After 46 years the tailgate latch on the pickup finally gave it up, assuming it had never been replaced. Wonder how many times it worked in all those years.
Category Archives: My Pickup
Tractor with two seats
I’ve never been one for off-roading. Feels like dressing up as a cowboy. So the Land Rover and the Jeep don’t get much four-wheel drive time. Today I loaded up the new rock sled with some big ones and used the Jeep (4WD/Low Range) to drag them up a hill and over to the trail head. Paul calls the Jeep a tractor with two seats.
And a little 4WD/low-range exercise for the pickup.
New hood hinges for pickup
The first thing most admirers say when they seed Minty Fresh is, “That’s a good looking truck. Want to sell it?” The second thing they says is, “What’s wrong with the hood?”
I finally got around to ordering new hinges and –with help from my friend George– installed and adjusted them.
I was able to get the old things off by myself using a couple of ratchet tie-down straps to lift the hood.
The old hinges probably just needed adjusting but I didn’t figure that out until I started installing the new ones (which weren’t very expensive). Like most such repairs, I suspect this would be damn near impossible on a new vehicle.
“Do you smell gasoline?”
Gasoline has always been a bit of an issue with Minty Fresh (my 1977 Ford F-150). When I bought it (4 1/2 years ago) Paul warned me it drank a lot of gas but no more than you’d expect for a 40-year-old truck.
The gasoline smell reached a peak last summer when I noticed a stream pouring from the rear tank (the truck has two). Less smell after I had a new tank installed.
But it’s gotten stronger in recent weeks/months and I chalked it up to “old truck.” Oh yeah… and my gas consumption was worse than ever.
I mentioned this to Paul yesterday and he popped the hood to take a look. What we saw was a stream of gasoline coming from a carburetor hose down onto the manifold. Which gets very hot. Why I never had a fire is a nice mystery.
Paul replaced the ancient leaking hose in about five minutes (and adjusted the idle for good measure.)
“Your gas mileage will probably double,” Paul speculated.
Road rot? Where?
When I purchased my 1977 Ford F150 pickup truck it was comparatively rust-free, having spent it’s life in Colorado where — I’m told — they add corrosion inhibitors to the salt they put on their highways. Had the truck spent those same 40+ years on Missouri highways, it would have rusted away long ago. But my truck did have (does have) some rust spots which I’ve successfully ignored. But the two holes in floor of the cab are getting bigger and sucking some cold air in.
My buddy George Tergin — the master of the automotive hack — suggested I patch these using old license plates, silicone, and self-tapping screws. Before and after photos below.
Hadn’t planned to do much about the other rust spots until Mr. Wolf pointed me to POR-15, a rust preventative coating that I can “glop on the other rust spots. Like so many things in my life now, the pickup only has to last as long as I do.
Haulin’ logs
During the 30+ years we’ve lived in our home (on 3 acres) we’ve thinned out a lot of trees, mostly scrub cedar. Woodsman that I am, I chainsawed them into logs and stacked them, thinking someone would want them for some purpose. Wrong. They’ve been sitting where I stacked them for years.
Today I started getting rid of them… with the help of Minty Fresh, the family pickup truck. It was always my hope I could drive the truck down into the woods and haul shit out with logs at the top of the list. But having no experience driving off-road in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, I’ve been reluctant to tackle the rough terrain and steep-ish grade. Until today.
I flipped the lock-out hubs to LOCKED… put the low-range gear lever in “granny low” and eased down the hill. I scraped a tree once or twice but the pickup is so beat up you’d never find the spot. I loaded up the extra-long bed with logs and made it back to the road without a hitch (although I do have a hitch).
Aside from my lack of off-road/4WD experience, the big obstacle to this project was nobody wanted the logs. But as (bad) luck would have it, my friend George has some big-ass brush piles as a result of last spring’s tornado… and he offered to let me add my logs to his piles which he will safely burn.
I’ve got maybe half a dozen more truck loads but it’s a labor of love and great exercise. And if I role the pickup… a great blog post. [Photos]
New door panels for pickup
The driver-side door panel on the pickup was falling apart when I bought the truck so a few weeks ago I just took it off. I thought I’d just leave it like that but there was no place to rest my elbow so I ordered a set of after-market panels. They came with little attachment gizmos that I couldn’t make work so I just drilled some holes through the plastic and into the metal of the door.
Next enhancement is replacing the driver-side shoulder harness with a simple lap seatbelt. Never cared for the shoulder harnesses and the Land Rover doesn’t have them, so…
Hauling trees in the pickup
Barb and one of her gardening buddies went tree shopping today and brought back four pretty big trees that probably wouldn’t have fit in the back of the Lexus. Getting them on the grown without damaging them was a bit of a challenger but Barb and I got ‘er done. A big strong man with mechanized equipment will be moving and planting. I do not know how I made it all these years without a pickup.
Lost gas cap found
This is one of those “I left my phone/coffee/purse/baby on top of my car and drove 10 miles without it falling off” stories.
Couple of months back I forgot to put the gas cap back after filling up the pickup and drove home.
When I discovered it was missing I went back to the convenience store but if anyone found it they hadn’t turned it in. So I purchased a “universal” cap because there was no way to replace the original which had been on the truck since 1977.
Yesterday my neighbor flagged me down and held up a gas cap asking, “Is this yours?” He had been raking gravel from his yard back into the road and discovered my gas cap. It somehow remained balanced on the bed of the truck for five miles of turns and hills and only our steep, bumpy gravel road shook it off.
Powerful forces at work here, friends. I’ll come up with some sort of chain to insure this doesn’t happen again. Minty Fresh is once again perfect.
UPDATE: I replaced earlier image with the one above.
When bumpers really bumped
Several months ago I bought an old (’77) pickup truck. Just for fun and hauling stuff. Like me, it’s a little beat up.
While stopped at an intersection today, waiting for the light to change, I got a little bump from the car behind me. (A Hyundai, I think.) In my mirror I saw the woman making cringing “I’m sorry” signs so I just smiled, waved and drove on. Don’t know if it did any damage to her plastic car (and don’t much care since she wasn’t hurt). It was just a nudge but who knows how much damage it would have done had I been in a ‘nice’ car.