Aug 20 2009
What a Great Day!
Although we’ve been making such good progress lately on the projects I already own, we went out and picked up the ’65 GMC today. It was a short road trip – only about an hour-and-a-half one way, but we stopped for breakfast on the way out and met Mark H., the previous owner, right on time.
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We figured we had about an inch to spare between the width of the trailer-rails and the width of the truck for loading and we weren’t far off. Since we were using a chain-fall and come-alongs, it was more than a bit of grunt work, but since everyone was chipping-in & cutting-up it went very smoothly.
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On the way back, we stopped at a couple of places a met some good people. One guy had this little Oliver and a John Deere “M” that he was trying to sell:
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Further down the road we met Robert and Randy Gilley “Old Iron Collectors” and just chewed the fat with them for a while. They seemed like really good people, friendly and willing to share; and we found out that they run a tractor pull every year on the 3rd weekend in August. Ping me for details.
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Since Mark H. had intentions of working on the truck at some time in the future when he parked it years ago, he said that he killed the engine by pouring ATF down the carb to try to keep the cylinders free. So after we got back home and unloaded the truck, we just had to give it a shot to see if it was free, let alone see if it would actually run. Mike suggested pulling the coil wire off and just cranking it over with the starter until we developed some oil pressure, so we threw a battery in it.
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Sure enough and much to my pleasure, after some cranking the oil pressure started to climb right up so we she ‘er back down and got ready to try to start it… No good. After some regular fiddling we found that we had no spark, so Mark A. went at it with a test light and discovered in short order that the wire from the points to the coil (out the back of the distributor and completely out of sight) had been chewed apart by some varmint to the extent that a good couple of inches of the wire were missing.
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All it took to get it running after that was to solder in a length of wire and crank it again. This time it started right up.
Later that day I took it out around the block and up the road a piece. She did quite well for not having been run in God-knows-how-many-years, but stuttered some going up the hills out here with the vacuum gauge dancing around, so I turned around and brought ‘er back to replace the vacuum hose (singular) and then went off on some other tangents like degreasing the engine, popping out a few of the bigger dents, and getting a good plan of attack for the one in the hood.
All in all, it was one of the most fun-filled, relaxing days I’ve had it quite some time.
You just don’t make old friends.
Wow you didn’t even wash er down, I had confidence it would run again but not the same day you picked er up. Glad the truck is in good hands thanks again John keep me posted if you could send me via straight e to download the pics from that day. Mark.
I’m very thankful that Mark A. and Mike jumped in the way they did. They went right at it as soon as we got ‘er off-loaded and are the reason she was running so soon.
All of the pictures on the site can be downloaded by right-clicking on the image and selecting “Save As” from the pop-up menu, but I’ll send the to you via email too. I know Mark A. took some good ones too and we’ll have to be nice to him to see if we can get him to share.
It was a pleasure.