Unusual looking truck

[Alex Blair (RIP)]

Originally Posted by Mike Kelly

Highly likely to be a import . Why on earth would anyone do that when so many local commercials are still out there ?

Mike..
In '48 when that was a new truck ,Australia probably had not engined up commercial truck production,and trucks like the Ford Cab over were rolling off America's production lines like popcorn..
a switchover from full bore wartime Fords to full bore civilian trucks and they probably exported them all over the world to country's recovering from war time austerity..
Cheaper and faster to import them than to wait in line for your truck..
My guess anyway.

[Dianaa]

Originally Posted by Alex Blair

Mike..
In '48 when that was a new truck ,Australia probably had not engined up commercial truck production,and trucks like the Ford Cab over were rolling off America's production lines like popcorn..
a switchover from full bore wartime Fords to full bore civilian trucks and they probably exported them all over the world to country's recovering from war time austerity..
Cheaper and faster to import them than to wait in line for your truck..
My guess anyway.

I would have thought tooling up for production of those COE trucks would be rather simple. The cab and top of the doors have the same pressings as the normal control cab and I rather suspect that the mudguards have similar if not the same outside profile. The biggest tooling issue is the extensive bonnet.

The advantages of the design are that the footwells are not as cramped as in the blitz designs and being so much higher the driver/offsider are away from the engine heat. I seem to remember lots of these style trucks running around Sydney as a kid in the 1960s, all of them RHD.

On the post war production, my great grandfathers transport business which started in the 19th century had so much trouble getting new trucks in the immediate post-war period that they bought crates of CKD F15a and F30 from the war surplus auctions. The trucks were all built up in-house without the front crownwheel and pinion nor the halfshafts and the C&P placed into store as spares for the rear diffs. About this time my dad swapped a ute for one of the F15As to use on his building company. A few years later when he sold the blitz, the buyer wanted the blitz for its off road capability and wasn't to be deterred from the sale even though dad suggested he'd never used the 4WD, my dad didn't have the heart to tell him that there was no diff centre installed.

[Mike K]

You can contact the Ford Discovery centre in Geelong. They have the local production records but I doubt if any LHD COE trucks were assembled locally around 1948 . LHD drive vehicles were banned in Victoria in 1948 because of a spate of accidents involving LHD ex army vehicles, many of which fell into civilian hands from 1945 onwards.

Locally assembled LHD drive vehicles are extremely rare here , and apart from myriad fully imported 1950's and 60's yank tanks from Nth America which became a popular business venture from the 1980's and keeps on going til today , the only LHD locally assembled vehicles you would see are street sweepers or cranes .

Mike