Today’s Nice Price or No Dice F-100 features Ford’s once unique “integrated pickup” design which added helpful space to the bed. This one is described as a “Rat Rod” by its seller, so it probably won’t do much hauling. Let’s see if it’s worth hauling out your wallet to buy.
“Solid” and “sensible” were the words that popped up the most in the comments on yesterday’s 1994 Buick Century. You could add decent value and well-priced to that list too, since most of you felt the car’s modest $1,950 asking price was appropriate for the car’s age and condition. That resulted in a solid 87 percent Nice Price win.
Buick sold a lot of Centurys over the years, however, the car never quite reached the sales numbers of its sister marque, the Oldsmobile Cutlass. For a time in the 1980s, that was America’s best-selling car. At that same time, the Ford F-series became America’s best-selling production vehicle of any kind. Here we are four decades later and it still is.
Ford has retained that sales crown by virtue of investing heavily in the F-series platform, making a bit of a jack-of-all-trades suiting the needs of a wide variety of buyers, and ensuring that it is always ahead of the curve on features and capabilities.
Today’s 1961 F-100 “Integrated Pickup” represents one of Ford’s attempts at making an innovative and forward-thinking truck. What was new and different about the truck was its integrated bed and cab, which eliminated the wasted space between the traditional box and body, allowing for what Ford would claim was 16 percent greater bed space in the same footprint as the separate-unit body style.
These trucks gained the nickname “unibody truck,” although that’s a bit of a misnomer since the integrated bodywork still rides on the same ladder frame as a traditional pickup. Advantages of the design weren’t limited to just increased bed space either. By eliminating he separate bed and cabin walls Ford was able to reduce the number of stampings and welds in each body with related time savings on paintwork and assembly.
As buyers discovered, however, the design had its flaws as well. Tradespeople soon discovered that the air gap between the cab and bed on a traditional pickup allowed for flex space when under a heavy load. Lacking that, the new F-100 would bow across its entire body, sometimes to the point where the doors would bind closed, preventing entry. These and other issues caused Ford to eliminate the body option after the 1963 model year, making it today one of the rarer trucks on the market today.
This one is presented as a “Rat Rod” owing to its patina’d paint and fancy Mustang wheels. The color scheme makes the truck look like a Pinto (the horse, not the flammable Ford) with straight bodywork — save for the rear gate — beneath. All of the glass seems intact and there’s no chrome to speak of so you needn’t worry about that. One tail lamp lens is AWOL, but that’s a pretty standard bit and should be easy enough to replace.
A sarape-style seat cover masks whatever is going on with the bench seat in the cabin, and that’s complimented by a rubber floor covering and some missing trim panels in the door for an overall look that screams utility and unpretentiousness. One thing you might note in the cabin is the long, snake-like shifter sprouting from the floor. That’s connected to what looks to be a M5OD-R2 five-speed manual which, in turn, is mated to a fuel-injected 5.0 V8. Other updates include a switch to power disc brakes all around and a rack and pinion power steering system.
Everything looks new and tidy both in the engine bay and down below. The under-truck photo in the ad shows what looks to be an incomplete exhaust system, but that’s likely to have been completed since.
The truck’s title is clean and the ad claims an odometer reading of 62,000 miles which, considering the major component replacements, doesn’t really mean all that much.
What does mean a lot is the asking price, and in this F-100’s case, that’s $12,000. That gets you a truck with old school patina and modern mechanicals that, hopefully, have all been reasonably sorted. That’s kind of the textbook description of a rat rod. What do you think, could this F-100 Integrated Body pickup be worth that kind of cash as presented in its ad? Or, does that price put a damper on this patina party?
You decide!
Portland, Oregon, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.
H/T to RevUnlimiter for the hookup!
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