Pickup Bed

[Original Smith]

Why do you think it took Ford so long to see the obvious on pickup beds. Most of you know the pickup was finally introduced in March 1925, but they had a prototype made in late 1924.

[speedytinc]

Perhaps not wanting to lower TT sales?
In hind-site, a missed financial opportunity.

[Allan]

Perhaps because it wasn't Henry's personal idea. By the time they were introduced they could have been in production 10 years or more. The proof is in the number of commercial offerings and home done conversions.

Allan from down under.

[JTT3]

I have a Dec 24 roadster & have a metal 25 style pickup bed that doesn’t have ford on the tail gate. Just never got around to taking the turtle deck off & putting the bed on. So many projects but I’ll get this one done.

[Rich P. Bingham]

It would be interesting to know how manu runabouts were purchased with the intent of installing a pickup box ? Early on, I’d reckon Ford saw that as the pickup option. The tiny turtle deck 1913-22 is quite worthless from a practical point of view, but it’s easy to replace with a pickup box, and purveyors of accessories made it easy to make one bu offering hardware kits.

[skyhunter]

Henry seemed to have a bias or blind spot towards things outside his use.

Like "there is the TT, why would anyone want a car with a small truck bed on the back".

Same with the Model A. "why, we have the model T".

[Wayne Sheldon]

It would be interesting to know how manu runabouts were purchased with the intent of installing a pickup box ? Early on, I’d reckon Ford saw that as the pickup option. The tiny turtle deck 1913-22 is quite worthless from a practical point of view, but it’s easy to replace with a pickup box, and purveyors of accessories made it easy to make one bu offering hardware kits.

Excellent point! Considering the goodly number of "early-take-off" (nearly NOS) turtle decks I have seen, I would guess that quite a lot of runabouts were purchased with the intention to have a small pickup. There are actually quite a lot of era photographs that one can be reasonably sure the runabout is at most a year or so old and has a nice little pickup box on the back. I would suspect some dealers had a local shop ready and willing to make them for customers. For more full bodied light trucks and delivery vehicles, there were literally hundreds of local/regional builders of fine truck bodies to fit the model T chassis. And the factory and dealers offered chassis for that use. For light duty delivery, a runabout with the turtle deck removed was cheaper than a full custom body on a bare chassis.

[rickd]

Maybe a business decision at the time cause Ford to balk because the Federal govt planned to place additional taxes on the completed Pickup built at the factory. Thus, the practice of pickups being put together at the dealer.

[John kuehn]

I think when the aftermarket folks started seeing T owners making their own out of lumber and having a more utility use Ford came around to doing it.
Ford could have started doing it years before the end of the T era and that might have been a mistake to hold off doing it.

[Rich P. Bingham]

. . . there is the TT, why would anyone want a car with a small truck bed on the back". . .

No TT generally until 1918. Meanwhile, there was the “Form-a-Truck” and similar offerings, and owner-built pickup boxes going back to ‘09.

I have a notion the factory metal pickup bed coincides with advances in factory-forming metal and Ford bodies produced mostly in-house. Consider how many parts of the Model T had become sheet metal stampings by 1925, that had initially been forged or cast. Meanwhile, light wagon boxes on horse-drawn vehicles were universal and readily available to adapt to a Ford runabout.

[JTT3]

Rich what a great point on wagons & buggy’s having aftermarket boxes available.

[DanTreace]

I have a notion the factory metal pickup bed coincides with advances in factory-forming metal and Ford bodies produced mostly in-house. Consider how many parts of the Model T had become sheet metal stampings by 1925, that had initially been forged or cast. Meanwhile, light wagon boxes on horse-drawn vehicles were universal and readily available to adapt to a Ford runabout.

Would to me be correct, Ford was advancing metal working all the time, and by '25 the big presses at the huge Ford River Rouge complex were hitting stride.


Lots of makers of wood beds, even earlier days.

E1D2D488-176B-4D18-9506-DCB76EFF7894.jpeg (116.63 KiB) Viewed 2628 times

Even this wagon maker that got into the metal fab business for making runabout beds to change the T into a pickup.

Ford likely figured to get in finally and make a light pickup.

[Original Smith]

Steve Coniff's pickup has for pickup stenciled on the frame.

[Rich P. Bingham]

Larry, what year is Steve’s pickup ? That’s really neat !!

[RajoRacer]

My apologies for jumping in but Steve's P/U was a 1925.

[Original Smith]

Steve used to drive that 25 pickup everywhere, even on some narrow Rocky Mountain trails that were barely wide enough for a Model T! Of course, he had a Ruckstell with 4-1 gears too. It is the first 25 pickup I ever saw, and he helped me with questions I had when I was building mine. For your information, my car is pictured on the cover of the Model T Times, Nov-Dec 2023.

[John kuehn]

Hopefully not to far off the subject but this is supposed to be a 1917 photo of a pickup truck in Orangefield Tx. Looks like this was a Runabout that was in good shape that was turned into an early pickup. The box looks like a aftermarket instead of homemade.

[Mark Osterman]

My 1923 runabout came to me with the factory turtle deck .. but a drivers side spare tire mount so I assumed that at some point there was an accessory pickup box installed. When I found an original vintage pickup box I bought it and swap it when I need to do hauling in the Spring.

[Rich P. Bingham]

I cherish the turtle deck that came with my ‘13 runabout, partly for its relative scarcity, but frankly, I could never appreciate its lack of utility for my purposes, so I built a pickup bed. Unlike Mark, I don’t change it seasonally
Here it is “in the white”. I painted it to match the body.

[Mark Osterman]

Takes me around 45 minutes to replace the turtle deck with the pickup box and vice versa. Most of that is reattaching the tail, brake and turn signal lights.