One of the reasons I love old trucks is because the vast majority of them were worked until their tongues were hanging out or they were so absurdly obsolete that they had no value at all and were scrapped. Think about it. Even today you’ll see some pretty ragged hunks of iron barfing out smoke and lumbering down the road with a load on their back or on a trailer behind them. Modern traffic and DOT regulations have certainly cut down on how far some of this stuff is allowed to go before being retired but when a tractor has a few million miles on it, that big fellow is all but used up. Such was most likely the case with the sparkling and awesome 1939 Peterbilt 260 tractor that was recently restored and now sits proudly in the showroom of the company. As one of 14 such trucks ever built, it is bordering on miraculous that any trace of the machine was left, let alone enough of it to actually fix up.
The fine folks at Overdrive Online broke the story while I was off calling an NHRA event and then I took off for an anniversary trip with my wife so that’s why we’re a few days late with this story but it certainly is worth telling. The abandoned and forlorn rig was found sitting in the Arizona desert in the middle 1990s and was purchased by a guy named Bob Dean who operated a Louisiana restoration business. Dean obviously didn’t jump into the project the second he bought it, but understanding what the truck was, how complete it was, and what its historical significance likely was, he snapped it up and the sad looking heap was delivered to him thereafter.
A couple of important factors led to this truck being saved and one of the most important was the meticulous record keeping done by the Peterbilt company and the fact that they had the build sheet for the very truck that was being restored. With all of the information in front of him Dean was able to really dive deep into the project. The most BangShifty part of the whole situation (in our opinion) is the fact that there was no place to go for replacement parts or specific small items so Dean had to fabricate pieces to the factory’s look in order to keep the truck accurate. As you would expect when looking at the restored rig, the most difficult and expensive piece to reproduce was the shiny, prominent grille that dominates the front of the truck. The Overdrive story claims that Dean had some $25,000 into its creation and when you start to get into how that whole thing had to get made from scratch, we believe it.
The truck came to be owned by Peterbilt when the company’s engineering manager got wind of the restoration and specifically the depths that Dean had gone to in making sure things were correct and those initial conversations led to the company buying the truck and finishing the restoration that Dean had so capably started. We think that the truck is in its rightful place and kudos to Bob Dean for saving it from the sandy tomb it was destined to live out its days in.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE WHOLE STORY AND GET EVEN MORE SWEET DETAILS FROM OVERDRIVE ONLINE
