Unpainted Bolts when Restoring?

[w30bob]

Hi Guys,

I need some help understanding something. Ok....lots of things, but let's keep it M37 related here. A month or so ago I found some pics of a really nicely restored M that I posted here. What jumped out at me as being "wrong" was that all the bolts on the truck were left unpainted. I didn't understand that, but kept my mouth shut......which was a good thing. I've since found a few other posts on here and Steel Soldiers discussing restoration and it seems that leaving the bolts unpainted is actually "correct" for an assembly line resto.

That's got me a bit confused. Why would Dodge not paint the bolts? I'm sure the military painted them before they saw active duty as the shiney bolts would kind of negate the green paint providing camoflage, no? And it added a step between when the vehicle was produced and when it was put into service......so I assume the Military had to paint the bolts after they received the truck from Dodge. That just doesn't make any sense to me, when you consider how easy it would have been for Dodge to paint them during assembly......or maybe I'm missing something?

So assuming unpainted bolts is "correct" for an assembly line resto......why was it done that way?? And who ended up painting them?

thanks,
bob

[Tom @ Snake River]

This is just a SWAG. But maybe there were some bolts unpainted when they left the assembly line. Most of the M-37s that we recieve have been painted 2 or 3 times, so that every bolt would have been painted eventually.

[Cal_Gary]

Unpainted bolts wouldn't seem to make sense. I took delivery of a number of new vehicles during my Army career and everything was painted (including one entire spare tire on a deuce and a half-ugliest I ever saw)....
Gary

[k8icu]

Well I'm not as versed on the M-serries build requirements, but in WWII all vehicles got a final coat of paint to cover exposed bolts. Unfortunatly nobody took a M37 right off the assembly line and put it into a vacumed sealed container so that we could pop it open know 60 years later and see what the truck actually looked like when it rolled off the assembly line. If I ever perfect time travel I'll see what I can do fix that....

[w30bob]

Now K8.....am I detecting the faintest hint of sarcasm in your post? Time machine, eh? If you ever get that built.....and you waste time going to the Dodge assembly plant.........we need to have a talk. And I need to get you to Vegas for a weekend!!!

Ok.....seriously......back to my incredibly important, life changing question about the unpainted bolts. Check out the two pics below to see what I mean. I have to confess that I'm really interested only in the Air Force M37s, not the green trucks.......but I've seen the greenies restored like this with the unpainted bolts too. I also need to acknowledge that these two photos are off of the MSeriesRebuild site, from Photo Gallery Page 1....and the truck belongs to a Mr. Steve Simons. I was going to send a PM directly to Charles (of MSeriesRebuild), but I figured some of you guys might like to know the answer to the unpainted bolt question too. Except, of course, those of us with time machines (SMILE).

And if you look carefully at the pics you'll see a couple of things I'm trying to confirm as well....such as the fact that Air Force M37s didn't use the green canvas seat covers. My M's seats have remnants of black vinyl covers and I've got pics of a number of other Air Force Ms that also have black vinyl seat covers. Also, this truck uses straps for door stops and not the metal stops that are internal to the door. My M also has straps, but up until now everyone has said that all Ms used the metal stops. This stuff keeps getting more and more interesting.............

To be continued.............

Have a good one,
bob

[snowdad]

One concern I would have on unpainted bolts is they will eventually rust and the rust will spread. I will be painting mine.
Phillip

[w30bob]

Hi Phillip,

Well.....maybe. ORD 9 specifies almost all the bolts used on the M were either plain steel, cadmium plated or zinc plated. So unless you used plain steel bolts unpainted you'd have some protection. I guess the best way to leave the bolts unpainted would be to use 316 Stainless bolts, nuts, etc., but not the cheaper 18-8 or 304 SS junk. I don't know if SS bolts were used in the restoration in the pics or in the other unpainted bolt restorations I've seen. You could also clear coat the steel, cad, or zinc plated bolts too. In reality the rust that forms around the bolts doesn't start at the surface that's painted, it starts in the thread area and the area under the bolt head and washer, the places that water evaporates from last. Obviously, all parts of an unplated steel bolt will rust, but the areas that hold moisture will be where the rust runs rampant.

So painting the bolts after the truck is assembled really won't stop the bolts from rusting. To do that you'd have to paint the bolts before you assembled the truck.....but even then some of the paint on the bolts and the area it's being bolted to will get scraped off as the bolt head and/or lockwasher engage........and rust will form there. I've seen a lot of military vehicles that have been restored, and you can tell the bolts were painted after it was assembled.....you can see the orange-red rust rings starting around the bolts. It's frustrating.....metal rusts. It's kind of hard to beat mother nature.

