1973 Chevy C10 Buildup - The Pickup Fix-Up Tour

In our never-ending quest to one-up our friends and their trucks, we've forgotten the real reason we live this crazy lifestyle. The passion to have the biggest rims, lowest stance, and loudest paintjob has clouded our judgment. These days, guys take more pride in the buildup of their truck than they do in actually driving them. It's as if building the craziest truck on earth, no matter how many years it stops you from getting out there and using it, has taken precedence over actually rollin' the boulevard in your beater. We're just as guilty as the next guy of enjoying one side of the hobby and not the other, but we finally made a change this summer.

This truck is a total bucket and I promised myself that this would be a driver, a truck that looks cool but that doesn't need a winning lotto ticket to finance the build. Paint would be just nice enough to drive to a truck show, but mediocre enough that I won't be tempted to enter the show and waste time polishing my way to a trophy. This is a cruiser, a truck to throw parts into the bed of, a truck that I can roll the boulevard with my wife and dog without worrying about paint chips, bent rims, and all of those other annoyances that might stop me from cruising it. How serious am I about it? Serious enough that I put this truck together in less than a month and drove cross country in it.

Picture this: two dudes from California with a willingness to do almost anything, driving a semi-roadworthy brown, tan, black, white and grey standard cab Chevy C10 across 4,600 miles of open road in the heat of summer. Our plan was simple: 14 days on the road in search of good times and a few gearheads willing to turn the Brown Bomber into a legitimate custom truck. What could possibly go wrong?

I hatched this plan in my office after a conversation with Corey Scott from Kustomwerx Autobody in Conroe, Texas. I told him that I didn't want to build a show truck. I wanted a daily driver that looked and performed like a vintage Trans Am-series racecar, specifically the old Sunoco/Penske '69 Camaro that Mark Donohue drove to the championship that same year. He said that if I showed up ready to work on my bucket and gave him 4 days, that together we could straighten it out and spray a coat of primer over the thing so that it no longer looked like four-year-olds tagged it with water colors. How could I refuse? Working behind a desk at a magazine for the last eight years meant that I had plenty of fingerprints left on my hands to sand off.