Sitting on the opposite side of the cab, I picture what the Ford was like when it was a working firetruck. A volunteer would have dived into the cab and run through the start sequence, then thrown the parking brake and hit the lights and siren as he roared out of the firehouse in second gear, shifting to third as the truck cleared the apron at the street.My brother and I are not in such a hurry. We’re not firemen, and our mission isn’t to extinguish a blaze. It’s to restore this fine old machine. On a winter afternoon in rural Michigan, we’re taking it for a spin. Carl swings the five-speed shift lever hard to the right and up one notch. Easing up on the clutch, he gently backs the truck out of the garage and into the cold winter air. “Needs a throw-out bearing,” he says, more to himself than to me. A telltale whine emerges from the clutch.
He snaps the shift lever straight back, then rolls ahead in first gear. The old red Ford crunches the snow under its toothy eight-ply Goodyear Hi-Miler tires as we rumble down the long dirt driveway. With a sly grin, Carl turns the siren on and off, but his neighbor’s Angus beef cattle stand motionless and seemingly serene.
Soon we’re rattling along the dirt road that leads from Carl’s homestead to a paved county road. It’s an austerely beautiful landscape. The wind has sheared the snow off the fields, revealing the stubble of last year’s corn and soybean crops. Tracks from Carl’s test of the truck’s four-wheel drive crosshatch the snow in his own field. Farmhouses, some of them nothing more than tumbledown wrecks, line the road.
By current standards, the truck is primitive. The suspension is ridiculously stiff—we bounce over every rut and pothole. Carl has to double-clutch between second and third. The steering has so much slop that my brother has to make constant corrections to keep the truck on our side of the road. The heater has one setting: blowtorch.
No question, this truck is a relic from the distant past—our past. It was built the year my twin brother, Carl, and I were born, in Hempstead, N.Y. It’s a sheet-metal barbarian with barely rounded corners, but to Carl and me it’s an American beauty.
The Allure of Old IronThe vehicle I traveled so far to help renovate rolled off the assembly line on a summer day in 1959 at Ford’s then-new plant in Lorain, Ohio, a storied facility that made 7.5 million cars and trucks before it was shuttered several years ago. The Ford was built as just a naked F-350 cab and chassis. After Lorain, John Bean Division, a firetruck builder in Lansing, Mich., heavily modified the bare-bones Ford by adding a hulking Stahl utility-box body and aftermarket NAPCO four-wheel drive. Most important, Bean installed a firefighting pump with a state-of-the-art high- pressure fog setting. It also wired in lights and a siren and built a diamond-plate rear bumper wide enough for a firefighter to stand on.
Like all good finds, the truck just turned up. Carl was cruising the Internet one afternoon to find parts for a 1947 Ford grain truck that he’s restoring and stumbled across an ad for the firetruck. The photograph on the posting showed it in hub-high snow and knee-high weeds, with a listing shack in the background. Carl was intrigued by the description: running condition with 10,000 original miles, rare qualities in an unrestored 50-year-old vehicle.
My brother immediately entered into negotiations with the owner, Shane Buer, perhaps the world’s most honest dealer of old cars and parts. Located in Dawson, Minn., Buer sent my brother more than a dozen photos detailing the truck’s flaws. The two men settled on a price, $2750, and Carl dispatched a car carrier to retrieve the firetruck. “It sat outside for two years or so, but the only thing we had to do to start it was clean the points a little and spray a little gas in the carburetor,” Buer says. He was able to drive it right onto the car carrier.
The Ford was delivered to Carl on our birthday. As soon as the old truck came off the trailer, my brother corralled some buddies to pump new life into it. In short order they replaced the truck’s coolant and oil and rebuilt the carburetor and installed a reconditioned fuel pump, new spark plugs and plug wires, a distributor cap, a rotor and filters for air and oil.
Now, five months later, after flying from Philadelphia to Detroit, I’m driving through swirling snow to Carl’s. I guess I expected a hero’s welcome or to get razzed that I showed up after the heaviest work was done. Instead, neither happens. “Get dressed,” Carl says, as I step out of the rental car, “we’re cutting firewood.”
That’s my brother, a man of few words. He’s a smart guy who has degrees in tool design and engineering and a master’s in business administration. After high school, life took us on distinctly different paths. He moved to the Midwest to be in the heart of manufacturing. I split my time in the Northeast between journalism and construction, an oddly bifurcated life that I still maintain. Carl spent nearly 30 years in the industrial sector but now does data analysis for an insurance company. He’s stubbornly independent. He heats his house with wood, and he’s constantly building or remodeling something. The new workshop he just completed is bigger than my house. He’s always been that way. Restless. Productive.
