Walking the Deplorable Devil Dawg this afternoon, stumbled upon Ken (neighbor three blocks away) and his Tonka Toy. (Too bad little Lisle didn’t see this.) It’s a 50s Jeep pickup, radically modified with a 600hp Chevy 454ci engine and other Chevy and GM running gear, 44-inch tires and custom bodywork that includes a unitized hood and wider-by-six-inches fenders that tip forward to expose the engine and front suspension. Stands roughly eight feet tall. Originally painted in yellow and green as a University of Oregon Ducks tribute, Ken is redoing it to make it less … political. The thing was supposedly once on the cover of a custom trucks magazine after a small fortune was spent on it; Ken is going to rework it a bit now and powder coat a lot of stuff, fabricate and install a custom electronic dropdown step assist for age-appropriate ingress and egress, drive it about twenty miles a month, and mostly put it in car shows. I was going to publish the pics below on my Porsche and sports car blog, but they don’t fit there, either.
For comparison, here’s a stock version from 1950: