Dad's Newest Old Truck

The other day my father sold his fully-functional, reasonably reliable 1936 Ford pickup truck (which I kinda liked borrowing when I needed to move cargo) so that he could buy this:


This is a rolling shell.  It has no engine, no transmission, no seats. In fact, there's nothing inside the body at all. So why, you ask, would he get rid of a working truck in exchange for less than half the parts to make another truck?

This is a 1933 International pickup.  1933 is significant because it was the first year that International made pickups.  This first year they couldn't afford to re-tool their factory to make pickups, so they ended up contracting Willy's (who had fallen on hard times) to build the trucks for them.  That year they built 17,000 trucks.  The following year, in their own factories, International made 75,000.

Being mostly used as farm trucks, these vehicles saw a lot of use and abuse right away.  As a result, the sheet metal parts of the bodies rapidly deteriorated.  Now, seventy-seven years later, most of them are so mangled or rusted that it's almost impossible to find one of these old trucks with a body worth salvaging.

So I suppose this old shell was probably worth about the same as the working (but much more common) Ford that he sold to pay for it.

Still, even as good a shape as it's in, the years have taken their toll.  Some time in the 1970's someone modified it to build a street rod.  Since then the wooden parts of the cab have rotted through in places as well as splitting or shrinking in other places.  There's a lot of wood in there too:


The other main selling point is that this truck was modified. That means that he doesn't have to feel guilty about chopping it up and making it into a rat rod roadster or the like.
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