Well.... I have kinda been MIA for a while. Some by now know i am building a truck. For some reason last fall i got this brilliant idea i wanted an old Ford Truck and i had this WILD idea that it wouldnt cost much and wouldnt take long and would be quick, easy, fast, and simple to build and then I could get right into the TurboCoupe and have it ready for spring. ....yeah right!!
Anyways.... heres the deal. I got a 73 F250 highboy off of my uncle. Had been a farm truck all its life and for the last 15 years was sitting in a field with no bed, blown 390, wrecked real bad to the point pass door wouldnt even open and I think for some odd reason this is an EXCELLENT project truck to "do fast and easy" woods/wheelin truck. The plan was to build it to be "low slung" but still with good ground clearance, and decent sized tires.I have never ever touched a welder are really fabricated a whole lot, so I was going to be learning all of this. I have welded pretty much everything on the truck and for the most part helped fab everything. My buddy that helped me build this truck was laid off all winter, so when I would work, he would mess with some of the fab projects me didnt finish from the night before. I owe my buddy Dave a HUGE HUGE thanks in all of this!! I know I am going to skip some things, and it may be all run together and hard to understand, but I am going to bring you up to date on how the project has gone so far. I will skip some details, but the pictures will shwo the results....
So I steal a 300 out of one of the other trucks we had sitting around and proceed to rebuild the bottom end, port the head and intake, put on a 2 barrel, long tube header, cam and paint it all up pretty.
I then proceeded to get the truck in my friends garage and rip everything on it apart down to a complete bare frame and start redoing EVERYTHING from front to back. The frame was twisted, not straight, had rust holes i coudl put my hand through, rips and tears and everything else you coudl come up with. So I start fabricating new crossmembers and fixing everthing that is rotted out and bad and also chopped several inches off the back of the frame. It escapes me right now how much, but it was back to the shackles...
I fianlly get the frame done and go through all the leaf srpings and redo everything as far as that goes and make it all perfect again. all except for one thing. At that time i decided to put the 4" block back in the rear, and now I have decided to remove that and just do a "shackle flip" and have no blocks. But I will redo that after I get it up and running.
After I get the sus. all ready I put the axles and leafes all back on the frame and make it a rolling chasis again. I then got my 300 to go in with my NP435 trans and NP205 transfer case all of with were on homemade mounts i fabbed up. Now its time to worry about the cab, and since i am building a wheelin truck, i decided to take my crushed cab and make it work, because hey.... i dont really care what it looks like.
So on goes the destroyed cab and i fix the pass side to the point that a new to me door i got from a friend would open and close. does not in any way look pretty, but it opens and closes. I am happy, the accident is fixed
Now i get this EXCELLENT idea to "boatside" my cab. I have never seen it in real life, only in pictures on the internet. So I get some box tubing and a bunch of 3 /16" plate and go to town. pictures will tell the story better, but all in all, i gained about 12" of ground clearnce to the cab, and I am real happy with how it turned out!! I get the cab done, cut the doors to fit again, do the floor boards, put on the front clip and hacked the fenders out, buy my 15-38.5-16 boggers and it kinda brings us to date.
The plan is, to have the truck ready to drive on and off a trailer and trailer it to carlisle. I wont have my little tube bed built, so it wont be street legal to drive. But I THINK I can have it that far. I JUST got off the phone from ordering my shocks, 140 amp powermaster, and new rad from summit. the alt and rad will pretty much get my motor ready to fire, and the shocks will finish the sus. I have been searching EVERYWHERE for a high pinion, open knuckle, disk brake, dana 60 front axle. That would pretty much finish it and make it ready. I foudn on e the other day and I am to go look at it tonight, so I think I have that tied up as well.... enough talking, here are a few pics....
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