A little light entertainment: 1939 Ford 1 ton Utility restoration

[jack neville]

It is over two and a half years since The Ford ute hit the road and I guess it is time to get a few things finished. The seat I have been using is out of my Ford/Marmon Herrington gun tractor and has been swapped back and forward.
They are a modified version of the Ford truck seat altered to suit the roadster cab to allow the roof to collapse and stow behind the seat. They are not a very robust design and disintegrate rapidly once the old trucks are allowed to be exposed to the weather. When I built the seat for the Marmy I had only scraps of data to work with and very few photos and no reliable measurements. The seat worked however but there was always difficulties getting the roof to stow behind the seat. A while ago I managed to acquire the remains of an original seat. extremely dilapidated but enough remains to make a better job of the second seat. A lot of detailed woodwork to replicate and I got the spring sets from a civvy Ford truck. It is a very time consuming and fiddly process to rearrange them to copy the ute setup as they are completely different.
It is now ready for Matt Strickland to do his magic and unholster it for me.
I also found that the side panels were never correct which is why I always had trouble with the Marmy. These should now be correct and you can see where I even had to re-correct some of the T nuts even this time. I made an extra pair of side panels to put of the Marmy seat as well.
A very odd thing with these seats is that there appears to be no method of securing the seat. It sits on top of the fuel tank and two drilled holes in the base locate on the two studs on the front corners of the fuel tank. Crash the truck and the seat goes with you into the windscreen. Not so bad on a gun tractor doing not much more than 20 mph I guess but the ute is a bit quicker.

[jack neville]

Spent a day with Matt Strickland while he covered the seat. Used a green vynil that is as close as we could get to the scrap of original material on the old seat i had. Also did the door trims and kick panels. These utes were apparently delivered to the Australian Army from the Ford factory originally finished in a semi gloss finish deep bronze green. I learned this information from Mike Cecil unfortunately after I had already painted the vehicle a sand colour but it was certainly consistent with the green colour I found in places when originally restoring the vehicle. At the time I thought the vehicle must have been repainted that colour post war. According to Mikes info the vehicles were then painted whatever colour was required once delivered. I couldn't imagine the interior would necessarily be painted to match the outside so maybe I will repaint the interior back to the green so it compliments the new upholstery.
Maybe.

[Jan Thompson]

this looks great