I thought I would take it as an opportunity to give you a deeper inside look at the ever popular Muscle Truck this is one of our most asked about vehicles and it's been in a lot of shows and extras and social media and stuff like that but you don't always get to see every little nitty-gritty detail about it so I'm going to try and show you some things now that maybe you haven't seen before and don't know first of all I was surprised at the event how many people ask me is this a '73 or a '74? not that critical it's like exactly the same truck but I checked the title and it's a 74 I think the confusion comes from the fact that I miss speak often when I'm talking about it.
Sometimes I've called it a '73, sometimes I've said '74 but it actually is a '74 the thing though is that this thing is patched together from a bunch of trucks when I bought it the guy was restoring it and had actually had the frame off the cab and everything had sandblasted and powder-coated the chassis the underside of this thing is truly mint it's nice but these fenders you know that we hacked these in an episode of Roadkill and so these are replacement fenders the fenders that we hacked they were also aftermarket fenders it's an original hood which doesn't have the kink in it that most these trucks do usually the hood hinges seize up and there's a dent right across the middle of the hood it folds in half it's got two different doors off two different trucks this one's actually off of a later model you can tell it's like weird it's got thinner glass slightly thinner sheet metal than the other one because it's from a newer truck and then the bed came from a completely different vehicle here's something that I found out a couple years ago that blew me away.
I stuck my hand up in here on the inside and found out that there's a weld mark right here on both sides and I assume here my conclusion being that this top came off of a different cab which is kind of strange but the guy did it really well you can't tell from out here I think the color of this cab was originally red if you look up under the dash that's what you can see but obviously the rest of the truck is a multitude of colors the big Roadkill sticker on the back window people ask about that all of the time people want to buy that thing and we don't sell them because they're expensive to make it expensive to ship that was just a one-off that I had done at a local shop so that's where that came from good backstory on this fender.
This whole truck was originally built when I was doing a thing called Car Junkie TV and one of our Roadkill directors Dustin Gould was also working at Car Junkie TV that's where I met him and that's how we started doing Roadkill together and we built this truck initially me and Chad Reynolds ended a cross-country trip to the second LS fest in Memphis with it but Dustin actually painted this fender it's like one of the few things automotive things that he's done for the show and he was obsessed with trying to mask off the pin stripe on it so this is not like a tape stripe it's actually the fender was primer gray and he masked it off and put I forget the brand of this metallic orange but it's actually lasted pretty well because that was about nine years ago and this right here the black spot which I noticed when people mimicked the muscle truck either in toy cars or in real trucks they'll always put this black spot here this was a Car Junkie TV logo that he had also masked into it and then you see there's more goo on it and then goo sticker leftovers everywhere on the truck when we took this on Power Tour last year.
We got into a sticker war with Rutledge wood we put Roadkill stickers all over his Toyota and we came out one morning and there was Rutledge stickers all over the truck and they left some goo and they peeled some paint off right here in the bed there's some green we considered painting the truck at one time and this was some spray can green that we actually thought about doing it thank goodness we did not you know that we changed the wood in the bed on an episode of Hot Rod Garage and we also made this thing which we obviously did not paint and is rusting that is covering the kick up in the frame it has C notch in the back. And let me think if there's anything else I need to tell you about the body on it I don't think so the other thing people ask about all of the time on this is what is the wheel and tire package so let's figure that out these are Crager Soft 8 wheels.
78 Chevy F100 Muscle Truck
They're really cheap I use them all the time Finnegan hates them and this is a 285/6017 on the back. It's almost 31 inches tall it's a huge tire but narrow enough to fit in there and I don't remember the backspace on these wheels but it kind of doesn't matter if you're building a truck like this because the rear end in this thing isn't even Chevy it came out of a '78 F100 complete full width I don't even know what the width is but it might be different than the Chevy and it might affect what the back spacing is so even if I told you the number it might not even apply to a Chevy and the same is true with the front back spacing it's all weird with spacers and a bunch of stuff and the other wheel and tire package that fits on this on the drag strip is this this is a wheel vintique just original steel wheel looking thing 15 by 8 and it's wearing a 30 x 12 50 15 ET Street this is the old kind of ET street they don't make anymore let's see what the front tire size is on this pile it's a 225 / 55 17 again on a 17 by 8 and because the rear end came from a Ford.
It's got a Ford wheel bolt pattern and so this has an adapter on it to go from the Chevy pattern to the Ford pattern and that adapter feels like it's also roughly a 1 inch spacer so it's moving the whole thing out now the front suspension on this is a two inch drop spindle and the upper control arm is from Ridetech and the lower control arms from cpp like a mishmash of parts it's got got McGaughys shocks, I never know how to pronounce that company's name and Dulcich it's just set this thing up with regular old mechanical coil springs last week that air ride on it for a long time but this truck ends up getting driven by so many people who couldn't figure out how to work the air ride system.
One of our assistants who doesn't know anything about cars tried to drive it with the front end drag on the ground and I was just over it and so it's now got coil springs on it to keep it simple for those guys let's see what's oh this grill notice it says 454 in the grill the Muscle Truck is not an original big block truck this grill came from a Gardner's truck that I bought years ago I mean like in the mid-90s to pull a 454 out of it I still have the grill sitting around when I bought the truck it had a tube grill in it so under the hood this is an all aluminum Corvette LS6 and its stock with the exception of a little train camshaft but I don't remember the specs on it has crane roller rockers on it it does have mid length headers and a BBK SSI cast aluminum intake manifold but a lot of people complain about because it retains a lot of heat versus the plastic manifold.
It is controlled by MSD atomic EFI and we've got a nitrous plate on it and a couple solenoids over here but the rest of the nitric system is not hooked up anymore it's got Aeromotive fuel system you can see the regulator here on this little custom bracket that I made off of the frame and course Optima battery here's the roll control that Dulcich made a bracket for on a recent episode of Roadkill Garage you should actually look up that episode there's a lot more on the Muscle Truck there and while filthy right now from driving to and from Arizona.
Everything you can tell that the inside the engine compartment was actually painted up and dealt with pretty nicely at one time back to the drivetrain transmission of the dynamic turbo 400 at the full manual valve body it's got about a 4,000 stall converter in it which is a little loose for driving around especially when we put highway gears in the back right now I have a 350 rear gear in it and it has a Gear Vendors overdrive and so 80 miles an hour is about 3100 rpm no problem cruising it all day that way it has gotten as good as 20 miles per gallon let's see if there's any interior details Oh people ask me where the steering wheel came from all the time which is weird to me because it just looks like a leftover as Brad comes around to show you the interior.
70 Buick GS 455
So I changed it to that Automator Street tack same one that is in Crop Duster I like that tack it's just real basic you can see the controller for the MSD efi over there hanging off the dash that red screen this seat came out of a junkyard I remember carrying it out of the yard by myself in the rain to put that together recently we made the cab of this thing much more comfortable with new carpet and jute pad and underlies from LMC Truck and I also dynamatted the inside of the doors we added a Pioneer stereo in the dash it also has six by nine speakers in both doors and in a couple of enclosures behind the seat and so that's pretty good unfortunately the truck is so loud that even with that thing fully cranked the exhaust just kills all of the high notes and I need to get some tweeters up on the dash or something because they're so directional because the exhaust is so loud and that's the last thing
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