Neat setup, right? Not with those matching front and rear tires, it’s not! This just will not stand…If you’ve been following along with Hemmings’ digital content and stories, you may have spied a particular brown-sugar “dentside” Ford pickup truck making an appearance here and there. As the arbiters of all things Hemmings Green, we’re expected to not only know a few things about old cars, but, y’know, own at least one and maybe even drive one, on occasion. And so it is with this 1974 Ford F-350 Super Camper Special: it’s (mostly) a daily driver and it’s (definitely) hauled its fair share of Hemmings employees, stories, and adventures on the West Coast over the last few years.

This truck was born at the long-gone Ford plant in San Jose, California, back in the Spring of ’74 and lived its entire life in the shadows of that plant till about a decade ago when it finally moved a whole 50 miles north to San Francisco. The great thing about this guy is that it falls under the cutoff for the dreaded California smog check. The bad thing is that its carbureted 460-cu.in. displacement V-8 gets 6 mpg parked overnight and California is in its spendy summer blend fuel season — mix that with a roughly 40-gallon capacity among two tanks and periodically winning the Powerball is definitely a requirement for driving it on the regular.

The lengths a car nut will go for the right parts...