Restore a 1972 Ford F100 Pickup - Worth it?

[MikeS29]

A neighbor has a '72 F100 for sale, it looks solid, has some rust, but looks quite restorable. Anyone have any thoughts on it? The price is right, he wants $1,000 but I am thinking we can get it for several hundred less.

Worth doing?


*ADDED PICS BELOW*

[1977CJ5]

Well yeah.

[homerzeppelin]

Paint it surf green! ;-)

[Joe-Bob]

I drove a 73 longbed stepside in highschool.

[Tim Armstrong]

As an investment? Maybe.

As a cool thing to do? Definitely!

Tim

[Bones]

yeah, they are kinda cool looking.

[MikeS29]

It is surf green already! Or a close enough Ford Green. The metal dash matches the exterior paint.

[Anchoret]

Restore a 1972 Ford F100 Pickup - Worth it?

No.

Not by any market comparison of expense/effort relative to payoff.

[Tim Armstrong]

Originally Posted by Tim Armstrong

As an investment? Maybe.

As a cool thing to do? Definitely!

Tim

Originally Posted by Anchoret

No.

Not by any market comparison of expense/effort relative to payoff.

As I implied above, there can be payoff totally unrelated to expense and/or resale value.

Tim

[nrand]

I am considering something like this for myself, the styling on these is timeless. I learned to drive in my Grandfather's 67. They are also pretty handy for carrying gear Definitely Surf Green.

[MikeS29]

Not sure I an considering a full-blown restoration for showing, but enough to make a sweet daily driver... but it could be easy to get bitten by the bug.

[muchxs]

I'm solidly in the Rust Belt so I ain't scared of no stinkin' rust. The '70s F100s aren't bad, the panels are available. How bad is it? Rockers? Cab corners? Rust repair costs a bundle if you pay someone else to do it or you can buy an SP135 and do it yourself. Mig, L-Tec EasyGrind, have at it!

+1 on the Surf Green.

That '72 with a small block Ford (302, 351W, 351W stroker) and a toploader is a do it all combination. It will cruise, it will show, it will tow your boat to the lake and take your garbage to the dump. Totally worth it.

[elihu]

This thread needs pics...

[Anchoret]

Originally Posted by Tim Armstrong

As I implied above, there can be payoff totally unrelated to expense and/or resale value.

Only intangibly and only for the terminally process-oriented.

Looking back on my life, I wish someone would have explained this to me when I was young instead of having to figure it out for myself the hard way, wasting years of my life in pointless pursuits because they were interesting or fun.

Lots of things in the world are interesting and fun; try to find ones with a point and a payoff. I liked restoring stuff, but I restored Harleys because I could make money doing it until I got it out of my system. It was still a bad waste of those years, in retrospect.

Seductive process is a curse. This is no less true just because it's an unpopular viewpoint on a forum in which people are repeatedly enabled in wasting $300 and six months turning a $200 guitar into a $100 guitar.

Maybe your life is such hell otherwise with the job and kids and bills that this foolishness provides an escape, but I'll tell you this for free and it's the bottom line:

For every twenty guys with fantasies of "restoring" some crate, not one sees it through according to plan (if ever) and for the rest it becomes nothing but a regrettable millstone, a contributing grounds for divorce, a long-term vermin trap in the barn or an expensive blight code violation in the driveway.

And you can take any odds you want on that bet and make money.

[MikeS29]

Pics coming on Wednesday when I look at it again with my friend, a mechanic. I am leaning towards Tim's ideas of non-monetary rewards!

The rust is not bad really. Surface rust, but no rocker panels or fenders rusted out. Solid, actually, but for the floor pans. Those are pretty crummy. The bed has a bunch of stuff in it, so I can't see the surface. It is under cover, an open sided canopy.

[MikeS29]

Well, Anchoret, I asked! I appreciate your frankness. I do have reservations about it becoming a money-pit. But I am not thinking car-show, more like, sweet old truck you aren't afraid to drive or haul a 1/2 yard of compost in.

[Tim Armstrong]

Originally Posted by Anchoret

Only intangibly and only for the terminally process-oriented.

