A hard-working Dodge

by Michael Golubiewski
Production Editor

Guy Palmer of Moscow is the proud owner of this classic pickup truck, a 1971 Dodge D100. Pickup trucks and Dodge go back a long way — as early as the 1914 — and the company was the first to introduce classic car features like plush seats and spacious cabins into trucks. Until the introduction of the Dodge Ram and Dodge Dakota in the 1980s, Dodge trucks were often in the shadows of their more successful and more popular competition at Chevrolet and Ford.

Palmer is the second owner of this truck, he bought it nine years ago from a local farmer. Though almost 40 years old, the truck only has 65,000 original miles on it.

The “D” series of Dodge pickup trucks were produced from 1961-1980 and featured stronger frames and a 34-inch cross member bar, straight frame rails, wider and longer leaf springs and stronger front and rear axles. The D100, which features a 128-inch wheelbase, is Dodge’s half-ton pickup from the era.

Not many Dodge pickup trucks from this era survived, but then again, the truck production numbers at Dodge were far below their GM and Ford counterparts. Only 33,487 of the D100 trucks were produced in 1971. According to motortopia.com, there are thought to be no more than 600 in the whole country still up and running.

Palmer says the truck, two-tone red and white, features the 318-cubic inch, eight-cylinder engine. The RB engine features a 3.75-inch (95 mm bore), with the bore the defining factor in engine size. The transmission features the three-speed standard with the shift on the column. The D100 trucks were pretty basic in the equipment they came with: no power steering, power four wheel drum brakes, no air conditioning, a windshield washer system operated by a foot pump on the floorboard. The 1971 D100 featured a new silver grille with two sections of two holes. The D100 at the time also featured a Chrysler AM/FM radio with one dash-mounted speaker.

Since the truck was used for work on the farm for so many years, Palmer says that now he just drives it on the weekends and likes to tinker with it now and then. He says that the truck is “a lot of fun.”

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