Making Progress on the Cab

Progress is a wonderful noun, especially when it applies to my truck cab. Of all the parts in this 54 Chevy truck restoration, it is the cab that makes me the most insecure and paralyzes me into inaction. Everything that has to be fixed with the cab is something I have never done before.

The floor was rotted out with rust and while it was tempting, putting a carpet over the holes, would not be acceptable. So, I manned up and cut out the rusted floor, learned how to weld and welded in the replacement floor panels.  The side of the cab had a dent as big and as deep as the Mariana Trench. This, in case you are wondering is 6.8 miles deep. I banged it out and used body filler to make it perfectly smooth.

Even with all this progress, my mechanical clock is ticking and it is runing out of time. This is the manalogy of the woman’s need to get married and have a baby. Who could forget Mona Lisa Vito in My Cousin Vinny saying “my biological clock is ticking”. According to my clock it is time to deliver this cab.

With the cold of winter about to shut down this Hillbilly Garage I had to get a heated shop in order to keep working through the cold dark months. I was starting to look for a garage to rent when my amazing wife offers to let me move my table saw, other wood working tools and bicycles into the back room of the house so that there would be room in the garage to work on the cab.

I am certain she was under the influence of a hot flash and didn’t know what she was saying, but I quickly agreed and now we have three rooms filled with truck parts and tools.

Once the garage was cleaned out, the next step was to move the cab into the garage. The timing for this operation could not have been worse. Several of the neighbors were out of town and another had hurt his back. That left me – one old guy, my daughter – who is like anti matter when it comes to helping with the truck, and my amazing one armed wife. Don’t worry, she has two arms, but with a recent rotator cuff surgery, one was out of commission – Doctors orders.

With a good three arms between us, we used Egyptian methods to move the cab. I would lift one side of the cab up off the stand and Stephanie would pull it out and put in a smaller one. Repeating this process we soon had the cab on a furniture dolly and were able to roll it into the garage and perform the process in reverse.

Now that I have the cab in a warm well light garage, I have been able to work on it almost every night after work. I have taken off all the paint and rust on the outside and primed the inside floor panels. Two recent warm days gave me time to spray on the primer and Baby it looks good.