peteandvanessa

perfect, I'll certainly plan to attend

That's my thinking too :-).

Yeah, the first order of the day is to get a solid motor, drive train and cooling system. Then move over to the whole braking system, then a complete rewire. The current wiring is questionable for sure. I did something similar when I rebuilt my 74 Bug, I tore the whole car apart back to bare metal, separated the pan and went through absolutely everything. I'm not planning on a full restore on the truck though at this point, kinda like the rusty look for this project. Here's a few pics on my being Bug torn down and a completed pic:

Yeah they have rebuilt alot of flatheads and have a good reputation and they're pretty close to me, just 5 miles up the road.

The engine rebuilder mentioned it when I was talking to him today. I'll chat to them about it when I drop the engine off to them next week

Here's where we stand today. Engine is out and on an engine stand. Planning a strip down before the motor goes to a local machine shop experienced with old flatheads:

Heads "look" ok, not had them checked for cracks yet:

First order of the day was the compression test. Pretty much no compression on most cylinders. Good news was that the motor was covered and not sitting in rain, still had coolant and oil. So we pulled the heads for closer inspection, it was after this we decided to pull the whole motor.

Picked up a pretty complete 1953 Dodge Truck over the break. I'm a newbie to early trucks, but have restored a VW Bug from the ground up over a period of 2 years. The 53 Truck is pretty complete, and solid for the most part. Not planning on a full restore, but will be going through the motor, brakes, steering, transmission. The first order of the day was to pull the motor, compression tests revealed 50 PSI on on cylinder, 30 PSI on four other cylinders and zero on one. So we pulled the motor to start a closer inspection. Planning to pull the major parts off the motor and take to a local machine shop for further inspection. Hopefully we won't have any cracks in the block. Here's the truck I'll be working on: