West Texas isn't exactly the sport truck capital of the world, especially when it comes to custom rigs that drag rocker across the asphalt. That didn't stop a 24-year-old good-ol' boy named Tye Farmer from busting out one phat mini though. The proprietor of Truck Outfitters and Trim Shop, in San Angelo, Texas, picked up a used, abused, and hammered '97 Chevy S-10 for a song and injected his own personality and talent into it, bringing back to life a truly cool truck.
As the story goes, the previous owner took great pride in dragging the rockers right off this truck, after it had been 'bagged and body-dropped. Obviously, this stressed the rest of the truck quite a bit and meant that Tye had a good deal of work ahead of him to make the truck respectable.
"I'm a neat freak, so I couldn't leave the truck the way it was. The first day I had it, I ripped out the half-done interior."
The interior was the least of Tye's problems. His shop easily remedied the mess inside the cab with copious amounts of gray and blue dyed leather. The outside of the truck was another matter altogether. Miles of draggin' hard across Texas had cracked the bodywork that had sealed the molded sheetmetal of the bed, rockers, and fenders beneath the paint. Tye attacked these areas next, sanding, welding, and sanding again, until the refreshed sheetmetal was ready for paint. Once the body was deemed straight enough for his liking, Tye had Daniel Smith repaint the truck's skin in factory Nissan Skyline blue.
Being a self-described neat freak isn't easy. It means only driving your truck on the sunny days and resisting the urge to release the air from the 'bags and let the sparks fly as the rockers drag on the pavement to impress hot chicks. Tye is comfortable enough with himself to shrug off his friends' jabs but admits that he is constantly refining the truck to keep it fresh rather than drag it all over the ground and mess up that pretty paintjob.
"I've rebuilt the suspension and straightened up the body drop. The audio system has also been changed since the photo shoot."
No matter how long Tye resists the urge to throw his pancake down on the ground, we still dig its fresh style and aggressive stance. You just can't hate on a smoothed-out and laid-out S-Dime, especially when you see one in West Texas.