Across from my office at the University of Oregon, the Koinonia Center has been demolished! One of the workers emptying out the last items from inside the building was driving this Van-up, which he confirmed was his own handiwork. I guess the dump-bed was essential for him in the demolition business.
So do these vans (GMC/Chevy) have a separate frame or are they uni-body? Cause that would be a heck of a trick for a uni-body vehicle.
Frame. The Dodge vans had floor sections welded to the frame, but I don’t think the GMs did.
In any vehicles, the distinction between unibody and BOF is not very clear-cut. If heavy frame members are welded to the underside of the body, it technically makes it a unibody, but not in the way we typically think of in terms of passenger cars.
The GM vans are built very similar to the Dodge, with stamped sheet metal “frame rails” so no they do not have separate frames, at least in the standard cargo and passenger versions. In the cutaway version however the Dodges retained their unibody style construction while the GMs got a traditional frame. The unibody construction of these does not really differ from that of most unibody cars in that they also use stamped steel frame rails welded to the floor pan. There are very few cars that use true monocoque construction.
I wondered simply because I have heard people refer to these vehicles both ways and then the addition of “chassis vans” for cargo hauling and RV construction muddies the waters a bit. Thank you for some clarification.
Well, this is a 30-series (1-ton) so I’m kind of confused on how these are set up — edit — I didn’t read Eric’s explanation —
I know the G10s and G20S are completely unit-body. No sub-frames either: just a front crossmember that the A-arms/suspension and engine bolt to.
I’m real curious to check out the next G30 I see at the scrapyard. It’s nice being able to say, “can you flip this thing upside down?” and they do it.
If it is a cargo/passenger version it is a unibody, only factory cutaways got a frame in this body style. Keep in mind that a G30 cargo/passenger has the equivalent or slightly lower payload than the same year E250, the G20 close to an E150 and the G10 similar to the E100 when they still made them.
That kind of makes sense since the G20s carried the 5×5″ 5-lug wheels just like the G10s did. Only the G30s got the 8-lug wheels & bigger brakes. The only difference I can obviously see between the 10-20 is that the 20 has a few more leafs in the rear.
I was looking at two 80’s E150 conversion vans at the crush yard early this morning. They seem like such better designed & built than the GMs. The engine cover on the Ford barely intrudes between the front seats unlike the GM. Somehow Ford squeezed a 460 under there on top of that.
these make so much more sense than pickups.
The idea of putting a slide in dump bed on/in the back of an old van is neat. This one seems to be decently lopped off to accomodate the slide in. Did the owner include any kind of wall behind the seats?
I have plainly spent too many miserable hours behind the wheel of these, when my first question was “I wonder if it’s possible to make a Chevy Van that can dump itself?”
Seriously, this has to be so much harder to put together than doing the same treatment to a pickup. I had always understood that these were some sort of hybrid between unibody and BOF. I had understood that the 1975-on Ford van was the only true BOF van out there, until the more recent Chevy Express. However, I have never spent any time under one, so will defer to those with more experience there.
JPC… By any chance were the GM vans you drove all 6-cyl. short wheelbase?
In “another life” in the late ’80s I drove for an auto parts warehouse. They had three ’84 Chevy vans in their fleet. Mine was the LWB w. the 305 V-8 and overdrive automatic. The seats were the high-backed ones. The other two were the 6 cyl. with the 3-speed A/T. IIRC, the seats in those were different, possibly low-backed ones.
Occasionally I’d need to swap vans with one of the other drivers. I liked my 305 van, b/c it rode and drove much like a car. The sixes, however were rough-riding and had a much “tinnier” feel. Oddly, the 305 got slightly better mileage. It seemed I could bank on the sixes taking about a gallon more than the 305 did on my route. Day to day, the miles travelled were pretty consistent.
Eventually, my route got to the point where I needed a bigger truck. They gave me a P30!! The first few times I drove that, it felt like I was driving a house!
Outside of work, I’ve driven some claptrap vans. All GM & Ford. Age & maintenance makes a huge difference. The ones I mentioned above were well maintained and fairly new.
I think there is something in the water. The commonality of “art cars” and various self administered engineering on autos throughout the Willamette Valley is obvious to anyone who drives the Ashland to Portland run with any regularity.
That thing wouldn’t look out of place here in Europe. Actually, it looks vaguely familiar to the “Opel Bedford Blitz” pickup that Opel offered sometime in the seventies; although they were somewhat rare, at least the pickups.
I guess this could be more practical than a pickup in some respects, but I don’t really see how it could be worth the trouble.
Well if you have a van, a need, and not a lot of money you make what you have work. In general if both are in the same general condition the pickup will sell for a lot more than the van.
That would also be know as the Bedford CF van? The general styling is uncannily similar. I’ve posted a couple of those to the Cohort page, I also occasionally see the pickup version, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a conversion like this though.
Re the ‘worth it’, I think to get a pickup to take the same size dump bed would mean going up the heavy-duty scale thus increasing the cost.
Right, that’s the one. Opel sold it here as a captive import (more or less, as Bedford was part of the name). Apparently they didn’t sell too well though, although you still see vintage Bedford-based RVs running around; they look kinda cool, the vague Chevy resemblance probably helps.
Concerning the cost of conversion, I think I can see the rationale now.
This reminds me of the light trucks scrap metal dealers drove here, back in the seventies and eighties. The home-made lengthened Hanomag Henschel, later on Mercedes.