I tend to always put a bit of grease on any steel bolt threads before I put them back in.......keeps the rust at bay and makes taking them out a few years down the road a lot easier.....and doesn't affect the strength of the bolt. But I agree with you.....I wouldn't leave bare steel hardware unprotected even if it was "correct". Cuz it won't look pretty for long.


Take care,
bob

[Rick C]

The pics of the Air Force truck are nice but I would use them to decide what color was or wasn't original. I took apart an Air Force M43 and everything inside was blue... there was nothing black in the cab except the rubber weather stripping. Both seats were green vinyl and the seats in teh rear compartment were OD canvas. Truck had only been to the Civil Air Patrol since it's Air Force Life. I believe there are factory photos showing unpainted bolts on the outsides of the trucks. Whether or not they were painted before delivery is the question.

[w30bob]

Hi Rick,

Yeah, there are some things about this restored truck that don't jive with my Air Force M too, but I don't know enough yet about how the AF trucks were assembled to know all the details. But I plan to keep digging. On my M, which is a '52, the entire truck was painted blue from the factory, no black on the frame or chassis components (see pics below). Now maybe when production of the second batch of M's started again in 1958 they changed how they were painted.....just a guess on my part. I don't know what year the restored truck is in the pics. But I haven't found any black on my truck anywhere yet.....it was all blue as the first coat.

As I get time to play with it I'm documenting the original paint color on every part....I just haven't had the time to check everything. I noticed on this restored truck (in other pics on the website) that they painted that gas tank blue. My tank was missing when I bought it, but that seems a bit odd to me. The more I learn about the AF trucks it's appearing they were assembled differently than the green trucks. And I mean that in terms of what was painted and what color things were painted. I did find one green thing on my M so far.....the horn. It's green and appears to be the original horn. Go figure!

regards,
bob

[Josh]

my truck is about as far from a restoration as you can get; it's heavily modded, but, I did it this way:

On items I knew I wasn't going to take apart later, like the box assembly, I sprayed the epoxy and high build primers on the separate panels, assembled them with zinc plated hardware, added a coat of sealer, then hit it with color and clear. On parts I might remove later, like the fender bolts, I sprayed the parts out to clear, and then cinched them down with good high quality SS fasteners. Anything I could get a magnet to stick to I didn't use. It's been two years, and no problems with either array. Interestingly enough, I installed a lockout front hub kit, and used black phosphate allen heads on those and they are rusty as can be. They look terrible. Some stuff on the frame I painted assembled, and when I take it apart, I of course chip the paint off, but, I jsut grab a can of rustoleum and hit them quick when tehy go back together. Not the best paint in the world, but better than nothing.

-Josh

[mike_l]

Here are my thoughts. I remember seeing photos of the WWII era Dodges rolling off the line and there was a man posted there with a spray gun doing touch up at the end. Photos I've see of the M37s rolling off didn't show anyone at the end doing touch up.

From a few notes I kept from Lifer's posts about this subject, paying attention when I'm stripping parts for underlying colors, and looking closely at the photos in the TMs have led me to believe that on the vehicle assembly line, parts were bolted on with whatever hardware was at their stations. Most likely these were directly from the suppliers and finished in the plating of the day (zinc or cad?), probably mirroring the ORD 9 details. Keeping in the spirit of an efficient vehicle assembly line, I presume that major components (i.e. engines, doors, beds, etc.) were assembled "off line" (and some maybe "off site") and then moved to the vehicle line. We know the rubber (weatherstripping, tires, wiring, pads, etc.) and glass wouldn't have been painted over so they were either a final assembly action after that component was painted or installed on the assembly line. Either way, once the rubber and glass went on, no paint was applied to that part. Some examples would be: bolts holding the windshield (upper) hinges since there is a rubber seal above them and around the glass frames; bolts holding lights to the fenders & rear since there are exposed wiring harnesses and glass; clamps & bolts securing the wiring harness; bolts holding the rear fenders on since there is the fender welt material sandwiched between the bed & fender during assembly; reflector hardware....I could go on for quite some time but you can probably figure out my method by now.

