Wicked Wednesday: 1947 Dodge Pickup Gets a 4.0L Jeep Engine to Help It Keep Up with Modern Traffic
Owner of this 1947 Dodge pickup wanted to drive it more often, but the stock engine was not up to the task. Enter the legendary 4.0L.
This 1947 Dodge pickup truck is extremely cool. The owner thinks so as well. In fact, the owner wanted to drive the truck more often. But he soon realized that the original Flat Head engine was not up to the task. He was tired of being a rolling roadblock, so he needed a bit more power. But he didn’t want to go crazy with something outrageous like a Hellcrate engine.
What he ended up doing is keeping it in the Mopar family with one of the most legendary engines the company ever produced. The 4.0L straight six from the Jeep Cherokee XJ. And while he was at it decided to also grab the 5-speed manual that went with it.
This week’s “Wicked Wednesday” is all about this 1947 Dodge pickup. It is refreshing to see someone take an old truck and fix it up to drive it more often. He didn’t want a garage queen or a drag strip monster. Just something with decent reliable power. He turned to the folks at the V8 Speed & Resto Shop to do the work. A bit ironic since no V8 was going in this truck. Regardless they posted a video overview of this truck on their V8TV YouTube channel. The video is short but refreshing. It reminds us that we can fix an old truck up and make it a bit more modern without going full on resto mod on the thing.
A Simple Task
A 1947 Dodge pickup is a simple vehicle. That is part of its charm. It becomes less charming when you can’t merge onto a highway. The 4.0L inline six from the Jeep was a perfectly reasonable solution. Many times, people tend to get carried away with these things. They want to quadruple the power and want brake discs the size of pizza boxes, and so on.
The goal here however was to make the truck a bit more livable in modern day to day traffic. A bit more power, a more modern transmission and some air conditioning can go a long way. Add in a bit of additional sound deadening and you have a perfectly comfortable truck that happens to be 75 years old.
Why So Rare?
When you watch this short video, it makes you stop and think for a moment. Why don’t more people do this? It seems most builds either want to refurbish everything and keep it all bone stock. Or throw almost everything in the bin and over build everything. Or another option is to keep the old truck running on a shoestring budget. This middle ground approach we have in this video is nice to see. The owner wants to DRIVE the truck. And while the work done here, we are sure was not done for free, it was probably much less expensive than other builds. So why don’t folks take this approach more often?
We Don’t See Them
Maybe there are more of these types of builds out there than we think. But we just don’t see them because YouTube is dominated with videos of folks stuffing 1,000 horsepower engines in everything. Or videos of trying to keep a truck running using bubble gum and duct tape. Do you have a Dodge project like the one we see here? If so, please share it with us on the Dodge Forum forums. We need to see more examples like this so people understand that it is OK to aim for the middle ground sometimes.
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