In 1986, a 1970 Dodge D-100 pickup came on our radar long before MyStarCollectorCar co-founders Jerry Sutherland (my twin brother) and I (Jim Sutherland) fired up our e-zine in 2009.
1986 was a pre-historic year because there was almost no internet world outside of nerds and NASA at the time.
Jim Sutherland
Consequently, we connected to the car hobby mainly through the local car hobby via telephone and paper ads. An older brother shared our chronic weakness for old vehicles beyond redemption and knew we would be very interested in a rusty old 1970 Dodge truck.
The sale was sweetened by the seller’s promise to paint the two-tone truck in a solid bright red paint scheme exactly like fire engine red since he worked at a company that built fire trucks and gave him access to cheap red paint supplies. The restoration process would involve generous amounts of Bondo and fiberglass, along with several incidents of heated disagreement about his sloppy process and deadline issues.
Eventually the ’70 Dodge was finished and looked great for a few years until the lipstick-on-a-pig restoration job started to lose the bad Bondo-and-fiberglass fix. The truck went from winter garage storage to winter beater driving in a place with very long winters, mainly because it would start at any temperature and its rust was once again revealed when the cheap body repair job fell out of the Dodge pickup.
The 1970 Dodge truck was a barebones model armed with a Slant Six engine and a four-speed manual transmission hooked up to a low gear rear end. In other words, the truck was screaming at modest highway speeds.
The truck was initially bought for farm use as a no-frills approach to hard work, so it took a beating along the way. It was pampered for a brief period after the shoddy restoration-right up until the sketchy body repair job revealed its true colors-rust and dents.
The ’70 Dodge became a workhorse for us after the shiny paint was gone and hauled major concrete chunks and straw bale loads that broke rear leaf springs, along with extreme towing when we attached a large mobile hot tub filled with water on a bumper hitch.
It lost a fan blade that added a dent to the hood and lost most of the cab floor to rust over the years. The cab floor issue was partially OK because the gas tank behind the seat in the cab leaked and passengers needed the extra air.
More sheet metal disappeared, and the D-100’s front fenders started to flap in the wind, so finally we parked the truck for a few years while we mapped out a game plan for it. The game plan was smart: we sold the truck to a nephew (Todd Puzey) who had the skill set to breathe life back into the Dodge truck carcass.
Surprisingly, the old truck fired right up after several years of inertia and drove right onto to Todd’s trailer. It was the beginning of a very happy ending for the ’70 Dodge because Todd wanted to restore the truck back to its original grandeur when it left the dealership 55 years ago.
He replaced the missing body components with real metal and gave it a complete mechanical refurbishment, along with a reupholstered front seat that once again protected passengers from bare springs. Todd also returned the truck back to its factory two-tone paint scheme because he leans heavily toward originality in vintage vehicles.
The result is a stunning restoration that has completely rejuvenated an old pickup truck destined to kill grass and build mice metropolises in a forgotten patch of forty acres.
Congratulations Todd, you may be a firefighter, but you make one hell of a body man and mechanic.
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.
- CLICK HERE to Sign Up for the Newsletter
- CLICK HERE to Like us on Facebook
- CLICK HERE to Follow us on Twitter
- CLICK HERE to Follow us on Pinterest