1966 Dodge Power Wagon gets heart transplant
New diesel engine should keep it busy for decades
One of my favourite vehicles is actually a Dodge truck, not a car. When I first started working around vehicles, I fooled around with old military trucks and Jeeps. The reason for this was that they were simple, extraordinarily rugged off-road vehicles and pretty cool. (When I was much younger, my sandbox had been littered with military Dinky Toys.)
My favourite truck, the civilian Dodge Power Wagon, was a thinly disguised military vehicle that rose from the heavy-duty 3/4-ton and one-ton trucks of the Second World War. The first generation was produced from 1946 until the mid-1960s. These trucks were massively overbuilt. When they were more common, it was not unusual to see one customized and festooned with all kinds of equipment such as massive plows, winches or drill rigs that would break the axles of most modern pickup trucks.
A few weeks ago, a wonderful 1966 Power Wagon arrived at my facility. I was delighted because, as much as I love these trucks, this is the first one that had ever arrived here to be worked on.
Funnily enough, while it is the first Power Wagon through my shop doors, it is so familiar because of all the Dodge M 37 military pickups and other Second World War Dodges I have owned and worked on. It was rather like an old friend had arrived.
Its condition was excellent although unrestored and, if it were mine, I would keep the old, weathered yellow paint and blacked-out frame and just keep driving it.
When I asked my general manager what the truck was in for, he told me the job was strictly utilitarian and that the owner wanted a modern power plant installed and a newer transmission with overdrive for the occasional time the truck would be on the road. The frame was to be cleaned, prepped and repainted with a special black anti-oxidizing paint as well.
It turns out this old truck’s working life is not over. It is being prepared to clear land and ready a building site for the owner’s new home. To be better prepared for this, he felt a modern diesel engine might be in order.
I have to admit some personal reluctance here because the flathead six-cylinder that was in the old beast was one of the best-working motors ever built. In some of its incarnations, it was known as the Chrysler Industrial engine. This family of motors powered cars and trucks from the 1930s right through to the ’70s, when they could still be found in tow motors, Zambonis and other heavy equipment.
The engine chosen to replace the
This old truck’s working life is not over. It is being prepared to clear land and ready a building site for the
owner’s new home.
original is a Cummins QSB 4.5. This is not a street diesel designed to push a chrome-bedecked urban powderpuff pickup. It is a very serious working motor designed to power heavy agricultural equipment. It would be as happy harvesting thousands of acres of farm crops or even sitting at the bottom of a mine shaft pumping water for a couple of decades.
The other reason installation of this engine and a rebuilt overdrive transmission caused some trepidation is they are far from drop-in. The re-engineering of the truck is daunting for the simple reason that we don’t want to change its outward appearance or modify it beyond the point where a restoration back to the original in the future would be next to impossible. Among the things we have to do is re-engineer the steering system, since the new engine will occupy the area where the old steering box is located. We also have to radically alter the whole front end, so there will be a number of factors that come into play in creating a new front suspension and steering gear.
The unit that puts power to the front axle and PTO is found on a frame cross member and is far too close to the new transmission. So we have to create a heavy-duty loadbearing cross member and move the whole assembly backward about 38 centimetres. This will mean making a new front driveshaft as well.
The injection pump on the engine is in the wrong place for the truck’s frame to accommodate it at its point of attachment, so we will have to work with engineers at Cummins to relocate the unit.
We also have to move the truck’s firewall backward. This worries me because the Power Wagon doesn’t have a lot of legroom to start with. The truck will be no good if the owner can’t get in and out of it and operate the foot pedals easily — especially in a working situation — so we are going to have to be very clever in solving this problem.
As the project progresses, there will be many challenges crop up large and small. Cooling is always an issue when blending old and new technologies. The electrical system in the Power Wagon will have to be replaced with a brand-new harness and we will have to install all the computers and high-tech gadgets required to run the turbocharged fuel-injected Cummins diesel.
When it is finished, it should be a magnificent truck, capable of another 50 years of heavy work. And, if we have done our jobs properly, it will look no different than when it first poked its nose into the shop.