ICON TR Thriftmaster #2!

hi there thanks for coming on another test drive with me I really enjoy building these trucks and I have a long history with the series one thirty one hundred several a five window thrift master I used to when I called my car antics a hobby I built several of these in my garage starting when I was about seventeen and I always loved but I was always kind of disappointed because no matter how beautiful they were when everything was said and done and I actually took it out and drove it just didn't do anything for me they're they're quite archaic I suppose if you're that guy that's fine and dandy but I'm not that guy so over the years with icon the five window was always in the back of my mind and one day I decided after speaking to Craig Morrison at Art Morrison our chassis partner discovering that he also loved this truck he and I decided to move forward and we started with Craig's personal truck which has become quite famous and he did all the chassis engineering so made my life easy all I had to do was hop on his coattails on the chassis and then another longtime love of mine is Raymond Loewy it's a great designer is actually the designer who coined the term industrial designer you know Raymond Louise work whether you realize it or not designed the coca-cola logo he designed Air Force One he designed the interior of the concorde he designed I think it was the Shell Oil logo Lucky Strikes on and on and on he's an icon so I got to thinking why not combining these two things that I love and let's do the thrift master from the perspective of what if Raymond Loewy had been on the design team what decisions would he have made so to kind of give you an idea when I'm where I'm going with this let's take chevrolet in 1947 pickup truck what are the market want in a pickup truck strong simple and cheap now Raymond Loewy have been involved strong yes no problem clarity of purpose and utility certainly cheap not necessarily so things like the headliner on these trucks originally their cardboard the door panels cardboard armrest plastic stuff like that so we kind of did a restomod modern vintage mash up and all the aesthetic components that I design and integrated into the truck like our front hood ornament our side emblems the interior door handles the seat hardware and recline knob the arm rests the dash reverse lights tail lights seats pattern all the knobs and switches were all based on that premise of what would Raymond have done the other thing that's fun with all of our projects obviously is infusing modern utility into the vintage aesthetic so you take the stock - of a 47 to 53 Chevy truck it has a really cool kind of I don't know kind of deco ribbed panel now back in the day all that had to do was house an ashtray that was it well with my work you know we were doing modern in - climate control system doing reverse camera we're doing car play we're doing voice to text and Siri and all that good stuff so what I did was take the the look of that panel but then we cab designed it so that it facilitates all those modern functions so you tap the panel in front of the audio system and then that door articulates down on gas shocks and that's kind of fun we we actually use our SC like remote control off-road truck shocks because you can tune about how much gas pressure you put in a kind of fun detail and then as that activates all the way down it has magnets that control the rattles so that gives you access to car play and all that functionality we designed a drop-down dash panel and we used a bead roller to roll the beads that emulate that dash line that allow us to put lights wipers fan vent temperature and then 12 volt power outlet the big V knob on the left hand side of that underneath the ignition switch is actually the Calvin and Calvin actually works great on these trucks kind of a cool detail you'll also notice on the glove box side we use the same apparatus that articulates for the series system for the gauges we worked with our buddies at Dakota digital great team great product super reliable just no issue except I'm kind of a geek as we know and I kind of wanted to do my aesthetic well what's cool about working with Dakota is they let me do just that so they give me their CAD files so that I don't screw up the positioning of everything because I can't mess with that and then I designed my own fonts and indices and integrated the lizard and we have control over the LED in this case we did the red LED which is my favorite because obviously at night it's like Aerospace's there's no glare so when you first look at these gauges they're analog and they're pretty straightforward you've got fuel bolts oil pressure temp and of course you've got speedo and you've got tach but there's two little hidden momentary switches underneath the dash when you push those there's one for each gauge it changes the functionality of the little indicator screen at the bottom the little LED deal so you can have that give you a digital readout of speed or tach you can do volts and oil and blah blah blah you can also do quarter mile which is kind of fun and you can also do 0 to 60 which I just discovered this morning that's good fun and