Dodge B100 image from the ’74 brochure.
Text submitted by Harry Case.
The 1971 Dodge B200 van I bought on impulse after my failed Pinto experience was solid. I carpeted and paneled the interior, and added a homemade bench seat that doubled as a storage locker. I had the brakes done once and painted an accent stripe along the character line so my friends would stop calling it Moby Dick.
Meanwhile, my job evolved into a union tireman/class C mechanic. The company bought a new fleet of Ford tractors and I had to get a class B CDL to run dollies to the I-90 toll plaza and deliver straight trucks to outlying terminals.
Eventually, a friend begged me to sell Moby Dick to him when his A100 died. Since the Dodge was now all paid for and I was getting bored with it, I gave in when I found a ‘73 Chevy Beauville G20 window van at a boatyard.
Chevrolet Beauville image from the web.
The Chevy had only been used in the summer, so it had been spared the worst of the New York roads in winter. I had never owned a GM product, and my family had barely tolerated the Dodge van. Surprisingly, as bad as Fords were to my dad, he never gave up on them and cursed his first car —a 37 Chevy with knee-action shocks— until the day he died.
The Chevy van was so much nicer than the Dodge that my mother didn’t mind riding in it. The ride was smoother, and the factory seats were cushy and soft. However, my wife told me there was not much passenger foot room, and the heat seemed to bypass her side of the van.
After I paneled and carpeted the van, it was even quieter. The 350 was a four-barrel truck engine, the transmission was a heavy-duty unit, and the rear had Positraction. In spite of the light rear end, it was good in the snow with 7.75 x 15 cross-rib truck tires on the rear.
I extended the front bumper to create a seat for viewing the F1 races at Watkins Glen and mounted the spare externally on a swing-away bracket from the rear door to make room for a cabinet in the rear. Leaving the middle seat installed, I added a partition to make the rear into a sleeping area. In California, I got a deal on white-spoke rims. I also mounted a tape player in the ceiling behind the driver seat since every aftermarket unit I had ever put in a dashboard was stolen.
Chevrolet Beauville image from the web.
In 1977 I visited my sister in Tupper Lake NY, and one morning it was 40 below. My sister’s Land Cruiser wouldn’t start and I agreed to take her and her roommates to school.
- Sure, pile in! – I said
The van started right up. A few minutes later the heat gauge pegged, the heater began blowing frigid air and the engine started knocking. The thermostat froze and I shut the van down.
As we trudged down the road I heard a high-pitched whistle behind me. The van was so shrouded in smoke, I thought it was on fire. Then I smelled the sweetness of coolant, and when I checked the engine bay it was boiling out of the overflow tube (no coolant reservoirs back then). I pulled the radiator cap and found it bone dry. I filled it up with coolant and water 50/50 and it ran with no problem. At the time.
However, the following summer every casting plug leaked and I pulled the front end apart to replace them all. While I had it apart I changed the rear spark plug that can’t be reached from inside the van without a special tool or cutting access in the floor — GM really does know how to build an engine… Later that year my sister and I crossed the Mojave desert at noon on our way to visit friends in California (GM should have been paying me for that kind of testing).
…
By then, I had quit the truck company to finish my degree at Syracuse University and after some serious job searching I ended up working part-time jobs when my savings ran out. Pizza making, truck tire changing, shade tree work to include rebuilding bus engines for a rural school district, and working on my friends’ cars. I worked tree cutting in the summer.
All this allowed me to be a little selective and I finally found a position with an emergency vehicle manufacturer in the fall of 1976. We built pumpers, rescue trucks and brush trucks and even tried getting into the ambulance market. One of my duties for the fire apparatus company was picking up chassis from Waukesha and Oshkosh in Wisconsin and driving them back to the shop in East Syracuse. I would fly out with an emergency tool kit and drive the 12 hours back the next day.
The only drawback to my Chevy van was its consistent 12mpg thirst. The only cure was to park it and find a more economical commuter vehicle…
Related CC reading:
CC Capsule: 1985 Chevrolet G20 Chevy Van – Just Don’t Do It
CC Capsule: Third-Generation Chevrolet G-Series – An Ode To The Chevy Van
Last Of Its Kind On The Street Outtake: 1980s Chevy Starcraft Conversion Van – GT Series, No Less
Curbside Classic: 1976(ish) Dodge Tradesman – All Bound For Mu Mu Land
Curbside Classic: 1976ish Dodge D-100 Tradesman – Dreamboat Annie Joined The Convoy
Curbside Classics: 1971 Dodge Maxiwagon and 1979 Dodge Maxivan – Dodge Pioneers The Really Big Van
Great piece! These old G Vans sure have stuck around. The local sketchy ice cream fleet still operates around 40 post apocalyptic looking Chevy Vans with 30+ years of body damage and sun faded stickers over stickers. They weren’t perfect but they sure were resilient.
Working for Sears for 33 years, I had purchased a 3/8 drive extension, 1 inch long to get to that rear plug on G vans with a V8. The heat shield around the manifold protecting the spark plug boot kept me from being able to use just a spark plug socket and ratchet. Any longer extension would interfere with the body of the van.