A game of one-inch-upsmanship between two longtime friends results in one rocking work-in-progress

By Todd Dills

Truck names come from a host of different origins – the occupation of the owner-operator, remembrance of a loved one, a favorite color, a movie hero or any number of other reasons. Two very custom rigs on the circuit take a different tack, getting their moniker from the wheelbase: Project 350 and Project 351. The latter takes its name from something of a challenge.

After Richie Acosta put together his now-infamous Project 350 custom Pete that was profiled in the pages of our sister magazine, Truckers News (March 2010), Acosta’s childhood friend, Anthony Fischkelta, was determined to make his own KW project one better.

He spec’d it straight from Kenworth, working with Tri-State Diesel, a dealership the Fischkelta family has a long relationship with for several trucking generations moving product for their Moonachie, N.J.-based Grand Street Warehouse.

That close working relationship came in handy, as Anthony was about to get quite specific indeed about the specs he needed for his 2009 W900 KW, chief among them an odd wheelbase measurement: 351 inches. (One inch longer than his buddy’s custom working class rig.)

“Originally, my truck was going to be a 42-in. flattop in a KW” to complement Acosta’s 36-in. flattop Pete, says Fischkelta. “But at the last minute, matter of fact it cost me $1,000 to change the spec it was so last minute, I switched to a 72-in. Aerocab sleeper.”

“There is a big market for that [style] truck,” says Fischkelta about the decision, but resale considerations weren’t the only factors involved. “I chose to do that hoping to inspire other Aerocab owners that enjoy working on their rides.”

Fischkelta has spent a lot of time fabricating, personalizing and customizing his truck to make it stand out while keeping it functional. The drop air suspension slams the bumper within an inch of the ground, and the other custom touches inside and out make this rolling office a real head-turner.

After more than two years’ worth of work on the KW, it’s clear he’s been abundantly successful in his mission to inspire today, as “Project 351” has become something of a sensation among fellow full-time haulers and custom rig enthusiasts who’ve lit up Fischkelta’s Facebook page with commendations, questions and pictures from the road.

At first, he documented progress on the rig via a static website. But when he moved to the social platform last year he suddenly found out very clearly how he was doing in getting the word out about the project.

“I never knew how many people follow this truck,” he says. “If they’re a truck fan, they pretty much know about it. I don’t need to solicit people. And I never knew it.”

Don’t be surprised to see him competing in a couple Pride & Polish events as well – if he can get time away from hauling groceries and frozen foods for the family business.

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Spec’s

NAME: Project 351

Owner: Anthony and Richard Fischkelta/Grand Street Warehouse, Moonachie, N.J.

Model: 2009 Kenworth W900L, 351-in. WB

Engine: 700-hp Cummins ISX

Transmission: Eaton-Fuller 18

Exterior mods: Custom cab/sleeper panels; 12Ga visor; fiberglass deckplate and fiberglass rear fenders; custom axle covers and tank covers in the rear; one-piece steps designed with 4 State Trucks; HID headlights; custom grille; 20-inch bumpe; air-ride w/ 12Ga Customs suspension drop kit; custom window shades; eight-inch exhaust; custom hidden hood latches

Interior mods: Stainless floor, ceiling and cab sides; painted dash; custom inserts supplied by 4 State Trucks

Customizer/Installer: Fischkelta, friends and Profab of Mannheim, Pa.

GROTE INDUSTRIES, grote.com

FIBERTECH, fibertech1.com

Randy  Humphrey’s Legacy Class Pete carries a lot more than livestock.

By Bruce W. Smith

Randy “Hump” Humphrey’s distinctive Legacy Class Peterbilt 379 is a familiar sight along the interstates between Florida, the southern states and all the way to Colorado. The Cool Blue Pete with the “Missouri Outlaw” band running from hood to sleeper and bright cattle trailer is always on the move, just like its current owner and operator.

But there’s more to the story behind this Custom Rigs Pride & Polish Working Class combo winner from last year’s Wildwood, Fla., show than the obvious: Blue Mule’s distinctive look and name are a tribute to friendships and respect.

