1950 Chevy

Purple grows on you after a while, but it's a nice purple.

Yeah, it's going to be nice.

Which is all said and done.

So, like I said, we can't wait for it.

Just a couple of very small patches to put in.

But primarily, I wanted to get the car back to the original B-3 blue.

So it's nice to see these these around.

I just love them.

It's like sitting on your couch.

Every car has a story.

Like, the best thing ever.

For some, they end up here.

These are just some of the stories about those who collect and restore vehicles, giving them a renewed lease on life so that their stories can be told right here on Radical Restoration.

Closed captioning provided by Cre-Oil.

On line at Cre-Oil dot com.

Funding for Radical Restoration is provided by (Music) Rakabot sources sustainable materials to create boot racks that organize footwear that allows drippings to go in the bowl.

Models designed for home, work or recreational settings are available on line at Rakabot dot com Joe's Hand Cleaner Manufactured by Clean Products supports Radical Restoration With our without water Joe's Hand Cleaner cleanses to ingredients that are food or cosmetic grade A family business since 1948.

On line at Joe's Hand Cleaner dot com.

Tire tag.

Re Usable labelling to organize tire rotation and re-mounting.

Tire Tag.

(car honk ) Tire dash Tag dot com Additional funding provided by Nutrafarms and Hagerty Insurance In this episode, we see how a 1950 Chevy pickup truck is transformed.

Then we tour the shop to see how some of the project cars are coming along.

Well, we picked it up.

Me and the wife, about 29 years ago.

We're together 40 years and just about 40.

So she got two and a half years left at Chrysler and we figured we'd better get on the move and get this finished.

So we don't want to be hassled and we want to enjoy it.

When she finished, right.

So I said, Now is the time.

Do or die, right?

So I brought it to Gary and checked him out on the website and stuff, and he's got a impeccable record for his work and stuff.

And I seen these cars and all this stuff he done and I had another guy who was supposed to get back me and he didn't, right?

So I said, Snooze, you lose.

So I came to Gary, man, and Gary's a nice guy.

He does good work.

And I came looked at the facility here and it looked good All the guys are great, the team.

And I said, Well, you got the job, Gary, And here it is right?

My dad always had trucks and I learned how to drive a standard on a truck sort of like this, only for it was a 57 short box step side.

This is a short box step side too and it's just a couple of years older.

And I just love trucks.

Right.

And they're a little easier to do than a car.

So so its all according to what you getting into?

Right.

So, well, we're going to go with silver all the way down from the door, from the top of the bottom of the window, say, down silver.

And we're going to go like a purple up top with some pearl into it, not so heavy on the pearl and what else has got a mustang?

Two front in in it from Fatman fabrications from the States and it's got a nine inch sorry, a Ford rear end in it from a 66 Ford Econoline van.

The reason why I picked it, because the width in the back, it was pretty much dead on with the one that came out the original.

So and I've got a four and a half inch chop, out of the roof and it had side glass, little vent windows and the doors, I took them out and I took the drip rail off around the top of the door to make the truck completely round everywhere.

I'm turning like sort of.

Well, a lot of vehicles today they don't got drip rails.

They're just, they're all rounded off.

So I'm taking a bit of newness important in here to rounding it off because this truck is so round everywhere else.

So I made it blend it all in a little bit better.

Right?

I got an air conditioning into it.

1200 watt amps stereo put it into and, which is lots for me.

I don't even listen to the radio.

And I didn't go too crazy, I got a did a steering column and I got a billet steering wheel.

Expensive stuff, Walker radiator Sanders and headers, stuff like that bow tie, Chevy covers and 350 put into it and 200 R transmission being rebuilt, put on a dyno too.

So before I put it in, I know it's going to be shifting perfect and I know the guy that owns his own transmission shop.

So I'll getting a sort of a deal there, which is good.

Every little deal adds up when you're talking big money in these things, I don't want to tell you the price or you'll probably fall down on the floor how much I got into it, (laughs) but that's the way it is.

You're better off to buy them done today and try to get in and do this stuff yourself.

Unless you really handy yourself at this stuff.

(music) Oh, I want it tomorrow.

But that's not happening.

But I'm in a sort of a rush, but not really.

