FULLY CUSTOM: 1947 Diamond T - Build BREAKDOWN - 12 valve Cummins swap

welcome this is joe from custom classics um behind me is a 1947 diamond tee um big project we've been working on i want to take a few minutes today and kind of go over all the detail of work we've done to it i did a lot of the work so i'm a good person to kind of go over most of the detail on it [Music] [Applause] uh for you guys that aren't familiar with the diamond tee um it was pretty much a um it was like a heavy duty truck they made in the um 40s 50s i believe the 60s i got bought out or something so you would have saw these a lot you know with like a steak bed on them or a big box or like hauling goods um it was kind of like it would have been like a mac or a peterbilt of its time so anyway the customer came to us with this truck and uh he wanted to be able to like cruise it down the road which the original drive train was not up for it i mean this thing in primo condition i mean the best we would do is 45 50 miles an hour and that just was not going to cut it what we started with was completely getting rid of the old frame and we hunted down a super clean 1997 dodge ram 2500 um it had a 12 valve cummins in it and the frame was like immaculately clean like i've never seen anything so clean before so we started with that i thought that would be a good base to start with when doing a frame swap one of the most important things you want to do first is you want the wheel to be kind of like centered in the front fender because if it's one way or the other it's going to look wonky and people are going to know there's a different frame under it so we started mocking everything up we got the fenders where they needed to be and then the first major problem we ran into was the motor was like way too far forward in the frame so the fenders kind of bolt on and you can see how the grille kind of sits around the fender so the grille was just like buried into the motor like it wasn't gonna work to even mock everything up we ended up having to move the motor back almost a foot i think it ended up being like 11 and a quarter inches um then once we got that moved back we're able to get the fenders in place get the grille shell in place and then the cab and so forth another big problem we ran into when we were mocking up the grill was the steering box was like right in the way um the original frame we ended up cutting now probably eight inches off the front and that's like right where the steering box bolted on so we ended up grabbing a rack and pinion steering uh from a later model truckers uh was a generation after the 97 i forgot the specific year but that ended up working out great because the truck steers like like really nice now we were trying to keep everything kind of period correct looking they did actually make a pickup truck model of this but it wasn't a dually and it didn't look nearly this cool you know it didn't have some of the detail my opinion would really kind of start this truck and kind of pushed it more of the custom side versus stock side was this centerpiece right here the old piece was so mangled that um we didn't even know we had it i honestly thought the truck didn't come with it and we found it in the parts and it looked like a taco someone ran over like it was destroyed so we couldn't find one so i decided i was gonna make it from scratch so i kind of came up with a little bit of my own design you know where it kind of like brought these two shapes together you know and before we had the bumper on there it was kind of the first thing you saw was like really cool and after we did that it was kind of like man that's pretty neat like maybe there's like some other stuff we could change on the truck to get a little bit more of a custom vibe out of it instead of being you know like stock looking but yeah it's just funny to think back like that was the first piece that we kind of built for the truck and then what it turned into where probably 80 of the truck is fabricated so another uh thing we ran into with doing the frame swap is the original track with it being as big as the truck is the original track width was seven inches narrower on the original frame than this dodge frame so we end up having to widen the fenders three and a half inches on each side to make up for that just to give it clearance just for for it to turn so where we did that was we pretty much cut this flange loose through here and then widened it and then kind of re-centered the light in there just give you an idea how much work that is just because the size of this truck um just that weld seam there in back was i think it ended up being like 18 feet um yeah and the cab i mean the cab was even more work but we'll get there in a minute so the frame the frame is pretty much stock other than we lowered it four inches in the back uh two inches in the front you can see the motor in there the motor is pretty much stock we just dressed it up to kind of look the part the exhaust manifolds just flipped upside down to raise the turbo up to give us a little more clearance it's all stainless exhaust aluminum tubing this radiator we had custom-made uh it's the radiator intercooler um ac condenser and trans cooler all in one it's like a beefy unit like it's it's kind of a shame it's got that grille covering up that's really cool just on its own so these trucks for their time they call them like the cadillac of trucks for the heavy duty truck market just because they were like really nice compared to other trucks around at the time so like all this stuff is factory like this grill the ornament all the side trims factory some of the trim we had to