Building killer cars is a dirty job so every shop needs a sweet truck, but you don’t want to bang-up a real slick one. It also needs to be reliable, powerful enough to haul that heavy vintage tin and easy on the long hours of seat time you always end up spending in the work truck.
We reckon we’ve got the perfect solution to this with our ’55 Chevy pick-up project: it combines the best parts of reliable late model power with that timeless ‘50s style, while adding in a dose of hot rod attitude too.
The recipe is fairly simple, a ’55 Chev pick-up body, laid over a sedan chassis from the same year passenger car, with a 5.7-litre LS1 V8 and transmission from a wrecked VX-series SS Commodore. We’ll give it a tickle for a lazy 300 rear-wheel horsepower as we still want to get more than 100km from a full tank of fuel.
While we’ve had a bagged ‘50s pick-up before this is a work truck so coilovers will be used in place of air. The interior will be function over form, too; we’re going for a purposeful look and utilitarian intent.
The rear-end will cop a four-link and diff from an early-girl HiLux. That will all be hidden behind the custom steel wheels and disc brakes.
We’ll bring you more on the truck as it progresses alongside our other vehicles at the shop, leading up to the October deadline.