“Back in the early ‘70s (and) through the ‘80s an old-time friend from Warren, Ohio, named Pappy Whitlatch used his truck to haul heavy loads of iron,” Humphrey says. “Pappy named his truck ‘Blue Mule’ after the mules that did the same job a century earlier. I’m carrying on Pappy’s legacy.”

The Wauchula, Fla., resident says his Blue Mule also pays tribute to another old friend, Tim Cantrell. Cantrell had his truck painted with a very distinctive black stripe that wrapped over the front of the hood and ran along the side of the cab and sleeper.

“That stripe is called the ‘Missouri Outlaw band’,” says Humphrey. “It was well known from East Coast to West. And if you saw a truck with that band you instantly knew it was from Missouri.”

This Legacy Edition tractor (No. 989 out of 1,000 built) was originally owned and spec’d by Clint Moore. It’s the crème de la crème of this model Peterbilt, complete with the unpublished Cool Blue paint, a factory 565hp ISX, 18-speed auto-shift, chrome engine package, car hauler front axle, factory 310-in. wheelbase, 10-foot insert rails, upgraded shocks and full-locking HP 40 rear axles.

The exhaust, breathers, steps, tanks, tool boxes and bumpers are also customized or upgrades.

Cattle riding from Florida to the West and back couldn’t be pulled behind a cooler mule.

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Spec’s

OWNER: Randy “Hump” Humphrey

MODEL: 2007 Peterbilt 379 Legacy Class

WHEELBASE: 310-in

ENGINE: 565hp Cummins ISX

TRANSMISSON: Eaton Fuller 18-speed Autoshift

EXTERIOR MODS: Outlaw paint job; 12ga Customs bowtie sunvisor; headlights turn signals shaved and installed on the fenders; boxed end bumper; Double Eagle generator; custom Coolpac and tool boxes; Rhino-lined; Brunners Drom deck; powder-coated fuel tanks; SS cab & sleeper panels; double-hump WTI with the lips trimmed to match front fender with 12 ga custom brackets; 7-in Dynaflex/Pickett exhaust; custom cab lights and spotights

INTERIOR MODS: Platinum leather interior; seats slid back 6-in; second bed, refrigerator, mini side extenders;  shifter relocated to dash; painted floor; wood trim painted to match the outside including tilt column covers and all removable plastic piece

Turning scrap steel into a custom touch fit for the working class.

By Bruce W. Smith

How many times have you walked past that pile of rusted steel pipe and remnants of plate sitting by the back door of your shop and wondered if it’s about time to take it to the scrap yard? Here’s a tip: Forget the cash. Take a few hours and turn that steel scrap into a cool custom rear bumper.

We watched a couple of Triple R Diesel’s fabricators do exactly that as they turned a piece of scrap steel plate and a rusty section of heavy wall steel pipe into a clean, cool rear bumper.

What they put together is perfect for any customized rig working oil fields, construction sites, rock quarries, or any other job site where a rear bumper is going to take a few hard knocks along the way. Steel is far easier to work than aluminum or stainless; it stands up well to abuse; and it can be easily repaired and repainted.

The best part is the materials are cheap and the only tools required are those you already have sitting in your shop: a plasma cutter, cutting torch, mig welder and disc grinder.

All you have to supply is a little creativeness and the time it takes to cut, weld, and finish the scrappy little bumper. It’s a simple DIY project that can be done all at once in a few hours or spread out over a couple weeks as work schedules allow.

To help you get those creative juices flowing we took a few photos of the basic steps Triple R Diesel’s guys use to transform rusty scrap into bumper art.

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Travis Lyon’s 1987 Kenworth K100E brings the demented Decepticon Motormaster from comic book ink to real-world form.

by James Jaillet

By his own admission, Travis Lyon was “a man in need of a project,” and on a long drive down Tennessee highways “to just get out and clear my head,” he stumbled upon an old junkyard ’87 model Kenworth K100E Aerodyne that, several years before, he wanted to buy and turn into an actuality based on comics and cartoons he revered as a kid growing up in the 1980s.

