The Cars & Trucks of My Formative Years, Part 3: 1984 Ford F-150 – Big Hat, Little Cattle

Welcome to Part 3 of this series featuring the chariots of my parents and family.  As with the rest of the pictures seen in this series, these, too, were rescued from the trash pile.

Today’s feature is the 1984 Ford F-150 my father bought in 1985.  While I had limited seat time in the previously featured 1970 F-100 and 1981 Dodge Omni, I drove this F-150 a lot.  This certainly makes me more aware of its talents and shortcomings, of which it had both.

Plus, I might add, this pickup is one I’ve rarely mentioned here and it was a challenge to write about; perhaps my latent youthful exuberance is clouding my middle-aged mind.  Or something like that.

When the “body fell in on the frame” of his 1970 F-100 (I’m speculating the cab mounts croaked), Dad went shopping.  He had been pickup shopping intermittently for a while, but was stymied in his search upon being told Ford was no longer offering a three-speed on the column (although Ford brochures show those officially being available through the 1986 model year).  This loss really threw him for a loop, as a three-on-the-tree was his ultimate fantasy in transmissions.  It didn’t take up floor space and, best of all, it was standard equipment, thus it didn’t cost extra.

For those in other parts of the world, please understand pickups for many of us in the United States (or maybe just the rural parts, which is 97% of the land mass in this country – no joking) are like a cocktail of a pocket knife, an insurance policy, and the fire department.  You may not always need such a tool daily, but when you need it you need it, and not having it really fouls things up.  Dad no longer had a pickup, and within a week after his F-100’s rendezvous with Rusty Death, this two-tone Ford was sitting in the driveway.

This Ford was found sitting on the lot of Cape Toyota in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.  I remember spotting it and Dad doing a quick U-turn to go look at it.  This Ford had 2,200 miles on the odometer and the asking price beats me.  All I remember from this experience was his realization this pickup didn’t have a four-speed so much as a four-speed having a granny low first gear (which yielded three ordinary gears, thus he was happy, except for it jutting out from the floor) and the dealer had a 1939 Buick sitting in the showroom next to a brand new MR2.

Twelve year-old Jason was infinitely more interested in the Buick than he was the MR2.

A deal was struck and we drove home in the ’84.  Since my dad’s seeming philosophy in child-rearing was offspring should be rarely seen and never heard, he had shooed me away during all discussion with salesmen, which is how I was able to explore the Buick.  It was on the way home I learned the most pertinent detail about his new Ford – it was powered by the 300 cubic inch straight six.

No doubt some are now thinking “Oh, a bull-nose Ford with a 300 and a sorta four-speed.  Sign me up!”.  If so, I’m happy for you.  My enthusiasm is rather restrained although the paint scheme was an attention grabber, in a good way.

It would seem any manufacturer should have four requirements for any engine.  The engine should be efficient, smooth, reasonably powerful relative to its displacement, and reliable.  The Ford 300, at least as found in this particular F-150 and in my limited experience with other examples, not only met just two of those four criteria, it mastered them.  To assist in narrowing things down, I’ll just say 10 to 12 mpg when empty was typical.

To further narrow it down, and to be fair, it was 1984.  No manufacturer had power outputs that would dazzle and awe anyone.  But with certain Ford engines, they had been defanged, neutered, and emasculated (yes, I know those last two are synonyms, but that’s how bad it was).

Now for a clinical detour and observation…

For the bulk of the 1980s, the 300 coughed out 115 horsepower (although a couple sources state some versions made as little as 101 horsepower).  That is 0.333 to 0.383 horsepower per cubic inch.  If perusing through Ford history, an overhead valve straight six was available thirty years earlier in 1954.  It made 115 horsepower from 223 cubic inches.  But that is a gross rating, so let’s deduct 15% to approximate net ratings.  That yields 0.438 horsepower per cubic inch.

Even if there is a larger variance in gross to net horsepower ratings, the 300 as of the mid-1970s through the 1980s still realized a specific engine output planted solidly in the Eisenhower era.  However, its torque was 223 ft-lbs at 1,600 rpm.  So the 300 had that going for it.

For further perspective, Ford’s 302 in 1984 wasn’t exactly potent, but it did extract an additional 15 horsepower from all of 2 cubic inches.

