Ford F100 1959 Short Bed Pickup

This 1959 Ford F100 short bed still runs its original 223-cubic-inch straight six backed by a three-speed manual, riding on Cragar SS mags and white letter tires. It comes from the model year Ford stopped outsourcing four-wheel-drive conversions to Marmon-Herrington and started building its own 4×4 pickups in house. Roughly 157,000 F-100s were built that season across every body style Ford offered. Read on to find out why an unmodified base-model work truck has become one of the harder things to find.

There is a particular kind of old truck that gets harder to find every year, and it is not the one with the crate motor and the airbags. It is this one. A short bed F100 wearing a fresh set of Cragar SS mags and white letter tires, looking every bit the weekend cruiser, until you open the hood and discover that nothing under there has been touched. Same straight six the factory installed. Same three-speed. The overwhelming majority of trucks like this were worked into the ground and scrapped decades ago, and the survivors almost all got a V8 swap somewhere along the way. So what makes 1959 the year worth caring about?

The Year Ford Brought Four-Wheel Drive In House

Ford made a quiet but genuinely significant change to its truck operation for 1959. Before that year, four-wheel-drive Ford pickups were not really Ford products in the fullest sense; the conversions were performed by an outside contractor, Marmon-Herrington, which took two-wheel-drive trucks and fitted them with its own transfer cases and front axles. Starting with the 1959 model year, Ford began building four-wheel-drive pickups in house for the first time. That shift mattered far beyond the specific trucks involved, because it marked the point at which Ford decided four-wheel drive was a mainstream product line rather than a specialty conversion sold to utility companies and forestry services.

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A New Face for 1959

The same model year brought a visual refresh that is the easiest way to date one of these trucks from across a parking lot. Ford replaced 1958’s busier quad-headlight arrangement with a cleaner grille built around a horizontal bar formation and rectangular turn signal housings. The result reads as considerably more restrained than the year before it, and to modern eyes it has aged noticeably better than the heavily chromed treatments that were fashionable elsewhere in the industry at the time. Combined with the wraparound windshield introduced earlier in the generation, the 1959 face gives the truck a look that sits comfortably between the fifties and what came next.

What the Base Truck Actually Came With

Underneath, the standard specification was deliberately modest. The base engine was a 223-cubic-inch straight six rated at 145 horsepower, with a 292-cubic-inch V8 producing 200 horsepower available to anyone willing to pay for it. The truck rode on a 118-inch wheelbase and carried a curb weight in the neighborhood of 3,430 pounds, which by modern pickup standards is remarkably light. Ford built roughly 157,000 F-100s for the 1959 model year across the full range of cab and bed configurations, making it a strong season for the division even though relatively few of those trucks survive today in anything resembling original condition.

Why the Straight Six Still Matters

The 223 six deserves better than the reputation it usually gets. It is not fast and it was never intended to be, but it is a genuinely well-built engine with seven main bearings, an unfussy overhead valve design, and a reputation for running well past the point where the sheet metal around it has given up. Paired with the three-speed manual, it delivers exactly the driving experience these trucks were engineered around: low-rpm torque, unhurried progress, and a mechanical simplicity that makes roadside repairs plausible. A surviving original drivetrain is increasingly the exception, because the 292 swap has been the default upgrade path for sixty years.

The Short Bed Advantage

Short bed trucks from this era occupy a specific place in the market. Ford offered the F-100 in both short and long wheelbase configurations, and the short bed has always been the more desirable of the two for reasons that are almost entirely about proportion. The shorter rear overhang gives the truck a more compact, better-balanced stance that photographs well and looks right on a modern wheel and tire package. Long bed examples are more common, cost less to buy, and are frequently used as parts donors, which over time has made the proportional difference between the two increasingly visible in what each one sells for.

Cragar Mags and the Look That Stuck

The Cragar SS wheels on this truck are worth a mention of their own, because that particular combination has become a period signature. Introduced in the mid-sixties, the Cragar SS paired a chrome-plated steel outer with a five-spoke aluminum center, and it spread across hot rods, muscle cars, and pickups with a speed that few aftermarket wheels before or since have matched. On a truck like this, wrapped with raised white letter tires, the look nods to how these trucks were actually modified when they were still cheap used vehicles rather than restoration projects, which is a meaningfully different aesthetic than a factory-correct restoration on painted steel wheels and hubcaps.

What Rust Does to These Trucks

Anyone shopping one of these learns to look in the same places. The cab corners, the lower door skins, and the floor beneath the rubber mat are the first areas to rot, and the seam where the cab meets the bed collects debris and moisture in a way that hides damage until it is structural. On the frame, pay particular attention to the rear crossmember and the areas around the spring hangers. Sheet metal reproduction support for this generation is reasonably good, which helps, but the labor involved in doing cab corners properly is substantial enough that it frequently determines whether a project makes financial sense at all.

The Case for Leaving It Alone

All of which builds the argument for leaving a truck like this exactly as it sits. The temptation to drop in a modern V8 and an overdrive automatic is understandable, and plenty of people have done it well, but every one of those conversions permanently reduces the number of original-drivetrain 1959 F100s left in the world. A running, honest, unmolested base truck with its factory six and three-speed tells a story about how these vehicles were actually bought and used that no restomod can replicate. That is a slowly appreciating position to hold, and it costs nothing but the discipline to resist an engine swap.

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