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7/16/19: She Finally Hit the Road: For Fathers Day, my wife purchased a set of NY vintage plates for me to install on our truck. Two 1951 plates with a single 52’ tag for the back plate. The only place that handles vintage plate registration is Albany NY, so today we made the one hour trip to see if we could get her registered. We did get her registered but with new “Historical” plates instead. Turns out that there is another place in Albany the handles “Vintage” plates and that is thru the mail. Leave it to NY to complicate the process. There is only a few requirements to register “vintage” plates in NY. They must be original to the year of the vehicle, not repainted and the plate letters and numerals must not already be in use. With the use of computers today, I don’t see why that couldn’t have been done at any of the local DMV offices. I’ll get the vintage plates registered and on the truck soon but in the meantime she is on the road.

I installed the “Historical” plates and the registration sticker on the windshield, but before we take her first shake down cruise, I need to get her back together. I retightened the water pump and reinstalled the radiator, fan, belt hoses and the other associated parts, added antifreeze and checked for leaks. So far so good. Started her up and let her heat up and rechecked for leaks and found none. Yea! Another success!

Time to get my wife and take her for a spin. The first thing I noticed before I even got her into gear was I felt naked without a seat belt. I know that I am from an era that thought nothing of putting our sleeping kids in the back of a station wagon with their pillows and blankets, so you could get an early start on your vacation or in the bed of a pickup truck to go and get some ice cream, but with more than 30 years of required use, I got used to it and now use them religiously.

When we started down the road, the truck was all over the road, following every bump and curve, with quite a bit of steering wheel play. The next issue is the brakes. It did stop the truck, but not without allot of force, a little bit of squeal and allot of anticipation, which would not be good in an emergency. This issue definitely made the top of my “To-Do” list.

Next issue was she is extremely noisy at 40 MPH. At 45 MPH, I felt like I was really pushing her past her limits and I didn’t feel safe. The only good thing that I could say was we drove her for about 16 miles and she ran good, real strong and she didn’t overheat.

My wife was not impressed. To tell you the truth, I was a bit disappointed myself. I still have allot of work to do, but I have the confidence that as I work out these mechanical issues, I’ll get her tamed down to the point that my wife will fall in love with her as I have. Much, more work to do!