It was sunken in the mud a bit, “and the radiator and a bunch of the metal had been stolen out of it, but it was mostly intact,” Lyon says. “I still sort of saw in it then what I’d seen in the past.”

And after a quick chat with his then girlfriend, now wife, he returned to buy the truck, something he says he “thought I could make a difference with and something I could turn into something positive.”

In the months leading up to the truck’s purchase, Lyon had lost both of his parents. His dad died of heart disease less than a year after his mom died of an illness she’d battled for years. As a self-employed engineer and consultant, he was able to take a good bit of bereavement time, and after he bought the truck, he turned his attention to converting its remains into the real-world form of the Transformers-based Decepticon Motormaster.

Lyon says he had “within 95 percent of what I wanted to do with it” in his head, and “from the very beginning, I told everyone involved the most important part of the project is making everything we do fit the character and making his personality make sense in this vehicular form.”

Appropriately,  3-ft. by 4-ft. painting of a black and purple Kenworth K100E on down a deserted Southwestern highway at sunset hung in the shop at Blue Ridge Kenworth in Abingdon, Va., (the shop that helped Lyon rebuild the truck) throughout the entire project.

It served as a reference for everyone involved, and it was based on pencil sketches scribbled down at a four-hour brainstorming session in a Cracker Barrel before any work on the truck began.

The result is what Lyon calls “a mix of two worlds,” he says, in which he mixed “a little old school trucker with the other-worldly, highly advanced, futuristic technology.” Lyon says the truck’s purple neon, 3,000-watt audio system, TV and Blu-ray setup and ultra-suede interior blend with the truck’s chrome, eye-popping exhaust system and overall old school look to do just that.

‘A real bastard’

Lyon says the truck’s Detroit Diesel 8V92 Silver Series engine “fits the character so well because that engine just sounds so, so angry.”

Lyon says the truck’s Detroit Diesel 8V92 Silver Series engine “fits the character so well because that engine just sounds so, so angry.”

Being a good fit conceptually didn’t make the engine a good fit during the building process, though, as the truck was equipped with a Caterpillar B-Model when Lyon picked it up from the junkyard.

To make matters even worse, the truck the engine came from was a K100C — slightly different than Lyon’s K100E. “It didn’t fit under the dog house correctly in the E model like it would have in a C [model],” Lyon says.

After a few test fits in the donor truck, the 8V92 was lowered into Motormaster, and the engine is one of the integral parts of bringing the character to life, Lyon says. “We really wanted to imitate Motormaster’s sound going down the highway,” he says.

“Since 1986, the character has been known as just being a real, real bastard. He’s so mean to the subgroup he leads. They all hate him, but they all fear him, and the 8V92, sound wise, fits the character in vehicular form better than any other, which is why I built it that way.”

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TALON TIGHT, talontight.com, (800) 376-7367

By Todd Dills

“We’re not 100 percent done with it,” says Bryan Martin, Joplin, Mo.-based Chrome Shop Mafia boss and perhaps the most well-known personality these days in the truck customizing world. He’s talking about the 1966 needle-nose Peterbilt 351 whose custom grille is staring you down in the picture above.

Though it looks almost black in this picture and in person in certain light, the base paint on Bryan Martin’s 1966 Pete 351 is a “deep indigo blue,” he says, “with Seminole red, and old-school red pinstriping.” The interior is heavy on button-tuck -- “very Kenworth-y,” Martin says -- done early on in the project’s long history by Truck Interiors of Seattle. And done over the phone. “At the time,” Martin says, “they’d never made an interior for a 351. I sent them some pictures, and they got on the telephone with me. When they sent it to me it fit like a glove.”

Some talk about the truck as Martin’s own personal project, and he admits that, “when we take it to shows or do a local parade with it, typically I’m the one who drives it.” All the same, he rarely uses the first-person singular when talking about the two decades of work put into it.

