Kansas man turns Ford pickup into mini-semi

It was probably inevitable that when Russ Walline got his hands on a tired old 1934 Ford pickup, it eventually would be transformed into a mini version of an over-the-road semi truck.

“I always drove a truck most of my life,” he said. “So last winter, a bunch of us were sitting around talking and we decided to `truck’ it.”

It was an easy-enough project to launch with neighbors and friends, since Walline had all kinds of semi truck parts and pieces stashed away inside his garage.

“I had bought the truck off Gary Cooper in Mac (McPherson),” he said. “It was really rough, out of Colorado. That was four or five years ago. It was more or less a rolling chassis. The top was all rusted through. It was runnable, but that’s about all you could say for it.”

Walline bought a 289 Ford V-8 engine, built by noted local race engine builder Jerry Phillips more than 20 years before, and installed it between the half-ton pickup’s narrow frame rails. When he first went to register the truck for a license plate, the inspector pointed out that while the cab and bed of the truck were, indeed, 1934 vintage, the frame’s ID number indicated it had originally underpinned a 1936 pickup.

When a push rod failed in the 289, Walline discovered he could buy a rebuilt sprint-car engine for about the same money as he figured an overhaul would entail.

“Jim Schrag in Moundridge had built this 351 for a guy in Colorado. It had TRW pistons, crank girdles and was balanced and blueprinted. It had lost a piston and the guy never picked it up, so Jim told me if I gave him what he had in the rebuild ($2,000), I could have it.”

So in went the 351 Ford V-8 sprint car engine behind the C6 heavy duty automatic transmission, a huge performance upgrade. The ’34 pickup appeared to be well on its way to being a traditional hot rod.

“I have never outgrowed hot rods,” said Walline, who grew up working at his family’s Derby service station, Schroff Oil Co., in Galva.

“With that 289, it was fast and fun. Now it’s fast and dangerous,” Walline said. “That motor still thinks it’s in a sprint car.”

Some serious chassis work, boxing the frame rails and realigning the steering linkage, had to be done when it was discovered the ’34 was lifting the left front wheel and torquing the frame under hard acceleration.

The single 4-barrel carb on the sprint-car engine was replaced with a pair of 4-barrels recently. They will eventually be plumbed into cowl-mounted air cleaners on either side of the cab.

Walline figures that with the Comp Cams solid lifter camshaft and aluminum heads, the somewhat de-tuned race engine still puts out somewhere between 430-450 horsepower.

In the process of turning the pickup into a road-going semi clone, he used the mesh metal heat wrap from a semi’s exhaust system to create the grille insert on his truck. With the help of Cooper, he joined a set of Speedway sprint car headers to a huge set of cab stacks equipped with internal mufflers to tone down the ear-splitting roar of the truck.

A VW folding sunroof replaced the rusted-out metal roof and an old Peterbuilt nose wing was placed atop the roof. A friend even created a miniature fifth-wheel hitch plate that was installed in the shallow bed, along with a beer keg fuel tank.

But something was still missing in the pickup-to-semi transition: a set of dual drive wheels like the big trucks use.

“We got in touch with a place in California and told them what we needed and two days later, we had them … a set of 8-bolt wheels, “Walline said.

The truck was painted a satin black by Jason Koehn of McPherson, with pinstriping by Nicholaus Jewelry and Design of Hutchinson. As a finishing tribute, Walline had the Schroff Oil Co. signage recreated and applied to the doors of his mini-semi by T-N-D Sales Service Sign Design of McPherson.

When Walline’s wife, Myrna, saw those signs, she said, “You’re not selling that, are you?”

The answer was obvious.

“It’s about half a rat rod,” he says. “It’s kind of rude and crude, but it’s a lot of fun to drive.”

This story was originally published April 27, 2016 at 10:16 AM with the headline "Kansas man turns Ford pickup into mini-semi."