peteandvanessa

Sounds like a good plan, are there any pics from earlier meets? I'm also hoping there's a swap meet for parts, I have a growing list of parts that I need ?

I finished the gauge cluster today, not perfect but not bad for a complete amateur.

While I'm waiting for some brakeline and fuel parts to arrive, I had time to try the temperature gauge fix. It went rather well. I found some scrap copper line in my parts drawer to make the patch. Dunked the temp probe in some ice water with salt and left it in there for a good 20 mins. I grafted the new sensor to the old gauge without any issues. Then it was time to test it, so I boiled the kettle and dunked the sensor bulb into the boiling water. Now the gauge works just fine and once it gets out of the normal area on the gauge I'll know the water is getting very, very hot. After that success I moved onto cleaning up the whole gauge cluster and fixed the fuel gauge (a wire had come unsoldered, so i sorted that as well). Slowly hand painting the faces of the gauges, they aren't perfect, but my eye and hand coordination isn't as good as it used to be. So all the gauges are working now (totally happy about that), I'll have to delve into the speedo, cos that's still stuck fast).

I took the speedo and gauge cluster out today. For the most part it was good news. I connected an airline to the oil pressure gauge, the needle moves from zero to full scale, yay. Did the same with the temp gauge, same result (now I know it works, the solder patch I'm planning should work), ammeter works. The fuel gauge shows a small resistance to an ohmeter, that's good news, the bad news is that the needle flips and flops around when you turn the gauge cluster 180 degrees, so I think something is broken there. The other bad news is the speedo head is frozen, so I've soaked it in a bit of penetrating oil to see if I can free it up. I'll leave it for a few days and try again.

When I got the truck the mechanical temp sender was broken, did some digging on the forum here and it looks like I can graft a new temp sensor onto the old one. I got one from eBay for $20, fits perfectly, so when I get time I'll attempt the repair. I'll post here when I do it.

I love all the help and tips I getting, I read them all. I'll have to check the heat riser. Transmission wise, I'm going to reinstall the three speed back in when I'm ready for the motor. Got the engine bay all cleaned up and painted. That was a dirty job. Going to work on the fuel and brake lines tomorrow.

Thanks for the offer and advice. Sadly the fluid drive is long gone, all I have is the three speed on the column tranny. I'm aiming to finish cleaning up the engine bay this weekend and getting it painted (nothing fancy, just a general clean up and paint.). I've messed with the starter a few time already when the engine was in the truck, boy of boy was that a slow painful job to remove and re-install. Then I can move onto the brake and fuel lines, which will be easier it do while the motor is out. I'm itching to install the motor, but it will have to wait a while while I do other things. It sure won't look like anything else I've seen, maybe sometime in the future I'll do a full restore, but for now I kinda like the rusty patina look and it will keep the costs down for now. I spent a small fortune on my 74 Bug and they are relatively cheap for new parts, these dodges are far more costly in spare parts for sure. On the 74 Bug I spent upwards of $10,000 (quite alot more, I'd be too scared to accurately add it up). The burned out 71 Bus was done in 6 months and for less than $2,000, that yellow and white paint on the Bus was done at home with cheap rustoleum paint sprayed on, it came out really nice.

The rear end is a little soft, I guess this is to be expected in a 66 year old truck (it's on my to do list). It looked worse than it was, since in the first few pics the front end was on axle stands and bed of the truck was full of hundreds of old 60's oil and grease cans. I snagged a few to put in the back of the truck:

Young Ed is correct. When I picked up the truck, it had a motor in it, but looking at it, it had low compression and sticky valves (taking off the valve covers, it's clearly missed ALOT of oil changes). So we pulled the motor to review which way we wanted to go. A quick review of whether we would rebuild the motor indicated that even with a basic refresh of the motor was going to be quite costly. The engine wasn't original to the truck (according to the serial number it came out of a 51/52 Dodge car). So a new option was offered, to buy and install a known working engine from another member on the forum ( 59bisquik ). So I worked with him and got the engine packed and shipped from SoCAL to my home address here. So short term, I will install the known working engine into the truck and sometime in the future refresh the working engine, or refresh the engine that we got with the truck when I purchased it.

The motor arrived today, I must say it was well packaged, thanks to 59bisquik, it's very much appreciated. Now I just have to finish up cleaning the engine bay, swap over the bell housing and get this motor installed and running ?

Cast the magic wand (read hard work, sweat and bruised knuckles) and here's what we ended up with:

After the engine bay is cleaned and painted we are moving onto the brakes, hard and soft lines, master cylinder and fuel lines. The list of things to do just grows and grows, but I'm used to that from the experience of building the 74 Bug. We also rebuilt a 71 vw camper. We had an engine fire just after we bought it, so it looked like this after the fire ?

Here's the running motor that's on the way to me

Spent the weekend cleaning, cleaning and more cleaning. 65 years of grime in the engine bay. Slowly making progress. Working my way towards the master cylinder, hard fuel and brakelines. All of which will be renewed. Also a kind forum member offered me their running 218 straight six, for a really good price, which is on it's way to me. Should arrive sometime tomorrow.

Agreed, I'm sure we will find out if we need to fix anything here. My Bug got hit on the front and had some frame/chassis damage and we had to put it on a rack to tweak it back into place.

The frame "looks" in pretty good shape, but I haven't made any precise measurements, I do know that there isn't a lot of rust under the body. I'm moving in a slightly different direction and sourcing a known running engine to put into the truck short term and run that for now and then consider what I need to do from there. That should limit my cash outlay in the short term since a complete rebuild of the current engine would quickly suck dollars out of my wallet.