Steve Keys has spent more than four years restoring the 1938 Diamond T Texaco streamliner tanker. Photo / Alastair Ritchie
Jane Phare looks at the painstaking restoration of a rare Texaco gas tanker, once nothing more than a rusting hulk.
A mate of Steve Keys’ took one look at the decrepit remains of a beyond-help Texaco tanker sitting in the Kiwi car enthusiast’s Auckland workshop and suggested he “dig a hole and bury it”.
Fat chance. Keys gazed at the rusted outline of the 1938 Diamond T Texaco streamlined tanker and just saw a challenge. He knew he’d get there in the end. His goal was to painstakingly rebuild the rare tanker back to its original condition, back when it began delivering supplies to Texaco gas stations in South Carolina 85 years ago.
Keys’ wife Sue says when her husband first saw the rusted tanker he “fell in love”.
“He didn’t see all the rust and dents. He just saw it as a piece of automobile memorabilia related to the gas industry.” Collecting automobilia has been Steve Keys’ passion for the past 40 years. That and restoring American vehicles.
After nearly five years of toil which included thousands of hours of work, help from skilled Kiwi craftsmen and support from an online Diamond T fan base, he did get there in the end.
The Texaco tanker, believed to be the only original one of its type in the world, is now on display at the Classics Museum in Hamilton in all its gleaming fineness. It sits alongside more than 100 other restored cars and a vast array of automobilia. The setting is perfect.
There the tanker will stay, on permanent loan, apart from a trip back to Auckland for the Ellerslie Car Show on April 23.
The old Texaco has quite a back story and, thanks to nearly 50 blogs covering its restoration, written by Keys’ wife Sue, it has built up a following of automotive enthusiasts from around the world. It was through painstaking research and the help of locals in Newberry County, South Carolina, from where the truck hailed, that she managed to piece together the tanker’s story from the time it started delivering gas in the late 1930s to the time it ended up in the Keys’ workshop in a sorry state.
The tanker could well have ended up as scrap metal if it hadn’t been for a series of car and truck enthusiasts determined to keep its legacy alive.
After the Diamond T retired as a Texaco gas tanker it was used in a nearby timber yard as a water truck. When that business closed an American, Billy Ackerman, bought it in 1980 and asked his good friend Wayne Turner if he could store the tanker at Turner’s towing yard.
It sat there for 25 years until Turner’s death, at which time the contents of the yard were auctioned off in 2010. Due to a lack of paperwork, the Diamond T was technically part of Turner’s estate so Ackerman had to buy the tanker a second time to save it from scrap metal merchants who had their eye on it.
Wanting to find someone who would preserve the tanker, he put the truck up for sale on eBay at which point it passed into the hands of Kiwi enthusiasts. First Christchurch-based Hamish Stroud bought the tanker and had it transported from South Carolina to Kiwi Shipping’s yard in Los Angeles, ready to transport home. But he eventually thought better of it so when fellow Kiwis Peter and Yvonne Phillips saw the tanker during a trip to the US in 2011 they decided to buy it, and transport it to their home in Ātiamuri in the central North Island.
Steve Keys knew of the tanker and kept checking in with Peter Phillips.
“Are you ready to sell that tanker yet?” he’d ask.
Eventually, in 2018, Phillips said “yes”. Five years later the Phillips were among 130 guests at the Keys’ home last month for a hurriedly arranged unveiling of the restored Diamond T.
The unveiling was originally scheduled for last month’s Ellerslie Intermarque Concours d’Elegance and Classic Car Show which was postponed at the last minute due to Cyclone Gabrielle. Unperturbed, the Keys put on a breakfast launch for guests at their home, in an exhibition space full of restored pre-and-post war American cars, restored vintage fuel pumps, and carefully curated automotive memorabilia collected over 40 years.
It was Keys’ love of petrol memorabilia that first attracted him to the Diamond T.
“I wasn’t thinking too much about the size of the project at the time,” he admits.
Sue Keys started writing a blog about the restoration and posting photos as a way of recording the project and keeping in touch with friends. After a couple of months her son looked at the analytics and realised the story of the Texaco tanker had spread around the world. Within the first year, the blog had more than 10,000 visitors to the site.
“I was just astounded,” she says. “It had been viewed in every single state in America, countries I’ve never heard of. It was just incredible.”
She thinks the state of the wreck, the art deco style and the uniqueness of the tanker piqued peoples’ interest. As the following grew, people shared information and introduced the Keys to Diamond T experts who helped with advice, contacts and piecing together the truck’s history. Some even donated extremely rare parts.
As an example, the stainless steel “apron” below the tanker’s front grille was almost beyond repair.
“Our one looked like it had been opened with a can opener. It was absolutely wrecked,” Sue Keys says.
One of the Keys’ online contacts, who has since become a good friend, shipped a rare original apron out to New Zealand, refusing to accept payment. Instead, all he asked for was a photo of the Keys standing in front of the restored tanker.
Steve Keys says that help from Diamond T enthusiasts was “hugely valuable” to what was an at-times daunting project.
There are three other restored Texaco trucks on display around the world – one in Bill Richardson Transport World in Invercargill, one in the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Michigan, and a third that is part of the Walter P Chrysler collection in the US.
But there are aspects that set those apart from the Keys’ Texaco tanker. The cabs and tank bodies of the original trucks were built by different companies. The other three restored tankers are Dodge Airflow streamlined trucks with Gar Wood tank bodies. The Key’s tanker is a Diamond T truck with a rare Heil tank, believed to be the only complete and original one of its kind.
Sue Keys has spent years researching the Diamond T’s uniqueness and says there is one other restored Diamond T streamlined tanker in the US. But it has a Standard Steel Works tank, and the 1940 Model 805 cab is on a donor chassis so its orginality has been lost.
That makes the Keys’ truck very rare. She shrugs off questions about what the Diamond T may be worth. That wasn’t the point of the project, she says, which is why the tanker is in the Classics Museum so that people can see it.
As for what now in Steve Keys’ restoration schedule, he has been quietly planning his next project for the past three years - to rebuild the now-extinct Texaco Doodlebug. Back in the 1930s the oil industry wanted to encourage American consumers to change from coal to oil for heating.
Texaco carried out a rebranding exercise to modernise its image and subsequently produced the quirky Texaco Doodlebug tanker. The futuristic fuel truck again involved Texaco, Diamond T and Heil. It’s believed only six Doodlebugs were produced in 1934 and none of them exist today.
Keys, with the help of Classics Museum owner Tom Andrews and other craftsmen involved with the Diamond T restoration, plans to build a Doodlebug using research material gifted several years ago. And, much like the Diamond T project, Sue keys will be documenting the build every step of the way.
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