Restoring Ham's '48 Willys 2WD - Progress

It's been a bit since I updated things - it's summer and there is a lot to get done.

Lots of seemingly little things have been finished since mid-June. In the last group of pictures I showed the radiator in place, but it didn't have a fan shroud on it. A new fan shroud was built since then. The old shroud wouldn't fit because the new radiator is a different "one size fits all" unit, so pieces of the old shroud with new sheet metal pieces was fabricated. Hoses come off the new radiator at different angles, so notches and cut-outs had to be made to accommodate things. The original seal between the radiator and shroud was some sort of fuzzy material that looked like the padding of an old rug. New rubberized sealer strip was fitted - this truck probably hasn't had a cooling system this good since 1955 if then.

Lots of detail work is being looked at. New door handle kits were ordered because of the pitting and poor finish on the "triggers". Getting the triggers re-chromed was as expensive as new kits and would have taken about as much work to tear them down and reassemble them. A few pieces will need to go to the chrome shop - hood scripts and windshield wiper mounting pieces.

All of the glass was received. We let the glass shop install the glass in the vent windows - they can get a better seal since they do it a lot more often than we do, and if they break the glass, it's their glass. The doors are going together. The passenger door is complete, we're waiting for a back-ordered part to finish the driver door. The latches go "click" very nicely and the cleaned up and lubricated window mechanism pushes the glass up and down in the new channels very smoothly. It's nice for some things to work right the first time! I think I'll try to sell the old glass as a set to someone who is doing another restoration.

We're going to try to repaint the door panel inserts back to the original color - sort of an ivory to match the interior trim. It is going to be another interesting task. The panels still have sort of a slick finish, so scuffing them isn't an option and priming would fill in the embossing. If we apply paint too thick, the embossing gets lost.

We have the wiring harness. Routing it and finding the right terminals is going to be interesting. The harness has provisions for turn signals, but I'll not use those wires - tie-wrap them off for a future (?) project some day.

The big job still undone is the bed. It's been a convenient parts room for the rest of the job, but as it gets closer to empty it gets time to start on it. We've had a couple of false starts on buying new bed panels. They're not cheap and shipping isn't either. Once we get the bed up on end and can give it a fine tooth comb inspection - we'll make the fix/buy decision. It's right at the edge on which way to go right now.