Have you ever cruised on down to an all-you-can-eat buffet in Las Vegas? You know the kind of deal where the food is actually pretty damn good (at 3 a.m.) and you just eat and eat until you have to loosen the old belt up a notch. I'm talking about a buffet at one of the better establishments on the strip and not that motel no-tell 10 miles out of town with the three slot machines and hot dog stand in the entrance. This issue is sort of like that first buffet, with the exception that all of the food is damn good. Call us your maitre d', if you will.
Our buffet starts off with the good stuff first. We have photos of killer feature trucks that span across 10 different makes and models. There is literally something for everybody, this month. You want to see classics? We have a pair of '56 panel trucks that'll make you think twice about what's really cool in the truck world. We're also pleased to show off a body-dropped Toyota 4Runner, a resto-mod Ford F-100, Mazda and S-10 mini-trucks, and fullsizes, both lifted and lowered. The cover truck, MBRP Exhaust's amazing Dodge Dakota dualie, is especially cool because you don't see something like it every day or even at every show you read about. Yeah, our main course is pretty varied and very tasty.
The appetizers, our bevy of tech articles, will definitely tempt your tummy with the taste of nuts and honey. At the very least, they will show you new paint tricks, a powerful new supercharger, and how to swap your classic ashtray for a cupholder. Along the way, we are even going to clue you into how a laser cutter works and how hiring one can enhance the look and integrity of your next project truck.
We didn't forget to drop some great show coverage into this smorgasbord either. The crew traveled to Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee, looking for hot women, badass trucks, and unusual sights. Scrapin' the Coast had perhaps the most off-the-chain bikini contest, much of which we can't even print, but a lot of the good pics are still in there. It was great to see this show go off even in midst of cleaning up the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The staff also put in overtime this month to bring you not only great features, tech, and show articles, but also a few bonus stories that are a little bit different. We are saying goodbye to our Toyota Tacoma, this month, since our lease is up, and we are done flogging her. All of the bolt-ons have been removed, and the truck was sent back to Toyota, where they hopefully won't notice the balled-up rubber stuck up in the rear wheelwells. The good news is that we'll be introducing another new guinea pig, next month, and this time, it'll be a spankin'-new Chevy Silverado.
One of the most time-consuming side items to our buffet had to be a pair of stories that don't really fit into the usual editorial you find in your favorite truck mag. We got our hands on a new Dodge Viper and a Dodge Ram SRT-10 for a few days, which was just long enough to find out the good and bad traits of both vehicles-we liked the truck better-and stuffed each with hot models for a trip to the donut shop. We didn't bother to race either Dodge because we already knew the outcome, but we still found a competitive arena to test them in.
We also got our greasy hands on a new GMC TopKick truck, which turned out to be even more dangerous than putting us behind the wheel of the SRT-10. Rather than simply take pictures of the TopKick towing a trailer or something normal like that, we hosed down some pavement and drifted the 10,000-pound monster through a parking lot. The photos of Galen hooking turns in the four-door monster in an inch of water are pretty wild. Oh yeah, we also road-tested the GMC and found out afterward that the insanely good-turning radius of this behemoth truck was part of the reason it was so easy to get drifting. The water helped, of course.
That's the gist of the Sport Truck buffet, this month. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. It's either that or I'm getting hungry because I really am headed to Vegas for the SEMA Show, and you know I'll be first in line for that killer buffet. See ya next month.