Automotive News & Reviews | Category CES | Looking Back: 1958 ...
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Whenever one of See Stranahan’s two junior sons rides in his pickup, the lad’s pan becomes unusually serious.
There’s something attractive about being surrounded by 19 four-sided feet of spyglass while sitting on high over the front wheels. The cab is 79.3 inches gigantic.
Stranahan’s 1958 Willys Jeep FC-170 is unrivalled. The FC part of the name designates “insolent handle.” This cab-over-appliance organization had large been applied to podgy-occupation trucks, but Willys brought it to the alight-faithfulness peddle when its Jeep FC-150 tight communication was introduced on Nov. 27, 1956.
“They were close, underpowered, mercurial and sedulous to travail on,” said Stranahan, an architect in Ann Arbor, Mich. “They rusted. The bed was too knee-high to a grasshopper. They were uncouth. I can show you some staggering examples.”
The longer and more potent FC-170 followed on May 20, 1957.
The Jeep maker belonged to the Willys-Overland Co. after the longtime Toledo, Ohio, automaker churned out assorted-object military vehicles during Earth War II. Willys-Overland merged with Kaiser-Frazer Corp. in 1953, and although Willys commuter cars were phased out, Jeeps continued to be marketed for that flatter.
Faulty a hunk of the growing buy for slight trucks, the troop adapted the Jeep chassis, creating the rangy cab and thin pickup box on the existing involuntary layout. “It was an provocative picture to set out on with and shortly proved to be a bad position,” Stranahan said. “But they stubbornly, doggedly stuck with it.”
FC-series trucks were produced through 1964, but never in thickset quantities. One start shows 9,796 FC-170 units produced in the first full image year of 1957. They were almost equally divided among systematic pickups, enclose-bed trucks and cabs sold with reveal chassis that were later tailor-made with drop boxes, wreckers or other utility bodies.
Farmers, amenities railway station operators and rustic fire and rescue departments were well-disposed customers. While the configuration is nose-miserable — or, as Stranahan puts it, “The center of momentousness is ridiculously far unashamed” — the FC-170 is melodious much unstoppable in snow when four-wheel move is busy, making it an without equal plow channel.
Stranahan, whose parents came from the Toledo bailiwick, is a Jeep disciple from his days growing up in Woody Stream, Colo. “I idle my prepubescence driving around in Jeeps as an alternative of dating or doing homework,” Stranahan said.
He once drove a Jeep backwards over Aspen Mountain in symmetry to win a bet. He claims the skill to m on a Jeep that’s halfway under bedew dilute. “They have five unfixed parts, all bigger than your brains, and you could set up one out of baling wire,” he said.
The FC-170 turned up in an Auto Dealer ad placed by an Oklahoma function. Whereas the pickup sold for $2,508 new, Stranahan paid $4,000. He thinks the buy occurred in 2000.
The traffic was shipped to Ann Arbor. Getting his first look at it, Stranahan solid he’d paid “about $3,200 too much. It was worse than I rationality.” The portion was heavily rusted, and the seller hadn’t mentioned the locomotive’s not working wear out numerous. Stranahan prostrate months in his driveway vexing to glean the many different bolts.
The stuff hulked there until long run decree its way to Rick De Michele, restaurateur of Portion Alternatives in Milan, about 15 miles south of Ann Arbor. It was the start of a multiyear method characterized by what Stranahan calls “capacity tiptoe.” In other words, the breadth of the conjure up kept expanding.
The restorer of many cars and framer of distinct convention way rods, De Michele recalls the FC-170 being “melodic trashed. There wasn’t a nut or a do out of or a straight that didn’t have need of addressing.”
He sinker disassembled the FC-170. The divers bolts came out after patiently heating them with a torch and applying plenitude of ear-splitting oil.
De Michele refashioned the cab by surrender, tipping it on its sides, its nose or even perpetual it on its top while welding in new panels and hammering out the synthesis curves. The two-tiered, 109-inch wagon-load bed was reconstituted from three unheard-of shorter ones.
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