With some help from and his trailer, my has now arrived in the garage. Once I started taking stuff apart, I got a vivid reminder of how incredibly uncomplicated Detroit trucks once were.

The whole vehicle appears to have about 19 moving parts, and this is the top-of-the-line, passenger-friendly Sportsman Custom. Most A100 buyers would have scorned such frills as chrome trim and a windshield washer.

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This may well be the Greatest Automatic Shifter Of All Time. No matter how I customize my van, I'll never replace this one-armed-bandit-style shift knob!

The data plate indicates that it's an original V8/Torqueflite 727 van with a 3.23 rear axle ratio. I haven't looked at the casting numbers on the installed engine to see if it's the 273 that came with the van or some other engine that got swapped in. Since it's got an end-of-the-world rod knock, it's coming out immediately.

How about an engine family that included V6, V8, and V10 variants and is still being manufactured…

The deal included this running-when-pulled 318, which I'll be installing pretty soon. Hope it's good! In addition to the extra engine, I got a Wollensak 8-track recorder, which means I'll be playing 8-track mix tapes when I get this fine machine on the road.

It feels good having a genuine A100 in my garage. I've owned an early Econoline, but never an A100; I've been a huge fan of the old Dodge vans since a friend bought one for 50 bucks and drove it from Los Angeles to Brazil and back... in 1985, through war-torn El Salvador and Nicaragua. The only malfunction was a sidewall puncture caused by a big thorn in Honduras.

For rough Central American roads, you need a beam front axle with leaf springs! Independent front suspensions make you soft!

Here's the climate control console. What more do you need?

Since it's a luxurious Sportsman Custom, it has a snazzy door-operated entry step. I'll probably have to ditch this accessory when I install lake pipes, but for now it stays.

Now that I've removed the engine doghouse, it appears that I needn't fear this engine swap. Plenty of room to get the cherry-picker in through the side doors, and everything on the engine seems quite accessible. Of course, the late-70s 318 probably has different accessory mounting points than the original engine, so some futzing around with that stuff will be needed to make everything work. I sure hope the flexplate bolts up to the torque converter!

The good news is that 98% of the fasteners on this vehicle are one of three sizes. It's been about 15 years since I've owned a non-metric vehicle (unless you count the , which features an unholy mashup of metric, SAE, and Whitworth hardware), so I had to do some digging in the toolbox to find sockets that fit non-Comintern-approved machinery.

Another great feature of this van is the front seat mounting method: quick-release pins! Yank two pins and the seat lifts right out. I assume this is so the Sportsman Custom owner can pull out the seats and set them up by the campfire when on a camping trip.

So all I need to do is drop the new engine in, clean up the sitting-for-10-years fuel system, hope the transmission still works, and then fix ten thousand other things before I can drive my new van. After that, I'll get rolling on the customizing process!