I heard of this one through fellow old car nuts Fred & Barb Littlewood, belonging to a friend of theirs up in Westhoughton.
This was early in 1993, and the thought of having 2 of the remaining 6 or so steel pickups in the UK proved too great a temptation.
So once again, dad's XJ was pressed into service and dragged the old truck down to Cheshire, being stored in Fred's driveway
alongside their Morris J-type van (OYF470 - since sold on). Going back a bit, both vans were once owned by a small agricultural museum up in the Lake
District somewhere. CJM didn't need much fettling for its MOT and was soon to be seen both at local classic car shows, and out and
about visiting a number of pubs in the area.
To date CJM has been shown at a number of Cheshire shows, for instance Tatton Park, Astle Park, Tabley House (Knutsford) and others.
She's also featured in the Ford Sidevalve Owners Club magazine, as did NCA, and once gatecrashed the Last Night of the Proms
open air concert at Tatton, with 9 people on board, hotly pursued by a Singer Le Mans, Jowett Jupiter and a couple of other venerable machines.
After a while the engine began to run on just 3 or so cylinders, and gradually became more and more difficult to drive, so was laid up for a while
pending mechanical surgery. This didn't happen until I bought my own place, and had a new 3 car wide garage put up,
ready to home some of the fleet. Once up, CJM was stripped down and found to have one burnt out valve, and another bent valve.
One quick hunt round my spares pile located suitable replacements, and the engine was soon back in one piece.
First turn of the handle and she fired up, running on all 4 for the first time in many many years.
In 2005 I set to with a plan to resurrect this interesting old pick-up truck. The gearbox was swapped out (the original had a damaged casing), and a new clutch was fitted while the engine was out of the chassis. A new front transverse spring has been fitted, along with new shackle pins. New engine and gearbox mounting have been fitted too. The bodywork on CJM is reasonably solid, although previous 'repairs' at the back corners of the pickup body were looking a bit ugly, so I hacked out some chunks of filler and decayed metal, replacing it all with some fresh hand-made sections. The plan is not to get the truck to show standard (it'd need a full strip down for that), rather get it to presentable and solid condition, and just use it for local journeys etc. It hasn't been on the road for some time, so I look forward to being able to use it again.
Update. The truck did indeed return to the road, and it was a lot of fun driving it around and about. In the end I had to sell it to raise funds for the Dodge's rebuild. A numberplate dealer bought it (grrrrrr), stripped the number from it, and re-sold it. It now lives on in Ireland, painted a bright orange colour...
To learn more about the E83W truck, please see my sister site devoted to the Ford E83W. Update - to raise money for the Dodge's rebuild, I had to sell a few old vehicles and sadly the green pickup was one that went. It now lives on in Ireland, albeit painted bright orange rather than the original green.
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