Hi Harry.
That is indeed a sad looking roof on your WIRE-5. I hope you have not purchased any replacement plywood yet for it. Any choice of plywood you should make will be incorrect. It was simply not used in any of the original factory production of these bodies by Wilson. The product they used was 1/4-inch solid fibre board. What we drill holes into today and call ‘peg board’. The trick is, they cut it into strips and installed it upside down; the rough, checkerboard surface facing up, rather than the smooth finished side.
In the 1943 - 1944 time period these trucks were built, several factors played against the use of plywood for these strips. Any marine grade supplys of plywood would have been reserved for the Navy. The use of the newer glues developed by De Havilland to solve delamination problems with the Mosquito in humid climates were reserved for aircraft production. So that left the animal glue based standard plywood’s that everyone knew would not hold up.
Plywood comes in three grades basically, a construction grade where all plies are crap. Good one side with a good ply on one side only. Good both Sides with all the crap hidden in the middle. Marine grade plywood indeed uses water resistant glues but I doubt the grade of the interior woods is much better than standard plywood. Cut into thin strips like you will require for your WIRE-5 roof will probably expose more flaws on the edges. It may take a little longer to happen but over time it would still start to rot out the wood bits.
The other problem is safety. These strips were added to the roof of the WIRE-5 to help reduce the risk of personnel slipping with wet, muddy boots and falling off the nice flat, smooth painted aluminum roof. How much safer would it be with rows of flat, smooth, painted plywood across the roof? They needed something better and as cheap as possible, and they found that with the fibre board strips installed upside down.
Back here in Winnipeg in the 1970’s, Princess Auto had a huge fleet of surplused WIRE-5s in their yard. They sold a lot complete but nearly 50 of them had the boxes removed to use as storage containers and the cab and chassis bits were sold off, oddly enough, as DODGE Trucks in their catalogues of the day. I combed through every single one of those boxes back then, collecting missing parts for my WIRE-5 restoration, including a complete accident write off vehicle sitting out near the front of the store. It was complete and very low mileage. The strips on its box roof, and 75% of all the others in their yard were 1/4-inch fibre board installed upside down. The rest were plywood and all looked like hell. The other interesting thing was most of the plywood jobs were on boxes with incorrect/repainted interiors, which led me to believe these vehicles had undergone a postwar military rebuild at some time using the cheapest possible materials chosen by people who did not understand the original design or purposes of the items being replaced.
David
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