Shop Profile: Outlaw Customs

Notable builds/trucks: Dead Man’s Hand, Vigilante, KMT 359

Location: Henderson, Colo.

Phone Number: (303) 952-8109

Outlaw Customs, headed by brothers Andy and Alex Gobel, spawned from transmission and differentials specialist Western Truck Parts, owned by their father Allen Gobel. Alex says the crew’s goal is “to think outside the box to provide cool custom products.

Anything we make, we want it to be truly unique – something that’s different than anything else on the market.”

The shop opened its doors in 2006, sharing property with its parent company, and started rolling out lines of custom products and building custom trucks. Alex says the shop’s start to finish design process is its specialty.

“Every piece we build for a custom truck, we build in relation to the other piece,” he says. “So we come up with new designs for entire lines or an entire truck and go into production.”

Outlaw recently opened a new four-bay building for custom work and a 2,400-sq.-ft. show room to house and showcase their builds. “We’re going to continue building ground breaking trucks and producing more and more Outlaw signature products.”

Shop Profile: Triple R Diesel & Texas Chrome Shop

Notable builds/trucks: Project One, Vamonos

Location: San Antonio, Texas

Phone Number: (800) 794-9817

Spawned from the San Antonio-based repair mega shop Triple R Diesel, the Texas Chrome Shop rang its bells of independence on July 4, 2005.

It was then, says the shop’s co-owner Raul Mendez, “we got more into customizing and started building all kinds of different trucks.”

Triple R Diesel opened shop in October 2001 as a tri-axle and tandem dump truck repair and rebuilding center. After the Texas Chrome Shop’s inception, though, the shop started working on sleepers, day cabs, heavy haulers and quad-axles. The shop has  repaired, built and customized  hundreds of trucks since that time.

Triple R still serves as the company’s repair shop, while the Texas Chrome Shop works in fabrication, custom builds and custom part manufacturing.

Mendez says Triple R and the Texas Chrome Shop have interior specialists, audio gurus and body shop and installation crews on-site.

He also says they on adding a retail store front soon to house their in-house manufactured parts and serve as a showroom entrance to the shop’s facilities.

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Shop Profile: Botelho’s Custom Trucks

Notable builds/trucks: 355

Location: Los Banos, Calif.

Phone Number: (209) 652-4204

Botelho’s Custom Trucks is a merger of business and hobby. Jeff Botelho says when he was a kid, his dad was big into building custom street rods. The family, though, has made a living off of the trucking business. “So I turned [the hobby] into a truck thing. I melded the two,” Botelho says.

Botelho says his shop isn’t one that makes money off of selling chrome – for his shop, he says it’s all about custom builds and installs. “We’re the guy people come to when they want the full custom job. Everything’s done in house.”

Now, Botelho and his crew work on custom jobs during evenings and on weekends, because he still drives every day. He is planning on expanding the shop and moving into a larger facility, focusing more on building custom trucks and running the family business, Botelho Brothers Trucking.

Shop Profile: 12ga Customs

Notable builds/trucks: MBH No. 40, Project 351, Picture Me Rollin’

Location: Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Phone Number: (519) 766-0943

Jeff Battler’s Ontario-based 12ga Customs shop started as a repair facility in 1990, doing general maintenance work and overhauls and catering mostly to owner-operators with more high-end needs.

Much time went wasted, he says, trying to make parts from different manufacturers fit, and “a lot of times, some parts never quite fitted the way we wanted them to,” he says.

12ga Customs' Jeff Battler

So, in 2004, Battler says he invested in equipment and began manufacturing his own parts, with the intent of “making parts that look like they belong.”Since then, Battler says his three most popular aftermarket parts are the flip bumper, lift bumper and sun visor – which, he says, 12ga has its own special touch to building.

Battler says 12ga Customs can do any custom or metal work needed, except painting.

Over the next few years, 12ga will work on product lines designed to fit the newer styles of trucks, Battler says, which will offer owners and drivers the chance to give their aerodynamic-focused stock rig a more retro look.

