Car of the Week: 1960 Ford F250 Flareside pickup

An F250 Just Like Dad’s

The F250 is kind of plain Jane, but nicely restored.

If you’re looking for a nice old pickup to restore, try looking around a granary out west. The experience worked pretty well for Don Schweitzer, Sr., of Clintonville, Wis.

“I got this truck from a grain farmer from North Dakota,” Schweitzer said. “It’s just a plain-Jane truck. It actually shows 55,000 miles of use. I think that’s original, because, being a feed mill truck, they never actually drove it very far…  only short distances.”

The farmer lived in a small town not far from Bismarck. “I don’t really know how he got hold of it,” Schweitzer admitted. “I found it advertised in a magazine. I called the guy and he said he still had the truck, so we decided to go out there and get it.”

An Amish craftsman crafted the wood side boards and bed.

Schweitzer’s dad had been the original owner of a 1960 Ford F250 Flareside pickup with four-wheel drive, which he had restored twice. Naturally, that truck left an impression on him, so he went searching for a ’60 Ford F250 of his own.

As if to show how passionate old truck restorers are, Schweitzer drove non-stop from Clintonville to North Dakota with a trailer hooked on the back of one of his trucks.

“When we got there to pick the truck up, it was about 80-90 degrees,” he recalled. “It was really hot and miserable to be there. It took us a while to load the pickup on the trailer. Then, we drove non-stop all the way back to Clintonville.” The trip was about 9 hours in each direction and about 550 miles one way.

Dual headlamps had been used on Ford trucks since 1958.

“I can’t even remember how much I paid for the truck,” Schweitzer said. “It has a six-cylinder engine and a four-speed manual transmission. Being a 3/4-ton, it’s not very fast. It’s a slower-moving truck, but it has the longbox that comes in handy. I guess all the 3/4-tonners came that way.”

After the truck arrived in Clintonville, it went to restorer Mark Kutchenriter, who worked on it for years. After he began the work, Kutchenriter found that he really didn’t have to replace a lot of parts because the F250 was fairly rust-free.

“It was just bent up from sitting and from the abuse it took by being used so much,” Schweitzer said. “Mark went through the entire vehicle and made it look really good.”

The steering wheel horn button has Ford’s gear symbol with a lightning bolt.

The factory paint on the now-red pickup was Corinthian White, which matched the F100 Styleside pickup on the cover of the 1960 Ford Truck Full Line Folder (Form No. FD-T-6040). The original engine (still in the truck today) is Ford’s 223-cid inline six with a 3.62 x 3.60-in. bore and stroke. It has overhead valves, a one-barrel carburetor, an 8.1:1 compression ratio, 139 hp at 4000 rpm and 203 lbs.-ft. of torque at 2000-2600 rpm.

The Ford six was a modern short-stroke engine that Ford promised would deliver “more efficient power.” It provided top-notch performance on regular fuel. A shorter stroke meant less internal friction was developed, so horsepower rose. Additional engine features included what Ford called a “Deep-Block” design; free-turn valves; high-turbulence combustion chambers; aluminum-alloy pistons with chrome-plated top rings; and a precision-molded alloy crankshaft.

Ford promoted the 1960 F250 as “the cost-cutting 3/4-tonner that hauls more for less.” It came with payload ratings and body allowances up to 4,000 lbs. The F250 two-wheel-drive model had a GVW of 7000 lbs. and featured a 118-in. wheelbase and 8-ft.-long pickup bed.

“We switched the color of the truck to red because I have a thing for candy apple red,” said Schweitzer. “But things didn’t go that smoothly with that aspect of the restoration — at least not at first. We got two cans of paint from a NAPA store and it turned out to be two different shades of red. It was supposed to have been all the same.”

The pickup’s cargo bed is made of locally sourced ash.

Kutchenriter nearly had the truck painted when he found out that the paint in both cans did not match. After the two men returned to the auto parts store, NAPA brought someone in from the paint company in Chicago to inspect the paint. “He didn’t know what had happened,” Schweitzer said.

Schweitzer thought they were going to have to toss the paint and buy new cans, but Kutchenriter suggested using the paint they had, mixing it together and making their own shade of red.

“It ended up that the paint company gave Mark extra sealer, extra clear and other supplies so he could mix both paints together. The result was the color we have now, which is a distinct red.

“We had plenty of paint left to refinish the truck,” he said. “And Mark did another fantastic job.”

The 223-cid six-cylinder engine is original to this truck.

According to Schweitzer, Kutchenriter has a small shop, but he can paint with the best of them. The two men turned to the local Amish community to get the best woodwork for the cargo bed and the side boards.

“The wood floor is like the original style,” said Schweitzer, “but we redid the wood floor. We bought the wood in New London, Wisconsin, and the Amish worker cut it. Mark actually cut it to final fit in there. He also fabricated the white rear bumper on the truck.”

Today, the truck is a stunner and is more fit for the show circuit than the granary. Hopefully, its days of hauling are in the rearview mirror — it would be a shame to scratch up that beautiful and unique red paint.

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