Going back to the "efficient vehicle assembly line" thought, you can almost imagine what would have been pre-assembled before being staged on the vehicle line. My gray area (pun intended?) is reverse-engineering the major components and guessing as if I were trying to assemble this truck how it would have been assembled. A lot of "chicken vs egg" theories turn into which came first, the paint or rubber/glass?. This process has provided hours of entertainment and research in planning my restoration. As mentioned, there are no preserved examples of an original truck remaining so this can allow a bit of flexibility on how we represent factory colors. This has to be one of the most fun parts of this restoration to me. Fun fact, the only piece of new hardware that I have found in the ORD 9 TM that is listed as OD in color are the lugnuts. There may be other stuff, I just recently noticed this so it comes to mind.

I'd always understood that once the military unit got hold of the truck via supply channels, they would do "touch up" on any bright hardware remaining (i.e., PVT Snuffy would be out on extra duty Saturday in the Motor Pool, paint brush in hand, "camouflaging" the bolts. By the way, my truck had straps holding the doors also but remnants of the proper stops inside the doors. I figured these were used in lieu of proper parts at some point in their post-military life when parts weren't so plentiful.

[w30bob]

Hi Mike,

I'm doing the same thing....working backwards to try and figure out how these trucks were assembled/painted. We've got to compare notes sometime.

With my M being an Air Force truck I'm trying to figure out if it was assembled differently than the green trucks. I learned something new today. I got a set of m37 headlight buckets from a guy on Ebay and they were delivered today.......I'll put a pic below. Reason I bought them was I could tell they were from an Air Force M37 and would answer a question I had about when certain parts were painted. If you look at the pic you can see the inside of the bucket was painted Strato Blue. It looks like only half the bucket was painted inside, but under the rust in the bottom half of the bucket it's also blue. No primer or green paint under the blue either. So this tells me the headlight assemblies were sent to the assembly line already painted blue and assembled, and simply bolted on the truck. I was thinking they might have been installed either painted green or bare metal, and then painted blue on the vehicle on the assembly line. That obviously wasn't the case. Which means other components probably were also delivered to the assembly line already painted blue. Now if ALL the sub-assemblies and component parts were painted before the truck was assembled then I could see why the bolts that held everything together weren't painted. It would be messy, and like you mentioned, would get paint on things that shouldn't have paint on them. But looking at the bolts in my truck's drivetrain and suspension I can see those were painted blue, probably after assembly onto the chassis on the line, as there's paint sealing the bolts to what they're attached to. So I'm thinking the frame, suspension, and parts of the drivetrain (differentials) were painted on the assembly line AFTER they were installed. Most of the other components that bolted onto the truck were delivered to the line already painted. That's my theory of the day, anyway...and always subject to change as I go.

This is fun stuff.....no doubt. What I'm not having much luck finding out is what components were not painted blue, meaning left green, for the Air Force trucks. For example.....I've never seen an original headlight switch with remnants of blue paint on it at the swap meets or for sale online. Nor have I ever seen a picture of an AF M37 interior from back in the day. So did that mean the Air Force trucks used the green headlight switch? Wouldn't have looked real pretty....but I don't know. My switch was missing from my truck when I got it. But my truck has a green horn underhood, and I believe it's original to the truck......so what other components weren't painted blue when installed in a blue truck?

I know that collectively we can all figure out how these trucks (both green and blue) were put together. Maybe the professional restorers of military vehicles already know. I'd sure like to.

Have a great night,
bob

[Cal_Gary]

I can't see Army and Air Force trucks being assembled differently at the factory. My Army Motors 125 has a few factory photos with no distinction regarding Service.
Just my 2 cents,
Gary

[refit1701]

I think that replacement parts were OD, not Strata. So if you needed a new horn, they removed it from the box and bolted it on...with the OD on it. When the truck went in for a repaint, it might get some blue on it then.

My '53 AF truck had blue all the way to the primer on the frame and running gear. No black that I could find. I was originally going to paint it black but changed my mind after cleaning it.

[k8icu]

My 53 AF truck has the following color on the frame. Army Green, AF Blue, Chasy Black, Red Oxide Primer. Body parts have a mixture of colors. Some parts like the top of the glove box are SB. Others like the dash board where Civilian Brown, FD Red, FD White, SB, OD, Red Oxide Primer.

I blieve that my truck might have been assembled at a cross over period when AF trucks changed from OD to Blue. So my therory (for what it's worth) is that my truck was a combo of OD and AF parts and black chasy. Was sent to the AF and they at some point pulled it apart and painted it. Then it got sent to a Army Res or NG unit where it got OD again. Then after life in the military it went to a Fire Dep and got a coat of Fire Engine Red. Then a coat of White and then Bubba painted it brown. When I'm done it will be three color nato camo.

Still working on that time machine..... Can't find a Delorian for a good price.....