GILLETTE - The 1929 Ford Model A pickup truck in the faded magazine picture hung creased and dog-eared from Rodger Truax's tool cabinet.

It had the classic front end - blocky, all right angles. In place of a truck bed was a rear end like an ambulance, with four ornately carved balustrades on each side. It was painted a glossy white with black fenders.

Truax, a funeral assistant at Stevenson and Sons Funeral Home, pointed to the picture in his garage. It was the hearse he hoped the skeletal frame of rust sitting next to him would become.

He pointed again to the sagging white drapes framing each of the three carriage windows in voluminous folds and carved out of solid pieces of poplar.

"That's an amazing amount of carving," he said, sounding a bit unsure.

It probably wasn't the first time Truax had had his doubts as he stared at the picture of a painfully perfect hearse. He'd never rebuilt a car before he started working on the Model A in April 2004. The only things he'd built were model locomotives and clocks, the mechanics of which were a far cry from what he wanted to undertake.

But he had a vision in his head of a funeral procession led by a Model A hearse puttering down the streets of Gillette on skinny tires and spoked wheels.

What sat next to him was wholly different.

"Most people would see this and say, 'Haul it to the dump,'" Truax said, gazing at his project in his garage at 407 Clarion Drive. He already had put around $3,500 into the truck, so that was out of the question.

The cab was primer gray, and C-clamps held the back wall of the cab to the subframe.

Truax mounted the vehicle and stood astride the frame, rubbing the raw wooden roof with his hands. The drive shaft between his legs was composed of two pieces, with a ground-smooth fissure where they were wire welded together. In fact, the whole thing was cannibalized from two different Model A's.

For the Frankenstein-esque automobile, he bought two frames - one with a damaged rear and the other with a damaged front.

But it worked out. He only needed one end from each, so he could lengthen the body an extra 28 inches.

There are also two engines, just in case he burns up the first one. The 200-cubic-inch flathead four-cylinder sits exposed on the chassis just behind the old convection radiator.

It seems like there are two of everything in the shop. In business and in his rebuild, he's a man of contingencies and planning.

Even as he appraised his work, he seemed to be planning the next task.

Truax stroked his white mustache and eyed the Model A critically from behind his glasses. Out in his garage, among the circular saws, grinders and saw horses, Truax doesn't seem as at home as he does in a black suit and tie speaking quietly and politely with the bereaved.

But there is a simplicity here in the garage. For a man in a business where surprises are a liability and easing grief-stricken relatives through an inevitable process is always dynamic, figuring out what bolts go where is much more straightforward.

"I'm still doing this for families, but I'm not dealing with the emotion when I'm out in the garage," Truax said.

Truax hopes his hearse will help celebrate a life lived, perhaps for an old-timer for whom the Model A embodies a more familiar era. It's got a long way to go, though. The body work is almost finished, but he will begin the most daunting task soon - the woodwork.

Truax says it will lead a procession down the road in summer 2008 - if he can just figure out where all the bolts go.