Posted by Vaughn [162.158.255.97] on Friday, January 27, 2017 at 10:58:56 :
In Reply to: Vaughn posted by Terry [172.68.133.237] on Thursday, January 26, 2017 at 23:10:35 :
Originally purchased by a Petroleum company, sign on doors over original paint. Then bought by a Water district and used to spray weeds along canals. The bottom of the bed had a 3/8, hot rolled steel plate, heavy as hell. You coulda dropped a boulder in that bed and not deflect the plate, it certainly would have sent both the Chevy and Ford trucks home with their tails between their wheels. When the plate was installed, they laid it directly on the bed cross rails, and cut notches in the bed side panels wood rails so bed set well below where it should have and that caused bent fender brackets and the gas tank filler neck to be bent downward. That resulted in a very slow process to fill the tank. Although nice and it rode like a Cadillac, I didn't want to carry all that weight around so I replaced it with 1/8 think tank steel plate. The truck had a heavy layer of weed oil and dirt, dried hard, so I removed most of it with a sand blaster. When we bought the truck only equipment left was a sprocket on the rear PTO shaft. All the bed panels were bowed outward so I painted them any way and thought how was I going to straighten them. When we bought the truck the guy the had it also threw in a parts truck and I used the best of the two trucks when I reassembled mine. After I got the truck to my place I figured I could use a lever winch to pull tension against the bed panels, sledge hammer and 2x4 to pound the panels towards the bed center. Well it worked! I started pounding along the bottom of the bed panels and worked upwards repeating the process several times on each panel until I got good straight panels. Once they were straight, I use body tools to work out all the little dings and dents until I got nice looking panels. The restoration took about 5 years hundreds of hours and calls looking for parts, Dave at VPW was just getting on his feet. I thought there had to be a better way to acquiring parts, so I spent over a period of several years researching the 1956 parts book against a NSN database to pickup Military numbers to expand sources for parts. This resulted in my own cross-reference manual and that has help tremendous in finding replacement parts. Parts that I post on the Forum off Ebay is a direct result of that research. The only parts I cannot find for a 56 PW are the PTO idler gear and shaft, which probably got sent from Dodge inventories to local dumps when Iacoca took over Chrysler and reduced inventories. And now you have the rest of the story. :=)