 

Dad worked this Ford but not as much as he had the ’70.  A week or so after purchasing this Ford, he went to the quarry and loaded up with around 2,500 pounds of rock to fill a few soft spots in the lane and driveway.  Those were the first scratches in the bed floor.

When I started driving, this Ford was my go-to vehicle as it was not being used daily.  Using it also once got me drafted for addressing those perpetual soft spots.

One summer day when I was 16, Dad left me a note and $20 before he went to work.  My charge was to get some gravel and address said soft spots.  Okay, no problem.  Thus, I fired up the Ford and drove the fifteen or so minutes to the quarry in Cape Girardeau.

Now, I wasn’t as adept at estimating volume as my father.  I’m still not.  The process for getting rock was simple; stop at the scale house then drive out to the pile you wanted.  Soon enough a loader operator would be there and start dumping; you’d wave to tell him when to stop.

It seems my gauge on when to stop was calibrated differently.  When I headed back toward the scale house, I stuck that Ford in granny low and took off.  What appeared to be my father’s 2,500 pounds of gravel was actually 4,200 pounds.

These situations are where talents emerge and the shortcomings amplify.

The chassis wasn’t fazed about toting this much weight.  The only chassis hiccup was steering.  Navigating curves, even at low speeds, was a trip as I could hear the front tires scrub for a bit before biting and taking me where I needed to go.  It was a bit disorienting to have the wheel turned, hear tire squeal, and still be going straight. Especially when there was a quarry pit on the other side of the fence that was next to you.

 

With a combination of a strangulated 300 straight six and just over two tons of rock, the trip home took about three hours.

To be fair, that 300 never complained.  But it was passive aggressive, telling you in its demure way to go pound sand, even when called upon to accelerate when empty.  It was routine to have bicycles, funeral processions, and old Volkswagen vans full of overweight people accelerate faster from a dead stop than this poor thing did – even when empty.

Naturally, I unloaded that rock and made a second trip, getting only 4,100 pounds that time.  Also, naturally, I got chastised for using the entire $20, for having loaded that much on a half-ton, and for using so much material it was hard to drive through.  I always enjoy shoveling over 8,000 pounds of rock only to be rewarded with criticism.  The key point, which was roundly ignored, was those soft spots in the driveway never reared their ugly heads again.  My spending $20 then likely saved dad $200 over time.  When my parents moved out five years later, those spots were still flawless.

That Ford was mostly flawless (although the a/c compressor slung oil after a few years, so of course it never got fixed, we just quit using the a/c, thus this doesn’t count) until one fateful day in March 1998.  I was moving from Jefferson City, Missouri (my first time here), back to Cape Girardeau.  The F-150 had migrated to Jefferson City so I could haul a trailer full of my stuff back to Cape.  Everyone knew that 230 mile trip could take the better part of a week, but we thought the old girl was up to the task.

She was, but then she wasn’t.  The morning my stuff was to be hauled back, when the trailer was loaded, that Ford refused to start.  Thankfully, the future Mrs. Jason was headed that way with her father.  The future Mrs. Jason’s father knew exactly what the problem was; something in the distributor, I want to say.

My soon-to-be father-in-law saved the day and all was good again.  That was the only time that old Ford ever refused to start.  Chalk up points for the 300.

Writing this has prompted a question intertwined with an observation.  Ford offered four different two-tone paint jobs in 1984.  This Ford doesn’t match any of them, but seems to be a hybrid of two of them.  I have never seen another Ford of this generation painted in a similar scheme.  To this day, I wonder what its story is.  It appears factory, but was it?

Soon after the non-start occurrence, my father started pickup shopping again.  By this time, the old F-150 had faded and flaking paint and was looking rather frayed around the edges, despite it only having 55,000 miles.  In late June of 1998, my father swapped off this Ford for a new Dodge Ram 1500 – with an automatic and a healthy 5.9 liter V8.

Dad and I found this Ford again sometime later.  It was parked in the yard of a mom-and-pop trash hauler.  It was now one of their haul trucks and was looking really beleaguered.  Given the paint job, there was no doubt this was it.  It has always struck me how being a garbage scow was a rather ignoble end for a pickup that, despite its woeful shortcoming in the powertrain department, had been a terrific one.