Project 53

I grew up on a small farm in South Texas. The farm life teaches you things even if you are not interested in learning. The constant repair of equipment requires welding, fabrication of non existence parts and constant mechanical work. I can’t say that I always liked it but little did I know where it was going to lead me. I had the Camaro’s, mustangs and many other cars during my life. I even ended up co owning a circle track car and was crew chief on that asphalt burner where we just raced local tracks never really taking it any further than that. Forty years passed by quickly and I found myself without any kind of project and I ran across this 1953 Dodge B series truck on Craigslist. I ended up bring home the Truck body already making plans on the way home to have a daily driver built with a 318, automatic trans and certainly out of as many Dodge parts as I could use on the build. Not getting the chassis with the truck body my neighbor had a 1991 Club cab ½ ton chassis sitting as he had scavenged the body off of it for a first generation diesel project. Purchasing the chassis was my first purchase for Project 53 which I cut out 7.5 inches in my shop making it 126 Inch wheel base. I could go on and on but 2.5 years later with very little outside assistance from only a few other folks here is what we ended up with… Engine 1987 Roller cam 318, 302 casting high performance swirl port heads, Comp cam, lifters, Hedman headers, Edelbrock aluminum intake, Edelbrock carburetor, Keith Black pistons….1984 Torque flight 6/ 999 transmission, 1985 -3.21 Dodge truck 9.25 inch rear end and 2009 Dodge truck 17 inch rally steel wheels. A Griffin aluminum radiator, Painless wiring kit, Vintage air and heat, 2005 Dodge Dart high back factory seats, Pioneer sounds with a 10 inch sub woofer and 500 watt amp and a 5 speaker system, Hand built custom wooden dash, on the truck as and all other wood work done by me. My wife assisted and I did all the mechanical work from the engine build, welding, fabrication to lots of painting. We did all of the work except the green paint on the truck which was done by CWC. There are parts from the 1930s through 2020 on this truck. I was not opposed to going to the junk yard and searching out specific parts I wanted to use in the build of project 53. It took 2.5 years working on it almost everyday of the week. It runs out very nice on the interstate and keeps up well with all traffic without any problem. The small details take the longest amount of time to complete so be prepared.