There has been a very noticeable trend in the vintage vehicle hobby over the past few years: the incredible rise in popularity of old trucks.
Trucks from a bygone era have become a major component of every show and now occupy a lofty place in desirable vintage rides.
Jim Sutherland
MyStarCollectorCar has changed our format over the past 16 years, including our approach to trucks. Initially, we handed vintage trucks their own section called ‘Star Truckin’ every month and gave them star treatment as part of our new daily feature story program.
The challenge at the time was rounding up enough truck stories to fulfill our quota per month, even though our truck stories were only a fraction of our car stories back in our early days. The truck scarcity problem meant we had to seek out the small number of entries at every show and grab the story–even if the story behind the truck was not particularly riveting in our opinion.
The bottom line was “it’s a truck”, and that was our mandate when we had a section dedicated to old trucks. Eventually, we moved on from our ‘Star Truckin’ section and included the best truck stories in our ‘Owner Stories’ section.
For the record, we like our big tent approach and will continue to offer both cars and trucks under our ‘Owner Stories’ section-even though trucks are now a huge part of the car hobby.
‘Five for Friday’ is a very popular MyStarCollectorCar weekly feature, and our topic relates to truck jargon found in the today’s car hobby. We will translate the meaning of five truck terms related to the most popular vintage pickups in the hobby.
The first retro truck term on our list is “Square Body”, a nickname attached to Chevy and GMC trucks built between 1973 and 1987. Square Body pickups live up to their name because of their overall shape, a design that indicated ample use of a straight edge when the GM people created Square Body trucks on the drawing board.
The design would become a staple of GM’s truck style for 14 years and is now a very hot commodity in the vintage vehicle hobby.
The second truck term is a “Bumpside Ford”, built by the Blue Oval boys between 1967 and 1972.
The nickname refers to the convex bulge that runs along the sheet metal on the body for the ’67-72 F-series pickups and makes them identifiable as a Ford truck built during these years.
The third truck term is “Dentside Ford”, a nickname given to Ford trucks built between 1973 and 1979. The Dentside Fords had a concave bodyline that was the complete opposite of the earlier Bumpside models because they dipped into the sheet metal on the trucks’ exteriors.
The fourth addition to our truck lingo is “Tin Grille”, a car guy nickname given to Dodge trucks built between 1972 and 1979.
The handle refers to the front grille on the Mopar pickups because they were made entirely of shiny metal from ’72 to ‘79. 1972 marked the introduction of a brand-new truck design for Dodges, one that completely separated them from the 1971 Dodge trucks in appearance, so car guys now celebrate the distinction with the Tin Grille name.
The fifth and final truck nickname is considered a slur by some IHC truck owners: “Corn-binder”.
In fact, we at MyStarCollectorCar removed one IHC story because its owner did not like the Corn-binder label in our article about his IHC. The owner expressed his displeasure every time we encountered him at a show, so we dumped the story. He was happy and we were even happier because Cornbinder is not a slur in our world, and we were tired of his whining.
There you have it, a list of “trucky” terms submitted for your approval here at MyStarCollectorCar.
Jim Sutherland
By: Jim Sutherland
Jim Sutherland is a veteran automotive writer whose work has been published by many major print and online publications. The list includes Calgary Herald, The Truth About Cars, Red Deer Advocate, RPM Magazine, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Windsor Star, Vancouver Province, and Post Media Wheels Section.
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