Last fall when I headed up to the other end of the state for a few days to go visit family, in the town where I grew up, I stopped in to an old friend's house. We spent a lot of time getting caught up and reliving past adventures. Even with MY eventful 20s and 30s, he definitely topped me since I left! Don had lost an arm in one adventure series and lost a leg in another!
But he got prosthetics for both and was keepin' on with livin'. (You'll see a pic of him farther down in this post.)Anyway, he was always a gearhead too, except that he liked motorcyles...the fast Japanese kind. His favorite was a Kawasaki 900 that he'd built from parts bikes. (Actually, now that I think about it, it was this bike that started the chain of events which eventually cost him the leg....but that's another story.) However, with things as they are now, he decided to mess around with and fix up a trio of vintage Ch*vy trucks that he'd picked up for next to nothing. He took me out back behind the garage in their country lot and showed me his collection:
As you can see, he's got a very nice trio of trucks here. Two of the three are virtually 100% stock with very little rust. The seats are almost non-existant, though, from years of wear. Two of the three run, one with the original inline-6. The other one....well, that's interesting. You know how it really chaps our butts when someone restoring a vintage ('40s-'50s) Ford truck, they often ruin it by dropping in a SBC. And you know how you always say "One of these days I'm gonna drop a Ford engine in one of those Ch*vy trucks, just to p*ss them off!"? Well, here you go....here's proof that some crazy people actually follow through on that threat.
If you lift the lid on the brown truck in the foreground, one of the running trucks, this is what you're gonna see:
Don can't take the credit for the engine installation, it was already installed when he got it. And to make it a little sweeter, it's got the matching transmission (manual 3-spd) and a 9" Ford rearend! He told me he'd gotten started looking into what he'd need to drop a SBC instead...until he started getting some flack from the Bowtie Bunch about driving an abomination....a Ford-powered Ch*vy!
I was encouraging him to keep the drivetrain as-is, and even offered him a spare FE I've got. Now he's decided he's gonna keep the Ford drivetrain in there....just to mess with people's minds!Anyway, I just thought I'd share that with you all....just a small step forward for the Fordaholics.
Here's the pic I promised you earlier, of Don and I and another good friend, posing with his trucks. Yeah yeah, I know I look like a dork in those shorts....but it was July there....it was HOT!
(By the way, did you notice how I still got a Ford in every one of those shots?)
:):):)
jd
