BLOOMINGDALE — After months of work under the hood, a false start or two and a winter carnival parade, Raymond Amell finally got the Bloomingdale Volunteer Fire Department’s 1941 Ford model 21YC replica fire truck up and running and on the road Monday evening.

The recent graduate from the Adirondack Educational Center’s automotive technology program pitched the project to his instructor in November, as his class had been looking to do a restoration project on the side and the truck hadn’t run in around seven years.

They reached their goal of showing off the restoration job at the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival parade in February, albeit on five cylinders, and Amell said he got the last replacement parts installed a couple days before he leaves town to start a diesel mechanic program at the Universal Technical Institute in Orlando, Florida.

“I leave Friday for Florida to go to school, and I was really trying to get it done, so it was very relieving to drive it down the road last night,” Amell said Tuesday.

Also a Bloomingdale volunteer firefighter, he said the first thing he did was drive the truck over to the home of the department’s longest-serving member, Bob O’Neil, to show it off.

“I had to bring it over to Bob O’Neil’s because I’ve been talking to him for probably a good five or six months whenever he’s down at the department,” Amell said. “I think he was probably the happiest person I’ve ever seen in my life when he saw that thing pull into his driveway last night.”

Amell said there is a question of whether this truck was ever in service, but that O’Neil said he remembers that truck being the first one he used for a fire call when he started at the department 63 years ago.

The last time Amell talked the Enterprise, he said he had heard that the truck was built and used as a milk truck and then converted to a replica fire truck, and that the Bloomingdale Volunteer Fire Department had a truck just like it that went out of service in the 1970s. With little evidence pointing either way, he is unsure of the truth.

“Which one’s right?” he said. “It’s a mystery.”

Amell discovered that the truck’s flathead V8 engine came from a tractor. One of his dreams was to work on a flathead V8, and his fascination comes with knowing that the V8 is a predecessor of today’s engines.

“They were run so much, in so many different things,” Amell said. “They were just beaten to death to the point that to find an original flathead V8 is very rare nowadays.”

Amell and his class finished up work on the truck the night before the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival parade, but it was only running on five of its eight cylinders and was getting too much fuel. Amell said they dragged it to the parade, made it through and got it right back on a trailer afterward.

After the work he finished on Monday night, he said it runs like it just came off a showroom.

The Bloomingdale Volunteer Fire Department will house the truck at its station and use it in parades and at barbecues.

Amell said he doesn’t want to make a career out of V8 work. Instead, he wants to focus on diesel, but he still might try finding another Ford flathead V8 engine for himself to work on in the future.