched pretty easy.
I'll check it out once I fire up my sand blaster, and see if I can find the number up bt the steering box. I think that it will check out though, there are five different colors of paint that are on top of each other on the truck, and the one on the bottom of the pile, matches the paint chip for Ford"s 1959 Indian Turquoise.
I think that unless TXDOT's computer says that the plate on the truck is wrong, (weather it IS or not),I will go with it. The base paint color under all the other paint jobs, matches what the plate says is supposed to be there. The engine that is listed on the plate is a six cylinder, but in the fourty years that the truck was on the road till it wound up sitting at my friend's towing yard for ten years, an engine swap to the 292 is not out of the ordinary. If the computer at DMV lets it go, I'll be happy. Brie
The Hudspeth County Treasurer, who is also the head of the Motor Vehicle Registration Department in Hudspeth County told me "No Problem, Bring us the old Wyoming licience plate, and a bill of sale from the owner of the towing company, and you will have a title in your name for the truck". "I personally know both you, and John Campbell, and I know that the deal is on the up and up". "Austin knows that we do things a little differently here in Hudspeth County". NEXT question. I want this truck to look like it was 1962 again, and some High School Senior, or College Freshman hot rodded the truck, by sticking a 312 engine out of a rolled T-Bird into it. WHAT Rocker Covers would it have "back in the day"? Some of you guys might be old enough to remember. I would like to use the ones that had Thunderbird in script painted on the covers, as well as a "V" over an "8" following the Thunderbird. I have a sneaking suspicion that those covers are going to be VERY expen$ive, if they are available at all. Brie
The Jalopy Journal
