Glam it Up

Most of Canada may be blanketed by four feet of snow right now, but for glamour truck enthusiasts it’s never too early to start talking about chromed-up heavy duty rides.

Short of keeping the truck DOT legal, when it comes to customizing iron, there’s not much holding you back except imagination and budget.

Bette Garber, a veteran truck photographer and author of several books on truck customizing, says drivers see their trucks as extensions of themselves. And she’s seen her share of custom trucks in 25 years behind the lens to know what’s hot and what’s not.

“It’s all about making it yours,” she says. “That usually means more that loading up the visa down at the chrome shop. It’s about individual touches that give the truck your signature.”

Jeff Battler of Cambridge, Ont.’s 12-Gauge Customs says you don’t have to spend a lot of money for “your” look.

“Of course you can,” he says. “But it’s not about how much you throw at the truck, it’s what you do with the money.”

Gary Randa of Lethbridge matched the flame motif to the hood
and fenders of his Pete 379 with monochrome flame on the sunvisor.

Battler says a lot can be done with a reasonable amount of money, and some jobs can be completed over a period of time. He says the best approach is to think long and hard about what you want. “Don’t go out and buy chrome and stainless just because everyone else is,” he suggests. “Take you time and do it your way.”

It would be hard to point to anything you can call a trend in truck customizing these days, but Garber says what’s most popular is probably the long, low-down, pared-down, minimalist, outlaw look.

The no-light look is hot now, too. There are some legal issues here, but some are disguising their lighting, or going with the clear, bull’s-eye mini lights — they’re so small you can hardly see them except at night. DOT is currently cracking down on trucks with too many lights, and obviously those with no lights at all, so be careful what you do in that regard.

Interiors:

The last frontier of creativity lies between the doors, Garber says. She’s noticed two trends here: a retro backlash and an avante garde design-it-yourself movement.

Carpet, of all things, is making a comeback, like the shaggin’ waggins of the ’70s – wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling upholstery. Except in trucks, we see vinyl and hand-tooled leather inlays, or even chrome and stainless steel cutouts worked into the patterns.

Simon Charrette’s

Painted floors are coming into their own, not one flat solid color, but in wild enthusiastic designs. Custom dashboards — all very retro, of course — are showing up everywhere, too, along with painted dash panels, and color-keyed accent pieces. There’s a roaring trade out there in custom steering wheels as well.

Garber says she’s seen one that was chrome-plated, billet-cut aluminum with a flame motif for the spokes. It has raised stainless steel studs around the exterior of the rim accented with gold titanium nitrate. It took 50 hours to machine. If you have to ask how much it cost, you can’t afford one.

“Interiors are a new area to become creative in,” she says. “It’s no longer a case of adding sparkle lights to your switches, putting chrome bezels on your gauges. You can go absolutely nuts inside in coming up with something cool.”

Many of the custom shops are now doing fiberglass-over-wood dash designs, painted in brilliant colors where the shape and style have practically no limits — beyond being at least slightly functional.

Nothing seems “extreme” anymore, but Garber has seen more than one case where a driver has completely stripped out a contemporary Peterbilt interior, for example, and put in a vintage Kenworth button-and-tuck interior.

In fact, there’s a lot of cross-branding going on. “The obvious thing is to switch out one brand of sleeper for another,” she notes. “More creative are the ones who are going father, taking out what they don’t like about the newer truck, and replacing that with something [they] liked about an older truck. Retro is new again.”

A word of caution here to owners of EPA ’07 models: you can’t mess with the DPF. It cannot be moved, and the piping cannot be modified. Before considering any exhaust work or modifications that would see changes to the exhaust system, consult your dealer.