Then things get really cool with that load of ICE in the cargo bed. Hit a switch and the bedcover scissors skyward to reveal an array of monitors. This portion of the buildup took six months to get the custom cover to work properly.
"I realized I had 6 feet of hidden real estate under that cover, and I wanted to build something that hadn't been done before," Jonas says. "That meant refabricating the Electrashade unit, which was originally designed for a fullsize truck. I wanted it to fit inside, instead of on top of, the bedrail, so it would suck down tonneau cover. The framework is all custom. It normally mounts on top of the bedrail. So we stripped it down, and rebuilt it to fit inside between the rails instead of on top."
There is so much ICE on this truck, you could turn it into an rolling electronics store. In addition to the 7-inch monitor in the dashboard, there are four other 5-inch monitors in the doors, so when they're open, the screens face both front and rear. With a pair of 17-inch flatscreens and a 7-incher in the rear, that brings the total to eight monitors in all. Why so many? Well, when you have three DVD players (in the head unit, the overhead, and PlayStation 2), you need extra displays, right?
For blasting out the tunes, you can't miss the four 10-inch subwoofers mounted in Sub-Zone boxes, plus two 9-inch three-way components speakers and four 6-inch components. Driving the speakers are six Sony amps: four 800-watt and two 600-watt units with crossovers. As you might imagine, they drain a little bit of juice, so Scosche supplied a pair of 1,100-amp dry-cell gel batteries, and there's a 110-volt power supply from Cascade audio as well to plug in at shows.
Dressing-up the interior are Woodview brushed-aluminum dash inserts, along with Katzkin two-tone gray-and-black upholstery on Scat Enterprises seats and tracks. Rod Doors supplied interior trim and fabricated universal molds speaker enclosures.
Of course, you've got to see and hear it all to really appreciate the sensory overload and sonic boom of the Sony Dreamscape system. It produces an audiovisual explosion of epic proportions. At the Pomona Roadster Show, spectators lined up three deep to play the video. And when the audiovisual system kicked on, it emptied all the nearby booths.
More than 200 pounds of wire and six sheets of 4x8-feet MDF (medium density fiberboard) went into this ICE chest. Altogether, this Colorado hauls an extra 1,000 pounds of weight, which required adding some Airaid airbags in the rearend and two bottles of go-juice from Nitrous Works. Even so, this rolling ICE chest is still a cruiser, not a muscle truck. "It may not be the fastest Colorado out of the hole," Jonas laughs, "but it sure is the loudest."