Greetings fellow bolters
I already spend a couple of days on this forum but I wanted to introduce myself a little bit.
When I was a little kid, my parents had an old (don't remember what year) Fiat 600. After a couple years my father decided to sell the car and buy a MG B from 1964. Since is saw that car I was instantly in love.
Since July last year, my Father and I decided that we wanted to buy a old pickup truck. When I was younger, my Father always told me that he wanted a pickup to drive his flowers (we have an garden center) to customers. We wanted a pickup that wasn't too expensive, but was in a shape that we could repair it ourself.
After a couple months of searching, we finally found the vehicle. It was a 1951 Chevy 1300 (for some reason the Canadian version was called 1300 instead of 3100) from Canada. When we saw it, we knew we had to buy it.
it had an beautiful patina all around it and the shape of the truck was perfect. The truck was imported in 2015 to the Netherlands and the past owner already rebuilt the engine and restored the interior.
After a long drive, we finally had it back home. Here we also encountered our first problem. The carburetor was completely shot and we needed to rebuild it. As you can guess, in the Netherlands there are not a lot of parts available for these trucks. So we needed to get it from America.
After a couple of weeks, we finally got the parts and we could start to drive it. At the time, I turned 18 and got my driver license so i could drive the truck myself, so I was really happy.
The truck drives phenomenal.
The engine rebuild was only 200 kilometers (around 125 miles) old and the sound of the Inline 6 with a straight pipe exhaust was phenomenal.
At first, the truck was hard to drive and the rear axle made an awful sound (we knew this when we bought it) when you pressed the gas in second and third gear. We did a couple of repairs to make it more driveable. In May of this year, we used it to promote our garden center and drive our flowers to customers. In July, we finally replaced the whole rear axle. The bearings of the old axle were completely destroyed and it had so much play that you could shake the drive shaft one inch up and down (this explained the sound it made).
Now a couple months forward and we still love it every day. We don't drive it a lot now because of cold weather. I'm now cleaning and repairing a lot of parts that didn't work or were rusty.
We are currently selling Christmas trees and use the truck again to advertise. I'm also working on the MG to make shine again for the summer.
The photo's I attached show how the truck is now (with one picture including our MG) and one picture shows how it was imported to the Netherlands in 2015.
With kind regards,
Thijs
