This posting is one in a series. If you have not yet read the earlier postings in the series, you’ll need to, as this posting won’t make much sense without having done so! Just do a search using the word “SLURP”.
In my last posting, I talked about the things that owning Red has taught me.
In this posting, we’ll examine how modern body shop forensics can reveal much about a vehicle whose history is not otherwise known.
First, you need to recognize that Red is a true survivor. If you research the statistics on vehicle damage, you will see that they are pretty stunning. The body shop industry, the insurance industry, and market statisticians in general can’t seem to agree on what the truly accurate numbers might be, but if you assemble enough data from enough different sources, you end up concluding that 16 to 17% of all vehicles registered in the U.S. will be involved in some sort of damaging incident, within any given calendar year. Furthermore, the percentage of those involved that are “totaled” runs somewhere between 10% and 20%, depending on whose numbers you believe. That means that each year somewhere between 16 and 17% of all vehicles incur damage, and that each year 1.6% to 3.4% of all vehicles are totaled.
There are also two opposing trends at work within these statistics.
One trend is that the percentage of vehicles “totaled” is rising rapidly as vehicle systems get more complex and more costly to repair, and as fears of liability for inadequate or incomplete repairs cause insurers and body shops to hesitate doing major structural repairs. Air bags are an example of a complex and costly technology that raises the cost of repairing a damaged vehicle. In fact, one source I found says that airbag replacement costs about $1000 per airbag, so a vehicle needing dual front, side, and curtain airbags replaced has a $6000 starting penalty associated with its repair before anyone lifts a hammer or metal dolly. Other costly features, many of them centered around electronics, add to the repair costs. The percentage of cars totaled used to be far less than the 10 to 20% of those damaged, but has been rising to the point where industry futurists are saying that we are getting close and closer to the concept of a “disposable” car – one that gets recycled for usable parts versus repaired, as a matter of normal policy!
The other trend is that the percent of vehicles involved in damaging incidents is falling, due primarily to better accident avoidance technologies built into vehicles, like ABS brakes and superior handling capabilities. As late as 1980, the percentage of vehicle involved in a damaging incident was 20% each year.
Think about what this implies about Red.
Red has been around 53 years now. He went through the time period where 20% of all vehicles were damaged each year. Read this carefully! He did not go through a time period where 20% of all vehicles were EVER damaged, but rather a time period when 20% of all vehicles were damaged each year.
Now vehicle damage statistics like this are like the statistics on rolling a die. The odds of getting a “1” are always 1 in 6, even if the previous 20 rolls have produced NO instances of a “1” being rolled. In other words, dice don’t have memories, so matter how many times in a row a “1” has NOT been rolled, the odds of getting a “1” on any subsequent throw are still 1 in 6.
However, statisticians will agree that the overall odds of throwing a die say 50 times and NEVER getting a “1” within that 50 throws are low. In fact, they are about 1 in 10,000.
Since a 16 or 17% damage rate per year means about a 1 in 6 chance of any given vehicle being damaged in any given year – very similar to the dice analogy – the odds of getting a vehicle with 53 years of service on it without any damage history are frankly astronomically low.
There are exceptions to the statistical averages of course. The damage history on Corvettes, SSRs, and the recent Thunderbirds is probably significantly lower than the average. This is simply because their owners tend to be collectors versus hard core users, because they tend to put on rather low miles per year, and because they tend to be highly protective of their cars (“have to park it where I can watch it”).
But ½ ton Chevy pickups sold over half a century ago were definitely not sold to these types of people. Pickup trucks back then were almost strictly working vehicles. That meant that many of them not only saw rough service, in many cases they were driven not by their owner, but by hired employees, who naturally had less motivation than the owners to keep their beasts of burden pristine.
All this assumes that Red was “in service” all or most of that 53 years, and we believe he was, although we do know that he was parked at least once for a long enough time period for a mouse to move in. We know this because when we were disassembling Red for the body work and paint, Randy pulled down the cardboard headliner at one point and got showered with fossilized mice droppings! We speculated that this happened after Red was “retired” from ranch service, and before Carter Gresham (the owner before me) bought him and drove him from Colorado to Texas.
Randy and I had already picked up a number of “forensic” clues in the work we have done on Red over the past 3 ½ months.
There is a prominent ¾ inch ding in his grill, and a slight forward displacement (3/16 inch) of the grill near the driver’s side parking light, consistent with that driver’s side of the grill being pushed forward by a rearward hit to the dinged area.
The front bumper was not really a front bumper at all – slightly wrong curve – and was actually a rear bumper from an earlier AD truck.
In addition, as I have mentioned in an earlier posting, Red’s frame is all riveted construction - no welds – from the factory, but his battery box mounting has sometime during his lifetime been welded onto his frame, and amateurishly at that.
Red’s “hood latch lower assembly” had been amateurishly “cut” at its top. That seemed very unnecessary and puzzling until you assumed that perhaps Red had acquired a 1947 through 1953 assembly to replace his 1955 factory assembly (the 54 and 55 models have a different hood latch assembly, and a 47 through 53 assembly won’t fit without butchering).
Finally, when I was disassembling and cleaning the frame, I noticed that the passenger side of the frame (same side as the battery box) had an unusually heavy buildup of mud in the semi-enclosed sections.
All this told Randy and me that there had been one or more “misadventures” somewhere along the way. Our favorite theory was that Red suffered an offroad excursion that sheared off his battery box, filled his passenger side frame rail with mud, and terminated abruptly with a sharp knock to the front end.
I had made sure to do some squareness and flatness checking of the bare chassis once we had it fully accessible, and it came up clean – all diagonal and flatness measurements coming up with no discernible inconsistencies.
