359 Pete - What would you do?

We started our business using this truck to haul grain locally. We are complete newbies at this and got taken on this truck. We fell in love with the paint and pipes and did not do a full due diligence on the mechanical aspects of the truck. We have now uncovered a pretty significant issue that has us buying another truck. Frame jacking...

As we have pieced it together, the truck was stretched quite a while ago. The weld seam is between the tandems and they double framed it there. The double frame has over the years started to rust between and is now jacking the frame. It is more pronounced in front of the 5th. The area under the 5th was badly rusted. When we replaced the 5th wheel we had the upper horizontal part repaired by cutting and welding a new portion that is under the 5th. The bottom horizontal part is also decayed but not nearly as bad. It needs to be fixed soon.

The real issue is that the frame jacking along with the stress of running daily 80K loads on an end dump is causing stress cracks in the crossmembers. We are also seeing some stress on the 40 year old air-trac suspension. We just replaced one of the brackets.

I think the truck is just too old and feeble in it's present condition to be a daily worker. I am looking for suggestions on how to proceed.

I can just sell it off now with the known defects. We will take a bath on the sale as I will not let these defects go un-noticed to a new buyer. With the frame issues and the small cam engine, I think we would be lucky to get 1/2 of what we paid for it. We paid $17K for it and thought that by buying it and getting it ready for regular work we could later sell it for $25K. That will never happen.

We could roll the tandems back to the original position and cut off a lot of the cancer and repair the rest. Would probably look ok. I wonder though how desirable the truck would be then to someone else. Seems like the first thing they want to do is stretch it.

I don't think it wise to just pull the inside frame, clean it up and re-assemble. With all of the welding we would have to do it would end up looking like a mess.

The cleanest fix is to get some replacement rails and cut off all of the back and replace - costly but then we could sell it as a solid truck and maybe get more for it. Even if we do anything with the frame we still have an anemic engine.

I guess I could shorten it and then keep it for a backup truck. I hate having assets that are not working.

What to do...

 

Btw, the original truck had a sleeper and was a 205WB. It is now a daycab and the WB is 254. So bringing it back to 205 should look ok.

I am hoping that taking the suspension loose and rolling it back is something we can do in our shop. Seems straightforward. The only issue then is finding a good driveshaft shop to shorten them.