Looking back on my life, I wish someone would have explained this to me when I was young instead of having to figure it out for myself the hard way, wasting years of my life in pointless pursuits because they were interesting or fun.

Lots of things in the world are interesting and fun; try to find ones with a point and a payoff. I liked restoring stuff, but I restored Harleys because I could make money doing it until I got it out of my system. It was still a bad waste of those years, in retrospect.

Seductive process is a curse. This is no less true just because it's an unpopular viewpoint on a forum in which people are repeatedly enabled in wasting $300 and six months turning a $200 guitar into a $100 guitar.

Maybe your life is such hell otherwise with the job and kids and bills that this foolishness provides an escape, but I'll tell you this for free and it's the bottom line:

For every twenty guys with fantasies of "restoring" some crate, not one sees it through according to plan (if ever) and for the rest it becomes nothing but a regrettable millstone, a contributing grounds for divorce, a long-term vermin trap in the barn or an expensive blight code violation in the driveway.

And you can take any odds you want on that bet and make money.

I'll trade financial reward for interesting and fun any day of the week, and yep, in my almost 51 years I've had experiences that were ultimately a net loss even when "interesting and fun" were factored in....

Tim

[Anchoret]

Originally Posted by MikeS29

Well, Anchoret, I asked! I appreciate your frankness. I do have reservations about it becoming a money-pit.

Then stop now.

It will cost you more than you expect and take more time than you expect and it will cease to be "fun" long before you're done.

Do what you want, but print this out and save it so you can remember I told you so.

[muchxs]

Originally Posted by MikeS29

The rust is not bad really. Surface rust, but no rocker panels or fenders rusted out. Solid, actually, but for the floor pans. Those are pretty crummy. The bed has a bunch of stuff in it, so I can't see the surface. It is under cover, an open sided canopy.

The cab doesn't sound that bad. Get yourself a 5hp Husky compressor over at Home Depot and an old school paint gun. Don't beat up your shiny new compressor sandblasting, take it to someone who blasts for a living and have the cruddy areas taken down to bare metal. If there are no holes cover it immediately with a coat of DuPont Variprime. You can buzz your seam surfaces to be welded down to metal with a high speed wire wheel later. Zapping in the floors is good practice for an amateur, none of it needs to be finish bodywork. Paint anything that gets covered with carpet or the utilitarian F100 rubber mats using Por15 and you're good forever.

The bed isn't a big deal, if it's crap it can be unbolted and replaced. A lot of guys are harvesting rust free beds from the southwest, we buy them here for as little as $600.

Take a couple tips from the process blah blah blah crowd:

Time is money. There are some things you can send out and get done for thin money or you can struggle through them yourself and end up with amateur results. Up to you.

Bodywork sucks. That's the place where time really is money. I've seen more primered beaters go out for cheap with all the mechanical work done because that's the easy stuff. Making it pretty takes time and talent.

Don't rush it. Every last one of these is a once in a lifetime project. Patience is a virtue. Plan everything carefully, budget everything carefully.

The projects that stall usually involve grandiose plans and inadequate resources.

Consider this: What does Ford charge for a new F150? How long would you have to work to pay for a new F150? How long would you have to work to make your old F100 really slick?!

[Anchoret]

Originally Posted by muchxs

The projects that stall usually involve grandiose plans and inadequate resources.

Relative to reality, that's almost all of them. On-schedule completion is under 1% for amateur car restoration projects and I doubt 5% ever get completed before the owners give up.

Go for a nice weekend drive around you neighborhood and count the four-wheeled long-term neglected eyesores that some fantasists thought were going to be "fun" to fix up. Bring a hand counter to keep a running tally, you'll need it.

The record here was some fool who decided he was going to collect and restore Panhards [!] and got a couple of them in about 1959. They sat dead, unmoved and untouched in his driveway until about four years ago when the guy finally died and his executors had them hauled out for scrap.

There are innumerable people who keep these failed-restoration junkers for years until the threat of divorce or code violation makes the owners sadly call it a day and scrap them. Very few ever realize their initial fantasies.

It's something that sounds like fun, but only to someone who doesn't have to actually do the work or pay for it.

Seriously!