But Randy and I are not automotive body professionals. David Horner’s folks at Restoration Specialties are, and they see ANY vehicle quite differently than the majority of us do. Where we look at the overall appearance and workmanship, they are by experience driven to focus obsessively on the alignment of panels, the width of gaps, the consistency of finish, and the stability of reflected images as one moves one’s point of observation along the side of a vehicle.
I have in fact seen David personally look at a vehicle brought in for inspection, and know within just a very few minutes more of that vehicle’s “undisclosed history” than its owner would probably like to hear.
So, when I went in late last week to see how work on Red’s body parts was progressing, David sent me over to see “Craig”, who was doing some of the disassembly prepping for body work, alterations, and paint.
Now you should be told that Craig is pretty experienced. He is in fact a 3rd generation auto body man and restorer, who David tells me is drawn to restoration more than to hotrodding when David assigns the shop work. Craig is also a certified aircraft mechanic. This means I got a tour of Red from a highly experienced and highly technical perspective. It was an eye opener and also a confirmation for someone like me who has been too intimidated by the apparent skills needed to even contemplate body work or painting. After his mini-tour, I know I made the right decision in looking to the pros to get Red’s body work and paint done right, and I also realized just HOW much more a pro sees than the rest of us do. I’m afraid I may never be able to look at any vehicle the same naïve way that I have in the past.
Craig covered way too much ground for me to even take notes or photos on but a fraction of his observations, but what follows is what I DO remember!
He pointed out that in disassembling the cab, he had discovered that in addition to the worn hinges we knew about, there was evidence that the driver side door had been dinged at some point, as the repair had resulted in the bottom portion of the door stocking outward from the cab body line, as shown in this photo (rear edge of the door):
http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh16/JimGnitecki/ForensicsonRedsBodyParts001lowerrea.jpgAnd in this one (front edge of the door):
http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh16/JimGnitecki/ForensicsonRedsBodyParts002lowerfro.jpgCraig pointed out that while the factory design for the AD cab does not enable inward or outward adjustment of the door for perfect alignment, there’s no way the factory door would be aligned for most of its height, but misaligned at the bottom, unless it got tweaked somewhere along the way. I realized as he spoke that a ding inward on the door say in the center area, would have in fact pushed the metal OUTWARD at the bottom in comparison, and a less than perfect repair would not realign it. Hence the artifacts of the door injury.
By way of comparison, Craig drew my attention to the passenger side door, where the only deviation from perfect alignment was that the door was too far inward, on both front and rear edges:
http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh16/JimGnitecki/ForensicsonRedsBodyParts003rearpass.jpghttp://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh16/JimGnitecki/ForensicsonRedsBodyParts004frontpas.jpgalthough less so at the front, which means the striker assembly at the rear is improperly adjusted, and can probably be adjusted to make it less misaligned like the front.
Craig said the factory did not build in any adjustment mechanism for this at the front edge of the door. This slight amount of inward misalignment simply was not considered to be a “flaw” within the factory standards at the time. Today, such a misalignment is viewed as unacceptable. Craig said he wanted to talk to David about the best way to address that misalignment.
Craig also pointed out that the recent tendency of the passenger door to become unlatched while the vehicle is in motion is not the result of hinge wear, but rather of the fact that the passenger door latch mechanism had simply loosened internally, and was no problem for him to repair.
Craig next reviewed with me how much we want a portion of the firewall recessed (2 inches), identified and marked the holes we want to preserve versus fill, and walked me through how both the floor mounted dimmer switch and parking brake assembly would require reengineering unless we limited the portion of the firewall displaced to being the portion down to only the “fold” in the firewall (I definitely don’t want to disturb either the dimmer or the parking brake, as I love the way they both work right now).
He also pointed out how the team would need a chassis identical to mine in order to properly locate and shape the new steering column hole in the firewall, since that hole is in an angled surface that will be displaced rearward in 3D space. Fortunately, David has two other complete 1955 AD chassis’s on the premises, and one of them is unaltered and “perfect”, so it can be used as a template for mine (mine is in my outbuilding, where Randy and I are about to start stuffing the 6 liter engine and 700R4 tranny into it).
Finally, Craig showed me a tiny (maybe ½ to ¾ inch) very shallow ding in the driver’s side edge of the firewall:
http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh16/JimGnitecki/ForensicsonRedsBodyParts005driverss.jpgI hadn’t noticed that ding, and would not have understood its significance even if I did, but to Craig it was clearly a significant finding, which verified that the vehicle had taken a hit from the front at some point in its history: That ding had resulted from the transmission of force through the front end sheet metal. If you look very carefully at the above photo, about 1/3 way across horizontally, and 1/3 way up vertically from the left lower corner of the photo, just to the right of the small screw hole, you MIGHT be able to see it. Like I said, auto body professionals see The World in much more detail than the rest of us do . . . (and now I too have some symptoms of that as a result of being around David and his guys)
I only spent a short time with Craig, but, as always when I visit David’s shop, I learned a lot! In this case, I also learned a lot about Red’s history.
You can see that forensic analysis of a vehicle can be very enlightening. In one unfortunate case that David told me about, someone brought a restored Chevy to him for inspection after buying it at a really good “below market” price. David and his people noticed immediately some body misalignments that seemed wrong, and ended up taking some detailed chassis measurements. The vehicle turned out to have a “diamond” in its chassis – that means it was not exactly rectangular, but had a slight parallelogram shape to it – the result of a hard off-center hit.
You can see how there is value in taking an auto body professional friend to accompany you when you examine your next potential purchase. You might end up knowing more about the vehicle than its current owner.
Jim G
