1947 GMC Truck

      We are the second owner of the 1947 GMC two-ton truck.  Our neighbors bought it brand new. World War II years were good years for the farm economy.  Commodities were in demand and the prices were high.  Farmers had money—but not much to buy, particularly in the field of equipment.  All factories were converted to producing war materials.  Farmers bought a lot of new equipment when it became available eafter the war.   

     Thus the ’47 GMC came to our neighborhood.  When we got it in the mid-fifties, it was a cripple.

     It looked a little strange when it came to us.  The grain box sat five or six inches behind the cab, instead of the normal separation of an inch or two.  Between the cab and the front grain wrack stood two hydraulic cylinders about three inches in diameter and about four to five feet long.  They were attached to the front of the truck bed and provided the hoisting function for the truck bed.

      The hoist was powered by a six volt electric motor attached to a hydraulic pump.  To raise the bed, you closed a valve and pulled a switch similar to the headlight switch on older vehicles.

     There were two problems:  The front end hoist could only raise the front of the bed four or five feet, not high enough to empty the grain out of the truck bed.  And, the six volt motor didn’t have enough power to raise much of a load.

      The lack of a functional hoist wasn’t too big of problem.  In those olden days, a lot of farmers still hauled their wheat to town in a pickup.  The grain elevators still had a hoist that would raise the front end of a pickup high enough to let the wheat slide out of the pickup box.

     The routine was to pull off the scale and into the elevator proper.  At the front of the passage was the hoist.  A couple of ramps led the pickup front tires up and down onto the hoist platform.  The high end of the ramps acted as chocks that wouldn’t allow the front wheels to roll back off the ramp platform. 

      If the tailgate of the vehicle being emptied wasn’t positioned over the grate of the elevator pit, the hoist operator would raise the front wheels off the ground a few inches.  The farmer could pull his vehicle forward or backward to get it right.  The elevator’s hoist was suspended by heavy cables to two big wheels or pulleys on tracks overhead that allowed the hoist to move horizontally with the vehicle being emptied.

      The tailgate came down and the elevator operator would raise the front end of the vehicle until all the grain could slide out.  The front end came back down and the pickup would clump over the hoist platform out of the elevator and back to the scale.

     The elevator’s hoist was strong enough to raise our truck.  That worked well until one day a greenhorn was manning the hoist.  He raised the truck up, then up some more.  The back end of the truck bed touched the cement.  He raised it one more time.  The rear wheels started to come off the ground.  Then there was a sound of splitting wood and the guy quickly let the hoist down a bit.  But it was too late.  The two wooden stringers that provided the support for the truck bed and also rested on the truck frame when the bed was in the down position had cracked along their length. 

     The GMC truck made one of its many visits to the shop of Ed Berridge, the local mechanic, welder, blacksmith, Mr. Fixit of all things mechanical.  Ed affixed two steel plates to the cracked stringers to support them and keep them on the job.  He would also redo the hoist.

     He used the same two hydraulic cylinders that were sandwiched between the cab and the bed.  He put them under the bed, mounted on a shaft that he welded to the bottom of the truck frame and attached the piston end of the cylinders to the underside of the bed.  He replaced the puny six-volt motor and pump with a bigger pump connected to the power take off from the truck’s transmission.  He moved the bed closer to the cab.

     Now the truck engine drove the hydraulic pump.  A rod coming up through the floorboards of the cab shifted the PTO shaft into gear. 

     To raise the hoist, shut the valve, pull the PTO into gear, release the clutch and give the motor a few rpm’s.  No more front wheel elevator hoists for the old GMC.

     Good thing, too, for over the years, those hoists hanging from grain elevator ceilings have disappeared.  As truck beds got longer and longer, the old hoists, raised up as high as they would go to get them out of the way, still got in the way of the front end of a 20 foot truck bed raised to dump its load.  So the hoists were removed.  No more raising pickups to dump them at the elevator.  Pickup farmers had to become truck farmers.

     It wasn’t the unorthodox hoist that made the GMC a cripple, however.  It was a jagged scar running down the side of the engine’s cylinder block, a scar left by nickel welding rod. 

       In those olden days, farmers used water for engine coolant.  After all the work was done, sometime in September, they would store truck (and tractor, too) for winter and drain the water from radiators and engine blocks.

      In the case of our GMC, Chuck, the previous owner, awoke with a start one frosty October morning and said, “I forget to drain the water from the truck!”  He drained the water then, but it was too late.  The water freezing in the narrow cooling passages of the truck’s engine block expanded and forced the block to crack.

      Ed Berridge to the rescue.  Ed welded the crack, did a masterful job, and the water no longer leaked down the outside of the block.  It still leaked on the inside, however, leaked into the crankcase, into the motor oil.    

      When we got it, if the truck sat for a few days, it was necessary to drain the water out of the engine oil before starting.  With wench in hand, you crawled under the truck, loosened the drain plug in the bottom of the pan.  It was a little bit of an art.  If you turned the drain plug out until it was hanging by a thread or two, the water, heavier than the oil,  would trickle out.  When the water was gone, the oil, thicker in viscosity than water, would be more reluctant to exit. 