you also have check engine light high beams and all the other various things that you need but they all come up backlit through the face circuit board so it just keeps it really nice and vintage for the steering-wheel in these trucks we use actually a tri-five Chevy Belair wheel but it's scaled down so it's not the big school bus monster of the stock one which gives you a little bit more gut room and these cabins are kind of tight so that's good also with our modern rack and pinion steering you don't want a big-ass school bus wheels so we're running a twenty to one rack so it works out really nice we take that wheel apart from the supplier we upgrade the surface quality we wrap it by hand in the bison hide and then we nickel plate it and brush it and then we add the icon lizard there in the middle the windows are power but we design those so that they look dead stock now granted I took some liberties with the design of the handle and the knob but all you do is you tap it down to actuate down and tap up to actuate up it's kind of fun door handles are dead stock but they do go to a modern bear claw style latch for a more definitive door function all the glass in the truck is smoked tempered so that's not a film it's within the laminate of the glass which is nice for the headliner on the truck we do Alcantara which I'm a big fan of we use it in a lot of our trucks and then this seat comes from Glide Engineering it's a really nice closed cell foam pad and I redesigned the paddle for the recline and the hinge point were cover so again I kind of geeked out and kind of went deco on that the seat has some other functionality that's quite nice it looks like a bench but it holds you more like a bucket we've got this articulating center console which is nice also the seat bottom you can release it in actuate it and it tilts forward 90 degrees so in this case I gobbled up most of that space for electronics but you can use it for additional storage there's also room behind the seats for storage speaking out of all the space I gobbled up the stereo on this truck rocks the house we work with our friends at Addison so it's a bit one audison digital audio system so that's one amp and only three speakers but rivals any luxury new car audio system keeps it nice and simple the beautiful tone and tons of bass and a lot of user interface and control another little modern touch the rearview mirrors so the rearview mirrors look like the old school Peet mirrors but when you turn on your turn signal they have a little LED arrow that shows up from behind the mirror glass which is just kind of a fun detail so I keep changing the head units on these trucks I think this one's my favorite so far next we're going to try the Pioneer systems but this is an Alpine head unit designed to be dedicated to a I phone I love it super simple no bogus dancing dolphins or all that crap a lot of these audio systems put in and it's like it's working just hard enough but not like overthinking things sometimes and they drive me nuts like you have exceeded the speed limit yeah that's what I have a speedometer for so I don't know the Pioneer unless I can get around that crap might work me what do you guys think with carplay you have a specific head unit that you've got good experience with and so I'd love to hear about it this system is really nice though it does everything I want and then we integrated a reverse camera which we hid in a valance directly under the tailgate and that works out really nice it's nice to have reverse camera on this truck because you really can't see that well another thing is height if you've been following my thrift masters you may remember the last one which was pretty slammed and granted we did that because we went out and autocross stood with Optima at the top street car challenge but in reality day to day it's a pain in the ass so when we build these trucks we give the client freedom of choice on the static ride height that they want their truck to be in this case we went fairly tall still significantly lower than stock still has a nice mild rake and stance to it but now it's set up so it's just higher than those standard parking lot concrete berms there's nothing worse than a custom trick nickel-plated brush front bumper and haven't had your coffee yet you pull in in the morning and that just sucks so I think this is a good balance four wheels or running our circle racing wheels we work with those guys a lot so these are 18-inch there's 6061 cnc one-piece billet and then you notice on the hubcaps those are acid-etched spun stainless that again we nickel played after the acid edge the acid answer is really cool though what it lets us do is give the effect of a stamped piece without the cost of stamping the acid eats into the top surface of the metal we also do that on the tailgate of the trucks but it's quite subtle you can only see it in the right light because it's tone-on-tone also on the tailgate we got rid of those gaki chains these stock trucks have chains that just go kakakaka can constantly beat the piss out of the paint too so it went to a stainless elbow hinge and then we have hidden on the Blind Side neural latches so you just finger