1949 Chevy 3100 in Red

This is a 1949 Chevy half-ton short bed pickup. It came from my father-in-law's backyard. We lived in the Mojave Desert and he was a typical desert person. He would drive a car until it died and then he'd park it in the back and he'd buy another one and scavenge parts off of the first one to keep the second one going. He was actually not arrested, but he got in trouble for running a private junkyard because he had 50 some cars back there. He had to get rid of a bunch of them, which is a shame. But anyway, I had painted some cars. I had done some minor restorations and I asked my wife, I said, I want to do a full restoration on something. What would you like? Let's pick something from your dad's backyard and I'll restore it. And he had some neat cars back there, but she wanted this truck and I was kind of disappointed in that, but that's what she wanted. But she had actually learned to drive in this truck. So he had several of them back there. So we took the best parts from, I believe, five different trucks to make one and wouldn't you know it, not one of them was a five window. Would have loved to have had a five window. I'm not a very imaginative person, so hot-rodding it, I didn't think I'd be able to do that because I don't really know numbers and how to do any of that stuff. So I put it all back to stock, which is expensive. Just rebuilding the old straight six was expensive and it probably would have been worth more money or more fun to drive had we hot-rodded it some. But it is fun to drive the way it is, but you can't really go anywhere with it. It's got the four-speed transmission and that first gear granny, you could put it into granny and step out and walk alongside it while it's putting along. So it'll do 55. It's not real happy trying to get up to 65 to drive around here. So it goes to the post office and the library and the hardware store, that's about it. The car was red originally, but it had become orange because of the sun. It still has the torque tube instead of a drive shaft. It has the single action knee shock absorbers. We put the outside visor on it because I like the way they look. That allowed us to buy the traffic light viewer prism on the dashboard there. That was a thing so you could see a traffic light when they used to hang in the middle of the street because you couldn't see that with the visor on. The original truck had spotlights on both sides. I should say the main donor truck. So I got new spotlights and put them in. Boy, that door closes nice. Well, I just finally replaced those latches because I was tired of the rattle. How about the chrome? Did you redo all that? Yeah, we had all the chrome redone back when you could actually get chrome done. I finished this back in 70, I'm guessing 76. So this paint was Centauri. It was a acrylic enamel and really, really easy to apply. And of course, California said you can't buy it in California anymore. And so when I was working on other cars, I had to find something else. I actually thought maybe I'll drive out to Arizona, see if I can buy it, but never did. It was sure an easy paint to apply and it's held up great. It's going on 50 years, but it's always been garage. My wife did the bed. The only thing that is original in the entire rear end here is the fenders. These were all single walled boxes. And of course, they were completely beat up and the tailgates are all beat up and all the bed steel was beat up. But you can buy just about any part for these nowadays, all steel. If I ever did something to this to update it, I would take this engine and put it in my Land Cruiser. This engine runs great.