Frankenstein '56: 1954 F100 Retrospective July to December 2015

Wednesday, June 15, 2022

1954 F100 Retrospective July to December 2015

Well the news is that my new project could be only a week from delivery, so let's start to wrap the retrospective look back at my first F100. Good ol' Dorothy. She was quite a sight on the road, and a lot of people just had no idea what the heck they were looking at and I would often get the WTF expression as I drove past. Such a shame she is still not with me. But life goes on and the new project promises to deliver just as much fun and heartache, so stick around/

For this post, I will combine the last few months of 2015 together in a photofest of some of the interesting things I did to the truck during this time.

By July, I had the Jag front in the truck and things were motoring along very well.

Can't remember now what happened to the engine, but I think the water pump was leaking, so my brother came down to help me with the water pump replacement and while we did that we did the timing chain. As you can see here, one of the studs broke and we had to get serious by heating up the broken stud and removing it and then tapping a thread into the block to accommodate a new stud.

Here, you can see some serious mods to a new flywheel cover that I had to fit up because the original was missing and a flywheel exposed is a big no no. I coughed up and bought a nice shiny chrome eBay cover and wouldn't you know it...it didn't fit too well, thus the significant butchering to the cover.

Came up okay in the end!

We replaced the harmonic balancer while we were at it.

RPC products was my new friend!

Patriot headers being fitted up.

The engine was really starting to look nice!

My brother and yours truly obviously doing something related to petrol as I had the old fuel can in hand. I think it could have been a carbi issue.

I paid a fortune for these special air conditioning brackets only to discover they weren't going to fit my setup in a million years, so after heavy modification (see below)

I got them to fit. Can't remember where I bought them from, but I think it was from a guy in the USA and I KNOW they were not cheap. Anyway, once this fitment issue was sorted the rest went together well.