Ron Adams shot lots of trucks as they passed by him on Route 22 in the early ’70s, but this was one of the oldest, although at the time, this ’57 Dodge was only maybe 25 years old. But it looks tired and hot, with its hood open to help cool the flathead six. Do they know there’s a stream of coolant being emitted?
And what’s with those thin “whitewall” tires? A little paint?
Those are the biggest West Coast mirrors I’ve ever seen.
It’s how he finds his way home, like Theseus and the Labyrinth.
With a coolant leak that bad we might be seeing this trucks last ride.
The most amazing and useful advances in motor vehicles over the course of my lifetime is longevity. In 1973, if you were using a 25-year-old vehicle for daily transportation (of people or goods) you were most likely in a desperate financial situation.
Nowadays, especially here in The Land That Rust Forgot™, all manner of 25 year old vehicles can be seen doing daily driver duties.
For decades, the cutoff for antique car status as defined by the AACA has been 25 years of age. To your point, 25 year-old cars were seldom seen on the road back in the ’50s and ’60s. Now they are just used cars.
Could those ‘whitewalls’ be recaps with their best miles behind them?
They appear to be raised above the sidewall like white-letter tires. Classic Curbside protectors? Could they even be structural to increase the load-bearing capacity of the tire?
Chances are the “leak” is boiling coolant coming from the overflow. Radiator cap releases the pressure at a set point.
My thought too. Losing coolant because of running hot, not the other way round.
In a ’57 Dodge in the early ’70s, when we talk about “coolant”, aren’t the odds pretty good it’s just water?
Yes. But then water is of course a coolant.
Running without hood side panels was fairly common for oldies here in Australia. I’m not sure whether popping the sides of the hood up like that would have helped much.
Would these have been the last vehicles to run cowl lights?
If we’re not terribly picky about just exactly where cowl lights are mounted, the Toyota FJ Cruiser probably takes that title—at least as configured for the NAFTA market.
NYC taxicabs in the ’80s—Chevrolet Caprice/Impala or Dodge Diplomat/Plymouth Gran Fury, mostly—used to run with the hood popped and held a couple inches open by the safety catch. I guess the drivers believed it staved off overheating. That’s really not how this works, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Daniel, when I went to work for the DOT we had a brand new Chevy 1 ton, crew cab, 8ft box 454 automatic 2 wheel drive. This thing was constantly overheating. It had a 250 gallon water tank in the box and it pulled a “skid” trailer. Skid trailers are used to evaluate the road service smoothness. You can actually have a road surface that is too smooth. The way it works is you pull the trailer at 40 mph, apply trailer brakes while water is discharged in front of the trailer tires. The trailer tires are specially made for this application. The brakes on the trailer are mounted to the axle via a very expensive strain gage.
So the boss’s solution was install some extended hood pins so you could safely run down the road with the hood up on the safety latch. That didn’t help. The next idea was to take the hood to a hot rod shop(the boss was big into 20’s and 30’s hot rods) and have the hood riddled with louvers.
Before that happened I got to do a ride along to see what’s happening. Being a former GMC Truck employee this was right up my alley. Handy scan tool plugged in and it was long into some skids tests and the beast was overheating again. The engine overheating was a side effect, the real culprit was the transmission. The trans was getting hot and the internal cooler in the radiator was cooking the coolant right before the coolant heads out of the radiator and into the engine. Installed a large external cooler under the front bumper complete with scoop and problem solved.
Geeze, yeah, I can imagine how that kind of usage would really heat up the trans fluid with all that power dissipation in the torque converter!
Nice old rig, thanx for expanding my knowledge base Paul ~ I had no idea Dodge used this truck grille after 1947 .
-Nate
Runnin hot but not overheating or we would see steam
If the photo was taken in 1972, and the truck is a 1957, it would have been 15 years old.
I graduated in 1976. My chemistry teacher got drunk at the graduation party and I drove him home in his 1938 Plymouth. I believe it had no synchros in the trans. Double clutch every downshift. It felt like a car from my grandfathers era, though my grandad always had recent autos. Of course cars just melted in Vermont, and the state mandated annual inspection. So, not many old cars.