Ford Model AA Trucks

By Wade Ratzlaff

Some days start off with promise. The kind of day where you think, “I’ll just fix this one little thing on the truck, and then maybe we’ll go out for ice cream.” Other days, however, start off like that… and end with you lying in the driveway, covered in grease, PVC pipe in your hands, wondering if you’ve accidentally invented a new branch of plumbing science.

This was definitely one of those days.

It was July in Santa Clarita, the kind of heat where the sun feels like it’s personally trying to set you on fire. The thermometer wasn’t content with 100 degrees — it was well past that, heading toward “boil water instantly on contact” territory. Even the lizards were complaining. Naturally, this was the day my dad and I decided to pull the rear end out of my 1930 Ford Model AA truck to replace a U-joint.

Now, the AA is a whole different beast than a regular Model A. It’s the heavy-duty version, designed to haul more weight than common sense would recommend. It also has a few extra parts that Model A folks don’t deal with — like the short shaft assembly.

The short shaft is a clever little section that sits between the transmission and the rear driveshaft, letting you add an overdrive like the original Warford my dad and I bought years ago. That Warford still sits in the garage, quietly judging us for never installing it.

The job sounded simple:

1. Pull the rear end.
2. Replace the U-joint at the short shaft.
3. Put it all back together before we turned into human jerky in the sun.

By mid-morning, “simple” had packed its bags and left town. The truck was in a thousand pieces scattered across the driveway like a mechanical crime scene. Dad and I were crawling under the frame, hunting for bolts that rolled into places known only to spiders and dark magic. Finally, after much sweating, grunting, and at least three busted knuckles, we got the rear end out and were ready to start reassembly.

That’s when we discovered a horrifying truth:
We couldn’t find the short torque tube — the very piece that connected the short shaft assembly.

We searched everywhere. Under the truck. Behind the workbench. Inside every coffee can full of miscellaneous parts we’d been “meaning to sort” since 1992. At one point, I even checked the freezer, just in case someone had mistaken it for a popsicle.

Nothing. Gone. Completely vanished, like socks in a dryer.

After an hour of roasting in the sun and arguing about whether we’d ever actually owned one in the first place, I had a flash of inspiration — or maybe it was just heatstroke. Either way, I told Dad, “I’ll be back,” and drove to the local hardware store.

There, in the blessedly air-conditioned aisles of plumbing supplies, I spotted salvation: black PVC pipe and fittings. It was cheap, it was round, and I figured, “Well, it’s not like it can get more broken.”

I bought a length of pipe, some fittings, and headed home with my highly questionable solution.

To my surprise, when I slid the PVC pieces together, they fit perfectly. Not “close enough to make do,” but snug and solid, like they were meant for this truck all along. Dad looked skeptical, but I just grinned and said, “Trust me. It’ll work.”

We built a temporary torque tube out of the PVC and started reassembling everything. For a while, it went better than expected — until we tried to get the splines to fully engage.

No matter what we did, the splines just wouldn’t slide together that last stubborn inch. We pushed, we pulled, we cursed, we prayed. At one point, I suggested dynamite, but Dad vetoed it on the grounds that we still wanted to own a truck when this was over.

Then, like a heavenly breeze cutting through the sweltering air, my wife Stacie came outside. She took one look at the situation and said calmly, “Why don’t you just crank the engine and let the wheels drive the shaft in?”

Dad and I froze. It was such a simple, obvious idea that it physically hurt to realize we hadn’t thought of it ourselves.

We hooked everything up, turned the key, and gave the engine a bump. With a satisfying clunk, the splines slid perfectly into place. Victory!

The truck was back together, the U-joint was fixed, and the PVC torque tube had proven itself as an unlikely hero. Dad nodded slowly, perhaps reconsidering his lifelong skepticism of hardware store improvisations. Stacie just shook her head like she’d known the answer the whole time.

As the sun set, casting long shadows over our scattered tools, I leaned back and admired the truck. Sure, the Warford overdrive was still sitting in the garage waiting for “someday,” and sure, my “torque tube” technically came from the plumbing aisle, but the old AA was back on the road.

And on that sweltering, grease-stained day, that was good enough.