Hello fellow Stovebolters. My name is Al, I’m writing from Arizona and I just bought a 1958 Chevy Apache 3200 about a month ago, but it’s not on the road yet. This is going to be a long introduction. Sort of “recent old truck purchase” therapy for me. First, let me digress. I bought my first Chevy pickup in 1989. It was a 1957 longbed with 65,000 well documented original miles. I used it for years mainly for my antique business. When I quit the business I sold the truck to help finance going back to school, but I knew I would always regret selling that old truck.
Fast forward to 2010. Going thru my bookcase I came across a book on old pickup trucks by John Carroll. I started looking at the 1950s Chevy pickups. There was one in particular, a beautiful red 1958 Fleetside. I left the book open to that page on our coffee table in front of the TV. My wife noticed me looking at that truck almost every night. And she probably got tired of hearing me say how stupid I was to have sold my old Chevy. Finally one night she says “Hey we don’t have any kids and you can’t take it with you, why don’t you buy yourself another old truck”. That was all the incentive I needed to start looking, but would I ever be able to find and afford another truck as original as my first one.
After about 8 months of searching, the answer seemed to be “no”. There’s just not much old stuff, trucks or otherwise in Arizona. I went to see a lot of overpriced rust buckets, almost finished backyard “restorations” and some that weren’t much more than a heap of parts in someones garage. Pretty discouraging. Then one day I saw an ad on Craigs list, just posted that morning for a 1958 Chevy Apache 3200 4 speed 6 cylinder 235 with panoramic rear window and side mount spare tire. The truck was in an old mining town in the mountains about 90 miles from where I live. I contacted the seller and he sent me about 50 pictures of the truck. I could see some flaws but it looked original enough that I wanted to see it in person. I was told the owner had passed away and the truck had been sitting unused for 5 years, but “it ran perfectly when it was parked”. His wife hadn’t been able to sell it for sentimental reasons.
So I rented a small moving truck and vehicle transporter and headed out to the mountains to go see it. Walking up to the truck I was excited, it looked pretty good. Opening both doors was the first disappointment. Both steps and about 3” of the bottom of the pillars showed a fair amount of rust. Surprisingly both doors opened and closed perfectly with no sag. Went over the whole truck with a magnet and could only find some minor bondo repairs at the bottom of the fenders. Cab corners and floor were solid, someone had coated them with what looked like asphalt roofing cement. The truck had a “basic” restoration and paint job about 20 years ago. Inside the cab looked original and complete, even the original seat was in decent shape.
One of the family members and a friend of the previous owner had flushed out the gas tank and put in fresh gas and bled the brakes and filled with fluid. We jump started it and that old Thriftmaster fired right up and idled smoothly for a while until we shut it down. Unfortuneately the tires were too dry rotted to chance driving the truck, especially on the mountain roads. Looking through the glove box full of registration and tire receipts it appeared the truck probably sat for more like 10 or maybe 15 years with little or no use, and the 48,000 on the odometer equated to 148,000 based on handwritten records of oil changes and mileage noted on tire receipts. So after a couple of hours of inspecting and debating with myself whether or not to buy the truck I made them an offer, I almost hoped they wouldn’t accept it (it was about half of the inflated price they were asking), because this truck didn’t compare mechanically or cosmetically to my previous one, but they accepted my offer, so now it was time to load the truck on to the transporter.
The truck was parked just off the road in a dirt area. We positioned the transporter close to the truck because the tires looked like they could come apart at any time. My first attempt up the ramp I made it just to the top of the ramp when the rear wheel started spinning in the loose dirt. I hit the brakes to hold my position and the brake pedal gradually and ever so slowly went all the way to the floorboard as the truck rolled backward completely off the ramp. I tried 2 more times – same result. So now I realize the only way I’m going to stop the truck is by relying on the hand brake and the stops at the end of the transporter. One last attempt, I gun it and shoot up the ramp, hit the almost non-existent brakes and yank hard on the (in this case) “emergency” hand brake. To my surprise I’m not in the back of the rental truck, but perfectly positioned on the transporter.
We then went out to lunch with the family, the previous owner’s wife was thrilled to hear I wanted to keep the truck original, since that was how her husband wanted it. During lunch my wife announced we were going to name the truck “Odie” in honor of the owner’s buddy who had helped the family get the truck ready to be sold. We left for home after lunch and the trip home up and down 6% mountain grades was slow but uneventful.
Because my mechanical skills and tools are very limited (my shop is geared for woodworking and jewelry work) I dropped the truck off at a local shop that specializes in working on only vintage cars and trucks to get an inspection and recommendations to get old Odie roadworthy. As you can imagine I now have a long list of items that need attention. All in all no big surprises and not much more than I suspected from my novice inspection. The shop had the initial work done to make the truck safe to drive in a couple of days except for the radiator. The radiator shop advised not trying to refurbish it. That lead to a “long” (since I hadn’t even driven the truck yet) three week wait for a radiator to be fabricated. Finally the shop called me to come get the truck to get new tires since one of them had exploded from the heat just sitting in their parking lot.
Finally I get to drive my new truck. I headed out to the tire shop which was about 6 blocks away. I made it to the light across the street from the tire shop when the truck died while stopped at a red light and would not start again. I called the shop and they came and towed me back to their place to have a look. Initial diagnosis is that it won’t start because the ballast resistor is overheating, based on the fact that we could see a little bit of smoke coming off it when trying to start the engine.
So my initial drive lasted just barely longer than the Wright brothers first flight and a worn (dried out) throw out bearing and a dried out speedometer cable made Odie sound more like a train than a truck. And I had to jog/walk about half a mile in 90 degree heat to find a pay phone, but as I walked back, once Odie came into view I got a big smile on my face just thinking, hey that’s MY truck. Hopefully I will be able to drive Odie home this week (now waiting on a part for the distributor) and start my part of the restoration work. I plan to keep the truck original and use it to cruise around town, go to the local vintage car get together and trips to the woodworking supply store. Thanks for listening and thank you for the generous supply of valuable information about these old trucks. I’ve attached a link to a few photos taken when we arrived back in town.
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/alvis58[/image]
