When I thought there was no way in H-E-doublehockeysticks that I was going to find a decent cab here in the rust belt, I resigned myself to trying to restore one of the two cabs I currently own. Both cabs would require a tremendous amount of work, not to mention hundreds of dollars in patch panels.

Well, I found a solution. A cab turned up in western Indiana which is a just couple hours away. We picked it up Saturday. For the price of a few patch panels, I have a cab that is very solid. It needs a little work on the cowls and corners but not anywhere close to what I was contemplating. The floor pans are in excellent condition. It does have a bad roof but one of my cabs will give hers up for the project. That will be a simple repair.

The cab came off a '54 F-350 that was used on a farm. The guy I bought it from said it was mainly used for shelling corn. He had the front end from it which had a big hole cut out in front of the radiator with a wire mesh basket where I guess they threw the corn in. It had a power takeoff on the engine somewhere that drove the sheller. There's a pulley hanging from the firewall that was used with the contraption. Weird.

We got it home without too much trouble. We did have a scary moment when we started heading back west into a crosswind. The wind was catching the windshield like a sail and lifting the rear of the cab up and down. A couple more tie-downs and we were good to go. I asked my brother if he wouldn't mind sitting in the cab to weight it down. He mumbled something about the missing doors and sub zero wind chills. It's so hard to find good help!

 

Kevin,

Congradulations on finding a cab, I live north of you in SE Wisconsin and I know what the "Rust Belt" does to sheet metal. I was able to find a cab off of a F-8 fire truck with 3000 miles for my F-2 about six years ago. It was in a town about ten miles north of here and to top it off my wife was the one who spotted it, she has never let me live it down.

I also had to cut off the roof of my panel a couple of years ago. It went on a heck of lost easier than I thought it would, maybe I was lucky that it went on the first try. The one bit advice I have to offer to anyone contemplating a roof graf is to measure twice and then measure two more times before cutting and then measure two or three times before doing the final welding.


My truck page

 

Kevin,
Not so wierd in farm country. Out of context we sometimes forget what these things were sold for in the first place. Work! Lot's of it! Back in the dark ages before widespread use of corn heads on combines, extracting corn to it's kernel state was a two step process: first pick the whole ears with a corn picker, then at some later time running the ears through a corn sheller to separate the cobs from the kernels. I still remember my dad and a couple of his cousins had a custom corn shelling business based around a waterfall-front 1'-1/2 ton Ford truck and a Moline corn sheller. They did this for extra cash in the winter. There were lots of truck mounted shellers.
Last summer I went with my dad by the auction lot and in the back row was a partially stripped '53 F500; just frame and sheetmetal. The cab was usable, and I'm sure it went for a song. So these things are still out there.....
Memories of a freezing aluminum grain scoup and frosty breath....
Brett