So I’ve given up on my hunt for a 40/41 Ford Pickup for a couple of reasons. First, the prices on these haulers have gotten so high that it doesn’t really make sense for a guy like me to use one as it was intended – a truck. Secondly, I’m doing a lot of wood working lately and the 40/41 bed isn’t wide enough for a standard sheet of plywood.

So, what now? Actually, I’ve started looking for an F1… or maybe even an early F100. Anyone have a line on a nice solid driver with no rust? Look me up if so!

Hey fellas… I’m looking for a good 1940 to ’41 Ford Pickup driver. Something solid with no rust and driving would fit the bill. If you have something, shoot me a line!

A bit off topic for the Ford Barn, but some of you guys might be interested in this… Essentially, we’ve released The Jalopy Journal #3. It isn’t a magazine. It’s a book. And it’s a book unlike anything you’ve ever read before. Flipping through it is akin to walking through a museum. It has white walls, white floors, gorgeous abstract art, and a furiously inebriated curator. And that’s really the best way I can describe it.

Anyway, you can get a copy here.

What you see before you is something so incredibly rare that there doesn’t seem to be anyone alive that can actually tell us why it was made or for whom. It’s a 1940 Ford cutaway chassis and running gear that is owned and was restored by Rick Rennebohm of Whidbey Island, WA. Rick bought the enigmatic chassis on eBay in 2009 without knowing much about its history. He just thought it was cool… and had to have it.

Of course, as soon as he got the thing home and started restoring it he began to wonder just where in the hell it came from. The obvious place to start was Dick Pierson – the man he bought the chassis from. As it turns out, Dick bought the contraption from Iowa State University in 1994. A friend of a friend of his, Richard Grieve, was working with the school’s industrial engineering department in a space that had been recently abandoned by the university’s veterinarian school. Richard simply walked into the lab one day and the cut-away chassis was sitting innocently in a hall way.

Richard had owned a couple of 1940 Fords in the past and knew instantly what the chassis was and felt there had to be some importance to it. His first thought was that it belonged in a museum, so he called The Henry Ford Museum and pitched them on his new find. They claimed to already have one on premise and declined the opportunity.

A side note here… You would think the fact that The Henry Ford had a cut-away already would be a big break in this investigation. I mean, if they have one they, of all people, would know its history – right? Well, it’s turns out that The Henry Ford Museum does not have a 1940 Ford cut-away in their inventory. In fact, what they have is an Oldsmobile.

Anyway, after striking out with the museum suits, Richard decided to see if any local early Ford guys had interest. A friend of a friend hooked him up with Dick Pierson and Dick was able to buy the car from the University. Once Dick had the car, he cleaned it up a bit and showed it around the midwest. In 2007, he tried to get it into the Peterson Museum, but was rejected. He sold it to Rick soon after.

So we know the car was at one time owned by Iowa State University, but how in the hell did they get it? And why?

Again, we turn to Richard Grieve. Even though he has never owned the chassis, he’s been really instrumental in helping Rick trace its roots. Through some friends of his at ISU, he was able to get a hold of Loren Muench – a trainer and driver’s education instructor at the university that was employed by the school from the 1950’s well into the 1980’s. Loren claimed that he was very familiar with the chassis and that he had, in fact, used the chassis as a teaching tool starting in around 1957. They used the chassis for decades. Incredibly, Loren’s last memory of its usage was sometime in the 1980’s.

But the trail stops there. We know pretty firmly that ISU owned the cut-away as early as the mid-1950’s, but we don’t know how they got it, when/if Ford built it, and why… I called some pals of my own at The Henry Ford Museum and was greeted by a questioning silence of sorts on the other end of the phone.

“Where do you find this stuff Ryan? Hell, I dunno… We don’t have anything on it. Try… I just dunno.”

It’s my guess that this cut-away was created before the war by Ford and used as either marketing material or as an engineering study. Some folks have suggested that it could have been created later by the engineering school at ISU for a study or for other educational purposes. I’d buy that as well if it weren’t for one little piece of evidence. The serial number on the block is ★1 – which I’ve been told is a pre-production serial number. If this was created after 1940 and by someone other than Ford, I can’t imagine that a pre-production block would have been used. In my opinion, this thing was created by Ford.

When? Why? Beats the hell out of me.

Editor’s Note: Just a special thanks to Tom Davison for not only pointing this feature out to me, but also really going the extra mile to shoot it. Thanks Tom!

Henry Dominguez is back with another book. This one, obviously, is on the last days of Henry Ford and promises to be a jewel. Henry was nice enough to send over some excerpts and a few images to wet your pallet. Check it out:

“He would never leave her. He was always behind her; always with her,” explained the Fords’ maid, Rosa Buhler, and he followed her around like a little puppy.”

“Pull the fires!” instructed McIntyre, referring to the fires in the two large boilers. “Don’t wait for me! Pull the fires! NOW!”

“It was amusing when Ford died,” said Henry’s distant cousin, “the big headlines in the paper. No heat, no light, or gas in the house. It was because of his own bullheadedness that he died that way.”

“The night Mr. Ford died,” John Dahlinger told a friend, years later, “Mrs. Ford sent her service men over to my house. They went upstairs to my mother’s bedroom and cleaned out the safe.”

“So much must have been going through Eleanor’s mind, for she loved Henry Ford and despised him at the same time.”

“Three large floodlights, the kind used in movie productions, were set up in the space to the right of the bier, and blazed down upon Henry’s coffin.”

You can get your copy here.

A little off topic, but I’m a watch guy… Always have been… Most car guys that aren’t watch guys, like those cheap Chinese made watches that you see advertised in the back of car magazines and what not. The ads are slick, the mechanical watches are not.

Anyway, let me introduce your to Shinola – an AMERICAN watch company. How about that?

And they just released the Henry Ford pocket watch… It’s pretty cool.

Check it out.

Some bloke sent me the above video just the other day… And it reminded me of why I love Australians. Ignore the “Chev.”

You know what this place needs? A thread dedicated to utility beds… So, post what ya got!

So this thing popped up on eBay recently. It was commissioned to be built in 1930 for a man looking to deliver rural mail while braving the winters of Montana. Really, really incredible.

Check out the listing with a full recount of the car’s history here.

I was tooling around the internet early this week and stumbled upon something you don’t see everyday. How about a ’36 Ford Club Cabriolet with 6000 original miles?

It’s for sale too.