About seven years ago I was at a family get-together at my parents’ house. When everybody else had left, and it was my folks and I at the kitchen table, my dad acted the way he does when he wants to talk business. There was this old pickup truck he’d bought nearly 20 years before to pull trailers with. Since he now had a newer truck, the old one wasn’t seeing much work, and he was thinking about fixing it up and selling it.
I didn’t wait for the obvious question. “We’ll take it,” I said. We needed a truck, having been without one since somebody in a minivan tried to create a middle lane during a traffic jam and totaled ours several years before. I hated having to rent a truck when I needed to haul something, and a truck was on my list of things to get.
Two days later we went back over, bringing lunch from a favorite drive-inn near my hometown. After we’d had a pleasant lunch with my parents, we went into the yard where my new old truck was waiting. Dad handed me the keys and an envelope full of paperwork, we took some photos to commemorate the moment, and then off we went. I’d barely made it out of the driveway before the tears I’d been holding back started to fall, and hard. I must have cried for the first three miles of the trip home.
For as long as I’d been around, squarebody Chevrolet trucks like this one had been a part of our family. To sit in one took me back to countless childhood memories of Saturday mornings, getting a biscuit and a big glass bottle of Dr. Pepper and riding around wherever the road took us, or going to work with Dad at the sawmill, the occasional Saturday I’d ride the mail route with him, or countless errands near and far. These trucks were as much a part of my childhood as the little church up the street or the Sears catalog. And now, the last of the family’s squarebodies was coming home with me.
Like all the family’s trucks, there was no mistaking it was a work truck. Dad’s trucks were always the lowest trim level (Custom Deluxe, which meant anything but), nothing power in the interior, no air conditioning, no fancy trim. This one was the same, the kind of truck that shaped my feelings about what pickup trucks should be. I know some folks like their big shiny trucks with the fancy trim and plush interiors and full-power everything, but I’d never want one like that. This one looks at you and says “Let’s go get a load of lumber or some concrete blocks and get to work on something, and I won’t care if I get a battle scar or two.” It’s a truck that cuts the crap, and that’s the kind of truck I love.
Although the 90-minute voyage to our homestead went without any drama, it was obvious the truck had some issues. Some I could smell (what’s with the smell of gasoline around the filler door?) and some I’d found out (no functioning horn). It also didn’t have a heater core, though Dad had one inbound through the local Carquest. There was surface rust on the top of the bed. The engine tended to flood out. A trailer neck had bashed into the tailgate a few months before, leaving a big dent. As they say, the bones were solid, but it was a fixer-upper.
Before I could do anything else, of course, I had to get square with the county and the state. The property taxes on a 33-year-old truck weren’t that much, which was good. Of course, I canceled out that luck by going to the DMV on the same day the statewide computer system decided to crash, and hard. After a long wait, I went home, new license plate in hand. But then Dad’s home county didn’t get a notification and kept sending him tax notices. It got resolved, but along the way it was every caricature of bureaucracy come to life.
Now with the official stuff done, it was time to start fixing what needed it. I’d done minor repairs before, but one major repair effort with my Cavalier that ended in disaster had left me gun-shy about trying anything new. On the other hand, it wasn’t easy to find people who could fix a vehicle whose technology was this old-school, and even that would cost more than I had. And, I mean, I had some tools – in fact, Mom had given me a huge tool kit she’d won in a local drawing she’d randomly entered, so I was set. Why not see what I could do? When the heater core came in, I looked up some instructions on how to do it, then screwed up my courage and dropped the heater box. Inside the box was a mouse nest (abandoned, thankfully). Everything got very thoroughly cleaned, the heater core got installed and connected, and with heart wedged between adenoids I started the truck to see if the repair took. Somehow, it had.
From there, the other little chores got done: fixing the horn, polishing the paint, then grinding the rust off the top of the bed and repainting it. Most of what I did in the first couple years was accessible stuff that didn’t require too much risk. I didn’t yet feel comfortable doing more intense projects, but I was also allergic to paying someone to do it. Not only am I not rich, but I just don’t like paying someone to do a job that I can do myself with a clear set of instructions.
