Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Progress on the Stude

Progress on the Stude

When I am not thinking WDC I have an automotive hobby and I spend a lot of time in the shop. My current project is the 1946 Studebaker on a Chevrolet S-10 frame.

Envision this…. A pickup truck almost as old as I am on the chassis of a more modern truck built fifty years later. As I sit in the Roadster seat I now have installed I can see the original instrument cluster still in place. The cluster is on a narrow strip and includes an AMP meter, a speedometer, an oil pressure gauge and a temperature gauge. That was all there was and everything but the AMP meter was mechanical. Heck they don’t even use AMP meters any more, now days they use VOLT meters, and everything is totally electric. The Windshield wipers ran off vacuum if you can believe that.

When I get tired of doing body work, I work on the electrical system. My first major milestone when I tackle an automotive project is to mock the vehicle up and drive it for awhile. The reason I do this is to decided if I really like it. I restored a 1953 Ford F-6 and when I finished I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way it drove, steered, the fuel it consumed or much else beyond the way it looked. Who wants to drive an old truck that is hard to steer, rattles along at 30 MPH like a relic? Anyway I decided after that to do a quick mock up to see if I liked where the project was heading.

Let me say that the Studebaker on the S-10 has exceeded all my expectation and it is a Pickup with a classic look and on the more modern chassis a joy to drive. Plus it has been the most affordable of my projects, however the body work and the electrical system have been a challenge.

For me to do electrical work I have to get in a certain mindset. I have to look at the wiring diagrams and talk my way through them and the whole process has to percolate in my mind for awhile. It’s almost as if the minions in my mind have to sort things out before I will have much success making the actual wiring a successful enterprise.

For example when the Cab of the S-10 was removed there were bundles of wires some constituting the main harness, the operating system, the Lighting system, directional system, radio, speakers and plenty more that escapes me at the moment. To make it drivable the functions that had been in the cab of the S-10 had to be transferred into the Studebaker cab. That “Stick” on the column had to be adapted to the cab and bed of a new vehicle. The wires that once fed the instrument counsel of the Chevy had to be adapted to the instrument panel of the Stude…

That meant a lot of head scratching with the diagrams, wire colors and poking around with the test lights and then new connectors on the wires to new switches and lights on the dashboard. Hey the turn signals now work as do the break lights, tail lights an dash board indicator.

Holes in the fire wall have been patched even though the biggie is yet to be accomplished. Progress is being made.