His best birthday gift finally finished

DERBY – Little did Dean Pater realize that when he spotted a tired old GMC pickup parked behind a garage a few blocks from his house, he was looking at his own birthday present.

“I saw it six months later and it was still there,” he said. He drove his wife, Darlene, over to see it and asked if it was OK if he bought the truck. Luckily, she had no objections.

“I purchased it from Roy Frazier on Sept. 28, 2002, on my birthday.”

The truck was a 1938 GMC 3/4 ton longbed, not in running condition. But Pater figured it would be a good restoration project.

“It still had the original Pontiac engine, but the head was missing,” he recalled. How much trouble could it be finding the right flathead 6-cylinder head? As it turned out, a lot.

“I went through all kinds of things, but I never could find that head,” Pater said. So it was time for Plan B.

“I knew I wasn’t going to keep it all original at that point, and I had a 350 4-bolt main engine I had just rebuilt. But I wanted fuel injection on it,” he said. So he contacted Paul Davis at A-Plus Auto about a fuel injection setup.

But in the process, he learned that Davis had an LS1 engine with only 8,000 miles on it out of a 1999 Corvette.

“He gave me a real good deal on it, so I sold the 350. This engine puts out 345 horsepower, and it moves,” Pater said. The engine is mated to a 4L60 automatic overdrive transmission sourced from a Camaro.

Holzman Race Cars narrowed a GM rear end by three inches on each side and installed a set of highway-friendly 2.73 gears in it. It is suspended by a custom-built 4-bar setup, with Chevelle disc brakes mounted, front and rear. Holzman also boxed the frame rails and installed a Mustang II front suspension on the factory frame, which was beefed up with a center X cross member.

“They did all the heavy welding and major wiring. I did most of the rough stuff and the engineering,” said Pater, who decided the tiny two-person cab needed more room. So he added 6 inches to the overall length of the cab, with the help of Floyd Bieberle.

To keep things in proportion, after the cab was extended, he sliced eight inches out of the cargo bed.

“The bed sides were totally gone, rusted out,” Pater said. So he took one of the panels to Derby Trailer and had them fabricate new bed sides of the right length, using pieces of 1 1/4-inch tubing to form the bed rails.

Rather than install a working tailgate, he obtained a second front panel and bolted it to the back end of the bed.

“I did the woodwork on the bed floor. I don’t like the silver strips they use on beds,” Pater said. So he took leftover pieces of red oak after he cut the flooring and rounded them over to use as mounting strips. A Holzman-built fuel cell was fitted under the bed, with the filler cap recessed in the wooden floor.

Pater’s son, David, had owned a Camaro drag car with a lift-off fiberglass front end, which inspired Pater to build a one-piece front end for his truck.

“Abe Dreiling welded all of the front end parts together. It’s still all original steel,” Pater said. The hood/fender assembly included the original grille and hood ornament, with a set of custom headlight buckets molded to the fenders.

But rather than a liftoff hood, Pater designed a tilt mechanism using electrically operated linear actuators that, at the touch of a key fob, lean the whole assembly forward or lower it into a locked position.

“The trouble was, I could see when it came down, the fenders would scratch the cab,” he said. Then one day he spotted a semi truck with its hood tilted up for maintenance at a truck stop.

“I said to myself, ‘I know how we’re going to fix that.’”

The “semi-solution” was to cut the pointed ends of the fenders off flat and mount them to the body, allowing the rest of the tilt front end to be lowered without interference.

The stock running boards were retained, but eventually sprayed with a color-matching Line-X bed liner material, as was the underside of the tilt front end, to protect against scuffs and rock chips. The only non-steel parts of the body are the rear fiberglass fenders.

Inside the cab, Pater installed a set of black Mustang racing seats from Summit Racing, with a custom-built console between them. A Camaro tilt column topped by a Grant steering wheel was used. The column had to be moved slightly to the left to make room for the Vintage Air air conditioning outlets. A set of TCI gauges fill the instrument panel and a Lokar shifter is mounted above the transmission.

“I always had everyone ask me, ‘What is it?’ when they saw the truck, so I had Morgan-Bulleigh embroider ’38 GMC in the door panels,” Pater said. Morgan-Bulleigh did the rest of the interior work, including the custom-fitted carpeting.

“I don’t like real loud vehicles,” said Pater, who had a fairly mild dual exhaust system installed, ending just before the rear axle, by Warren’s Auto in Kechi.

Pater selected a set of vintage American Racing 3-spoke wheels and BF Goodrich T/A tires for the rolling stock.

After nearly a decade, the project was nearing completion, with John Dalton doing the body work and paint prep. But then Dalton moved to Roanoke, Va., and Pater was faced with having someone else take over the paint work. When he couldn’t find a local shop to handle it, his GMC was loaded on a trailer and hauled all the way to Virginia, where Dalton installed new glass in the cab and sprayed the truck a 2008 GMC Envoy Red Jewel color.

Now, with the truck back in Kansas, Dean Pater can finally cruise to car shows in his beautifully upgraded “Jimmy.”

“I drive it every chance I get,” he grinned, noting that he even hauled a load of topsoil in it for a yard project -- after carefully covering the red oak floor of the bed with a waterproof tarp, of course.

This story was originally published March 13, 2015 at 6:29 PM with the headline "His best birthday gift finally finished."