The Stovebolt Site Forums Welcome! Welcome Centre Do It Yourself (DITY) Gallery 1951 Chevy 1300 - "Selling trees in the Netherlands"

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

Welcome. Great looking truck and car you have. You will enjoy this hobby very much.
Harold

Thijs, Welcome Aboard!! Great story and very nice truck and MGB. You'll find folks here will be able to help with any issue you encounter with your 1300. And in the appropriate forum (The Greasy Spoon) you might find someone that has MG experience. I may be mistaken but I believe we have a member or two in your neck of the woods.

Best of Luck,

RonR

Welcome to the 'bolt. Great story and a great truck. enjoy it!!

Gooie dag, Thijs. Nice truck. I see a few 1300 series trucks here in Canada, but there are at least as many 3100s here nowadays.
I have lots of first cousins in Nederland so I get there from time to time. Not too many American or Canadian oldtimers there, so your truck should attract attention for your business. Good luck with it.
Leo

Hi fellow dutchie. What a nice truck. There is one for sale here in the north of the Netherlands. I am a member here also since a few days. Where are you located in the Netherlands?

Thank you for your welcoming guys!

Yes Leo there aren't a lot of old aAmerican cars here. Most of them are from the '80 and up. So it is quite a rare vehicle on the road (actually never have seen one of this type).

Also greetings Robby! I'm from a small town near Breda. Do you see a lot of these trucks up in the North?

I know there is a classic truck club in the Netherlands. So a few are out there. I dont see many driving though unfortunately. Once in a while some are for sale but i have 1 and thats enough 😁

Hello fellow bolters,

i wanted to share some of my progress on our 1951 Chevrolet 1300 (3100 in the States) because I'm pretty proud of myself for what i accomplished the past winter as just a 20 year old boy with no experience.

So to begin in October. The good weather was over and it was raining a lot (not really uncommon in the Netherlands ). I wanted to restore the steering wheel as it was cracked, ugly and it made my hands black from the bakelite when my hands were a bit sweaty or wet. So I removed it and sanded the steering wheel. After that I filled the gaps with some epoxy and sanded it again. I painted it and it looked horrible because it was full of runs .

I have a lot of experience with painting things with a rattle can, but I used a different type of paint and a spray gun. So I sanded it back, primed it and painted it again. The result is acceptable. Unfortunately it has some runs again, but it was better as the first time. So I put it back on and it feels a LOT better in my hands. It's pretty smooth and the best of all, my hands are not black anymore after driving . I will probably remove the steering wheel again in the future and try to paint it with no runs in it. But for now it's good.

The second thing I did was completely rewire the whole truck (worst decision in my life ). The truck still had the original cables from 1951 which were in a really bad condition. It was a miracle that the truck hadn't already burned down. The protection on the wires were decomposed and it just showed the bare wire. Some wire cables even touched each other.

I rewired it all by removing wire for wire and putting a new one in so I didn't forget where they went. And luckily everything worked. I made everything nice and tidy and protected it with some special cloth tape. Unfortunately the alternator doesn't work (has never worked) so I need to remove all the cloth tape to see what wire went were. Will come back to that.

When I was busy with the wiring, I decided to remove the bed floor completely so I could repaint the bedstrips as they had a lot of paint chips. Repainted them, put some boiled linseed oil on the underside of the bed panels while I was at it and put it all back together. Unfortunately, I only have some dirty "after" pictures because we used to deliver Christmas trees to our customers and I haven't cleaned it since.

Did a month doing nothing to the truck, as I was very busy repairing my and my friends Tomoses. For the people that don't know, a tomos is a very fun, easy to work on moped. They are very popular in the Netherlands. Only thing is they break down easy because we tune them as fast as they can go and beat them up.

After that, I changed the last two brake cylinders (in the front) because the brakes locked up while driving due to the heat of braking (cost me two hours to bring the truck back home from a Christmas tree delivery due to the lockup. ) It was worth it as the truck brakes a lot better than the original brake cylinders.

I also lined the inside fenders with boiled linseed oil to protect them and make them look better.

I'm currently working on the alternator, as it is not charging the battery. I find it very difficult, but luckily there are some very nice and experienced people on this forum that try to help me with this problem.

We also bought a 235 engine to make a nice looking decoration piece. I understand that some people will say that it's a shame we use a engine just for decoration, but the cooling ports are so rusted out that it's not really repairable

That's currently it! Me and my Dad are still very happy with the truck and like to drive it! Of course there are still some problems that need to be solved but we knew that when we bought it. The list of things that need to be repaired or changed is getting smaller and smaller and the truck is driving better and better. We are also thinking about buying a new American vehicle to add to the collection. But that can wait for a little bit.

I hope you liked a little bit of my story!

With kind regards from the Netherlands,

Thijs

Last picture!

Your truck is a Canadian made 1300 .I see the plate on your picture maybe from Quebec.

Yes our truck is from Canada! Actually it's not from Quebec but from Saskatchewan . It drove around on a farm near Regina Beach. The previous owner imported it from Canada to the Netherlands around 7 years ago. Did already do a lot of work on it and sold it to us. We are going to buy 1951 replica plates from Saskatchewan with the original number plate on it! We have the original key chain with the original farm number plate on it.

If you go on kijjiji there are 51 licence plates for sale.