Restoration: Dodge—Part 12
Quick updates from Deals on Wheels' resident restorer Lyndsay Whittle
 |
|
Donor cab found November 2022
|
A coat of paint in February would have progressed the restoration fairly quickly to the next step of fitting the front and rear screens. Hindsight, of course, gives us the benefit of knowing that in no way shape or form did the weather want to play ball, as I so hopefully put it.
Knowing what I know now I perhaps should’ve transported the truck to the South Island to work on it there – just kidding, of course. I often joke about the fanciful excuses I come up with when from time to time I skive off, with the result being a slack amount of progress in the workshop.
Well, this month I have a doozy of an excuse for the total lack of forward movement, one that even I could never have concocted. Let me explain.
On top of a month’s worth of rain in about six hours, Cyclone Gabrielle made an appearance and completed the job by bringing down a huge slip, which effectively imprisoned our house, along with about 25 others for a little over a week and leaving us with no power for close to 14 days.
While our house wasn’t damaged in the mayhem, the storms gave us all a good enough reason to remove the focus from restorations to keep generators running, in order to keep fridge/freezers and water pumps running, not to mention getting machinery out of the sheds to cut accessways through slips for cars and foot traffic.
Basically, an entire month of restoring and vehicle maintenance was lost to basic processers like keeping the home fires burning not just figuratively but also in the literal sense.
Who’s ever heard of lighting a fire in the middle of February in Auckland, I have to ask?
Anyway, now that the excuses are out of the way, in lieu of a story on how we managed to get the truck painted and placed the glass in the holes, it’s probably time to do a bit of a review of the process so far, given we are now one whole year into restoration project number six.
For the benefit of those who haven’t followed the RG13’s restoration from the start, the reason this process was undertaken in the first place is that the old fool (me) carrying out the restoration owned a brand-new one in 1980.
The truck was an RG (or G1190) as they’d become under the Dodge branding, which replaced the ‘Commer’ name in around 1979–1980 and was configured as a box-bodied unit, used as a general goods delivery truck on the Auckland-Hamilton run.
I’d had a bit of a soft spot for these trucks, as they were relatively modern for their time, so a couple of years ago, I set out to find one as a do-up to satisfy a late-life crisis.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to search too hard and found one on the internet, which was quickly purchased from a guy called Simon Coombes, who was generous, as he heavily discounted the asking price, giving me a head start with the restoration.
At the time of buying the truck, I was in the middle of another restoration, so the Dodge had to sit under cover for a number of months before I was able to start on its restoration.
The early photos I took of the truck don’t do justice to the amount of surface rust it actually had all over the cab, so unfortunately, the pictures make it look like I was pulling the cab apart simply for the fun of doing it.
Initially, all the rust I could see was simply on the surface of the metal, however, as I dug further into the front panel of the cab, I found that this particular truck wasn’t any different to any other RG Series I’d ever come across over the past forty years.
In fact, the truck I bought new in 1980 started showing rust in the same spot after only a couple of years of service. It’s all to do with the way the cabs were assembled, where moisture gets trapped between several layers of panels and subframe.
Recapping the process to date
 |
|
Axle out 1 June 2022
|
Preparation
While I purchased the truck in October 2022, the restoration didn’t start until March 2022, some 18 months from the purchase date.
.gif) |
|
Purchase date October 2020
|
Having loaded the truck onto the transporter and taken it to our workshop, I gave the unit a customary washdown just to get a handle on what might (and might not) need to be done in order to get the restoration underway.
Once that part of the operation was completed, the truck was placed into storage until I was able to make a start. The truck was fired-up regularly and given a short run around the paddocks.
During one of these runs, I noticed some surface rust in the roof was getting beyond an acceptable level, so I spent a day or two cleaning it off and rustproofing the area to at least keep the rust at bay until I was able to start the real work ahead.
 |
|
Under way 1 March 2022
|
Getting started (March 2022) The worst rust I could see initially was in the roof panel where the orange marker lights sat and around the windscreen. This was a relatively easy fix, as this only required a small amount of shrinking and stretching on the corners of the windscreen void.
Things progressed fairly quickly panel-wise, however, the first snag was encountered when I realised that the front axle had been raised by about a 100mm and someone had removed the shock absorbers obviously because the originals were now too short.
I remember viewing this as a major setback at the time, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as although it did put us back a month on the restoration schedule, it did eventually make it easier to get in and give everything a good-old clean and paint.
 |
|
Interior paint January 2023
|
Not only that but we also wound up with a nice shiny pair of shocks to boot. Steady progress was made throughout the rest of 2022, although an unscheduled trip to Woodville to collect a donor cab that a regular reader, Noel Galloway, had kindly sourced for me had to be factored in.
This year started out well too until things came to an abrupt halt courtesy of the aforementioned storms and almost constant rain.
The downtime has caused further grief because the truck has sat around for the better part of two months with only a few coats of primer to give it minimal protection.
The full extent of the damage underneath the primer is currently being assessed, which I guess will be the theme of next month’s issue in Part 13. In the meantime, please wish me luck.
Find new and used heavy machinery for sale in NZ
Keep up to date in the industry by signing up to Deals on Wheels' free newsletter or liking us on Facebook.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
