I've posted on here before about Brutus, my 1951 Dodge M37, a Korean War Military pickup truck. I got it for it's great ground clearance and rugged build. It's not fast (way under-powered by today's standards), but it will go anywhere and has a lot of "character". I think of it as my "fast tractor" rather than a slow truck. I regularly use him in the woods getting firewood, and have set him up for towing my log forwarding trailer. I always get compliments and questions when driving him around town.
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Since buying him, I'm upgraded the brakes, added a brake controller and receiver hitch (but kept the original pintle hitch), swapped in a rebuilt engine, and had the transmission and transfer case rebuilt. I finally had him running like a top. I was down to considering the little things, like fixing seals around the windsheild which had rotted away to nothing and were letting in the rain and cold air. ... Until several weeks ago, when he got in a little argument with a telephone pole:
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I was driving down a small dirt road, slowed way down to go around a 90˚ bend. As I came out of the curve, another truck was coming around a small bend from the other direction, driving almost down the middle of the road. I pulled over as far as I could, but he barely moved over at all. I pulled over a few inches further, and my right wheels dropped off onto the soft shoulder of a deep ditch. I rode the edge for a bit, I tried to turn back on to the road, but it was not use. I was afraid to turn the wheels too far out of concern for rolling the truck into the ditch. Even hard braking was chancy, since it seemed to shift the weight toward a roll. Most of these trucks had a soft top (canvas). The hard top on mine is not structural. It would have collapsed like a tin can if I had rolled. I ended up just riding it out for about 200 feet. I tried to miss the pole, but the ditch held me right on that track.
The other truck kept right on driving, probably oblivious to the mayhem he had caused.
I was completely uninjured. Not even a little sore the next day. I am glad I had seatbelts installed... the truck did not come with them.