#6 Major Catch-up | The restoration of Miss Drop 44's GMC CCKW

If you thought the last one was a photo dump, buckle up. Haven't written one of these for a while, so be prepared for all of the spelling mistakes and clunky writing - lol.

The first step here was removing the body to clean up the chassis (But also replace the body with the one purchased from Richard)… Dan came along to 'help' with this ;)

Following that, some closer inspections of everything were in order. A couple of bits removed and the cleaning begins!! Getting this chassis prepped for paint meant removal of the driveshafts, pillow-block, engine and gearbox, so we started on that too.

As much as I would love to take the credit for cleaning up the chassis with wire wheels and grinder disks, 99% of this work was done by my dad (Russ)... You'll notice this is a common theme here ;). I can however say that the painting of the chassis was done by myself under the guidance of Dom, with the first coat of red sending me loopy after climbing under the truck all afternoon to catch the missed spots. I then repeated the process with the green, finally finishing up late in the evening with some headtorches and lamps. Dom also gave the engine a nice coat of grey - this engine isn't original to the truck anyway, so this was more of an aesthetic choice than a historical one...

While the gearbox & transfer box were out, we gave them a quick inspection, some minor wear on a few gears and a very slight bit of play in a bearing but nothing major to worry about. We also took apart the brake master cylinder to make room for the freshly rebuilt cylinder from Green Barn. Few other parts recived paint too...

Once again, I would love to take the credit for the following pictures but it was entirely my dad's doing... told you there's a theme. The new truck body was delivered from Richard Taylor at Debach (after one minor misunderstanding with me driving a 4 hour round trip for no reason), after Dom had flipped it over, I removed the tailgate and my dad began work cleaning up the underside of the body. We removed some reflectors and found an odd manufacturer GROTE (we were expecting Guides). It feels a bit unfair to my dad to have all of these images in one short blog, because cleaning up this underside of the body took WEEKS... but once that was finished, I could begin spraying, first with the coat of Red Oxide, then giving it a lovely coat of green. Everything seemed to be going a bit too smoothly so just to add some excitement, the tree decided to shed spines all over the wet paint..... Thankfully Dom thought quickly and saved us an evening of sanding and respraying with his expert use of a hoover. Following that, Dan had previously suggested the idea of extending the toolbox, so that's what we did, leaving a gap either die to accommodate the clamps that hold the body down to the chassis. Once that was all sorted, Dom and my dad spent a day fitting the new body onto the chassis, with fresh new wooden bearers. Once on the truck, my dad spent some time getting the sides of the body into red oxide primer.

Overall we're making some pretty major progress at the minute, with stuff actually starting to get bolted back on!! In the background we've also been collecting new parts from various places, all of which have been/ will be promptly put into a fresh coat of green. Still a while to go yet but its starting to feel possible now!