30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Four: Preparing to Escape

Preparing the truck for the move and to be converted into my home involved doing a lot of mechanical work. The original 235 straight-six cylinder engine was worn out at 78,000 miles. As fortune would have it, Woodley's brother-in-law had a GMC 305 cu. in. V6 that he had removed from a Carryall. I purchased it for $25 and disassembled it for rebuilding.

Woodley quickly realized why the laundry company that he bought his step van from wouldn't let him test drive it on the street. Besides having a worn-out engine, the brakes were poor and the front springs broken. Working together, we removed his engine and disassembled it, taking the block and head to the same machine shop that was doing the work on my new V6.

When it was time to pick up the parts, we loaded it all into the back of my beat up old 1962 Rambler American station wagon. I had hauled a lot of stuff in/on that old car, including the rear axle out of Fat Frank's Camaro race car and Ward's Suzuki 350 motorcycle (heaped onto the tailgate), but it was never as much of a low rider as it was with two truck engine blocks, three cylinder heads, two crankshafts and the rest of the parts loaded in. We did get followed by a cop for a while, but didn't get pulled over, which I found kind of amazing.

Here's a old photo of "La Bondo", my old Rambler sitting on the side street behind where we worked on Woodley's truck's engine rebuild install:

The engine assembly took place at "The Shop", which was an industrial warehouse that was rented by several of my associates from the old car club (the "T-Timers", if anyone is interested). The club had since disbanded, but Frank, his brother, and several others had rented the place to have a location to pool their tools and store their race cars. Big James had set up a paint booth, and did body work there, so there was a big three-phase air compressor that could really supply the volume of air needed to run air tools.

I could spend a week going on about some of the antics and exploits that took place at The Shop, but I'll just mention that they included home made explosives, fisticuffs, cheating the phone company, getting ripped off by burglars, turning in some tool thieves, playing detective, and even some actual work on cars. It was the utlimate guy hangout. There was no safe harbor at The Shop, and one day I came in to find that someone had intentionally broken a beer bottle over the top of my partially assembled engine. It was time to leave.

A brake job and a new radiator were added to the project list after the new engine was shoehorned into the engine compartment.

Next on the housetruck came body work. The original box van was badly rusted. Many hours were spent with the pneumatic air tools grinding and removing rust from the exterior of the box, and applying primer and pale yellow paint. The roof leaked pretty badly, so I went up and spackled on some roof goo that didn't really help much.

I had been parking the truck around the corner from my rental house, on a less busy side street. I did my best to keep it out of anyone's way, but being as big as it is, someone was bound to complain. One of the neighbors who lived on the corner of the alley made some noises about calling the police about it being parked there, but I told him that I was kind of interested in what they might be able to do if it was used/moved regularly, and he shut up. In fact, he got rather friendly after a while and started giving me advice on the painting.

Each morning I would pull the truck into the alley behind my rear house and go to work on it. My intent was to have at least a few of the interior amenities installed before I gave up the rental house and put myself on the road.