Truck restoration a testament to mates, mechanics and Kiwi ingenuity
Pohara resident Stu Hill with his newly-renovated Ford F100
Stu Hill has a pickup-truck with a story that’s just bursting to be told.
It’s a 1955 Ford F100 Pickup, powered by a 256 cubic inch V8 motor, and it was owned from new by the Golden Bay Power Board. Stu’s grandfather, Ben Hill, bought it from the power board in 1964 and used it as his farm vehicle. When Stu’s uncles Dave and Allan took over the family farm in Central Takaka, the F100 was still going, but at some stage it must have started to show its age because it was repowered.
“Uncle Dave was the mechanic in the family and he must have done some of the work,” said Stu. “He dropped a 1973 Falcon motor and gearbox into it, but he left the original gearbox in as well. It had two gear levers and was basically a tractor in its lowest ratio. It had big mud-grip tyres on it and it would have gone anywhere.”
The farm eventually sold and the F100 was meant to pass to Stu’s cousin Glenn in Wellington.
“He’s a vehicle man, but he had no way of storing it or doing it up,” said Stu. “It had last been on the road in about 1986 and it sat in a shed and deteriorated. I’d been thinking about doing it up and in about 2006 I approached Glenn to see if he’d sell it and he said he would, so I brought it home to Pohara, and that’s when Trippy came into the story.”
“Trippy” is Jonathon Tripp, engineer and multitalented problem-solver. He supported Stu in his decision to faithfully restore the F100 to its former glory.
“First of all, we stripped it down to the last nut and bolt,” said Trippy. “Then we retrieved some old blank rivets from Stu’s big collection of random engineering supplies, trimmed them to length and re-rivetted all the cross-members of the chassis to recreate the original effect.”
The re-rivetting process involved car-hoists, anvils, gas torches, sledge hammers and dollies. Stu and Trippy said that, because the truck needed the structural work to be roadworthy, it made sense to put in the extra effort to make it faithful to the original construction process.
“It’s called blueprinting,” said Trippy. “You take the vehicle back to the manufacturer’s original plans. Actually, we like to think it’s better-than-original.”
Then luck played a major hand. Stu thought that he knew where the original well-side and motor parts had gone because his uncle never threw anything away. When he retrieved a well-side full of parts from a hayshed in Central Takaka he discovered that, while the parts were original, the well-side came from a totally different vehicle. So he decided to find a new one.
“It was kind of a friend-of-a-friend situation,” said Stu. “I found out about a guy who was going to the US and bringing back a whole container of car parts, including some F100 parts. I went to a fellow car enthusiast, Mike Warn, and he and I had a week to go through a catalogue and work out what we needed to complete the job.”
The new well-side was purchased out of a warehouse in the US where Stu says you could buy everything you needed to “kitset” a new F100 if you wanted to. “My truck isn’t a kitset, but a good half of the body panels and quite a few of the mechanicals were bought brand new from the States,” Stu said.
“The engine parts that were in the old well-side we found were a real jumble,” said Trippy. “But we decided to take everything, even if it looked like junk. It’s just as well, because what looked like an old oil-can turned out to be the queerest-looking crankcase breather you’ve ever seen.”
The day came when the fully-restored motor and gearbox were ready to be dropped into the sandblasted and painted chassis.
“That’s when we discovered that the chassis was actually missing a front cross-member so there was nothing to hold the motor in,” said Trippy. “It’d been cut out to make room for the Falcon motor and gearbox.” Fortunately Stu had a mate in Nelson with a similar F100, so he made a hasty trip to see what the missing cross-member looked like.
“We couldn’t start the whole re-rivetting process again, so we made a bolt-on cross-member that looks just like an original one,” said Trippy.
The mechanical and structural work nearly complete, the team decided to fire up the motor. It sounded right, so they took the motorised shell for a short test drive to celebrate. Quite a bit of running gear was missing so they improvised with sheets of plywood, some vice-grips and some fencing wire, enough to take the nearly restored truck a kilometre or two. “It was fantastic,” said Stu. “The best time I’ve had in years.”
The exterior finishing involved tradesmen from Golden Bay and Stu is full of praise for their work. “Shane Turner did the paint and panel work and Ben Moyle did the upholstery and I’m very happy with the results. They were thorough and professional,” he said.
Stu says that the restoration process was never about making a vehicle for a museum. “It’s got to be used,’ he said. “It’s there for driving and I want to drive it. I’m taking it down to Hinds at Labour Weekend. I’ve got a mate there with lots of vehicles.”
“It’s been a lucky thing, the whole process,” said Trippy. “The pair of us have put the best of ourselves into this vehicle. It’ll go forever.”
Neil Wilson