remake because it was missing and we couldn't find any in good shape moving on back in the truck here the firewall we had to completely cut out and make from scratch so we're trying to keep that factory look but a little on the custom side too so that's why we rolled the diamond tee in there it was kind of neat a little something extra when we got the cab set in place we wanted to have a full eight foot bed so we kind of measured where the bed would sit and so from the back of the cab to the front of the bed was about 19 inches so that's what we ended up adding to the cab so these cabs are like real small it's just that period of a truck they're just not very big and so i mean even me i'm you know i was kind of crunched in it so in the customers he's pretty tall guys so that's why i want to make an extended cab just to make it a little bit uh more friendly to drive so coming inside the cab um this truck really didn't have a floor in it it was kind of like the seat pan was kind of the floor so once we got rid of all that we pretty much built the entire floor from scratch and we tried keeping everything as tight as we could over the trans um just to give you as much leg room as you could so that was a that was a pretty big task because it's pretty pretty long in there the dashboard is pretty much stock it even has the stock gauges in it all we changed on it was this piece up here and this piece used to be two separate pieces so i ended up bringing the dash out two inches and down like two inches and then adding a piece and welding them together and the reason we did that was um we want to run air conditioning and heat in his truck so we did like a vintage air unit and to make it fit to give it more room we had to give us a little more clearance that way plus it gave us some room for the vents but um we did add um what did we add oh but you can see it with the lights on it looks really cool we put like kind of a kind of like an underglow effect underneath the dash there another cool factory thing they did on these diamond tees was um these uh windows they call them like safari style windows but these little cranks here and they pop open it was kind of a kind of like air conditioning before they really had air conditioning you know that's kind of neat so the uh the original interior in this truck are i mean to be honest it really didn't have an interior it was all metal panels and just pretty much everything was painted in here um what was factory though was this overhead unit was actually came with the truck obviously we added this little thing here for the stereo then we added these up here kind of a big rig look for the lights and the windshield wipers samson design did the interior they did a killer job i mean it looks so freaking nice in here um even the with the lights on you know you can see the underglow and the dash and we added the wood to the dash also to kind of match everything and we matched the leather kind of to the wood there it turned out awesome um we got your vintage ac and heat controls up here ac blows super cold just pretty standard four-speaker stereo nothing too crazy but it sounds pretty good you got all your window controls here for all five power windows but pretty happy with the interior turned out really cool 19 inches to the cab added all these windows the it had the rear window already obviously but it was really small it was like a male slot so we ended up making the window about twice as big as it was and then making these side windows we tried to follow um you know all these little detail body lines to kind of match the truck just to make it look more factory and all all every window in here is power other than the windshield so it has five power windows in it which is pretty cool so yeah if you got all the windows open and the safari windows open you really get you know your hair blown and the wind is pretty cool these running boards were made from scratch also we were just kind of sifting around looking for a cool truck bed and we felt the coolest looking one for the time was a it's like a 40-53 chevy pickup truck bed so we ordered one of those and the a long bed truck of that time um was not a full eight foot bed i didn't know this so yeah we put it on there and thing ended up being like six inches short so we actually had to add to the bed to make it you know a full eight foot bed these were all stock although we did add one over here because for some reason they have two and then just one in the back and they look kind of silly so we added one you know here kind of the same spacing just to make it look nice they also used to end about right here um so these we we made from uh scratch you know just to kind of make them not just ends they look a lot nicer same with these bed extensions we made if this was a chevy truck they used to kind of pop out the other way so we kind of swooped them in that way just to i felt like it fit the truck a little bit better these rear fenders they started life as front fenders um they were in pretty poor shape when we got them so this one we had to pretty much from like here back we had to make from you know from nothing just to have something to start with from here you know this whole top part is like the front fender then we just hacked it off there and made it a little bit wider so the dually wheel would fit in there and they turned out pretty cool that's what was kind of fun with doing this project was we didn't really have like a rendering to go off of we kind of did it like old school like we'd kind of get an idea and then kind of mock it up with poster board or some like thin sheet metal kind of grab everybody