“It’s a truck that we started restoring and customizing about 23 years ago,” he says. “It’s always been one of those project we had to pull off of to work on a customer’s project.”

But its story is as much his as his team of customizers’, and begins when the 351 was a local tow truck in Joplin Martin long had his eye on as a young man.

“I’d got out of diesel school in 1986 and started work as a mechanic in Joplin,” he says, “and that’s about when we traded for that truck. It was a tow truck with no sleeper, and the engine was blown up. I traded a running dump truck for it.”

Martin removed the tow body and outfitted it with a flat-top Peterbilt sleeper, mid-1980s-era 400-hp Cummins BigCam, 13-speed Fuller tranny and 3:70 Rockwell rear end.

“Laid out in the 1980s,” Martin says, the stretched 248-inch wheelbase “looks pretty short by today’s standards.” All the same, it was the first truck Martin ever had a hand in lengthening, laying the groundwork for the Bossman’s well-known history to come.

At first glance the Bossman’s Pete might look finished, but Martin says “it still lacks electrical wiring and all the weather stripping” to really put a cap on the two-decade restoration, alterations that might get him a little more time behind its wheel.

Martin, no doubt would love more seat time in the old truck. As he says, “The world never looked better than through the windshield of a needle-nose Pete.”

At 129,000 pounds and more than 98 feet, Burningham’s coal ash hauling tandem-trailer combo is one big custom rig

by Hib Halverson

Photos by author and Paul Hartley

The Burningham guys swapped the stock bumper for a smooth-finish Valley Chrome model, along with a VC drop visor. The headlight brackets and front and rear blinker bars are of the Double J variety. Haulin’ Ash has 250 lights, along with blue neon tubes over every axle and beneath the cab.

Half the electricity in the United States comes from coal-fired power plants, the typical power facility in the West burning 50 tons of bituminous an hour –about 1,600 pounds a minute.

Out of the fires comes ash – a lot of ash. Perhaps surprisingly, 43 percent of that ash, about 29 million tons annually, is recycled for use in chemical products and construction materials, primarily cement. It’s usually hauled from generating plant to cement plant by rigs pulling special 30- to 35-foot doubles. Such rigs’ GVWRs can scale as much as 132,000 pounds.

One of the most wicked ash haulers on the road is a rare 2005 Peterbilt 379X called Haulin’ Ash, owned by Burningham Enterprises of American Fork, Utah, located about 20 miles south of Salt Lake City.

Gary and Jeff Burningham started the business in 1988 to pay for college as owner-operators hauling sand, gravel and anything else they could. Today Burningham has grown to 60-truck fleet hauling coal ash and aggregates. Haulin’ Ash is its pride.

“In 2005, Gary and Jeff were looking for a truck for heavy haul projects,” says Brad Rigby, a Burningham dispatcher. “Jeff ordered a 379X Peterbilt and was lucky enough to get one of the last ones.”

What arrived was a rare, special-edition Pete made only in the ’04 and ’05 model years, spec’ed the way many Burningham trucks are: with a

long nose, 270-inch wheel base, 475-hp Caterpillar C15 Acert engine, Eaton 18-speed double-over trans, Dana 46,000-lb. drive axles with 3:58 gears on a Pete air leaf suspension, 295/75R22.5 tires on Alcoa wheels and polished aluminum, four-strap fuel tanks.

“One day, Gary and Jeff put it in a local truck show and won Second,” says Rigby. “ Once they had a taste of the show truck life, they told Kerry McGraw and myself we could customize it.”

Rigby, Mcgraw and Kendall Curtis, all former company drivers, took to the task quite seriously, burning through what might otherwise be a 10-year project budget in just one. This customized ash hauler’s distinctiveness comes from its killer paint job.

Applied over the stock Peterbilt black Imron is some incredible airbrush work by Dan Langston. The owners’ last name provided the theme for the artwork: burning ham. Thus a big, ugly wild hog trailing smoke and blue flames is on the hood and the back of the sleeper. More blue flame and smoke adorns the tractor’s doors, the sleeper sides, the rear fenders and the trailers.

