Cooke keeps his eye on the prize

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This article was published 24/03/2022 (1524 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While it may not look like much right now, James Cooke has a clear vision of how he is going to rebuild his 1974 Chevrolet short box truck.

This model served as a reliable source of fun for the Brandon resident back in the day, when his best friend Brendon Reilly invited him to ride shotgun in an identical model.

“He mostly used it as a garbage, run-around truck, but it had sentimental value, of course,” Cooke told the Sun on Wednesday. “And then about five or six years ago, unfortunately, it was parked out at a farm for the winter and the shop burnt down. The truck was in there, so it went along with it.”

While Cooke has been looking to replace that truck ever since then, he finally hit pay dirt last summer in Killarney, stumbling across another 1974 model with the exact same motor package and two-tone green-and-white paint job.

Unfortunately, rust had run through the vehicle following years of neglect, meaning Cooke had to basically tear it down to the frame and start over.

“The box is off, the door is off … the motor is torn out of it. I’ve done a lot of rust repair on the driver’s side,” he said. “The floor boards are gone … all the stuff. I have about half of it done, anyways.”

Luckily, this isn’t Cooke’s first rodeo.

Having worked in automotive collision repair for the last two decades, the 38-year-old is no stranger to transforming a glorified scrap heap into a well-oiled machine, given the proper time and resources.

This passion can be traced all the way back to childhood. Cooke’s father ingrained in him a love of automotive repair from a very young age.

“As far back as I can remember being a kid, I was playing around with cars or being near them and learning stuff from [my dad],” he said. “So it was a no-brainer once I got to be the age where you knew what you were going to do and not do. Hotrods and vehicles like that were running in the veins.”

On top of that, Cooke has also taken it upon himself to tackle a couple personal projects in his own time, having recently restored a 1965 Chevrolet Impala and a Jeep CJ-7.

With all this experience in his back pocket, the Brandon resident now believes the key to any successful restoration, at work or at home, is visualization, where you have to keep the final product in view to stay motivated.

“I always have a picture planted in my mind of what’s there and what’s to be expected,” he said. “And that’s the main driving force, just knowing that no matter how big of a piece of crap it is, you just have to know what it’ll be in the end. And that makes it all worth it.”

However, Cooke freely admits he has a lot of work ahead of him when it comes to this 1974 Chevrolet truck.

He estimates he probably won’t be able to get the vehicle back on the road until at least the summer of 2023, since he wants to get all the details nailed down for the benefit of himself and his best friend.

“I vowed that I would redo this one with the same colour scheme, so it would be a nice memory for the both of us,” he said.

“So it’s kind of going to be … not a rat rod, but it will be slammed to the ground and with a bigger horsepower motor and be my take on it. An updated version of what it used to be.”

Outside of visualization, Cooke also wanted to advise his fellow gear heads that patience is key to finishing one of these massive restorations, especially if they want to avoid abandoning the projects halfway through.

“Don’t go into it thinking it will be done in a day, and don’t go into it thinking that everything is going to go as planned.

“So if you do get burned out a bit, just take a breather and come back and attack it with a fresh head. Even if it takes an extra day or week or month, just don’t quit on it.”

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

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