Now, while my exposure to what are euphemistically labeled motorheads admittedly is somewhat limited at this point in the game, I am gathering more and more evidence to support the conclusion that most people who own these vehicles are neither knowledgeable nor motivated enough to perform the maintenance on their cars themselves. These people simply like owning them. This is a fascinating concept to me.

Certainly, some motorheads like to restore classic vehicles; some love it. However, I met a young man today at my bi-monthly classic meet who owns a ’92 Wagoneer; beautiful car, classic, bold, masculine styling. I remember them from when I was a boy. He recently had a tune up, as well as the valve cover gaskets and the oil pan gasket replaced by his classic motor shop. My readers should understand here that there are no items on the engine that are easier and more foolproof for the owner to perform or replace himself. Yet he paid exorbitant shop prices for someone else to do it for him.

No one sensible would fault anyone else for not knowing how to do something, whatever that something might be. This is what learning is for. Yet, to this Wagoneer owner, the satisfaction lies not in the learning, but only in ownership; in bathing her, in polishing and detailing, in the accolades, the questions, the answers; in the awe of his attentive listeners as he parades his vast acquired knowledge of the history of the Jeep. I suppose that’s fine for him, if that is what makes him happy.

For me, however, I personally could not afford to own Charlotte if I had to pay someone to maintain her for me, even more so to restore her. That $1200 I paid to Larry to rebuild the head was my financial, psychological, and philosophical limit of having someone else work on my truck in my stead, and that was only because I’m not set up for that kind of work. Larry owns machinery I would not dream of owning, and has fifty years of stored knowledge I cannot equal, especially at this stage in my life. He performed only the machine work. I put her back together.

Working on the truck is a challenge for me. I also find it satisfying to accomplish a repair, general maintenance, or restoration of a vehicle. To me, it’s reassuring that the work is now done correctly, that I have reinforced or improved my mechanical knowledge and understanding, that I have saved what usually is a significant amount of money in the process. Said another way, I do not like someone else working on my vehicles. I am thrifty, I want to do it myself, I like to learn, and I like to figure things out on my own.

At this point, the to-do list on Charlotte is dwindling. I have still to replace the kingpins in each front wheel; only one side shows movement, but I will do both. I also have to paint the interior with Chevrolet brown/silver from my Chevy supplier (already have it), reupholster the seat, replace the passenger rolling door glass (already have it), at the same time renewing all related rubber gaskets and glides (have them), and install a headliner.

Eventually, I have to run a fused wire from the heater blower to the switch, but I hardly need that. This engine produces so much heat that, even though I have the water supply from the engine turned off, the cab gets plenty warm already. She also could use a new exhaust system at some point, but there’s no hurry.

Finally, Charlotte’s radio sits on a friend’s bench awaiting rebuild. Now, if I could be assured that this radio would play 1952 stations, with the sensible music that was popular then, the incentive might be there to prioritize the rebuild. Until that assurance arrives or I simply run out of other things to do on the truck, the radio will sit on that bench awaiting acquisition of a single oval speaker that, now that Radio Shack has gone out of business, seems to be eluding me. I’m not sure I want to get into replacing diodes and all that, so I may just buy an original block-off plate on ebay to cover the hole in the dash and be done with it.

Someone said to me recently, “You’re almost finished with her. What will you do then, get another one”? That is the first time I considered that I am almost finished restoring her. His remark caught me a little off guard. She has been a lot of work, that’s for certain. She will never be perfect, no show truck, by any means, but a nice-looking, safe, and reliable driver.

I’m attached to the old girl now, so I have no plans to sell her. Still, all things considered, with most of these trucks today going for between $15,000 and $25,000, some even $30,000 to $40,000, and I’ve seen them as high as $60,000, it turns out she also was dirt cheap.

The winter offered us this year was fairly mild. With a stretch of unusually-warm days arriving in March, I was suddenly met with a new project, a sort of emergency. Out driving Charlotte one day, I noticed the clutch starting to slip. I knew this was not my fault since I am quite careful with a clutch. I confirmed the problem during a test drive on another day. So, it was settled, a clutch job had just become the next project.

Over the next week, I collected the parts from my Chevy supplier, clutch plate, pressure plate, throw-out bearing, pilot bearing, gasket kit, checking with Larry about refinishing the flywheel. Awaiting the parts, I busied myself reading the shop manual about the procedure. It looked a simple-enough job. As the last of the parts arrived, I could be found already covered with grease, set about removing the transmission.

