Originally posted by Arjay Bee 
That Powerwagon series is very interesting - never seen one of those before - looks like a real beast - does it have power steering?
It don't have power nothing. . . unless you count the PTO winch!
We've made very few upgrades during the restoration. The guys at the shop strongly recommended putting in better brakes, plus a synthetic winch cable. I insisted on adding synchromesh, which the later Power Wagons in this series came with. We both thought bolting on some turn signals and brake lights would be a good idea.
And yes, it is a "beast". These were introduced in 1945 (with 1946 as the first model year) as soon as car makers were able to start producing vehicles for civilian sales again. Somebody at Dodge had the idea: let's go through the bin of military parts we're already making and put them together into something we can sell commercially! Maybe some of these returning G.I.s would like to have something like the military trucks they're already familiar with. And the result was what some have called the toughest pickup truck ever made.
They were made from 1945 to 1978 with only minor changes -- only an expert can tell the first one apart from the last. In the 1960s, emissions rules caught up with it, and it wasn't economical for Dodge to redesign the power train to meet them. The US Forest Service testified before Congress trying to get an exemption, since they were unable to find another vehicle to take its place! They didn't get their exemption, but Dodge kept on making and exporting them. It was a dinosaur, and the tooling was all wearing out, but every time they wanted to shut down production they'd get a call from some oil company working in Brazil or the Congo saying, "Send us another two thousand Power Wagons!"
It's not exactly a rare truck, as such, but a great many of them were beat up and worn out, and most of the surviving ones have been converted into mud buggies or the like. Very few are restored like we've done with mine.
Quote: don't all rebuilds run down to the wire - that's my impression from all the rebuild shows on TV...;-)
I'd hoped from the start to have it ready for the Comanche County Pow-Wow. That was a week earlier, so obviously we missed that one. At the shop they have several cars in the works at any given time, but the pace is determined largely by the customers. There was one guy ahead of me who really, really wanted his car done urgently, and he prevailed on them to drop everything else for about three weeks. And I was really OK with that, since if I don't make it to one car show, there's always another one coming up. It'll be done when it's done.
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