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The rainy days we're experiencing lately have given me good reason to stay in the shop and work on my cab. Much of the cab still had original paint under a coat of red primer (added by a previous owner) which protected the metal pretty well. Other areas were not so nice. I've had to do a lot of sanding to get rid of deep surface rust, and even then I still apply a coat of rust converter to be sure. The new primer on the rear of the cab has made it painfully clear that I will be doing a lot of filler work! The non-original bed that came with the truck does not have a front (end) wall, so it's no surprise that the rear of the cab took a beating.

Today, I stripped the paint off of the firewall and got a really cool surprise. On the driver's side appeared a name written under the original top coat. Since I was using a wire wheel in an electric end motor I was only removing the top coat. Had I been using the more aggressive tools that I have, I would have never seen it! I can only guess that this was put there by an assembly line worker, perhaps to give his or her (female auto workers during the Korean war?) stamp of approval on the cab before it moved on. Has anyone else run across something like this during your project? I plan to preserve this bit of the truck's history by leaving the name exposed (clear coated) through the new paint. I'd love to know more about this person, so I've sent emails to both the GM Heritage Center and the UAW hoping one or both of those groups has access to a list of Flint, MI employees in April, 1951.