      That worked well if you judged things correctly.  If you misjudged or got into a hurry, the plug came all the way out.  Water and then oil came out in a rush.  The effort to get the plug back into place ended with a fistful of motor oil if you were lucky, a sleeveful if unlucky.

     Dad tried a number of radiator additives to seal the internal crack, but none of them worked. The day came when the engine used oil and didn’t have much power anymore.  Time for an overhaul.  But there was no need to put money and time into an engine with a cracked block.  Another neighbor had a good idea.  He had an old engine block, not quite the same, a few years newer, a bit larger, but otherwise with the same dimensions.  It used the same head, bell housing, etc.  With new pistons, the neighbor’s block would work.  The price was right.  We could have it if we came to get it.  Dad got it.

     There was a problem.  The neighbor’s block had lain in the dirt for a few years and was in pretty bad shape.  Dad thought it would be okay if he took it to Ed to have it “boiled out”.  When Ed looked at it, he said in his inimitable mutter, “[When they] look like that, we usually throw ‘em away.” But he threw it into his solvent tank for a day or two, anyway.

     Dad took on the job of overhauling himself.  Late that fall, the old truck got worked into the school house shop somehow.  It was a tight fit all the way around.  Dad bought new pistons and rings from Montgomery Wards.  There were a few adaptation problems with the “new” block, but eventually it was all together and backed out of the shop.

         At harvest time, the rebuilt engine developed an ominous double knock that meant only one thing:  a rod was “going out.”  What to do?  We had traded the old ¾ ton Ford for a smaller  ½ ton International.  There was no way we could haul all the wheat with that.

      We decided we would drive the truck slowly from field to bin without damaging the engine further.  That worked until the bin got full.  The old truck chuckled around field and bin, never getting out of 2^nd gear.  Perhaps that is how it got the nickname of “Chuckle Truck.”  We were down to the last resort, piling wheat on the ground.

      So it came to pass that the truckers, Brother John and I, started a pile on the ground, on the short buffalo grass.  We had a pretty lengthy pile when it happened.  I raised the front of the bed a little too high.  The load shifted to the back of the bed.  The weight all on the back end of the truck swung the front end of the grain box up in the air so high that the pistons came out of the hoist cylinders.

      The pistons swung back and forth suspended from the floor of the bed.  The top end of the cylinders fell to the ground and commenced draining their oil on the grass beneath the truck.  John jumped into the back of the truck and began shoveling wheat over the tailgate.  I tried to prop up the cylinders so they wouldn’t drain all the oil out onto the ground, but lacking any thing to use for a prop, I knelt beneath the truck and held the cylinders up by hand.

     After shoveling a while, John jumped out of the back of the truck.  With his weight gone, the front end of the bed outweighed the back.  Down came the bed in a rush.  The piston on my side of the truck embedded itself about six inches into the sod.  On its way down, it came very close to me.  My first inclination was to look up to see how close I came to being cold-cocked by the truck bed.  A few moments later, I began to wonder about the result of being in the path of that descending piston that stuck itself into the ground.

      There was no moving the truck with the hoist rams stuck in the ground.  We propped up the cylinders with a 2 X 4 or two and left to tell Dad.  I think we studied the problem over dinner.  The fix involved using the Farmhand to raise the front end of the truck bed until it was high enough to get the piston rams back into their cylinders.  I don’t know exactly how that was done, or how the bed was let down slowly enough to get the pistons on both sides lined up at the same time to get them back into their proper place in their cylinders.

     I wasn’t there when that all took place.  I don’t remember why, but it might have had something to do with my mother’s Adams apple bobbing, her hand to her lips, her face paling a little when she heard the story of the truck bed coming down with me under it.

     Anyway, the hoist was restored to normalcy.  We finished the harvest without a repeat of the over-balanced truck bed.  We were very careful not to raise the bed too high.  After harvest was finished, another neighbor lent us a truck to haul the wheat off the ground into town.

      The GMC limped to town to Ed’s shop.  Ed reoverhauled the engine, replacing the failed rod bearing.  He determined that we had not cleared all the oil passages of the dirt and rust, so the failed rod bearing was not being oiled properly.  He took care of that.

     He also made an addition to the truck bed.  He welded two lengths of old roller chain to either side of the truck frame and the bottom of the bed.  He called them snub chains.  When the front end of the truck bed gets so high, the chains come to the end of their length and prevent the bed from going any higher.  No more would the bed get over balanced and pull the rams out of the cylinders.  When the bed is down in its normal position, the two chains hang looped beneath the truck bed in front of the rear axle like a couple of dangly ear rings slightly out of place.

     Since that trip to Ed’s shop, the old GMC has run fine.  It sits in the shed with its third engine, its revamped hoist, with 34,885.7 actual miles.  They have been hard miles, mostly in stubble fields, dirt paths between fields, gravel roads, with few miles on paved roads.  If it could talk, it would probably tell of endless hours of boredom sitting in various sheds. 

     It could tell a lot of interesting tales, too, some of them rather scary.