When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
Looking closely at my bumper today when I painted it I knew the frame horns were messed up but I didn't know they were this bad.
The frame horns must be bent. My uncle Abe drove grandpa's 54 through an intersection probably in the late 50's. This intersection had no stop signs as many did not in rural areas back then. Some guy hit him in the left front. The repair was not great. They used a 1956 air deflector. They also used a 56 hood with the two bolt heads at the cowl . They must have put on a new grille and gravel shield.
To make the gravel shield fit they cut out part of frame horn. See the cutout.
My bodyman did not line up gravel shield with the cutout because he couldn't or didn't try
And so the lower right part of the bumper is touching lower part of the gravel shield.
And my hood sticks out on the left side. It's been like that since I owned it in 1977 and probably before that. Just part of driving Grandpa's truck.
When I got the truck repainted in 2016 I asked my body man to see if the frame is bent. He said it is not .
One way to tell if the frame is straight is to remove the bumper and put some straight edges on the frame to check it. For the purposes of driving, the frame horns do not matter. I think they were designed to take some abuse and be relatively easy to repair or replace, if necessary.
When I had my truck down to the frame, my frame horns got their work over with a torch to straighten them out.
A chain, a come-along, and a telephone pole and you can usually tweak them back a bit.
I just spent some time with a chain, a ratchet strap, and my other truck to pull the ends of my Studebaker's bumper back into shape (well, almost)
I noticed some odd but obvious waves in the front passenger of my frame when I was just a kid getting the brakes working.
Years later when painting the truck, the front passenger fender on my truck had a faded spot of paint on it and showed different colors than the simple original yellow on other parts. There was also lots wrong with that fender's metal in general.
When I painted the truck and took the grill off I saw that the headlight back-plate-thing was wrinkled up pretty badly.
It then became obvious that my truck at some point had a fairly serious accident on the front passenger, and that they replaced the fender with another fender that was already in absolutely horrible condition. I used about a pound of body filler on that one fender alone because it was so beat up I didn't think it was worth even 5 minutes of real metal shaping.
Anyways, these trucks have seen a lot, and most of them lived on. In CA there are no safety inspections, so I see cars that are severely wrecked driving on the road daily, i couldn't care less. If the people are too broke to fix it, that's their business.
Moral of that story is that story is that people have been reviving and driving heaps of junk for years. And one day probably 50 years ago, my truck was in that same predicament. Here it is today, surviving.
Rezvani's Latest Post-Apocalyptic Monster Is a Ford F-150 Raptor Underneath
Slideshow: Called the Fortress, the 850-horsepower pickup combines Raptor underpinnings with military-inspired features, survival equipment, and a starting price of $285,000.