After we pile the firewood, we start up a kerosene heater in the corner of the shop and go to work. Half the challenge of restoring an old truck to its former glory is just getting past the dirt. It’s to the credit of Ford’s engineers that they designed a vehicle that can still run 50 years after it was built, even though every spark-generating, air-moving or fuel-carrying part is clogged with crud. “The air cleaner looks like it came off my lawnmower,” Carl says. He plucks it out of a box of recently replaced parts. Everything in there looks like it belongs in a landfill for toxic waste.
Fortunately, other things about the truck are as tidy as can be. So complete are its documents that we know the date and mileage when Bean took possession (Sept. 9, 1959; 9 miles). A few weeks later, Carl and I were born. Such was the medical technology of the day that the truck arrived with far more certainty than my brother and I did: My mother didn’t know she was carrying twins.
Sliding under the truck on a piece of cardboard, Carl shows me the grease points. Each zerk looks like a new form of undersea life: dirt coral. He demonstrates how he wants me to handle this job. First, he carefully scrapes away dirt with a putty knife and a brass wire brush, then he uses a dental pick to open the end of the fitting. Finally, he injects fresh lubricant with a grease gun. My tutorial complete, I set about lubricating each grease nipple I can find. I lose track of how many I clean—the undercarriage is plastered with them. In this truck’s era, if an engineer felt that a part needed heavy lubricant, it got a zerk.
While I deal with the dirty fittings, Carl tinkers in the engine compartment and debates whether we should replace a radiator hose. There’s nothing like a burst hose to strand a vehicle far from home. It feels good to work together again, like when we were kids. Between passing tools and parts, we catch up a bit: a divorce, a marriage, kids and stepkids.
Trucks—Then & Now
Call me old-fashioned, but instead of working on today’s vehicles with their artfully concealed fasteners and parts that require special tools, I prefer a truck on which only ordinary tools are needed and the heads of fasteners are easily accessible. Replacing the driver-side window is a joy. We remove the Phillips screws on a door panel and gain full access to the window crank mechanism. The rest of the job is a snap.
Even though we’re twin brothers and we share a love of working with our hands, our techniques couldn’t be more different. When I do mechanical work, I put on coveralls, gather my tools and plan my attack. To me, every job is about preparation, execution and cleanup. Carl, on the other hand, just dives in. If we were musicians, I’d be the classical pianist, and Carl would be the jazz soloist, a master of improvisation. Example: When I can’t remove a broken cap from one of the Ford’s brake-fluid reservoirs, my brother suggests a pipe wrench. The idea of using a plumber’s tool on an old truck strikes me as almost scandalous, but it works beautifully.
My brother’s philosophy—that results matter more than technique—emerged as far back as the summer of 1977, when he bought a ponderous ’58 Oldsmobile two-door that we nicknamed the Fish Tank for its tendency to take on water after a heavy rain. If there was a tool or makeshift repair that we didn’t employ working on that thing, I don’t remember it. We kept the Olds running for years and kind of started to enjoy the sound of water sloshing around in the quarter panels.
As the truck’s restoration took shape, Carl kept me abreast of its progress with daily e-mails. We begin calling it Canby, after the Minnesota farm town where it spent the bulk of its firefighting career. It was delivered there in the fall of 1959; the town paid $9600 for it, a handsome sum in an era when in Minnesota, for another $3200, you could buy a good house. The Canby News, a weekly paper that’s still in business, reported the truck’s arrival and ran a small picture of fire chief Art Betts, wearing a plaid wool jacket over bib overalls as he stood solemnly next to the vehicle. Painted on the truck’s door was its identification: Canby Fire Department No. 1.
Paul Miller, an 85-year-old retired farm-equipment salesman, joined the Canby fire department in 1947 and served for 26 years. He fondly remembers the era. “When that whistle would blow, your heart went right up into your throat,” he says. “You ran as fast as you could to the firehouse.” Eugene DeWit, another volunteer, remembers driving Canby No. 1 to a fire in a hog house. “I set it to fog and walked right in,” he says. “I had that fire out in 2 minutes.”
Trucks—Then & Now
Call me old-fashioned, but instead of working on today’s vehicles with their artfully concealed fasteners and parts that require special tools, I prefer a truck on which only ordinary tools are needed and the heads of fasteners are easily accessible. Replacing the driver-side window is a joy. We remove the Phillips screws on a door panel and gain full access to the window crank mechanism. The rest of the job is a snap.
Even though we’re twin brothers and we share a love of working with our hands, our techniques couldn’t be more different. When I do mechanical work, I put on coveralls, gather my tools and plan my attack. To me, every job is about preparation, execution and cleanup. Carl, on the other hand, just dives in. If we were musicians, I’d be the classical pianist, and Carl would be the jazz soloist, a master of improvisation. Example: When I can’t remove a broken cap from one of the Ford’s brake-fluid reservoirs, my brother suggests a pipe wrench. The idea of using a plumber’s tool on an old truck strikes me as almost scandalous, but it works beautifully.