The interior’s a sick combination of chrome, leather and marble. Burningham's shop added chrome gauge covers and jeweled switch extenders while Contempo Tile handled the intricate black marble cab and sleeper flooring.

Prior to airbrushing Haulin’ Ash, Langston, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, known for his work on custom bikes, had never done anything larger than a pickup. Nevertheless, he finished the combo in 12 hours – an astonishing feat. More of Langston’s imaginative work is on the underside of the hood, where an underwater panorama of a hot-looking mermaid, a giant shark, a Kenworth lying on the ocean bottom, a sinking Freightliner and the two owners, Gary and Jeff Burningham, looking on through portholes.

“The scene portrays the sink-or-swim mentality of the trucking industry of late,” Rigby says.

Burningham’s custom rig has a mere 8,000 miles on the odometer. But that may change. With business slow, instead of buying new equipment they may put “Haulin Ash” to work pulling a set of newer trailers. “The truck was built so it can go on the road,” Rigby says. “If that happens, I hope I can dispatch from the driver seat, because nothing is better than driving something like this down the road and seeing the people’s reaction and approval.”

Besides truck beauty shows and work, Haulin’ Ash has another important duty: motivational assemblies at elementary schools around the Salt Lake City and Utah county areas. Burningham drivers challenge school kids to read more pages in books than they drive miles on the road during the school year. So far the race between the two has been close. We’ll have to wait and see whether the kids can keep up if she hits the road in earnest.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of Custom Rigs.

Talladega Fiberglass kit makes it easy to convert Ultracabs into ultra-cool flat-tops; add function to form

by Bruce W. Smith

Scott Brown watches closely as Jesus Cedillo and a three helpers lift the sleeper cap off a 2000 Peterbilt inside the Texas Chrome Shop.

In a couple hours the TCS truck customizers will have transformed the 63-inch Ultracab standup sleeper he’s looking at into an old-school flattop using a Talladega County Fiberglass Unlimited conversion kit.

It’s exactly what the owner of Scott Brown & Daughters, LLC has in mind for his ’98 Peterbilt, which is next on the shop’s waiting list. The conversion can’t come fast enough for the Devine, Texas owner-operator. And it’s not just about having the custom look, either.

“Having the upper bunk and a little extra headroom isn’t nearly as important to me these days as it is being able to load overhead at grain silos and rock hoppers,” says Brown who stands 6’4”. “That difference in height between the Ultracab sleeper roof and the flattop is the difference between being able to take on a job or not.

“What makes this conversion nice is the Ultracab opening into the sleeper is large enough so a big guy like me can get back there easily. So you have the added functionality of the low roof with old-school looks.”

Brown, who hauls everything from aggregates and grain to oil field drill rigs and equipment, says his pending flattop conversion will also include the addition of a rear window so he can see out the back of the cab while winching or making sharp turns in tight places.

He’s not the only owner-operator out there who has a case of Flattop fever.

Roland Mendez, one of the owners of San Antonio, TX-based Triple R Diesel and Texas Chrome Shop, says “We do at least one Talladega flattop conversion a week for customers and we’ve done at least 20 of our own trucks before we re-sold them this year. We have guys waiting in line to get this done.”

The cost of the conversion varies from shop to shop. Texas Chrome Shop sells the basic Talladega kit for $1,650. If they do the conversion and paint the sleeper to match the cab, the cost is about $3,800 for the basic package. Adding a rear window and more elaborate paint and body work ups the ante.

The good news, according to Mendez, is “An owner-operator can easily double what we charge for the conversion on re-sale value because factory flattops are getting hard to find.”

Doing the conversion isn’t that difficult; it’s more time consuming than technically challenging. In short you remove the standup sleeper top, shorten the roof support and drop on the Talladega flattop roof. The typical do-it-yourselfer can do the work over a weekend.

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SOURCES

Talladega County Fiberglass Unlimited

talladegafiberglass.com; (205) 405-6436

Texas Chrome Shop

Texaschrome.com; (800) 332-9999