Old Anvil Redesigns an International Harvester C1100 Backside
With an overabundance of ugly, it’s hard to make a mid-’50s International pickup look anything but odd, but the crew at Old Anvil Speed Shop certainly proved that theory wrong while working on this ’63 International Harvester C1100 and, in the process of creating a swan from an ugly duckling, turned their attention to fabricating a perfectly proportional tailgate.
In previous stories featured in this magazine we’ve witnessed how Old Anvil Speed Shop in Orange, California, was able to work some of their magic on (by all accounts) an ugly ’63 International Harvester C1100 with the midsize bed (International Harvester made three lengths: a long-box type, midsize, and a shortbed version—commonly seen in the Gasser era).
- Advertisement -
The biggest reason Old Anvil didn’t use the original tailgate is it was made of a single sheet of steel and they wanted a dimensionally thicker (and stronger) double-wall ’gate.
The truck’s factory design wasn’t meant to be anything other than just functional, and the factory must not have had a high level of quality control back in the day because Old Anvil has noticed on multiple International Harvester trucks the same doorjamb rub or different dimensions from the right side to the left side of the vehicle.
To get the desired lowered stance, the bed floor was raised to clear all the truck’s required chassis parts.
Old Anvil began by first chopping and reshaping the roofline, stretching the doors, fabbing new A-posts, and making some major improvements to the rear fenders that allowed Old Anvil to reproportion the factory “large forehead” appearance and bring the whole project into the 21st century while keeping some of the ’60s-era look.
A new tailgate required new/updated hinges, so Brandon Gerringer not only created the mount and pin part, but also turned some Delrin bushings down on the lathe so one end would fit snuggly inside the tailgate’s bottom tube and the other end perfectly set the needed gap to the bedside.
One of the Old Anvil fabricators, Brandon Gerringer, knows this truck well. He’s spent the last year working on it and was the main fabricator on the roof chop, door stretch, and fender fabrication, so scratch building this tailgate gave him another chance to improve the truck’s appearance.
Once installed on the reworked bedside flange, the hinges will disappear when the gate is up.
He estimates he put about 100 hours into building the tailgate, done in 16-gauge steel, which is far less forgiving than a standard 18-gauge when it comes to shaping. The 16-gauge also meant more work was needed to get the finish perfect, but the thicker gauge takes the heat from welding better. The tailgate’s height is fullsized even though the bed comes halfway up the backside of the ’gate, and it’s now very sturdy—there’s no slop or movement like the original.
Part of the double-wall design of the tailgate included wrapping the front and back panels around a tube to meet in the middle, so in order to find the seam of where the two pieces would meet a simple gauge was made to determine its location.Gerringer first fashioned a template that incorporated all the design elements of the new tailgateand then mounted it onto the bottom tube to see if everyone involved liked the direction it was going.The original end of the bedsides ended with an ornate, curved flange, but Old Anvil cut the curve off so the flange was straight (and easier to cover).Gerringer made several dies for this project but modified this one for the edge of the tailgates three raised panels on the back portion of the tailgate. (He also ground it smooth and gave them a high polish before using them on the final piece.)For work on the inner tailgate piece, the location of all three panels are determined and the smaller wood block will be reused on the other end.Since they’d be working with 16-gauge steel sheets (not the more common, thinner 18-gauge), Gerringer wanted to check his dies with a test piece. The 0.75-inch wooden block screwed to the sheetmetal provides a guide to push against the die for an even stamping.With the wooden guide unbolted from the test piece Gerringer can check it against the panel that has been coated in Dykem and then scribed with the intended design.The decision to make the tailgate panel in one piece rather than smaller sections welded together requires three workers to wrestle the entire assembly (with the wood guide blocks attached) through the Lennox Tru-Edge MetlMastr, closing the gap of the dies just a little bit with each pass.With a little bit of WD-40 sprayed on the sheet to lubricate the dies, Gerringer makes three passes through the machine, closing the dies down each time to get to the desired depth on the last run.With the smaller block removed (and moved to the other end of the panel) you can see how the inner section is now raised.In order to straighten and sharpen up the lines stamped by the die, a hammer and chisel will help correct any imperfections.The next step in the process is to DA the entire surface with 80-grit sandpaper.The handmade radius die Gerringer made will roll the inner panel’s bottom edge up to create a quarter-circle. The front panel of tailgate will have a corresponding quarter-circle and the seam where the two pieces meet will get welded together.Gerringer and Old Anvil owner Paul Bosserman (left) get the tough job of repeatedly feeding the long piece of 16-gauge steel through the Pullmax multiple times to round over the tailgate’s bottom edges.Gerringer also designed a stop lip in the top die so the edge doesn’t get over turned.A piece of steel sheet is clamped between an aluminum block and a rounded wooden form with a portion of the sheet sticking out, and a torch is used on what’s sticking out to make it momentarily malleable so it can be shaped with a hammer over the curved edge of the form, which will yield both the top and bottom halves of the tailgate corners.The end of the bedside is capped, so the round corner piece will be tacked and then finish welded to the tailgate structure.The inner section of the tailgate can now be attached to the tailgate’s framework.To hold the tailgate in place when up Gerringer milled a slightly oversized latch pin and threaded the inside so it could be mounted to the bedside flange. The pin is oversized so the tailgate will close tight and not rattle around.Normally the latch bolts straight into a tailgate but because they wanted to hide the mechanism Gerringer made a housing for it and then attached the assembly to provide a cleaner look.A cable-fed bellcrank will operate the latch.The edge of the tailgate was fashioned with a small lip that folds over to hide the end of the bedside.
The outer edge of the tailgate was actually made in pieces like a picture frame, with the edge pieces folded 45 degrees on a break and then welded to the outer panel (with a raised design that’s different from the tailgate’s inner panel).You can’t see the butt-welded seams where the outer panel meets four edge pieces at all. The raised section of the tailgate’s outer panel will probably get some lettering of some sort spelling out “International.”The top edge of the outer panel will be welded to the tailgate’s top edge (arrows) but just below that the exposed edge and spot welds will remain visible to mimic the original bed’s design.Making a rolled rear pan is a bit complicated with this project. Original International Harvester Fleetside taillight lenses are mated to newly fabbed buckets and a large recess will house the license plate and light.You can see the access to the taillight housing before the finish sanding and grinding of the welding seams.The finished edge of the tailgate still retains the feel of the original without some of its odd proportions.Roughly 100 hours went into fabbing this tailgate, which includes making some new dies and imagineering a whole new way to dress up an old International pickup.
Click on this issue’s cover to see the enhanced digital version of Old Anvil Redesigns an International Harvester C1100 Backside.
