Our WC53, “Franklin”

Show them the money!

Last week I’d started ripping into the leaking window and rotted truck side issue. This, like all projects, snowballed beyond anything I could ever foresee. Also this time, instead of buying a bunch of tools and struggling for weeks to learn how to use them.. I threw money at the project. I, gasp, hired some professional help. Here’s the story.

Things causing trouble:

Fuel tank sender is now binary! Fix!
Rear differential seized up. Fix.
Carburetor is flooding all over! Fix.
It wont go anymore. Fix.
New differential is leaking oil like crazy. Fix.
Frame to bell housing grounding strap is falling apart. Fix.
Tie up the main power cable better under truck.
Fuel system looses prime. New fuel pump fixed this!
Headlight switch gets so hot it burned my finger. Look into this.
Roof leaks in the rain.
Passenger side wall leaks in the rain.
Strip out old window box.
Fabricate something to cover hole from missing window.
Spark plugs are cracked, replace ‘em.
Get rotted wall cut out.
Get rotted wall sand blasted.
Have new metal welded into rotted wall.
Prime & paint repaired wall.
Passenger window box has dissolved. Need solution to this.
Get window box fabricated.
Put the window back together.
Re-drill interior panel mount holes.
Replace gasket on oil pump.
Get gasket for oil pump.
Seal up cowl vent.
Get cowl vent gasket.
Window cranks. What to do?

Expedition upgrades:

Get a five gallon bucket for washing things.
Find the bucket, I lost it.
Some sort of awning for rain.

Out comes the window box. They are/were held in by a couple welds on the top edges, about half way up the window opening, and tack welded along the lower window lip.

The bottom of the box is held up by two sheet metal angle brackets welded to the wall. Most of this was missing. Luckily the brackets were still there and they helped for showing how things should be lined up later for reassembly.

I grabbed the air grinders and cut it out.

Tom and I cut a piece of thin plywood, gave it a coat of Army Olive paint and clamped it in place of the missing window. Now we can at least still use the truck as things are being worked on.

This is Chris of Extreme Metal and Paint here in Anacortes, WA. The locals pointed me to him as the guy that could handle a repair like this.

The original plan was to chop out this little piece of rotted metal, get the area sand blasted bring the truck back and have a patch welded in the hole.

Patch repair : $500 - estimate

Sand blasting? $200 - guess

Fabricate box : $200 - guess

$900? Ok, figure about a grand? Ok, lets do this!

I mean, its not all that big of a repair. Not a big deal..

I even supplied a donor body piece to get the metal from. I got this when bought the truck.

Although the lower shape that we need was correct. Chris noticed that the window cutout edge didn’t match up correctly. Body lines up there were wrong. There’s an extra body line that’s not on the truck.

In the sand blasting booth, ready for blasting. We had it done at Skagit Powdercoating. This is a really popular shop with the locals. They were somewhat reluctant to sandblast the truck because they knew sand would go just everywhere inside, no matter what measures they tried to mask it. I told them that I understood and do it anyway.

And they did it, both inside and out. It was a mess inside, but not the end of the world.

Sandblasting : $350

$1050.. Still ok.

While showing off the truck at the sand blaster, they’ve done a lot of stuff for this project but this was the first time seeing the machine, we noticed I had a cracked spark plug.

I guess its time for a set of new spark plugs. I wonder what cracked that one?

Anyway, after sand blasting, I ran the truck down to the body shop on Friday. Lets hope it doesn’t sit there for months like I’ve seen happen at other custom shops.

Find out they are on it Saturday morning. Cool!

I get there to take pictures to find the entire section being replaced.

What the? Where did you find that big shiny new piece of carryall wall to weld in there?

And why?

A peek inside.

Turns out the damage was a lot more extensive that what was showing originally. Actually, not terribly surprising.

Well, that covers the “why”. Now where did the metal come from?

Here’s how.

Using the piece of donor body panel, Chris made up a set of dies for this machine. Turn it on, push through a strip of sheet metal and it gives you yards of carryall body panel. How cool is that?

Stamping out an example piece. That machine was really impressive. He has dies for all sorts of common body parts that rust out. A couple examples were for 1970s pickup truck windshield gutters.

Having it be easy to just stamp out different shapes makes fixing body rot so much easier. When in doubt, cut it out.

I never thought that this could be an approach to take. Everywhere else I’ve seen body panels painstakingly fabricated by hand.

Then he chopped out all the rot, and did a little more sand blasting to clean up what was exposed.

Actually, not all the rot was chopped out. To get at it all we would have had to pull out the rear window as well. I hadn’t done that because it wasn’t leaking and I was trying to limit the size of the project.

Futile, I know.

Weldable primer going in. This was a really poor design to begin with, with nothing put in to seal out water. No wonder so many carryalls are missing this part of their bodies.

New body wall, ready to weld in.

New panel being tacked in. It was really neat seeing how all this was accomplished.

Once everything was tacked together he welded up the seams. Then, using the grinders, erased them.

It was shocking how fast he could replace body panel parts.

Seam erased. Inside now sealed with body sealant.

