Hey all!

I've been absent from the forums for a while but I figured it's time I finally start a build thread of my ongoing restoration of Grandpa's F100.

My Grandpa Silvio drove, from brand new, this '77 F100. It was his work truck at the Delano-Earlimart Irrigation District here in California for seven years, then he bought it from the district in the early ‘80s to be his personal truck. The drivetrain is all-original with a 302 and C4, and the color is a respray (in the ‘90s I think) of the original Light Jade. The odometer never turned over so it’s at a young and spry 93,xxx miles.



Grandpa parked his truck in the same spot out front of their house in Delano for 40 years. Then in 2017, on the same day that my Grandma agreed to take money for the truck (she wanted to just give it to me for free), the truck was smashed into while parked by a Corvette driver who lost control in the rain. No one was hurt and the Corvette was stopped before it came close to the house, but the truck was totaled.


2017

We went back and forth as a family about what to do but eventually my sister just stepped in and said, hey, I’ll loan you the money, let’s just save it. So the truck spent a year at a body shop, MV AutoWorks in Wasco, while shop owner Jesse and his team looked for a donor truck to find original Ford replacement parts. The crash broke or bent a lot of the front end but somehow spared the motor and even the radiator. Jesse ended up finding FoMoCo parts, straightened the frame, and even color-matched the primer on the replaced and repaired body panels (I can’t yet afford a full paint job). Then in April 2018 my dad and I drove down and trailered Grandpa’s F100 up to my place in Campbell so I could finish the work.




I’ll populate this thread with the trials and tribulations of reregistering the truck (brake and lamp inspections are so much fun) and all the various projects I’ve worked on so far to get the truck drivable again. Long story short, she’s now my daily driver and I just showed her at the Saratoga Classic & Cool Car Show (the only Dent in the show). Though my grandpa passed in 2017, I think he’d dig that the truck is now a family affair and is back on the road, hauling and cruising again!




Stay tuned - many details to come, of past work and of my next projects For those on Instagram, I’ve been posting photos since the project started with the hashtag #grandpasf100, otherwise follow on here as I get this thread going to spread the Light Jade love and tell a bit of the story of Grandpa’s F100.

 

Glad to see you're saving it, especially being that it was your Gpa's truck. ~Pat

 

Damn, sucks that it got hit but awesome job on saving it. I look forward to seeing the progress.

 

Great story. It never ceases to amaze me how many of these trucks actually become part of the family, I've got one of those myself, I've had it for 34 years and will never let it go.

 

That's awesome... I too have my Grandpa's truck. I'm still working on it. I should have it on the road here in the next few weeks. I made this at work, it's now on the glove box door.




Your grandpa would be proud!

 

That’s awesome! I’ve been customizing the truck a bit with 3D printing, so instead of buying replacements of worn out parts, just drawing some up myself. One of those was the hubcaps. This truck came with the Type 7 FoMoCo dog dishes painted argent silver, and one was dented beyond repair. My aunt had saved the caps off the street after the accident so I knew I had to put something similar back on. So I fired up Solidworks and got out the calipers:




I designed them to print in two pieces so as to not need support material (and so hopefully print sharper with all the little text details). I ended up needing to clean up the letters with a knife but they turned out pretty sharp.






The prints turned out so clean that I decided to just print in grey ABS and clearcoat them so you can see how they were made. The process was clearcoat the centers, then with a fine brush paint the black with acrylic (the base clear helps clean up mistakes I made with the water-based acrylic), then bond centers to outers, then more clearcoat.






I designed them to use the same friction fit around the lip as the originals, but only in four sections that line up with the wheel tabs. That way you pop them on in the gaps, twist 45 degrees by hand, and they “lock” onto the wheel tabs. No pry bar required to remove them!

We shall see how well they hold up in weather, UV, and thrown rocks, but so far so good

 

Wow, that turned out great. I would have never thought of 3D printing hub caps. You did an amazing job

 

Thanks! I’m not totally convinced they will survive the environment long term, but if not I can always remake them, experiment with more hardy materials then plain ABS, even someday print in metal when costs come way down

 

Either way, they look great.

 

Nice work ,

 

My other big 3D printing project so far: grill inserts. The donor truck from which the body shop pulled a front end was a '73-'75 so I've been eager to get back to the '76-'77 aesthetic. Nothing like committing to a car show to get your butt in gear and finish projects! I had started drawing grill inserts back in December and so finally about a month ago dove in to finish them.






I started just with photos, then eventually got out to a pick'n'pull to grab dimensions off of a wrecked truck. Lots of paper templates helped fine-tune the profiles without wasting print time.







I ran out of time to get it all right in CAD so ended up just going for it and getting parts in the printers, then going back and hand-fitting the prints with a finger sander and cutoff wheel.






I ended up gluing some of the mounts while the grill insert frame was taped up into the grill openings, just to short-cut how to align those holes instead of trying to measure their positions.







Now that I've got the geometry I'll someday reprint with more of each section in one print (and no longer need to hand-clearance at the back). But for now I'll just run them raw black until I feel like painting them the factory black/grey.





Fitment isn't perfect but it's a good 1st draft

 

I'd forget painting them and just leave them as is. It looks great.

 

That's awesome... I need to get myself one of those.

 

Very very cool!!!

 

I'd probably de-burr those edges a bit