Now, as I mentioned, by the shop manual, this procedure should not have taken long, no more than a couple of hours. However, this shop manual was written, as are probably all manuals of this nature, operating under the presumption that the machinery the mechanic is working on was assembled correctly prior to the event.

Instead of those couple of hours, it took me, in fact, two days to remove the transmission. The only way I finally got it out is by dropping the rear end out of the truck so the transmission could clear the driveshaft. It turns out that this last one-half inch the transmission case needed to clear the universal joint was governed by that pesky law of physics stating that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. To resolve the suspense building within my readers, let me make a longer story a little shorter by jumping to the reason for that inconvenient one half inch governed by that same law of physics.

After finally getting the transmission out, then removing the clutch components one by one, did I learn that someone had installed the clutch plate the wrong end around. Consequently, the “neck” of the clutch plate, which is supposed to face toward the engine, was now facing the transmission.

Installed forward-facing, the neck is not a factor, allowing the input shaft from the transmission to slide effortlessly out. With the neck now facing the transmission, the input shaft could not clear both the neck and the universal joint. By dropping the rear end, I succeeded making barely enough room to finally wrestle the transmission out.

All the while, I could be heard muttering with increasing intensity that the men who wrote the shop manual must never have worked on one of these trucks. However, as I finally discovered, these guys write their text operating under the assumption that the truck I am working on was put together correctly prior to this event. In the perfect world in which the writers of my manual existed, yes, the job should have taken no more than a couple of hours, the transmission sliding effortless out.

Also, with the clutch placed the wrong end around, the clutch springs, which are designed to dampen any grabbing of the friction plate as it is squeezed between the flywheel and the pressure plate, were now positioned tight against the flywheel bolts. When the engine was first started, this must have made quite a racket, springs hard against bolt heads, whirling metal shearing helpless metal, bolt heads ground down half their thickness. Since this mess was set in motion long before I acquired the old girl, I was not around to witness all that commotion.

With no room to maneuver, became the next logical question, how did whoever it was get all these mechanicals back together and fitted back into the truck in the first place? The answer to that question is that all this mess was accomplished when the engine was removed and replaced during that partial rebuild somewhere during the 1990’s. Both the engine and the transmission were reinstalled as a unit, so there was no requirement to clear the driveshaft.

As a result, as is usually the case, it now became up to me to undo the mess in whatever creative way possible, then to make it right. This may have been the force at work motivating a friend long ago to declare when introducing me to someone else, “This is Doren, the restorer of lost causes.”

Off I whisked my flywheel for refacing at Larry’s shop. It turns out that the ring gear was so torn up, it needed replacing, so, again, to make things right, that had to be accomplished, for additional cost, of course. Hey, there is no sense in expending all this energy and cost to do the job, then only halfway. People have already been employing that philosophy with this truck for most of its life, and I am forced to live in the aftermath. If we are going to do this job, then let’s do it right. Otherwise, don’t bother to own the truck.

It was too cold over the winter to do anything with Charlotte but drive her, so I consoled myself with that. Still, I learned that even though I was missing the entire window unit from the driver’s side door, in the dead of winter the heater plus two dogs were enough to keep me warm.

For Christmas, my kids gave me all the hardware, stainless steel bed strips, carriage bolt kit, to install a new bed in Charlotte. All I needed now was wood.

Some now-obscure owner in this truck’s now-ancient history replaced the original wood in the bed. Despite that she left the factory with what was the Chevrolet standard: 3/4 inch thick wood in the bed, this now-obscure owner decided to make the new bed he was installing one-inch thick instead. This was most likely because he had only one-inch-thick boards available and no planer to change that dimension. To secure his new plan, he welded the angle iron support rails to the bed sides at one inch.

Thus, from then on, everything that had anything to do with the bed had to be adapted to accommodate this new dimension. At every turn in this bed project I was reminded of this unalterable dimension that I had inherited.

One can buy the wood kit from most antique Chevy suppliers, which, depending upon the species, oak or yellow pine, can run anywhere from $450 to $600. He can also use whatever wood he desires as long as he has the machinery to mill it. However, any wood kit he buys is all milled to factory specification: 3/4 inch thick.

