When Burnt River resident Larry Mann brought home a 1949 Ford F-1 pick-up truck in 2015, he figured he’d spend a couple of years upgrading it before gifting it to his wife.
Nine years, and several thousand man hours later, the project, which turned into a full-blown rebuild, is finally over. Rather than giving his new baby to wife, Darlene, Larry has turned it into a show vehicle. The truck placed second in the radical customs category at the prestigious 2024 Toronto Motorama car show. It was one of 28 vehicles featured in the front room at the show, which ran March 8 to 10.
Sitting down with The Highlander at his shop just off County Road 121, Mann opened up about what he described as the rebuild of his life.
“I found the truck through a guy I knew years ago who worked at the snowmobile dealership in Haliburton. He got it as part of a trade deal, but didn’t have the resources to really fix it. It needed a lot of work – it looked good from afar, but it was far from good,” said Mann, who started his career as a mechanic before going on to work for Ontario Power Generation.
The original idea was to fix it up for his wife to use as a leisure vehicle – she had always wanted a vintage truck, and this fit the bill. Once Mann started working on it, though, he quickly realized this wasn’t going to be a simple job.
“I started with the suspension, and it just blossomed from there. The next thing you know, I had the frame completely off. It was a total rebuild. There isn’t one part of that vehicle that isn’t customized,” Mann said.
The finished product boasts a 347 ci engine, four-link rear suspension with coil overs, coil over front suspension with tubular control arms, custom fenders and bumpers, custom fabricated bed, ridler wheels, flush mount glass for windows and windshield, leather interior and keyless entry. It’s painted metallic black – done by Steve’s Coachworks in Bobcaygeon – with the fuel-injected motor hitting up to 535 horsepower.
The rebuild was completed last fall.
“It was an evolution – the more I worked on it, the more my vision came together. Once I did one mod, that sort of fed into another,” Mann said. “The motor was done by Don Palmer Racing, when we tested it for power, it came back way higher than I expected. So, in my joy, I called my wife to tell her and she said ‘well that’s not really what I need’, so the project moved from me building it for her, to building it for myself as a show vehicle.”
As a make good, he bought Darlene a turquoise Ford Thunderbird.
After finishing the truck, Mann reached out to judges from the Toronto Motorama show. They visited his property in October, saying they’d love to feature the vehicle as one of this year’s premiere entries.
“It was nerve racking leading up to it – this is the first time I’ve put the truck out there for people to see… getting the second place was amazing, but my sentiment was, when those fellas came up here to look at the truck and said it was worthy of being in the front room, I had already won. For a guy who does stuff at home like me, I didn’t need anything else,” Mann said.
Further validation came when organizers of the Syracuse Nationals Classic Car Show invited him to attend their July show for consideration for the annual Gene Winfield Award, which recognizes excellence in custom automotive design and build techniques.
Mann hopes to make the show in New York and will be featuring the truck at Back Alley Cruiser events in Lindsay over the summer. He plans to put the car up for auction sometime in the future.
It wasn’t his first rebuild – he remembers transforming a 1969 Ford Mustang Cobra Jet Mach One in the late 80s – and it won’t be his last. He has a 1932 Deuce Coupe he plans to work on, and a 1972 Ranchero GT he’s already mostly finished.
“You only want to have one big project at a time, because you only have so much time in the day and you only have so much money,” Mann said. “To be perfectly honest, I’m glad the truck is finished. When a build goes on that long, it does start to wear on you. I went back to work to help fund it, that’s why it took me so long. If I had stayed retired, I would never have had the financial wherewithal to finish the build the way I wanted.
“I’m definitely proud of it – the rebuild was pretty much all me, and it stood out right alongside all the other vehicles [at Toronto Motorama], even ones that had hundreds of thousands of dollars pumped into them,” he added. “It’s been a fun ride.”