actuate that on both sides and the tailgate rotates down then you don't have to listen to all that nonsense all the time for the wiper system again it looks stock but it's not running a modern three-stage single wiper system with hind linkage and that we've done in partnership with our friends at Newport engineering good product all american-made keeps the look stock but the stock wipers on these trucks and they suck fact they were vacuum so we've come to a stoplight they kind of go you have to idle up to get them to go again but that's just another one of those things that that makes icons icons and that like I kind of geek out or rethink all of those details to make it a more modern experience that we can all live with so obviously as with all of our projects when the body is metal work complete and it's been painted and is out of the oven we put it on a rotisserie we invert it and then we coat the underside of the body assembly and a heat cured polyuria as well as the inside back wall of the cabin and the floor then comes Dynamat we use copious amounts of Dynamat coating the headliner the inside of the doors and again the rear of the cab and the floor the floor also has pretty intelligent heat shielding on the underside of the body to really keep the interior temperature where it should be if you don't do that on a truck like this just cook your ass so the Dynamat really makes a huge difference to just more like a modern car you know no wind noise and just really keeps everything nice nice and quiet so you can hear the obnoxious exhaust speaking of exhaust let's talk about mechanical mechanically we are running a General Motors Iran this is the L M for the 5.3 smaller displacement motor so that's an emission certified engine now I always get guys the email and me are commenting on YouTube what would you guys put cuts on there why not it's not like the 80s where the cats were out in a hurry and smother all your performance it's not like the 80s where you've got air rail smog pump in each yar and all that peripheral crap jams gotten so good at it that it's the catalytic converters pre cat post kado twos and a charcoal canister event system that's it so why the hell not truck stinks less it's better for the environment and it's fast as hell to make sure it's fast as hell we integrated Magnusson air to water intercooled supercharger so this trucks a bit of a beast you keep your foot out of it fine you stomp it and it is gone I'd say this trucks probably died knowing at the wheels about four hundred and forty horse whatever exactly it is if it had one more horsepower it would not hook up as it is you got a lot of power and limited weight in the rear so one thing we did to offset that is build the stainless fuel tank with the in tank pump and sump and fit it underneath the bed that helps with the weight balance so now you can stomp the truck pretty good for transmission we're running the general motors for l6 5e with their control pack again from the e rod family of products good stuff for exhaust we hand-built our own system we're running dual Magnaflow mufflers and then three inch system its TIG welded mandrel bent and then ceramic coated each one of the thrift masters we do we peek out a different way and the bed so this time we're running conventional style stainless runners and then for the wood we work with those guys able and Baker are buddies that we did that VW 67 bus derelict with and we used old-growth quarter sawn white oak when my favorites kind of a very traditional American furniture maker favorite wood is a beautiful tone and then that is finished in a new product that's intended for predominantly marine applications but it gives us a nice matte finish on the hardwood and that's finished 360 degrees for durability so really happy with that it's a cool look I think on the next truck we're trying koa wood because the trucks going to live in Hawaii oh I almost forgot for the carpet we're running the German hog Ogden's growl if it's that good it's like you see in vintage I don't know Mercedes and Porsche applications but it's a full loop carpet doesn't pick doesn't run really durable all organic fibers then then we do that two layers so you have the bottom fixed carpet which is hemmed in the Bison hide and then you also have a bison hem removable floor mat and then that floor mat we line in Dynamat for a little extra insulation so I don't know I could talk all day about these trucks but you're probably bored by now if you're still with me as it is anyway so I really appreciate you guys taking the time to follow my brand support us watch these crappy videos get a little better though right so any further questions call us eight one eight two eight oh three three three three email us JW at icon 4x4 com certainly visit our new and improved website I just launched it at icon 4x4 comp and follow my antics on Facebook at Jonathan Ward Instagram icon 4x4 and that's all I got so thanks again I really appreciate it see you you Craig you available my sweet sounds like Jennifer

Channel: Jonathan Ward

Views: 97,472

Rating: 4.9551821 out of 5

Keywords: iMovie

Id: uT94lgvwpOA

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2015