The truck is reborn...

This week has been a little funny.  Wednesday night, we spent time cleaning up the pieces that we had taken off of the truck. By cleaning up, I don't mean soap and water.  There were a LOT of sharp edges on the parts where we had cut parts away from the frame and uni-body.  We also spent over an hour and removed the shattered windshield.  That will be replaced by a sheet of Lexan...stronger and lighter weight than glass and will not shatter.  But that's not happening until the very last thing, after reassembly and paint.

On Saturday morning at 8 AM, my nephew and brother in law arrived at the scenic shop with a car hauler trailer.  It took the three of us about an hour to maneuver the carcass of the truck onto the trailer.  What made it so difficult was not the weight.  Removing the body and bed probably reduced the weight by 1/3.  What made it so difficult was that I had cut the steering wheel out for use in the prop truck.  So, to turn the wheels, we had to jack up the front end, push the wheels one way or the other, then let it back down.



The overhead door on the shop is at a 90-degree angle to the driveway, so the truck carcass had to come out and be turned 90-degrees before it could be winched on to the trailer. That's what took all of the time.









With the carcass on the trailer and strapped down, there was now some room to breathe in the shop.

We really couldn't begin putting things back together until that mess was cleaned up and gone.








On Sunday morning, I picked up some lumber and was at the shop by 8:30 AM.  First thing on the agenda was to rearrange things so that I had some room to get to the tools and to load in the lumber.

Patrick arrived around 10 AM and we started building the new wood chassis that would hold the body pieces.  We basically made a box out of 2x6's that was the size of the wheelbase of a Nissan Frontier...8'-8" long and 4' wide.  The two end boards extend an extra few inches and will serve as the "axle"...the wheels will hang on them.

We made four legs out of 2x4's and fastened them into the corners with carriage bolts.  We put special, high-capacity caster assemblies on the bottom of each leg. These will be critical for moving the thing around both in the shop, and through the halls to the theater.  The chassis will ultimately be 15' long and 5' wide when all is done.  That is just a bit too unwieldy to carry without wheels.

Before the carcass left the shop, I made some careful measurements of where the body parts; the cab in particular, sat in relation to the axles. This would be critical if I had any hope of hiding the legs behind the tires.

We added a horizontal brace to the chassis underneath where the back wall of the cab would set.  We then lifted the cab on to the chassis and positioned it where it needed to be relative to the axles.  We then had to whittle and fit the supports that replaced the firewall which we cut away because of weight and size.  This extends from the underside of the windshield to the chassis.

The uprights also serve as the door posts, where the doors hinge on.

We re-installed the dash, to make sure that we had bracing where we needed it and to make sure that the luan closure on the firewall was adequate to disappear up behind the dash.

Our attention then turned to fitting the doors.  We will put a plywood floor in the cab eventually, but it must extend out several inches beyond the chassis and until the doors are on, there is no way to know exactly how far.  There will also be custom sill pieces that I will fabricate out of wood and attach to the floor.

Hanging the doors was a bit tricky. They are extremely heavy and they tend to twist the wooden door posts.  We will have to reinforce the door posts after we get the rest of the framing on.

All in all, it was a good days work.  Wednesday night we will pick up with the front fenders, the floor of the cab and door sills.  Then the grille, headlights, etc to finish off the front end.

Until next weekend...R