My name is Luis Herrera. I'm 44, I work for the county, and in April of 1998 I bought a 1965 Ford F-100 from a farm out by Shafter for $1,200, mostly so my son Danny and I would have something to do together on Saturday mornings besides argue about the TV. Danny was 14 then. He's 16 now, he's got his license, and he has an opinion about every bolt on this truck, which is exactly what I was hoping for.

What it is: A 1965 F-100 Styleside, short bed (the 8-foot bed was standard; ours is the 6-1/2 foot), two-wheel drive, with the "three on the tree" three-speed manual shifted on the steering column. 1965 was the first year for Ford's Twin I-Beam front suspension, which is one reason I wanted a '65 and not a '64: they ride a lot better. It came to us in faded turquoise-and-white two-tone with a lot of Kern County sun damage, a bed floor you could see the driveway through, brakes that went to the floor, and a cab that smelled like alfalfa and mice.

The engine: Here's a wrinkle. A '65 F-100 came from the factory with the new 240 cubic inch six (or a 300 six, or a 352 V8). Ours has a 223 cubic inch six in it, the older Ford six that was standard in these trucks through 1964. Somewhere along the line, a previous owner swapped one in, probably out of an early-60s Ford truck or car when the original gave out. The farmer didn't know when. It's a good, tough, simple little engine, one-barrel carburetor, about 135 horsepower on a good day, and it runs, so it stays. Danny says it's "not original." I say it's a work truck with a work-truck engine and the guy who put it in was probably a farmer with a barn full of parts, same as the guy I bought it from, and that's about as original as a farm truck gets. We've agreed to disagree. It's staying.

Danny keeps the real log in a spiral notebook in the glove box. This is the short version.

Everybody wants to start with paint. Paint is what you see. But I'm going to hand the keys to this truck to a sixteen-year-old, and before I do that, I want to know that every single thing that makes it stop and steer is new or as good as new. So brakes were first, before the engine even ran, and I'd tell anybody doing this with a kid to do the same. Here's what a 1965 has and what we did about it.

• Four-wheel drum brakes. No power assist, no discs. That's what it came with and it stops fine when it's right. We replaced the wheel cylinders (all four), the shoes, the springs and hardware, the flexible hoses, and every foot of steel brake line, because the old lines were rusted and I'm not going to trust a 34-year-old brake line. Had the drums turned at the machine shop; two of the four were still within spec, and we replaced the other two.
• The master cylinder. This is the one I want to tell people about. A '65 has a single-circuit master cylinder: one hydraulic system for all four wheels. If one line lets go, you lose all your brakes at once. Ford went to a dual (split front/rear) master cylinder in 1967, and the dual-circuit setup from a later F-100 can be adapted to a '65 with the right bracket and a little plumbing. We did that. It's not "original." It's the one thing on this truck I don't care about being original, because if a rear line pops on Highway 99, Danny still has his front brakes. Do this one.
• Steering and front end. Tie rod ends, drag link, the kingpins (which were worn to the point the front wheels wobbled), and new shocks all around. Then an alignment at a shop.
• Everything else that keeps you alive: Seat belts. It didn't have any; lap belts weren't required in trucks until 1966-67 and this one came without. We bolted in lap belts, both sides, to reinforced points on the cab floor. Working lights, horn, wipers, a mirror on both sides, and a fire extinguisher under the seat.

Total for brakes and front end: a bit over $600 in parts and machine shop work, and about two months of Saturdays. Best money on the whole list.

The floor of a Styleside bed from this era is wood: planks running front to back with steel strips over the seams, bolted down through the cross-members. Ours was rotted through in three places and gone entirely in a fourth. I told Danny that if he wanted to run the bed, it was his, and he ran it.

He measured everything and drew it up. He priced a ready-made kit (oak planks, strips, bolts, all cut to fit, a few hundred dollars) against buying rough lumber and cutting it ourselves, and picked the kit, because "we don't have a planer and the kit's cut right." Fair. When the kit came, he did the tear-out of the old floor himself, wire-brushed and painted the cross-members, laid out the new planks dry, drilled the bolt holes, put three coats of spar varnish on every board (both sides) in the garage over two weekends, and bolted it all down with the stainless strips and hardware. I held things and handed him things. That's it.

It is the best-looking part of the truck right now, sitting in the middle of a faded two-tone body, and when people walk up at the hardware store the first thing they say is "who did the bed?" and I get to point at my kid.

Here's the plan. Wimbledon White, Ford paint code M, which was a factory color on Ford trucks and cars in 1965. A plain, creamy, single-color white, the way a lot of these trucks left the factory, with the grille and bumpers in argent (silver), the stock hubcaps, and the interior a plain tan. No two-tone, no stripes, no flames (Danny asked). A clean white work truck.

Why white? Because it's right for the truck, because it's easy to touch up when he dings it (he will), because it doesn't show every ripple in the bodywork the way a dark color does, and because it's about 110 degrees here in July and a white cab is a kindness.

The job: We'll do all the prep ourselves, which is most of the work. Finish the bodywork, block-sand the primer, pull the glass and the trim and the bed. Then it goes to a body shop on the east side that does a lot of older trucks, for the actual spraying, because I don't have a booth and I'm not going to learn to shoot paint on the one truck I care about. The estimates we've gotten for a good single-stage enamel job, with our prep, run around $2,000 to $2,500. That's the big number on the budget and we're saving for it, with the goal of paint in the spring of 2000 when the shop's slow.

Rounded. Danny keeps the receipts in a shoebox and the total in the back of the spiral notebook. Labor is free, except for the welding, which cost a case of beer and a lot of tacos.

So, all in, we'll have something like $7,000 and two and a half years in a truck that'll be worth, honestly, less than that. That's not the point and everybody who's done one of these knows it's not the point.

He'd write this part himself but he says it's "corny." So I'll be corny.

• How to bleed brakes, and why you never, ever skip a wheel.
• How to read a shop manual and a parts diagram, and that the diagram is always right and your memory is always wrong.
• How to set points with a feeler gauge and time an engine with a light. (I had to think for a minute. He'd read the manual.)
• That a job takes three times as long as you think, and that's fine, because the point was the Saturday, not the job.
• How to drive a three-speed with the shifter on the column, with a clutch, in a truck with no power steering and no power brakes. Every kid at his school drives an automatic. He can drive anything now.
• How to make a decision with money: the bed kit versus rough lumber. He priced it, he weighed it, he picked. That's the whole game, right there.
• That his mother is a saint, because her car has been in the driveway for seventeen months.
• That his old man doesn't know everything, and will say so, and that's okay. That one I learned too.

Danny gets the truck when it's painted. That was the deal from the start. He's got a license and a beat-up Honda for now and every Saturday he asks if the paint shop has an opening yet. Spring. I keep saying spring.

We've got two shoeboxes of prints from the drugstore, from the day we towed it home right through the bed wood, but I don't have a scanner. My cousin Ray, the same one with the welder, has one of the new digital cameras and has promised to bring it over "one of these Saturdays." When he does, there'll be a picture page: before, the brakes, the bed, the rust repair, and the truck as it sits now. And when it's white, believe me, there will be pictures.

Until then, other people's projects are worth a look: Project '67 Mustang (Dave in Flint is a couple of years ahead of us), The Corvette Diaries, Motorcycle Touring Diary (before us on the Hobby Horse ring; Sandy and Jim are the folks we want to be when we're done), Sunday Gravy (after us on the ring, and if Danny and I could eat there on Sunday we would) and The Pinewood Derby Workshop, where the dad has the same rule I do: the kid does the work.