squirrel's 55 Chevy step van/bread truck

[squirrel]

A guy on the HAMB was giving away his vehicles...I ended up with the step van. It's a 1955 Chevy (second series) chassis, with an American Body Works body. The body is fiberglass on the front, has steel ribs covered with aluminum for the top and sides, and a wood floor in back.

I first looked at it in March, when I was in Phoenix for a robot competition. I drove about 200 miles to look at it, thru the mountains and hills. Here's what I found

[Scott Liggett]

Are you going to be an ice cream man, or sell groceries from it?

[Beagle]

Nice! Excellent to know it is with someone who will do something with it, but I have to ask... how do you add / graft the campler to the Cheech and Chong ride?!

[DirtyWhiteBoy]

NICE UPGRADE!

LOL seriously tho I like it!

[squirrel]

what, Candy is in jail again?

Seriously...I haven't figured out for sure what I'm going to do with the van yet. But here is more of the story.

My friend Dan (who went with me on Drag Week last year) offered to help me fetch the van. It was about 340 miles from home, and we planned on doing it in one day. I knew it was going to be a long day, but didn't really figure we'd be on the road from 6am till 10pm. The drive to St Johns AZ is through the mountains, no matter how you get there from Sierra Vista. We decided to try route 180 through New Mexico on the way there, and then decide which way to come back after seeing how the trip was. We'd both driven the other route through Globe and the Salt River Canyon several times, so we were aware how fun that was.

The weather had been nice the week before the trip, but that Monday a storm blew through Arizona. When we stopped for lunch in Alpine, it was snowing pretty well. We decided to go back the western route, so we would hopefully avoid the storm, which my wife said was moving east.

Anyways, we got to St Johns, and installed the rear hub I had borrowed from the friend who got the original rear out of my 57 truck. We swapped normal 3/4 ton wheels on the back of the van, and put one of the right rear tires on the left front, to make the van sit up a bit higher. I had measured the van and the trailer, and knew it would be a tight squeeze. We started winching the van onto the trailer, and I put some 2x4s down so the front tires could ride on them to lift the van above the fenders. Not quite enough...I had to pop off a clearance light that hit the trailer fender...but we managed to get the van on, the rub rails were resting on the trailer fenders, and it was hanging pretty far off the back, but everything seemed to be ok.

We stopped at a nearby gas station, filled up the truck, and headed off into the wild blue yonder. By this time it was around 2pm or so, and we had a long drive ahead of us through some really steep two lane roads. And the truck was handling a bit loosely, since I never did any work on the front suspension or steering, and the new tires seem to have some tread squirm when they're filled up with enough air to hold a lot of weight.

The trip back was long and tiring, but we didn't have any mishaps. Dan didn't feel like driving, hopefully I didn't scare him too much....on top of the other features of my 57 truck, it doesn't have any seat belts. At least the truck and trailer brakes were all working pretty well, and the transmission only popped out of 3rd twice on the steep downhill sections.

[JOES66FURY]

would be a killer food truck...or storage unit....

[squirrel]

After getting it home, I did some cleaning up. I removed all the stuff that previous owners had added, such as the modern seat, plywood flooring, miscellaneous brackets and boards and whatnot. I also set a seat in it, from a 31 Chevy vicky. I haven't gotten it running or messed with the brakes yet, but plans are to get a modern axle for the back, put single wheel hubs on the front, and get the 305 running. I did buy an axle from a 55 3/4 ton pickup, so I have the front hubs and drums.

[squirrel]

I also figured out the PARISIAN name...it was a brand of bread that was sold in southern California (maybe elsewhere?). The Bread Trucks group on flickr has a bunch of pictures of bread trucks...and a few of them are kind of like this truck. And a few of them show PARISIAN lettering, and some have descriptions that tell about the different bread companies in the area (Barbara Ann, Weber's, Langendorf, etc). I found pictures of about ten different trucks with bodies by the same company that made mine. The nose is very distinctive, although there were changes over the years. The early trucks had a separate top piece at the front, and later ones had a really ugly grille (so ugly it makes the early versions with the 48-50 Dodge truck grille look nice!) Here they are hopefully in chronological order.

[mlcraven]

Sensing you'd dial the Way-Back machine to the 1950's?

[ogre]

van looks to be in excellent shape
says a lot about your truck to tow that monster 300 miles with it