1963 Dormobile Project Almost Finished

[MassMike]

My intention was always to start a thread for this project but that never happened... so I figured I would share a few before, during and after pictures instead. I acquired this 1963 109" Dormobile in 2018 from the estate of a collector (Ian) in Charlton, Massachusetts. After working up the courage to start, I dove head first into the project and recently was able to drive it to Metal Dash weekend.

Some project highlights include maintaining the original external patina, galvanizing as many steel components as I could (missed a few), conversion of a galvanized chassis from regular to station wagon, fully rebuilt 2.25l engine, partially rebuilt transmission, addition of a Salisbury rear, power brakes, lots of corrosion repairs and fiddling with almost every component on the truck.

Just wanted to share

[MassMike]

Few more progress pics

[MassMike]

Current condition Pics

[loose gravel]

Nice! I'd kill for a garage like that!

[Bud]

Looking great Mike

[Xplitive]

Perfect!

[series guy]

Looking great. I’ll bet that bead blast cabinet got a workout.

[GraniteRover]

Ian was going to take a Dormobile top from me for that truck. Looks great, and looks like a ton of work. I was thinking it would be fun to see where all his trucks went.

[worldofinflation]

Nice. Great work.

[conrad1468]

Nice job!!

[rover03]

And it looked even better in person at MetalDash.

[50 wulf]

Beautiful 109! Great work! I love those Station Wagons. The frame condition pic is about how bad the frame is on my 61 109.

Does it have the Dormobile seats? If yes, what happened to the camper top?

[MassMike]

Thank you all for the kind comments, it sure was a fun but challenging project. I still intend to finalize all the smaller details over the next year or so, but at least now I can take it for a ride to keep the motivation levels up!

The Dormobile seats are still part of the truck. I used the Exmoor cover kit to recover them after fixing a few broken springs and freeing up all the different pivot points. Overall I was happy how they turned out. I was under the impression that a Dormobile could be custom ordered in any configuration that you wanted, so I believe this truck might have been ordered with only seats. Either that or the seats and Dormobile ID tag were sourced from another truck in a past life.

[dporter110]

There used to be another hard top Dormobile that came to the MAR rally. The truck had a capstan winch and the owner had machined an aluminum blender that ran off the starting dog from the winch. The mahogany storage box for the blender was as much of a work of art as the blender itself!

[series guy]

I remember that David.