Like I just want it to be right.

That's all right.

Nice clean job, that's all.

I don't have to be perfect.

Everybody wants a perfect machine, right?

But there's nothing perfect, far as I'm concerned.

But you just.

That's it.

That's just when I get it, I get it right.

But I'm hoping another two months, probably be finished.

It's a lot of work.

It's a lot of work, believe it or not.

Right now, I'm going to drive that every day, right?

I was hoping to get driving, so I still got some hair left on top.

So I'm not bald and let my hair blow back or whatever, (laughs) but it doesn't really matter at my age.

(laughs) but other than that, everything is good, right?

I just hope it comes out nice.

(music) She's doing good, buddy.

I love it.

It's coming along, right?

I just can't wait like everybody else, I guess.

But waiting to get dressed up a bit more.

So then take a snapshot, show the wife.

But I don't want to show it to her yet I want to get the engine in it first, a little more color color scheme and be nicer.

There's just too many bits and pieces yet to take a picture and make it look nice.

Nice, like, you know.

But it's coming, it's coming.

But it takes time, though.

A lot of parts, eh, it's been a while.

Well, like I said, I got the truck 30 years that's quite a while.

But the wife picked the colors in case you were into purple right top of the truck.

It's going purple too, more.

It's just the top and the box rails, they're going Just the rails, they're going purple.

But the rest of the truck also Silver.

Right.

So it's going to look nice.

Nice combination.

I seen one done like it.

But I'm making this on the door and it's purple and the silver is a little bit different.

Right?

So not the same because you don't want that identical to somebody else.

Got it right.

So but other than that, it's good.

Everything is brand new.

Everything.

So custom stuff too, right?

Gets expensive.

All right.

But I want to give this one to the wife.

Let her drive this and I'm after another one.

I'm looking at two right now like this, but same truck.

But it's a long box.

This is a short box?

All right.

So just got to get on the sweet side a bit of the old lady there, I hope she don't see this tape.

(music) There's a box, too.

It's got the oak floor.

I want to do a dark stain on it, just like a white oak.

And it's going to look a bit too dark with the grain It's going to pop it, make nice, come out nice and I'll stainless steel strips in between the boards.

But the purple grows on you after a while.

But it's a nice purple.

Yeah, it's going to be nice when its all said and done.

Right.

So like I said, we can wait for it, but.

(music) My name's Darren.

I'm from the Barrie area and I've got a 1969 Dart that that I've had now for about a year and a half.

I've been, I've been bringing my, my cars to Gary here at Radical for probably ten years now and have probably brought him at least ten cars.

But this one here is a nice one that I found out of the US out of Maryland and all original body panels original.

And I just wanted to bring it back to the original B3 blue color.

So when I brought it in, it just had some minor, some minor work to be done in the bottom Fender and quarter panel.

So there was just a couple of very small patches to put in.

But primarily I wanted to get the car back to the original B3 blue.

So this kind of reminds me of when I was a kid and I grew up on a farm and we drove these types of cars in the in the early to mid eighties.

So I remember having a blue one just like, like this driving around.

So it brings back some good memories.

It's a rebuilt 340 motor with the six pack set up in it not original to the car but it it certainly makes a difference when you put a fresh 340 and the six pack on it.

So it rides nice.

This will be my fourth one now.

So I'm kind of partial to the Dodge Dart from from growing up with them.

But this is my fourth and this will be the one that I keep.

And it may sound funny, but primarily because of the color.

And that's, you know, what I learned how to when I learned how to drive.

Well well and for all the Dodger Mopar guys out there to the 346 pack is pretty attractive to keep as well.

(music) You know.

And these cars were these cars were destroyed like in the in the in the eighties they weren't they weren't worth much.

So, you know we were driving these around the farm.

You could pick them up for a couple hundred dollars.

So it's kind of nice to be able to keep a bit of history to restore it.

They just had a lot of character.

Yeah, You know, had a lot of character.

(music) Yeah.

We're here today in the Body Shop Side Work has really come along on the 77 Volkswagen van.

This thing turned into quite a fairly big job.

It was lots of damage underneath, a ton of metal work in it (music) Oh yeah, really (music continues) A little bend in it to make it go around the corner and then we'll see if we can get it to fit.

