An Old Truck
An Old Truck
by Bill Aumack
Hey, good morning, boys and girls. I'm glad to see you here this morning, joining us for the children's story. I'm here in my garage. Well, actually, this is not my garage. It's kind of just a picture back there, but it's kind of cool, huh? You see that old truck there? Pretty cool. Kind of wish this was my garage, but it's not.
But I do want to tell you a story today about an old truck. And it's an old truck that I had when I was a senior in high school and I wanted a car very, very badly. And so I saved my money and saved my money, but it wasn't very much money. And i bought a car, a truck it was a van actually, it was a ‘69 Ford van and i want to show you some pictures of it okay you guys want to see some pictures of it? Yeah well you're going to get to see some pictures of it okay. And there is my 69 Ford van! Pretty stinking cool, huh?
And you can see it looks a little rough. One of my friends is there in the van. It was kind of rough. The paint's coming off the side. It's all rusty along the bottom and it was worse on the other side. And so I said, well, we can fix it up. We'll start working on it. Right. And so, yeah.
We pulled it into the shop to start working on it. Now, I lived at the school, and we had an auto mechanic shop. We had a lot of tools that we could use, and the auto mechanics teacher was gracious enough to let us use those. When I pulled it into the shop, I kind of didn't like the front end. Right here on this front grill, it says Ford right there. I didn't like that very much. I didn't know what I was going to do about it. But I want you to pay attention to that. Oh, I also want you to pay attention to the wheels. It came with these old white wheels. I didn't like those very much either.
We started working. This is looking through the back doors. You see I've already cut some of the side off of it. We've taken the side doors off over there. The back doors are off. And we started working. You see all the rust that's down here along the bottom. It was rough.
This is the other side and you can see I've cut the side off. And look, here's the exhaust where the exhaust comes out and there's nothing even connected to it. It's just dangling there. They'd cut the exhaust off but left this little piece of pipe hanging in there. And look here, there's a whole thing missing. They just rusted away. When you live in places like Ohio, they salt the roads. There's snow in the wintertime they put salt on the roads to melt the snow and it gets on your car and it makes rust. And so this thing was pretty rusty. Look. There's just a whole section here gone. There's a close-up. There is supposed to be metal all here make this all solid it was all wobbly and shaky. This was a hard piece to make as it had a piece that had to bend around this door Jam and go around the floor and go around the jam at the bottom was a very difficult piece.
And then we started putting new pieces in. Well, you see, we've put in some pieces there on the side. We've put in a piece here under the door. I'm up on the roof, fixing a vent on the roof that was bad. On the other side, we're going to put in the back, the side. Remember, this is a spot that was all gone. Look, we've built that up.
I had to go to a shop and get somebody else to help me make that piece because I didn't have the tools and equipment to make that piece or the know-how. And he made that piece for us. There along the driver door, there was holes. You can't really see them here, but there was holes in the floor. You could see right through to the ground when you were driving the vehicle. It was rough.
And we put in a new fender and new all along here and along the bottom here's my dad helping me work on the back a little bit and slowly it starts coming together right. Starting to see the new body pieces on. The back doors were so rusted that i just had to take the side door off a different van and cut it down to size and get it to fit in here and make all the body lines line up. And I just welded it in solid so I got rid of the back doors. I want you to notice, we've been working on this a while, and notice there's no leaves on the trees. It was wintertime. More pictures of us getting the body work done. There's still doors missing on the side. This door is all rusted.
And we started doing the bodywork and filling the dents and filling the holes and putting in the Bondo and fixing everything. And remember that ugly front end? Look, I found a chrome grill off another van and got that and put it on. So I thought that looked a lot better. And then we got it primered. And remember those ugly white wheels? They're not white anymore. There's different wheels on there. Actually, they're the same wheels. We'll talk about those in a minute.
But look at all these body lines. We had to get straight in the back doors. We welded in and made it all fit. I got the side doors off a different van that weren't all rusted and put them on. A lot of work went into that. And remember those white wheels? Well, now they're silver. I couldn't afford to buy new mags, new rims. What I could afford was a can of silver spray paint. So we painted them silver. They didn't look too bad. They weren't great, but they didn't look too bad. They were passable.
And this is the van. There's me and my dad and our little dog that we had at the time, Nickie. And it's not quite done yet. There's still not glass in the back windows. And there's some other things we had to do.
But this is the van that I drove all the way from Ohio to California. And when we moved, you notice all the leaves are on the trees now. Took me a while to do all this stuff. Months working on this and getting ready so that when we moved to California, we'd have something to come in. And it was a lot of work and it was hard. And I didn't know how to do all those things.
And as I think back about all the people that helped me, of course, my dad helped me work on it. Remember that piece I was talking about that was real hard to make? I had to go to another shop and that man helped me make that piece. And he did it so quick and easy. And I didn't even know how we were going to make that piece. He had knowledge I didn't have. Even the principal of the school helped when we were getting ready to primer it and put the primer on. He came up and he used to be a painter. And so he painted that thing so quick. I was trying to do it and I was very slow. But he was quick and he just banged it out real fast and taught me some things about painting. And so all these people came together to help and to work on it. I didn't do it all myself. I did a lot of it. I did a lot of it, but I had help. People showed me how to do it. And how to do these things, how to how to make it work.
I drove that van for a couple of years and had to sell it as life goes on and bought a different vehicle. But that van always reminds me of, “I can do it.” I didn't know how to do those things when I started it, but I learned and I can do it. And I can trust the people around me that I have around to help me, to teach me. I can trust God will be with me and will help me and will guide me and will teach me. The Bible tells us that with Jesus, we can do all kinds of things if we trust in him and we believe in him and we let him guide our lives.
It may be something simple like fixing up a car. It may be something much harder like telling your friend about Jesus and having them have a change of heart, become a follower of Jesus. I don't know. But one thing I do know is that you can trust Jesus. All right. I hope you've enjoyed the story. I hope you'll remember that, that you can rely on your friends and your parents to help you. And most of all, you can rely on Jesus.
We'll see you next time. Bye.