73 F100 Project - What Ive been up to

MRaburn said:

Ya I don't wanna be making any noise, just a cruiser.

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Grandpa pulled a horse trailer with a stock 300 I6 in a Ranger (the earlier pickup, not the Mazda collaboration). Even if he was never a fast driver that I can recall, it would have been more fun with this set up.
Enjoy your ride soon!

Not if you already have that nice exhaust

Can I play too? Barn find, 22,800 miles, 360/C6, swapped the mirrors and turned the front hubs so the Cragars would fit.

Very nice look with the Cragars
First and only wheel I know of with a Mag or AL center welded to a steel rim
Peachy

So I built it as a truck I'd seen in the high school parking lot from the middle school playground as a kid growing up in the 70's in Northwest Oklahoma (1985 graduate). Half the kids lived on farms and drove hand me down trucks, 95% 2wd longbed regular cab Ford or Chevy's, there were a few muscle cars and the occasional boat (early 70's 4 door or station wagon). Other than different wheels, there were really never any other modifications to the look of the truck. Chevy's almost always had Cragar SS's and Fords almost always had US slots (the dentsides anyways). I'd always preferred the SS's over the slots, but never knew why no one put them on Fords. I got this truck with stock wheels and dog dishes and went looking for slots, I found a pair of 8.5" for the front and a set of 10" for the rear, then I found these 5x5.5" Cragars on Craigslist. They were new in box, never had a tire put on, one had been removed from the box and put over the studs on the early 80's Fleetside they'd been bought for just to see how they looked, then tucked away for over 20 years. The boxes were shot, water damage, mouse holes, crushed from having other things stacked on them. One of the wheels has a mouse pee rust spot about the size of a dime and really that's it. I tried to do the same when I bought the wheels and quickly figured out that the Ford hubs were too big to go inside the cast wheel hub. A buddy turned down the hubs after I made a plaster of paris casting of the inside of the wheel hub so we could use some outside calipers to see how much more we had to turn down to get the rotor hub to fit the wheel. The grille and bumper were polished up with some Never Dull. The tailgate is straight as a string and opens and closes with one hand. Its just a base custom but had power steering and dealer added Deluxe Air Conditioning (the truck has no glovebox). I have all the original paperwork including the original inspection sticker receipt, original tag registration, the build sheet, window sticker, the remnants of the sunvisor sleeve.