from the shop to look at it and it's like oh yeah that looks cool so we'll do that you know so that's kind of how we got the idea for you know how this bumps out here and then this whole roll pan we built from scratch and we didn't want to have go straight down we thought it would look kind of too big and flat so that's why it's got this nice little curve in here and then this rear rails kind of follow the curve also so keeping with like the old school theme these tail lights are off of 37 ford um they look kind of it's kind of similar to like how chevy tail light they're kind of on pedestals like that um the reverse lights are out of a 57 chevy um along with the cargo light up there you can see we kind of mold it into the cab and then the rear bumper is also off an early bronco but um we added this little cutout for the license plate here so being a truck we felt like it wasn't a truck if it didn't have a trailer hitch so it actually does have a trailer hitch under there it's kind of a hideaway deal it kind of it's kind of hard to explain it i have to have a picture of it but yeah it kind of runs this way so it's like a fancy receiver that comes out so you can still tow the trailer with it it's got a trailer plug in there light plug in there so the tailgate used to be you know it was obviously for a chevy we got a smooth one and it just looked really plain back there so we ended up having these letters designed and cut out well into the tailgate kind of smooth them in to make them look like they're stamped into the gate and then had them a pinstripe to kind of match the rest of the pinstripping to make them stand out but i really feel like that was a nice touch because it just needed something back there it was kind of plain so one of the original intentions for building this truck was well not only to cruise down the highway but the owner of it has a lot of really cool vintage motorcycles so he wants something cool to haul his bikes around in but we ended up doing the super nice bed wood in the back um i believe it's called brazilian blonde it's probably got like 12 or 14 coats of clear on it you know it has the holeless center things to hold the wood down but yeah it turned out beautiful see if i don't forget anything um it has the factory fuel tank in it still which is a big fuel tank i forgot how big it is exactly i think it's over 40 gallons but to get it to work we had to build this custom filler neck here um we kind of lucked out because the bed sat high enough where we could do the filler neck underneath the bed wood because we didn't want to have to drill into this beautiful i believe it's brazilian blonde wood we have in the back there so so that worked out nice um these little side compartments here um this is originally for the battery and it's still for the battery we just added a second one because the truck now has two batteries because that's what the factory truck had so they kind of made a match they got these fancy little push buttons they pop open also a battery shut off in there which is nice i forgot to mention the other side if you noticed there's also a similar style door on the other side and that one's actually just for storage that was a kind of a cool factory thing they had back then um it's all stock other than i added i think i added about 19 inches to it or so you know to go underneath the cab even like down to these these lights up here these cab lights on these are like nos lights we found from the 60s just to keep everything kind of period correct but like i said a lot of the stuff is all factory like all this trims factory this is factory even these handles are factory these were originally painted but we had them chrome just to give it a little extra of the door handles and latches that's all factory um we added a uh like a second style latch just be able to lock the doors with a key fob but all this stuff is still factory um these wheels we had we had these centers are really cool we had these 3d printed out of plastic and actually had them chromed and then cut out the old center and then glued that in to give the wheel kind of a factory appearance like the original wheel actually um looked very similar to that original hubcap i mean but give it a little extra even down to these um these step things these are actually the floor mats we found this truck came with like a bunch of parts and we found those floor mats and the thing of parts there so we thought it'd be cool to make a stepmate out of them it was a good enough shape or look good still if we get it up in the air again we have some pictures of just the brake system alone was like super tricky it's a this truck from the factory had a hydro boost system which works extremely well but it's so large that it wouldn't fit on the firewall so we came up with a system where we were able to mount it to the frame and then we used a aftermarket clutch pedal assembly where the master cylinder power is a slave cylinder that actuates the the main hydro boost system which is kind of like a i didn't really it was kind of a kooky idea but it ended up working out like awesome where at a truck stops like extremely well and that way we were you know we were able to hang the pedal and give you a little bit more foot space so i'm trying to think if i can think of any more details on the truck but i think that's about it so so if you like this truck be sure to check out some more of our videos and yeah hit that like button and subscribe have a good day [Music]

Channel: Custom Classics Automobiles & Restoration

Views: 76,923

Keywords:

Id: THSb35RsMY0

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 23 2022