The Mylar stencil worked ok, the line is a little heavy and there was a little over spray but with a little rubbing compound it looks pretty good. The Mylar really isn't stiff enough to maintain the thin line that I believe the original logo had. One of our members emailed me that he thought that they might have used a metal stencil. It would be quite possible to produce a metal stencil now days in brass using a laser setup. If I had access to this equipment I think I would pop a few hundred out and would bet that they’d sell like hot cakes. I’ve been to Wood Working shows and seen some very intricate shapes burned out with small CC lasers. I have seen what people believe are original logos and they look like they were done with stencils. But you have to consider that we all believe that our trucks when we found them were original and that no one before us did anything to them, right?
Now that all that has been said about stencils I still have this gut feeling that they were either printed or lettered with Silk Screen. If you look at all of the Load master logos (I wish there were some pics of the Thriftmaster) in the advertisements they were one continuous scripted word. This could only be done by printing or with a Silk Screen. Silk Screens actually seems like a more practical method for the restorer as you can make a simple SS up in the home shop with out much trouble. Now if I can ever figure out how to get my warped Rochester “B” to stop leaking fuel all over the engine I might find the time to tackle the Silk Screen thing.
Isn’t it funny that there is no one left in the whole world that worked on the GM production line and actually performed these tasks that could set the record straight on many of these little details! A dad, brother, uncle, neighbor, etc. I went through this very same quest with my last hobby, i.e., old time radios, all of the people that worked in the factories are gone and with them the production processes were lost and apparently there isn’t any documentation that survived either. It’s to bad that when the production department cleaned out their file cabinets of production notes that someone didn’t think to take them home and horde them. Then we might really know what color the interior of our AD truck was painted.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL
