It’s a fun read.
Our family misadventures that finally led to Joel buying his Galaxie have been quite the ride.
I have always been a gearhead of some sort.
When I was a kid, it was my mom, my sister and me, as dad had skipped out when I was in about 4th grade and left us. I remember living in a series of rentals or motels and uncomfortable trips to government buildings to get food stamps, the not so great food that comes with that, painting fences to help pay the rent, clothes shopping at Goidwill,… I’m not trying to paint some sort of sad picture, I’d just like to illustrate that we were pretty poor. And honestly, not having money to buy things is probably what gave me my ability to turn junk into treasure, my curiosity for fixing things, and the basis for my mechanical aptitude. I had no choice – if I wanted a bicycle, I had to dig in the trash or trade off for other kids, broken crap, and figure out how to make it work. Most of the toys and stuff that I had as a kid and honestly well into adulthood were because I didn’t have the money to go out and buy it so I had to buy stuff that was either broken or needed a lot of work and then figure out how to bring it up to snuff.
Honestly, that trend continues in my life to this day. The freight shaker that is featured in this thread frequently, we bought as a $12,000 pile of junk. It took me two years and untold amounts of self education and work to figure out how to make a semi truck into a once again usable service truck-because we didn’t have the money to go out and buy a six figure work truck.
We still don’t. 😄😄 😬
Anyway, my point is, one way or another. I’ve always been a gearhead. From fixing to building things it’s just apparently an ingrained part of me. As many of you know, I ran an off-road fab shop out of my backyard for a number of years and was involved in all manner of building or modifying and designing vehicles and parts for them. When we decided to move out in the sticks at Fort Rock almost a decade ago, I left a whole bunch of that behind. Yes we had plans to build a shop, but we had also planned to attempt to lead a simpler life and as such, I sold off a number of toys and other things that I had spent many years putting together. I did this willingly with the idea that I would now turn my talents and intentions to building a farm or something of that nature.
Things don’t always turn out like you planned, and often enough that’s not actually a bad thing. After several years went by I began to realize that my ability to leave tinkering with cars and trucks behind was not as good as I thought it was. I missed working on crap. I ended up fixing and building a lot of heavy equipment and while that was nice it’s just not the same. Primarily, I really missed performance offroading, and I still do. I don’t know if I will ever be able to get back into go fast Desert vehicles, but you never know.
As it turns out, I never really got into classic cars or hot rods. My interest drifted towards being out in the wide open spaces with the air is clean, and the rules are few. Exploring the remote reaches of desert and forest via a vehicle was my passion, and building vehicles that could do that just fueled my desire to go to such places.
Denise and I were Overlanders long before that term became popular in the United States. We used to call it “adventure camping “back then.
When Joel started sending us pictures of all these classic cars and explaining all the differences, and showing his knowledge of being able to identify them at a glance and what they did or did not come with from the factory, it was all new to me. So this has been quite the exciting little educational adventure.
And all of this brings us to this past weekend. An interesting fact came out – I have never been to a car show. And I have certainly never entered a vehicle into one. So, seeing as how we were going to go check out this Rockabilly and entry was open to pretty much any kind of vehicle, we decided to enter Ol Yeller seeing as how it was as clean as it has ever been and was just freshly running again.
In truth, Ol Yeller is really a resto mod. There has been so much work put into that truck over the years. It would be hard to explain and probably needs It’s very own post going over all of the little details that have gone into that truck. Furthermore, that was the first dedicated work truck I ever bought for our company and like a lot of things I have owned over the years, It started as a barely running, beat up old work truck and has been rebuilt several times into the shiny yellow truck that you see here.
Needless to say, Denise and I were pretty excited about getting to go to the car show and even have something in it. And with Joel and Amy going too it was a great and fun family trip!
Here’s Joel with his galaxie shortly after picking it up from the detailer. We were getting ready and had an hour or so to kill before entry into the car show opened.
Friday morning and into the afternoon was overcast and cool and not a whole lot of cars showed up. It was very nice. We got to sit in the matching yellow lawn chairs we bought for the two vehicles and relax and talk with some of the other car people around us. We ended up parking right next to a bunch of really cool old Ford cars and trucks we dubbed it the Ford corner.😄😄
Ol Yeller is pretty tall. Too tall in my opinion, but that’s a project for another day. Denise had a great idea of putting a little step ladder out in front of the truck so people could look under the hood, which is probably one of the best parts of the whole truck. Finding the surprise diesel engine buried under there and it really is a nice clean engine compartment.
I took her idea one step further and used this piece of aluminum by the driver‘s front tire as a step. I polished it up a little bit so that the engraving would stand out as it has our company logo and website on it. Sharp readers may recognize this as a scrap piece of failed battery box that we were using as a blast shield recently for our exothermic welds.😄😄
Friday’s sunset was pretty.
We were also excited to meet up with friends we hadn’t seen in a while. @Yarder ( who isn’t in this picture for some reason 🤷♂️) and his wife. The six of us had a great time throughout the weekend!
I had more pictures and text here, but somehow the page did some sort of automatic reload and dumped half of my post.🤷♂️
I have to get back to work so I’ll see if I can find time later to add to this story.
Stay tuned!