Then I got lazy and told him I’d like it ready for paint.

Smoothed out, body filler added and block sanded.

Primer going on..

Primer on, ready for paint.

Its just AMAZING how much custom work you get around here for just $500. Mostly done over the weekend as well. I was able to pick up the machine all completed that Monday morning.

I think we probably went past the $500 mark some time ago though..

Bodywork : $1600 and change.

Ok, not what I budgeted for. But wow! They did such a great job! Because, some times I just cringe at what I’ve seen body shops do to cars.

$2150, this is starting to hurt..

Took the truck home. Window plug back in. Sprayed some Olive drab over the repair to make things less obvious. I don’t know when, if ever, I’ll get around to painting the rest of the body.

This’ll be fine for now.

Now remember I found a 1934 Perry Mason Novel inside the body panels? I discovered that you could get these for your Kindle (Digital book viewer) And bought one.

And got completely hooked on them.

I’m reading my 20th Perry mason novel as I type.

Oh boy..

Meanwhile, back in the garage, I’ve been looking into the possibility of having, at least this window, complete with the ability to roll up and down. I was completely surprised to find the rolling mechanicals were in great shape. Except, that they had been bashed at some point and the pinion gear on the crank had been shattered.

And parts were not available.

But Midwest had a replacement for $150. Ok, fine. Bring it on. I thought it was going to be a reproduction, but it turned out to be NOS part, so it needed some cleanup.

$2,300 Woo hoo!

I wanted to replace the old cracking seal between the window frame and the glass. In order to get the frame apart I needed to clean up where the two bottom screws attached to top and bottom frame pieces together.

Mask and sand blast.

Cleaned up nice, but it didn’t help any. I still had to grid these out of the frames.

Then I felt bad. I really need to clean these up while I’m here. Also, I couldn’t get the frames apart.

I took it to the body shop, they pulled it apart and sand blasted the parts for me.

I painted the frames and took everything to the local auto glass shop. Same guy that put in my rear windows. He took one look at the frames and said “Old Dodge huh?” That made me feel better.

I had him put in new glass seal and assembly. $75

$2,375

I’d been waiting for the window box being fabricated by Superior Systems. My usual guy was out on vacation and it seemed they were pretty loaded down with work. So it took longer than I expected. Typically these guys are pretty speedy quick.

But its ready for installation now. Here it is at the body shop getting its primer coat.

Box fabrication : $400

$2,575

Another Saturday and Chris is test fitting the box.

Now there had to be a lot of guess work on all of this. We had most but not all of the original box. So we weren’t positive about the size. The angle brackets were still on the wall but in pretty bad shape. There were quite a few compromises and “splitting of differences” in the final assembly of all this.

Hours of work, trimming, welding..

Assembling the new window to the crank panel.

The mounting brackets for the crank panel hadn’t been attached so Chris had to figure out where they were supposed to go. These are critical because it locates the window glass into the window.

While we were struggling with all this, I’d been thinking about how Chris could weld like a madman with his electric MIG welder. Never having tried one of these modern machines, I wanted to try it. So I asked him, “While your on the clock, could you let me try a little bit of welding on that machine of yours?” He was all,

“Sure!”

He hopped out and set me up to play around with the welder. Showed me a bunch of stuff on how to weld sheetmetal. Do’s and don’ts. It was a lot of fun.

WAY easier than the old stick welding I used to attempt back in the day.

Sunday morning the window and all the interior is in and working. There are some screw holes that need re-drilling and I agreed to take care of that. Along with the drain plumbing.

Back at home, center punching for the new screw holes.

Finishing and imstalling window box, reinstalling the window and interior bits $1,100.

$3,675 And I’m sure there were other bits I missed.

The truck sits on level ground with a few degrees of nose down rake. Ok, fine. But they put the drains at the rear of the window boxes.

Really?

Also, as carryall owners pretty much all know, they just dump the water between the body panels and let it find its own way out.

Really?

And where it ends up is still on Julie’s pillow!

So I had them put drains in both ends of the box, just in case. Last night I decided to just use the front one. A handy body rot hole allowed me to run the hose out the bottom of the body to drain completely away.

So, I needed to plug the rear drain hole. Tired and out of clever ideas, I came up with this. Its a piece of double flared steel tubing with a chunk of sheet steel soldered to the end of it.

Look at them dirty hands!

Painted to slow down rusting..

The flared part is between the hose clamps.

All together, sealed up with working winder and drains. As they say in Project Binky,

Sorted!

Actually, I’ve been working on the window cranks but haven’t gotten anywhere with them yet.

So in conclusion. Paying to get stuff done? It costs a LOT. No matter where you go, it’ll cost a lot. I’m lucky because I live in an area that has people with mad skills. If I had taken it to some Bozo, this would have been a disaster.

Also, I had to deal with guilt the entire time. Paying to push my hobby forward? Is this right? What am I doing?

I justified it by telling myself that it was about tools and skill-set that I don’t have. But the real reason was, I needed it done to use the truck. As it turns out, my hobby is shifting from working on the truck, to using the truck.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

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