Chaparral vs John Deere: A Build-Off Challenge

For some time, I’ve been thinking that the shop is missing something. I’m a bit of a slow learner so it took awhile but Gary’s post finally lit the lamp. It needs a Hamm’s banner. I’ll be working on it.

heckler56 said:

I was going to write something smarta$$ like your an “influencer” and we are your “followers”, but, I prefer guys enjoying shop talk and watching a skilled craftsman at work.

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I agree with your preference. I can’t even be an influencer at home, much less out in the online forum world.

mezz said:

Well, your not wasting any time. Quoting a military phrase, "As you were".

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The truth be told, I had a slight head start on the Cyclone earlier this summer. At the Boondock Inn vintage event last year, I promised some of my John Deere enthusiast friends that I would have a re-done Cyclone 440 at the event next year so I’ve been nibbling at it when time permits. Otherwise, I knew I could never fulfil that promise. Of course, adding the Chaparral to the mix really spiced things up, which is why I decided to document the progress here.

Whenever I look at the beatings these chassis took, I can’t help but think about the stories that some of these dents and hack repair jobs could tell.

I decided to switch horses (sort of) on the John Deere. The 440 chassis was rough but had I no other options I would have tried to work with it. As luck would have it, I had a decent 76 340 chassis off the parts sled that I bought last year that had much less damage.

While the damage on the 76 chassis was light, the pan must have been a Monday stamping. This thing has more waves than a parade queen. There’s no point in trying to correct these, it’s just a part of the sled’s character.

So, by virtue of a chassis change, the 77 440 Cyclone will be a 76 440 Cyclone.

very good choice

While the 76 chassis was decent, it still required some hammering/filling. I also filled in the passenger grab handle holes in the tunnel. Somehow the handles just don’t seem to look right on this sled.



Some guys can hammer sheet metal to near-perfection. I’m not one of them. This is where the cheaters (fillers) come in. When doing the initial filling on bare aluminum I’ve had good luck with this product – USC All Metal. I’ve never bothered to look at the chemical makeup but it behaves like it’s basically aluminum powder mixed with fiberglass resin. It’s workable and very strong. The claim is made that it can be drilled/tapped but I’ve never put it to the test.



I’ve never had an issue with holes filled with this stuff. I usually just hammer a small depression around the hole to give the filler a more feathered bonding area. Sometimes I will back the hole with fiberglass mat first to contain the filler on the backside. I’m sure it’s not as good as welding but it’s something I can do in my shop.

Speaking of hammering, a couple of years ago I treated myself to a fancy (to me anyway) hammer and dolly set to supplement the single hammer and dolly I’ve gotten by with for over 50 years. The new set does make some things easier but guess which set I pull out most often.

One curiosity of the Cyclones is that many of them came out of the factory with no dedicated means of lifting the back of sled. Whether it was the intent or not, people resorted to using the rear passenger grab handles to lift the sled. These sleds are heavy and most of the plastic handles eventually snapped under the load, probably causing more than one person to do a 9.5 backwards summersault.

A bumper/lift bar was available but the mounting points put a lot of stress on the rear tunnel “ears” causing them to bend and/or tear away from the tunnel. Deere eventually came out with a reinforcement kit that went out of production but is now being reproduced.

I have both a Cyclone lift bar and the reproduced reinforcement kit but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it looked like an afterthought slapped on the sled.

So I went to the well one more time and fitted the project sled with a 79 TX bumper. This the third sled I’ve modified to use this bumper and why not, it’s simple and strong.

The Cyclone tunnel is exactly ½” wider than the TX so I riveted a ¼” spacer plate to each side of the tunnel. The mounting hole placement is important and a little tricky. You want the holes as small as possible for the ¼” mounting bolts but the bolts thread into the bumper so the holes have to be almost perfectly aligned with the bumper holes to get them to thread in. Plus, you want the holes placed correctly vertically so the bumper to fits tight against the top of the tunnel for added strength.



When it’s done, I think it’s worth the effort. The bumper extends the lift point rearward which provides more leverage and looking back at last year’s cyclone project, I don’t think it looks at all out of place on this chassis.

Looks great!

Looks great Kelly,thanks again for the UPdates!

As usual well done!

Thanks Guys!

I always feel like I’ve made some progress when I’ve put on the first full coat of primer. It’s mostly to fill sand scratches and expose any work I’ve forgotten. A lot of it gets sanded off and re-primed but it’s at least all one color.



The paint guy recommends that the stock Cyclone “Mean Green” that I'm going to use be sprayed over a black base coat, which is interesting because a white base coat was recommended for the John Deere Emerald Green I used on the other Cyclone last year.

He custom-mixes all his vintage sled colors and I’ve yet to use one that isn’t a dead ringer for the original color so I’m taking his advice.

Black it is. I think it looks kind of cool in flat black.