Friday-Monday, May 19-22, 2006  -  Well, as outlined on Page 59, I bought a parts truck on E-bay for the box, to use on my '67 project. The truck was located in Berryville, Arkansas...about 30 miles south of Branson, Missouri, just over the Missouri/Arkansas border. It was about 500 miles from here, according to MapQuest, and while it WAS a little far to go for a parts truck, my wife and I decided to take a 4-day weekend and use it not only for the truck, but also as a mini-vacation. Granted, it would be a long drive, especially with 3 children (all under the age of 4), but that's why we decided to take four days to get this instead of the two it would normally take to do this in a deadhead-run.

We left West Point about 10AM last Friday morning and drove south as far as Omaha. While there, I hit the local Harbor Freight outlet store to pick up some much-needed supplies and some tools I figured I'd need for this truck retrieval, like a good farm jack and some load binders to secure the truck to the trailer. We grabbed a quick bite to eat at Burger King and then hit the road again, making it as far as Monett, Missouri before calling it a night and getting a room at the local Super 8. From there we got hold of Robert, a FORDification forum member from the Joplin area who had expressed an interest in the second parts truck we were hoping to check out. We'd exchanged a few messages prior to my heading down, and I told him that if we did go look at the parts truck, I wouldn't be able to get the whole truck but was just going to strip it for whatever I could fit into our truck, and then leave the rest, so he decided he'd help out if I'd let him have the rest of the truck. So I called him and told him to just meet us in Berryville. He was supposed to have a friend's truck and trailer, but his friend wasn't able to work, so Robert rented a U-Haul trailer and drove his '72 F100 down instead. It was running very rough and burning a lot of oil, and he was having some problems on the hilly terrain, but we figured once we got out of the hills and back onto the flatter Interstate highways he'd be OK.

Even though we got to Berryville by lunchtime, while trying to find the seller's place out in the country we got lost several times trying to navigate the windy curvy mountain roads. By the time we finally made it to where we had to get the truck is was mid-afternoon. Since the truck didn't have a rearend under it, we had to bolt one in that I brought along from an F250. It was actually pretty easy...the seller had the truck up on semi-level ground and had the back-end jacked up for us, so we just had to roll the rearend up under the truck and lower the truck down. However, the nuts holding the rearend's U-bolts were just too hard to tighten with the hand tools we had, so we ended up just tightening them down as much as we could and used some spacers to take up the slack. They were still fairly loose, so I also decided to hook up the rear shocks to help stabilize the differential while winching it up onto the trailer, and it worked great. It took about 20 minutes to get it winched up and tied down.

We then decided that we'd head back north towards the seconds parts truck, stopping in Branson, Missouri for the night at a motel, and then head out bright and early Sunday morning. About a half-hour into the trip the next morning to get the parts truck Robert decided his truck wasn't going to make it, and that he'd better head home instead, so I called the owner of the second parts truck and told him what was going on, and Mary and I decided to just head home ourselves and check out some sights along the way. Since we now had the rest of Sunday to ourselves, we drove to Mansfield, Missouri, which is where the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum is located, and we spend several hours there. We then headed back west to Carthage, Missouri, home of the Precious Moments Chapel, something Mary's been wanting to see. We spent the night at the Precious Moments Best Western motel and then get up in the morning and spent several hours at the chapel and grounds before finally heading home.

You know, overall I was really surprised at the amount of interest this truck got from people on the road. We were driving a little slower than most on the highway, and almost every vehicle with guys onboard would slow down a for a moment as they passed us to turn around and check out the truck. Whenever we stopped for gas, there were guys who would drive by just to check it out, whenever we went through a highway construction zone the workers would all turn their heads, and at one rest stop while the family and I were having a picnic, several guys pulled in and spent several minutes walking around the truck and checking it out.

Fig. 01  -  Here's a shot taken winching the truck up onto the trailer with a come-along. If you look closely you can see my baby daughter up on the back of the tow truck in the background.

Fig. 02  -  Here's a shot of the load of trash in the back. We tried several times to empty this out in local dumpsters but got chased away, so we just threw a tarp over it, weighted it down with some concrete blocks and hit the road. (That's Robert's '72 in the background.)

Fig. 03  -  When traveling with three children, frequent potty-breaks are mandatory. In this shot the caravan had to pull over to change a diaper.

Fig. 04  -  Well I'll be darned! There's actually a Missouri town named Fordland! Cool!

Fig. 05  -  A very pretty Missouri sunset. It was a very bright orange just a couple minutes prior to this shot, but I missed it when trying to calm down my screaming son who got freaked out by a couple of bikers revving their Harley's at this truck stop.

Fig. 06  -  We had to park in the back parking lot behind some trees at the Precious Moments chapel to avoid scaring the kiddies! LOL

But probably the coolest thing to happen on this trip happened just about an hour from finally arriving home. We pulled into a truck stop in Missouri Valley, Iowa to gas up, and a trucker from Aberdeen, SD pulled his big rig in next to us and came over. He said "You're Keith from FORDification.com, aren't you?" I told him I was, though I couldn't figure hot how the heck he knew. He said when he saw the parts truck on the trailer he figured it was me. It turns out that while he's not a forum member, he checks out the site regularly and he remembered I'd mentioned here that I was headed out to get another parts truck, and when he saw us pull in he figured it was me and decided to follow us in to say hi. We chatted for a few minutes and he told me he has 3 bumpside trucks that he tinkers with and that he enjoys visiting the site, and promised to join up on the forums in the near future. Even my wife, who's normally not even remotely interested in my truck hobby, thought that was pretty neat.

We finally pulled back into town about midnite Monday night and I had the parts truck and all my tools unloaded by 1AM, and finally crawled into bed at about 1:45. After work on Tuesday I spent several hours cleaning the truck up prior to my pulling it into the shop for teardown, and got a bunch of pictures, which can be seen on the next page.