Picture Me Rollin'

“Just because the industry has gone one way doesn’t mean drivers have,” Battler says. “We’re really going to focus on bringing out more products and a better way to make newer trucks look the way drivers want them to look.”

Shop Profile: 75 Chrome Shop

Location: Wildwood, Fla.

Phone Number: (866) 255-6206

Twenty years ago, the 75 Chrome Shop started as a retailer for mud-flap weights and lug nut covers. But, “things have evolved quite a bit since then,” says David Farkus, the shop’s co-owner.

The shop used to occupy just 1,000 sq. ft. of space, but has since graduated into an 8,000-sq.-ft. building. They also no longer sell just mud flap weights and lug not covers: they are a fully-stocked chrome and accessory shop that sells stacks, bumpers, visors, turbo wings – the list goes on. They’ve also opened up an installation facility.

The 75 Chrome Shop also hosts an annual truck show every year in April as a customer appreciation event. The Wildwood show is one of the annual venues for the Custom Rigs Pride & Polish show tour.

Shop Profile: First Class Services

Notable builds/trucks: First in Class, Bucket List

Location: Lewisport and Owensburg, Ky.

Phone Number: (270) 295-3746

Randy Stroup of the Lewisport, Ky.,-based First Class Services says the shop’s inception stems from his and the rest of the crew’s personal passions for hot-rods. They’ve been actively building trucks since 2006, Stroup says, and the shop’s services range from complete rebuilds and custom glider kits to smaller custom installs.

“We’re pretty flexible,” Stroup says. “Whatever [customers] want done, we can do it. They can bring in ideas, or we can make suggestions – however they want to do it.”

The First Class Services build First in Class won the Big-Rig Build-Off in 2008.

Stroup says recently the shop has been rebuilding lots of 2006- and 2007-model equipment to keep up with regulations standards.

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Shop Profile: T/A Truck Painting

Notable builds/trucks: Jeff Silberstorf’s ’72 Peterbilt

Location: Pewaukee, Wis.

Phone Number: (262) 691-1410.

Paint and graphics artist Jeff Zimmerman and his crew of nine at T/A Truck Painting offer custom paint and body work, restorations after crashes, accessorizing and custom vinyl graphics. The shop started in 1984 when Zimmerman and his partner left another shop to create their own after gaining somewhat of a following.

Since then, the shop has grown from 3,000 sq. ft. to 12,000, building upon a base of high-end paint and body work.

Zimmerman says his shop offers a service that shows digital designs of what the truck will look like before they start working. “We have a schematic of the truck and can show customers different designs to help them decide what they want to do,” he says. “You can see it on the truck before we do the job.”

Shop Profile:

Car Craft Truck Works & Elizabeth Truck Center

Notable builds/trucks: Mayhem, Hillwick 66, The Beast, Punisher

Location: Elizabethtown, N.J., and Staten Island, N.Y.

Phone Number: (908) 355-8800

Car Craft Truck Works began as a heavy truck collision shop in 1976 in a 6,000 sq. ft. facility in Brooklyn. Today, the Car Craft crew operates in a 60,000 sq. ft. facility – and that only accounts for one of its locations.

Up the road, in Elizabethtown, N.J., sister company Elizabeth Truck Center works on a two-acre (soon to be six-acre) facility in the heart of the central Jersey trucking hub.

Elizbaeth Truck Center opened in 1997 after brothers Anthony and Steven Pesce joined their father, Steve Sr., as the company’s co-owners.

Pesce says shortly after, the shops got into the rising popularity of custom parts and installations. They started selling chrome accessories in the early 2000s, which “automatically seemed to push us into custom fabrications and custom everything else,” Anthony Pesce says.

Both shops essentially do the same work, repairing heavy truck after severe hits and collisions, installing custom touches and building custom trucks.

“First and foremost, we specialize in the heavy truck collision repair work,” Pesce says. “Not far behind that – anything that’s super custom. That’s what we like to say we’re real talented at, anything that needs a phenomenal fit and finish.”

Custom fabrication

Complete custom builds

Hillwick '66