My brother’s philosophy—that results matter more than technique—emerged as far back as the summer of 1977, when he bought a ponderous ’58 Oldsmobile two-door that we nicknamed the Fish Tank for its tendency to take on water after a heavy rain. If there was a tool or makeshift repair that we didn’t employ working on that thing, I don’t remember it. We kept the Olds running for years and kind of started to enjoy the sound of water sloshing around in the quarter panels.
As the truck’s restoration took shape, Carl kept me abreast of its progress with daily e-mails. We begin calling it Canby, after the Minnesota farm town where it spent the bulk of its firefighting career. It was delivered there in the fall of 1959; the town paid $9600 for it, a handsome sum in an era when in Minnesota, for another $3200, you could buy a good house. The Canby News, a weekly paper that’s still in business, reported the truck’s arrival and ran a small picture of fire chief Art Betts, wearing a plaid wool jacket over bib overalls as he stood solemnly next to the vehicle. Painted on the truck’s door was its identification: Canby Fire Department No. 1.
Paul Miller, an 85-year-old retired farm-equipment salesman, joined the Canby fire department in 1947 and served for 26 years. He fondly remembers the era. “When that whistle would blow, your heart went right up into your throat,” he says. “You ran as fast as you could to the firehouse.” Eugene DeWit, another volunteer, remembers driving Canby No. 1 to a fire in a hog house. “I set it to fog and walked right in,” he says. “I had that fire out in 2 minutes.”
➔ The firetruck’s detailed documentation includes the well-thumbed original manual. Those old guides have a lot of useful information.
➔ Amazingly enough, you might still be able to find rebuild kits for this funky glass sediment-bowl fuel pump in the aftermarket. A previous owner installed a serviceable, if incorrect, modern pump with no bowl. Regardless, use a big, clear plastic fuel filter on older vehicles like this, because there’s probably plenty of rust and junk in the tank.
I make another trip to Michigan a few months later and tail my brother as he drives the Ford to the Davis Auto Mart Spring Dust Off, a charity car show in Charlotte, Mich. At the show, the old machine holds its own among beautifully restored cars from the 1930s through the ’60s. Old firetrucks are just cool. “I feel right at home,” Carl says before going off to look at a Hemi Challenger.
Back at the shop, we tighten mechanical and electrical connections. Socking down those bolts makes for a cleaner garage floor and less oil spilled on the road. Likewise, getting the truck timed to 4 degrees before top dead center and replacing its Rube Goldberg coil with a new, more reliable version produces a vehicle that runs flawlessly.
Most of the work is pretty much by the book. Then we hit a snag, and Carl swings into improvisational mode. When the jack proves too short to fit a pair of shocks, he grabs a concrete block, flips it on top of the jack’s pad, works the jack under a crossmember and pumps up the truck body to gain the needed clearance. Left to my own devices, I’d probably saw a 4 x 4 to the exact dimension and place it on the jack. Fifteen minutes later I might have one of the shocks installed.
Maybe that’s what makes working on old vehicles so rewarding: You battle entropy using everything at your disposal. Then you take your handiwork for a long drive. The very fact that it still runs nicely is a pleasure in itself.
Early evening shadows are stretching across the shop as we straighten up. A radio is tuned to a ’70s rock station, and the scene is so evocative of our teenage years that I confess I've become a little wistful. Carl urges me to take Canby for a drive. “Go ahead,” he says. “Take it for a good, long run.” I back the truck out of the garage and head into town. For some reason, I feel more exposed without a seatbelt as a driver than as a passenger, especially as I get the truck up to its top speed of 50 mph. (The truck’s speedometer goes to 100 mph, but you’d have to drive it out the back hatch of a cargo plane to get anywhere near that velocity.)
Driving along with the windows down and the warm spring air billowing in, I get the truck’s full effect. The rude howl of six snow tires blends nicely with the growl from the glass-pack muffler. Carl describes the serenade as “primal.” I agree.
Double-clutching helps me make the all-important shift from second to third, but the first time I try it, I amateurishly bang the gears together. It sounds like a mower blade hitting a rock. It takes several miles, a deft touch and a couple of shifts before I have the second-to-third timing down.
Eventually, I turn around and head for home. It’s getting dark, and passing trucks have their lights on. Farmland scrolls by, and as I crest a rise, I meet Carl coming the other way in his snowplow truck. He must have been worried that I’d broken down somewhere and come out to look for me. Seeing him makes me smile. It does a brother’s heart good.
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