John Lloyd posted this rusty Ford Courier he saw in Aberdeen, WA. He left this comment:
Around here you often see some really rough trucks parked along the road full of firewood. Sign on the back says $75 a cord. I don’t think it would make it up the hill to my house. Judging from the rust, this one spent some time on the beach. Generally , not many rusty vehicles here. The regular rain cleans the underside well.
Update: I hadn’t taken in that this photo was shot by John back in 2010. Even out here in the PNW, where fir (not hardwood) is very cheap, $75 is still a fair bit less than it would be today.
Wow, that’s some rust. Is the hood panel the only one without big holes? It has been too long since I looked at rusty Couriers in the midwest (because they have been gone for decades) but there aren’t many other cars that got that Studebaker-style rust all up and down the trailing edge of the front fenders.
I had a Courier a year or two older than this one. It did not have fender liners, hence the rust pattern.
Regarding the load – those old Couriers had underrated capacities. Very stiff springs in the bed. I definitely overloaded it a few times and no problem, just slower than normal.
ETA sorry for the duplicate comment, the first one disappeared for a while.
No fender liner, so the water is thrown between the fender and the footwell. My 76 wasn’t nearly as bad but did have some issue.
The rear springs on these were seriously heavy so they could carry a lot. Didn’t help the ride much though. I once carried close to a ton of gravel with minimal problem (not like it was fast even empty..).
Pretty sure I havn’t seen a Courier since around 1990. I have never seen a gen2 Courier.
That’s a darned respectable load on that Courier, which appears to have been really nice once upon a time. We at least know the bed isn’t overly rusted or that wood would be on the ground.
It’s been years since I’ve seen one of these. However, does anybody else see a whole lot of 1975 Nova in the grille and headlight treatment? I cannot unsee it.
Yes – I saw the Nova right away. I was about to ask the question, and scanning through the comments, I saw that you had already mentioned it. And yes, I cannot unsee it either. Not necessarily a bad thing though, it’s a clean simple design on both vehicles –
What a crusty and rugged old Courier. It’s nice to see it still at work.
Is that firewood price recent? Cut, seasoned firewood hasn’t been priced that low where I live for a long time. My father and I sold cords of wood for $100 back when this truck was new, and I have seen it as high as $250 where I live now. Considering the underlying value of the wood, and the time and effort involved in bringing a cord of wood (which can weigh up to 2 tons depending on the species) to a customer, it seems to me that the owner should be charging more. Perhaps enough to enable investment in a heavier duty vehicle and sending this one out to pasture.
Built Ford Tough! (By Mazda). 🙂
That was a good looking truck back when it was newer. The underlying roots are still visible, with just a few age (wisdom) spots now.
$75 does seem quite inexpensive for ready to go wood, I haven’t seen what it goes for here nowadays though.
I went back and checked, and this photo was shot back in 2010! Oops. That was during the depths of the recession when folks were desperate. It’s more like $200 a cord now.
I’ve added an update. I’m not sure why folks post old pictures to the Cohort.
That is more like a half cord of wood in that little truck. A cord measures 4 ft x 4 ft x 8 ft.
Put another way a cord would be 128 cubic feet.
So 6x5x4.25 = 127.5 would be pretty close.
Might throw in a couple extra logs to make up for the wheel wells. Lol
Sure is stacked tight!
You can’t stack split logs 16″ long into that space as densely as you can 4x4x8
Referring to limitations of loading with the truck bed and stake sides, or poor match-up of nominal dimensions?
Poor matchup plus the wheel wells.
Whenever I see a Courier I’m reminded of the oft reported story of when Lee Iacocca negotiated a deal for Honda to supply engines and transmissions for only $711 per unit, to which HFII reportedly replied, “No Jap engine is going under the hood of a car with my name on it!” (Iacocca and The Reckoning).
Ironically, entire Japanese vehicles were being sold at the time with his name on them.
There was a severely battered (but not rusty) Courier of this vintage parked at a house near me. It was still running and being used. The last time I saw it however, it had apparently lost in a run in with an immovable object. It still appeared to be running, but disappeared soon after. 🙂
One of the cities I worked for had a small fleet of these Couriers. They were rugged workhorses that rode like buckboards but took everything that could be thrown at them and came back for more. The city finally rotated them out for something new, “just because,” and they were sold off…City employees who knew what they were, bought almost all of them by matching what the dealer was offering as trade-in. Only the one that had been in a collision went to the dealer.
Our local cities used Couriers as well. Below is a random picture that includes one of them, this photo dates from about 1981:
It really amazing how far we have come in rust prevention. My ’83 Ranger is/was light years ahead of this machine. Even my ’75 LUV, which did live at the coast for a period of its life before I bought it, was not as bad as this Mazda pile.
That’s about the amount of rust it would have gotten in Northwest Indiana by about 1983.
Through the comments I now know how much a “cord” of wood is. Never had a wood-burning anything.