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What would a farmer have done: round or rectangular?
I’m plugging away at my 1950 ½ ton, and I now have to think about the rear bumper. It's a battered work truck, and I am leaving it alone as I happen to like the way it looks right now. It came without a bumper, and there’s no way I’m tossing something new on to this as it would stick out like a sore thumb. I do however want a bumper, mostly because I like the way a bumper hides all the junk under the truck.
I have a couple of options I am kicking around, round and rectangular. I have access to a nicely rusted round tube:
Or I can opt for a rectangular tube like this:
So my question is, which of these is most typical for the farmer fixes that are common in our trucks. Remember that I am just trying to keep the flavour of the vehicle and am not in the least bit worried about originality. I’m trying to recreate what a farmer or tradesman may have done back then.
I’m looking forward to hearing what others think. I wandered around a wrecking yard the other day that had a ton of ancient trucks in order to come up with ideas, and I saw a truly amazing variety of farmer fix bumpers (all of which seemed to have been booger welded to the rear of the frame itself!)
I'd say that in rural agricultural areas, pipe of various diameters would have been a lot more available, and more likely to be found on farms, than rectangular tubing, so there's that.
I grew on a farm in Iowa. We had 56 F100 and it got c channel bumper after factory bumper was tore up. Most trucks I remember had rectangular bumpers. Maybe in the other states with oil fields, the truck got round bumpers.
In my almost 40 years of studying German farmers, I've been deep embedded, I would say whatever piece of scrap metal from down on the scrap pile would have been used. Take it over to the farmer down the road and have him booger weld it after he was done with morning milking and then rummage through the numerous coffee cans and five gallon buckets of mismatched rusty bolts to find something that worked mount it to the back of your truck but most likely you wouldn't worry about a bumper until someone banged into the rear of your truck then you'd over compensate and go overboard and build the biggest monstrosity. Also, don't forget the baling twine, there has to be baling twine used somewhere.
Yep, them old farmers would have used whatever they had on hand.
If it were me, I'd be looking at that rectangular tubing. You could make a decent bumper out of that.
Here is what was cobbled onto my truck when I got it. Overall....not horrible.
when I drug mine home it had a section of cutting from a dozer blade....5 feet long and about 1-1/4" thick ....beleved to a sharp edge on one side...I torched it of the rear frame rails
It must have weighed a hundred pounds...use what u got... I think it's still around here somewhere
Thanks for the awesome (and often hilarious) inputs! The trucks I saw at the wreckers had a lovely mix of the above suggestions, and most often included the jagged instant tetanus rust suggested by 85e150 (on both ends of course!). I'm making mounts that will work for both the round tube I have on hand, and that rectangular piece that's in the scrap pile at the wrecker. Now I just have to slice the welds at the ends of the tube (you may have noticed that its a driveshaft) and see how tough it is to knock out the tube yoke and slip yoke after 74 years.
My dad had a 62 Chevy Belair we got from my uncle in the mid to late 1970’s. It was a rust bucket when we got it, then it sat in the back for numerous years after 150,000+ miles of use continuing to rust away. Never touched the bumpers, but the chrome shown like new the day we got rid of it! I always wondered what Chevy did with their chrome that year!
Round was probably the most used as it was usually readily available. If more weight was wanted for traction, a section of railroad rail was used. Be aware that most towns had at least one welding shop, a cottage industry that made aftermarket truck bumpers.
For the one I'm working on now I picked up a scrap of 3 x 5 x 1/4" that the saw mill through out and boxed in the ends, should add traction too, it weighs 100 lbs..lol
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