The truck was going to force my hand, anyway. One summer day we went to get some building supplies and barely made it home. The engine was stumbling out, and a couple times the truck died on the highway. Somehow we made it home and got unloaded, and then the truck just sat for a while as I did some figuring. Bad sending unit? Bad gasoline? Dirty fuel tank? Carburetor problems? Fuel pump? Everything seemed questionable, and the more I looked, the more I figured a general overhaul was in order. So the whole fuel system got redone, from cleaning the fuel tank and changing the rubber lines to installing a new fuel pump and charcoal canister.
Then came the real fun: rebuilding the carburetor. I had visions of things going really wrong there, of a rookie mistake causing a stuck throttle. But, good student that I am, I did my homework and ordered the correct parts and supplies. After a couple evenings of work, the old Quadrajet was in better shape than it had been in years. Getting it dialed in once reinstalled was an adventure, but two years and several thousand miles later it’s proven reliable.
Since then I’ve done more projects. I replaced the water pump and flushed the cooling system. The transmission has a new gasket and filter. The rear differential, which was covered in gunk from a leak, got serviced (and few things are worse than the smelly glop that is aged, dirty gear oil). I rebuilt the power steering pump. The electrical circuit from the battery to the starter and alternator was rewired, and the alternator got overhauled, too. Last year I finally replaced the window rubber in the doors, and the cab is nicely weatherproof now.
Along the way I’ve found all kinds of surprises, such as the battery cable with a length of electrical tape covering a couple inches of missing insulation. When I replaced the shock absorbers, I compressed the old ones to see how shot they actually were. One of them was still compressed when I took it to the scrap metal bin a few weeks ago, so it’s no wonder why the poor truck rattled my fillings whenever we hit a bump. I’ve found things that made me wonder how the truck got this far, and yet we keep going.
I’ve kept a list of all the things I’ve done for the truck, and all the systems I’ve fixed, one at a time. Most all of it has been done with that set of tools Mom gave me the day I brought it home. It’s been an education, and mostly a fun one. Sometimes I’ve inflicted setbacks on myself (I learned the hard way the difference between inch-pounds and foot-pounds on a torque wrench) but I’ve always worked my way through it.
And that’s the thing: it’s only been me doing all these things. Call it a Generation X-er’s instinct that nobody’s going to help you, call it autodidactism, or call it whatever you may, but no one else’s hands have been doing the work. Thus far at least, it’s worked. Fortunately, a Squarebody with a small-block engine is not only easy to work on, but since they’re common as dirt just about anything you’d need is widely available.
Maybe if I were more enterprising and outgoing and visionary I’d have chronicled the adventure and turned it into something educational. I mean, I work around television in my day job, and I love Vivian Howard, so…maybe I could have my own series and everything, an automotive version of Kitchen Curious. (Imagine me, a purposeful smile on my face, one of the cats in my arm, as I stroll out of the house and head purposefully toward my workbench! Imagine the vigorous string music behind the gorgeous drone shots of the local Advance Auto Parts store! Imagine me strolling the aisles of the hometown Harbor Freight with a mechanic friend who’s telling me about the merits and demerits of floor jacks versus bottle jacks! Imagine me having interesting and informative and artistically-captured conversations with auto body repair instructors and junkyard owners! This concept sells itself! Somebody get the teevee people on the phone! Somebody round up some funding sources and let’s get this going! Y’all know where to find me.)
I haven’t kept a spreadsheet on how much I’ve spent fixing up the truck. Maybe it would be fun to know, but I really haven’t minded any of the money I’ve spent on it. Some of it is an investment in my own education, in the skills I’ve picked up as I’ve done all this work. But the real value is in keeping this truck on the road, not only for its usefulness, but as a link to where I came from.
Sometimes I’ll have fun with the fact that I own it, calling it the Rolling Energy Crisis (I mean, it has the aerodynamics of a brick and it gets 11 miles per gallon with a tailwind) or the Herkimer Battle Jitney. But underneath it all, I know how much I love that big ol’ truck, that sometimes I can’t believe I actually own it, and how it’s a reminder of so much that I left behind in yesteryear, and of so much that will never leave me.