(Music) Yeah.

So see me.

A little bit more.

(music) It's pretty close.

Yeah.

I'll cut the rest of the rust out all the way across and I'll be welding my new piece in.

Mike's done a great job getting it, all smoothed out.

This is just going to act as a guide coat.

So they're going to do the final sanding on it.

Coming up in the next couple of days.

We're going to get a nice dark blue on the lower and a white on the top.

(music) And then Chris has done a really nice job on all the seats are already done.

So we're trying to hustle this along for them because they're going to be using it for promotional stuff this summer.

(music) (sanding) Well, there's a 1931 Ford, as I understand.

The customer purchased this.

And the same day that he was unloading it off of his trailer, he was backing it off and the throttle stuck or something happened and it had come flying off the back of the trailer and actually hit the back of the car into his post of his garage and suffered some fairly extensive damage.

It bent the rear, flipped it, and actually broke the fender off, dislodged some of the the bodywork the the gas tank underneath the car is bent and pushed forward right into the differential.

So it it's taking quite a hit.

It's cracked the body all the way up into the roofline on both sides.

And it's back it's bent the rear flip down into into the rumble seat area.

So we've got to get into a little bit more.

I'm suspecting that there is probably some frame damage as well on this back corner.

But that we won't know until we get it up in the air and do some measurements (music) (sanding) We can just get it out here on the stone Find your happy place Do a quick wipe.

We've just finished up on the 31 Ford that's been in for the accident.

If you recall earlier, the This Fender, the Lower Valance, all this up in here had been damage from the brick falling on it.

They've been involved in the accident where the accelerator had stuck in it.

You know, The guy had the car for one day and went right into the garage center post.

So we were able to recreate all this for him, straightened all this out.

There was some structural stuff underneath.

There was a box and frame rail.

It was bent.

So there's a bit of extra work in this one.

We were very lucky.

This is a hard color to match because it's look in the without the sun, it looks black, but it actually has a a green flake in it.

We were able to blend it up the sides and you can tell where where we actually did the blend we talked about of some of the old tail lights that he had.

They were just sort of strips in here.

And we brought the old style teardrops in with the blue dots in the middle, which is sort of more correct for the period.

Car came out pretty good.

This is a 1953 Pontiac.

We've done body paint and we're in the process right now of doing the interior.

We tend to work with the client's budget.

This one, they're trying to keep it, you know, as low as possible.

So where we would normally we replace trim or try and re chrome it, we're trying to make it look the best that we can.

So these are the panels that's going to follow the blue and white on the exterior.

So we've got a navy with a nice white, crisp white on its we've dragged as you could see over here, we've dragged the white piping in to break up the blue.

So that's your front seat.

This is your your panels for the back.

So we've got a bunch of different designs.

We're trying to use as much of that old trimmers.

We can we do all of our interiors in-house, we stitch our own stuff.

We do our own door panels, headliners, carpet.

Well, well, it's a 53 Pontiac Chieftain that's got a lot load of chrome on it.

And I can't believe there's that much chrome on it.

But every single piece has a very specific type of clip.

And yeah, they just don't make them.

This is this particular model, of car a lot of people don't refurbish.

It's usually like 55 or like 48 or 49, not 53.

So trying to so which all we can get are just miscellaneous clips and then it takes twice is more than twice as long because I have done Line up these clips make some marks on it, then I can't just leave these in place because they're not designed for this, because some of these are pretty wide.

So then I have to prime them.

I got a special primer for urethane and then I got a urethane them in place so that they don't move on me.

And the urethane takes a day to set up.

So it's it's like it takes two days to do a job that should only be a couple of hours.

But you do what you got to do and but I couldn't find any access.

Really anything else to go on like this.

But can it go down far enough?

That's the thing Oh, okay.

So yeah, we got about an inch of space.

Okay.

One, two, three.

And we're going to have to put a hole in here.

Yeah, there's a little hole here, though, that's going to go.

I know, those are supposed to be so.

Yeah, we made them.

Engine mounts here to fit the actual small block Chevy and the car that's designed for inline six.

It's kind of a hell of a task.

But after we did it, so we actually made engine mounts for it.

Got the actual bracing all through the top here.

