Junkyard Find: Customized 1971 Ford Econoline
I’m back in California to visit the family, which means I also get to visit my favorite East Bay self-service junkyards. I was hoping to find a Dodge A100 to donate some parts for my A100 Hell Project; instead, I found this Econoline to serve as possible customizing inspiration.
This van appears to have been customized after the peak of the mid-70s van craze, since it’s more wholesome-conversion-van than bongs-and-black-light-van.
The exterior graphics have a distinctly 1980s feel, and there’s a real lack of plastic bubble windows shaped like cannabis leaves.
Ford went to a front-engine design for the Econoline in the 1968 model year, which freed up more interior space for waterbeds and wood-burning stoves, but I still prefer the mid-engine design for style reasons.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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What you have their is a family van. Only the family vans had big windows all over it. And skor is wrong about the window crank handles. They were not made from "drillium" that's what they wanted you to think. They were actually made from "crap-tonium". A company called Cal-Custon sold millions of these great parts. They eather broke in half, or they just stripped completely. We all ended up drilling small holes into them and using nails to keep them from falling off. The best years in my life came from my vans. 1965 Ford, powered by a drive train from a wrecked 1969 BOSS 302 Mustang. Sure I had to bend down to the floor to shift , but it was fast and it had a kingsize bed in it. And for a long haired guitar player, it worked on so many levels. And I'd like to be the first one to say, "Van's are coming back." I've been seeing them at shows and around town. I don't know where they've been, but I for one am glad their back.
There are a lot of reasons why I never liked these vehicles. First of all, people are not cargo. It took a single model generation for minivans to add a second sliding door. Even after fifty years manufacturing and selling full size vans, has a similar design been widely marketed. Full sized vans are not for passengers anymore than a coupe is designed for rear seat riders. It takes little to imagine that a full sized van is nothing more than an enclosed pick up truck with an abbreviated front end. During the first generation of these vehicles, the Corvair, the Falcon and the A-100 were all available with an open bed, similar to a pick up truck. These were utility vehicles looking for a market successfully being filled by the VW Station Wagon/Vanagon at a time when Detroit became aware of VW's sales successes at their expense. The Full Size Van craze of the 1970s and early 1980s is precedent to the Sports Utility Vehicle craze of the 1990s. In both cases, Detroit took a simple body on frame truck and filled it with profitable options. In both cases, people replaced cargo in the original vehicle design. Consequently, a number of suboptimal design compromises were used to make these vehicles passenger friendly, although decidedly substandard to passenger vehicles. The shortened front end of the full sized van resulted in a substandard design concerning passenger and driver safety. Placing the engine within the passenger compartment removed it's possible use as a crash barrier. In crash tests, dummies lost their legs and feet, in low speed barrier tests. Pining for a full sized van in 2011, is like pining for a 1996 Ford Explorer in 2026. Nostalgia does not make these vehicles any better than for what they were originally designed to be - an enclosed urban truck using 1950 technologies. But you know that, and remember using these vehicles as a place to get away from the 'rents. OK. Being a tad claustrophobic, I was never able to enjoy these vehicles, regardless of window sizes. Being shipped within one was not fun.