This truck was bought brand new by my grandpa back in '82. He used it as a farm pickup for its whole life. He gave it to me years ago after he dropped a tree on the cab. Finally started working on it, after it had been sitting for at least 10 years. Some parts had been stolen off it in that time too. Apparently mice think a bell housing is a great place for a nest if the starter is gone. Anyway, I replaced all the missing parts after a bit of trial and error, and replaced the belts, filters, fluids etc. Runs very smooth, the 300-6 is very quiet, various small issues keep popping up though.






It has the usual rot for a truck this age, the lower rear quarters, and a bit on one rear wheel arch. The entire bed floor is shot too.





Took a trip to the yard today and picked up a few parts. Rear view mirrors, and a water neck (that broke). Also got some nice headlight bezels, and a tailgate off an '87-'91 to adapt. Was hoping to find a 80-81 grille to swap in, but scored a chrome tubular aftermarket piece, looks almost like a billet grille.

Comments?

 

Your bed's floor looks marvelous compared to mine! What I see there looks like
surface rust, nothing major,,,

 

Heh, you can't see where there are pure rot holes, and places I poked through with a tire iron.

 

Went to the junkyard today, and picked up some new visors to replace my missing/ripped originals. Also got a relatively intact dash pad that I'm going to restore using Em's method.
Also found a nice instrument cluster that has a tach, trip odometer, and actual voltage/oil pressure gauges. Touched up the needles with a sharpie and it looks good as new.
Sorry for the crap pics.




Also, I got a new thermostat housing at Checker. Despite being a cheap chinese casting, it is cast iron and thicker than the two stockers I managed to break.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by newrider3

Also found a nice instrument cluster that has a tach, trip odometer, and actual voltage/oil pressure gauges.

If you have idiot lights right now instead of gauges, get ready for some, um,
issues (search the archives on cluster replacement, there's lots there).

 

I figured there would be some difficulty. What in specific is incompatible? Can I just swap the two gauges for the original idiot lights? All I really wanted out of this was the tach, and the trip odo is a nice bonus.

 

you just have lights? the plugs are different, so you would have to wire up an old plug....someone once posted me a diagram or two on here when I tach'ed up my 81

 

Like quad says, the sizes of the wiring connectors are different; the one with gauges has (I
think) 4 additional wires in the harness, resulting in a bigger physical plug. Search the
archives, I did what you're wanting to do (about 2-3 years ago, though) but never hooked
up the ammeter, decided instead to replace the entire harness. The wiring for the tach is
pretty easy but you're prolly gonna have questions for which I'm again gonna point you to
the archives (enclosing multiple words in a search term with quotes helps) as this is
commonly discussed out here.

 

Look in the classifieds. There is a tach and circuit film for your truck there.

https://www.ford-trucks.com/classifi...t/27762/cat/14

Jerry bought it for his truck (later model) and found out that it would not work. I already hooked him up with the one that he needed.

 

50 bucks? I didn't even pay that much for the whole cluster.

But I could just swap the circuit onto the new cluster and plug it right in, correct?

 

No. As already mentioned, all of your information is in the archives.

 

Where are the archives then? I've been looking through all the site links and searching any term related to instrument cluster swaps and I've came up with little more than has already been posted here.

 

Do an Advanced Search in just this forum, not the entire site. There's a notification on the
page, very similar to what I said: "IMPORTANT: Use quotes around keywords to get
better results. Examples: "fuel pump" ; "fuel pump installation"

This search engine kinda sucks and is nowhere near as user-friendly as google but you can
still get good info out of it by playing' around with date ranges, posts vs threads, etc.

 

Apparently I'm just not looking close enough, because that is exactly what I've been doing.

 

I just posted the link so that you would know that one was available.

Jerry is a good guy and will probably work with you. Tach clusters and circuit boards are VERY hard to find for your model year.

I was trying to save you some aggravation.