There's another big channel that sat way out to about here.

So you weren't able to get any of the V8 part of it in there because it just wasn't enough room at all.

So we had to lop all that out, actually make it all fit, and then we had to make a transmission cross member You see at the back here, right there with the original one actually un-bolts.

So the measurement of the actual Chevrolet engine and the transmission that we're using added up exactly where the original one was.

So it was pretty, pretty nice to see that happen.

It was kind of like a icing on the cake after the battles that we've had with this one Yeah, everything else fits well with the rad saddle.

and all the fans and stuff like that in it, the rad hoses all match up to it But that's the engine right there that's going to be going in the car Bit of an upgrade.

-Yeah -to a flat head 6.

Yeah.

Flat head 6 weight in That was like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is sort of what we call kind of a budget built on this one.

You know it's customer supplied a lot of the parts and you know, there's a lot of stuff that we would normally do on this, like the chrome work.

We've polished some of it, but you can see some of it's still got little ripples of dents in the in the trim.

But the customer chose not to, you know, spend thousands of dollars in re chroming and fixing trim work.

So we've spruced up as best we can.

And it's probably one of those things where you can just get out and drive it.

So the upgrade to the small block Chevy with the three speed automatic.

So the power glide power.

Yeah, no, it's the three speed sort of that's turbo 350 and we have to upgrade the rear end a little bit because this had the old torgue tube You can see down in between there down underneath, you can see that was the tube and the rear end was all one piece.

So we've got to adopt a proper driveshaft and stuff into it, but interior's already already made up.

We're just going to do the wiring next and then we can start putting the interior in it, put it back together.

(car approaches) This is a 1959 Ford Fairlane 500.

This is a regular customer of ours.

You know, earlier late sort of late last year, he was in for we did a bunch of the window glass and trim problems and stuff.

We're not fitting properly this time.

He's been in had a bunch of oil leaks like from one end to the other.

There was oil leaks in the engine.

The transmission and steering.

So we basically went through everything with it and got all that, got all that cleaned up for him.

He says, I don't want any more drops on my garage floor.

I said, Yes, sir.

And we looked after that.

I'm sure he was actually quite happy because he thought it was a rear main seal, which would have caused, you know, a lot more expense.

And it turned out it was some other problems with the oil dripping down off the top of the motor down the back.

It made it appear that it was at the bottom.

So, yeah, beautiful car, real nice driver.

It's nice to see these these around.

I just love them.

It's like sitting on your couch now.

Is this the Color scheme that it came?

Yes.

Yes.

This is one of the color schemes.

And funny, there's different variations of this color that was used throughout the fifties.

You know, when you think about the the 55 to 57 Chevy's there was you know, there was tropical Turquoise and Bahama blues and stuff like that.

So they were very, you know, Caribbean themed colors.

There was lots of different ones.

This is this greens and, you know, turquoise colors, very, very popular from basically the early fifties to late fifties, this being a 59.

But, you know, they just look great these days and everything is sort of one color nowadays.

And you get these two tones is just lovely.

What's unique about this car is it has one of the early, you know, what they call F-E motors from Ford.

It's got a 352 which was your basis for your 39 F-E motors, which was F-E stood for Ford and Edsel and the problem is, is as you go along, the parts are getting harder and harder to get for these things.

So they keep them maintained and and running smoothly.

It saves you a lot of money down the road because it just gets harder and harder to find this stuff.

Funding for Radical Restoration is provided by (Music) Rakabot sources sustainable materials to create boot racks that organize footwear that allows drippings to go in the bowl.

Models designed for home, work or recreational settings are available on line at Rakabot dot com Joe's Hand Cleaner Manufactured by Clean Products supports Radical Restoration With our without water Joe's Hand Cleaner cleanses to ingredients that are food or cosmetic grade A family business since 1948.

On line at Joe's Hand Cleaner dot com.

Tire tag.

Re Usable labelling to organize tire rotation and re-mounting.

Tire Tag.

(car honk ) Tire dash Tag dot com Additional funding provided by Nutrafarms and Hagerty Insurance Thank you for joining us.

My name's Gary Nichols.

Until next time, may all your rides be radical.

(car drives by) (tires squealing) (sanding) (music)