I had a Flathead once upon a time...
This is the first forum that I was directed to when I found the "Club Hot Rod Forums" website, and it was especially interesting to me since I drove a '53 Ford F100 with a flathead for most of my senior year in highschool.
My '53 had the original engine in it (I don't know the displacement) and the previous owner had taken a big piece of heater hose and ran the crankcase breather exhaust into a hole he had cut into the top of the air cleaner. When I first started driving the truck in September of '71, it was hard pressed to to 60 mph flat out, was a serious oil burner, and ran 0 psi of oil pressure on the dash guage when it was at operating temp.
My first real performance modification was to get rid of the "PCV system" and put a set of plugs and points in the truck. Those few changes gave me an honest 85 mph top end, and I was able to get 2nd gear scratch with the column shift. Not to bad for an afternoon's work. A couple of weeks later, my brother found an old glasspack with about 6 feet of exhaust pipe welded to it in a trash barrel. We asked the person who lived closest to the barrel if we could have the pipe and muffer and they said they didn't care, so we took it. In those days, I didn't exactly have enough spending money to buy an exhaust system. so luck was where you found it. Anyway, the glasspack and the pipe (wired to the rear axle with bailing wire) became the performance exhaust system for the '53, and added another 5 mph to the top end.
Over the winter and into the spring of '72 I did a lot of other things just to repair the truck and make it more reliable, but not much more to hotrod it. It had a tray of sorts behind the seat, and I always kept 5 quarts of the cheapest motor oil I could buy back there lying end to end. A good day's worth of driving on the weekend would take all 5 of them. Since the oil pressure guage was useless as far as keeping tabs on the crankcase level, I used to wait until the lifters started clacking before I added another quart. It was a pretty good system, and the flathead was a tough old customer. I don't know of many engines that could go all day with more or less no pressure lubrication. I'm sure it had some pressure, but it must have lubed at least as much from splash as anything.
Anyway, in March of '72, my dad sold the F100 out from under me while I was at school one day. I had ridden my Honda 350 since it was a nice spring day, and came home to find the truck gone. I asked my dad where it was, and he told me he sold it for $250.00. A '53 Ford F100, less than 20 years old at the time, and he thought $250.00 was a good price for it! It still chaps me that he sold it. I had such big plans for it; paint, wheels, maybe a 351 Cleveland (I had been told that flatheads weren't worth overhauling), a toploader 4 speed, and who knows what else. After all I was a hotrodder from the word go, and I had made some real progress with that truck. Well, it was history, and I had a '70 Chevelle SS396 a couple of weeks later, so I kinda forgot about the old flattie for a while.
After all these years between now and then, I still miss that old truck, and I wonder what would've happened if I had persued my plans to build my first real hotrod from it. I still get a little excited when I see one of those old late 40s or early 50s F100s, and really intrigued if it has a running flathead under the hood. The Ford flathead was a good, strong-running engine, and it deserves a special place in hotrodding history.
Randy
