Six month update

I've been driving this thing for six months now, racking up a little over 6,000 miles, and figured it's long overdue for an update.
Lots of little details have been taken care of since my last post- Carpet is in, windows & door locks working good, wiring has been cleaned up, the cutout in the bed floor covered, some of the body work on the bed & a cab corner are done (thanks to Troy), exhaust has been through several iterations, and I even entered it in a car show and received an award!  Here's a few pictures I've taken along the way...

Drove in the Paddy Hough Parade with the Slo Poks 

Took a little time off my project to give Troy a hand building his own "Cruck", which is what we've taken to calling these Crown Victoria trucks.  His is a '66 F100 on an '05 Police Interceptor frame.  

Got a new engine cover, added trim rings and center caps to the stock Vic steel wheels

Went to the Portland Transmission Warehouse show, Troy's truck made it's first appearance as well

Picked up a different steering wheel at the Portland Swap Meet, I think it's a big improvement

Threw in a temporary wood cover in the bed to keep things from falling out 

Went to a Slo Poks Alley at Troy's, showed the truck off to a few guys that were interested in the details

Crystal & I took the truck to the Clatskanie Cruisers annual car show.  It was a great show, I plan to go again.  I even won an under construction award, sponsored by the Clatstkanie Volunteer Firefighters Association

Troy helped me out with a cab corner and started body work on the front passenger side of the bed

I installed rear air suspension out of a civilian Crown Vic (police models have extra stiff springs in the rear).  I don't have it set up to go up and down quickly, but it does allow me to adjust the ride height as needed.  There's quite a bit of travel.

I also cut the front springs down a bit since the police cars sit higher than normal, and swapped out the chrome center caps for some chrome lug nuts.  I don't have a lot of wheel options and the tires are good, so I'm trying to do what I can to make them look decent.

Made a quick video to show the new ride height

I also took the truck on it's first big road trip, but I'll save that for the next post...

Taillights, mirrors

Haven't posted much lately, been too busy driving it!  I have made a couple of minor improvements-  Replaced the mirrors, installed some '50 Pontiac style tails, tweaked the timing and shift points, rebuilt the passenger door internals so the window goes up and down... minor stuff.  Mostly I've just been out driving it and enjoying it.  Here's a few pictures for now.

'50 Pontiac tails

And here's the original tail light style, it's a big improvement

A picture from Red Door Meet in Portland

Went to Cars & Coffee with Troy & Wendy

And a picture from Dave, he had the cool bug parked next to me

Side steps, brake pedal, mufflers, start of bed work

Made some good progress today.  Started with the side steps, where they were cut out to accommodate the wider frame rails.  Troy made some new steps out of sheet metal:

Adds a lot of strength to the cab floor and it cut down a lot of the road noise.  In between helping out with the steps I got working on the mufflers, the stock ones were ridiculously quiet.  It's a little better, real nice sound but still very quiet.  I'm pretty sure the catalytic converters are plugged (the Crown Vic came with four of them!) but those will eventually be removed.  Here's the new ones in place:

Next we spent some time on the brake pedal.  The Vic pedal sat way to high and too far to the left, so the pedal arm was modified to bring it down and over.  Don't mind my ghetto carpet: 

Finally time to get started on the bed.  This is the biggest remaining challenge.  Due to the difference in wheelbase between the truck and the CV the bed needed to be shortened by 3.5 inches so that's where we started.  We cut the pinch welds at the bulkhead, cut the bed sides and floor, the moved the bulkhead back:

That's as far as we could get today.  Before we put the bed away for now we did move it over the truck to have a look at the new length:

I'm probably going to shorten the back a bit as well, but lots to do before then.  The rear frame will need to be shortened and dropped down, the bed floor cut out some, and the fenders widened.  It will be a couple weeks at least before Troy will be able to help me with the bed so the next couple updates will be interior work.

For anyone looking to do something similar- I learned from a member on the Facebook group "Custom Classic Ford F100 Trucks 1957 1958 1959 1960 F-100 Rat & Hot Rods" that the Lincoln Town Car wheelbase is 0.3" different than the 57-60 F100 wheelbase. That would save some work modifying the bed, which is a pretty big task. Ideally for a full frame swap it would be better to use an '02 or earlier in my opinion, the track width is narrower giving you more wheel options.