I have a good friend who is a superb builder. Around that time, he was working on a ninety-year-old house in North Arlington, VA. To tie the new structure to the old, he had to remove a number of rafters which were cut from sturdy, old-growth southern yellow pine trees, wood well known to be fairly strong. Those he gave to me.

A mutual friend living in our shared neighborhood is a cabinetmaker on the side, so he has a small shop in his back yard filled with quality woodworking tools. Armed with his skill, using his tools, he and I planed the rafters to the right thickness to fit Charlotte. Then, using dimensions I found online, ripped them to the desired widths, shaping and grooving the edges as necessary to receive the metal bed strips.

I carried them all home where they lay for the winter, stacked one atop another upon my workshop floor to keep them flat.

With the approach of warm weather, using my own table saw, I further milled the lumber, making many more adjustments to the various dimensions. It turns out the dimensions I found on line were a good place to start, but I had to make up for those inherent shortcomings myself.

Filling the water-blackened holes where the nails from the sheathing pierced the wood, occasional damage from worms, repairing knots and checks, then a thorough sanding, the wood was finally ready for finish.

There are imperfections in the wood, as there are inherent in the truck, but I was ready for that. In fact, I want the bed to have a sort of weathered, rustic, even imperfect look more befitting the long, hard life, the abuse, the history from which Charlotte is now safely, comfortably retired.

Waterlox marine-grade finish, expensive stuff at $42.50 a quart, was my varnish of choice. In my dismay, with each application of finish, the pink tone characteristic of old yellow pine now took on a more golden hue. I am happy with the result. This wood had spent the last ninety years in a hot dry attic, so it was well dried. The thirsty wood soaked up the first coat of varnish like a sponge.

After that coat dried, concerned I might not have enough varnish for a second coat all around, I painted the back, ends, and edges of each board with two coats of Rustoleum Satin Black paint. That allowed for plenty more varnish for the visible side.

After a total of four coats of marine varnish, I let the lot cure for several days in my workshop. I now have more in the can for regular maintenance coats. This varnish is a fairly-slow-drying finish, so every day over the next couple of weeks it seemed to cure harder to the touch.

Restoring this particular truck, I have learned that when I take some item apart for maintenance or renewal, it does not necessarily go back together the way it came apart. Many would-be, hopeful, but dismally-naïve and incompetent backyard mechanics have monkeyed over the years with this venerable old girl, so I cannot trust that what I am studying at a given moment is in the condition that was intended by the engineers, then rolled off the Chevrolet factory floor in Detroit soon after.

Thank goodness included with this truck is the original Chevrolet shop manual, complete with narrative, pictures, and illustrations. Where narrative, pictures, and illustrations are not available for certain parts and systems, my own logic and common sense, mechanical ability and ingenuity have been my salvation. There have been more than a few occasions when I have been forced by circumstances to manufacture my own parts for her from scratch.

In building the bed, the only stock item I could use from my Chevy supplier, the only thing even resembling the original, were the stainless steel bed strips. With thicker wood in the bed, the bolts supplied with the bed kit were now too short. I found a hardware-and building-trade-tools-and supplies merchant in town who ordered lengths of bolts for me that would suit my application. The washers and nuts from the kit I could use, so now I was set.

So, on a late-spring day, wood dry, finish cured, bolts and washers and nuts, tools, work clothes at the ready, plenty of Cutter to stave off mosquitos, I set about assembling my bed. It took two full days in my case because nothing on my truck is standard. In fact, as I mentioned, even the dimensions I found online themselves needed to be modified to make the finished product look and fit right. This truly is a custom bed.

Suddenly, no longer can I just bound over the bed sides to reach things underneath. Because someone has dreamed up this bright idea of installing a bed, I now had to crawl underneath the truck, tools in hand, no less, just to install washers and nuts, then to tighten those washers and nuts, of which there are many, several near impossible to reach with any tool other than my two index fingers stretching around one on either side of the truck’s frame. I tightened those few difficult nuts incrementally with my two fingers as a friend tapped gently on each bolt head from above with a hammer against a small block of wood.

In fact, any future work underneath the truck will require the aforementioned crawling under, tools in hand, to accomplish it. I’m beginning to think I should have installed this wood bed on hinges, lift up the wood and jump in, were this bed truly not already a custom fit in every sense of the word, as well as an enormous expenditure of effort. So far, I have received nothing but accolades about Charlotte’s new bed.