It's not often that someone waltzes down your driveway and asks if you are interested in buying their old truck, but this is exactly what happened to Randy Carter one day. The man told Randy he had this old truck on his farm that was about 30 miles away and wanted to know if he had time to look at it. Randy is like many of us and already had his hands full with other projects, but he figured it was worth a look.
What he found sitting in a garage outside of Concord, North Carolina, that day was a rare '47 Dodge Canopy Express that had been hibernating for at least a decade. The old chicken farmer went on to say that he used it on his farm back in the day, and after it was painted he felt it was too nice to use as a work truck. Eventually it went to a local museum during the 1980s and then into the garage on the farm where it sat now with flat, rotted tires, a dead battery, frozen brakes, and a gunked-up fuel system.
The Dodge wasn't anything that Randy normally would have gone out looking for, but he knew it was something special. So he took the bait and made arrangements to haul the '47 home. The previous issues the truck had were easily remedied, except for the rebuilding of the stock brakes. Anyone reading this who has worked on a vintage Dodge truck knows how hard it is to get parts for them, and rounding up the needed brake spares was no easy task for Randy. As the fluids were changed, battery replaced, and fuel system cleaned out and revitalized, Randy washed the Dodge and found a beautiful dark blue and black two-tone paintjob under the dust of long storage that came to life after a good coat of wax.
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