ICON TR Thriftmaster #3 Final Testdrive Video!

hi there how's it going today so these trucks are so much fun to build and the last video the last one I did or was the one before didn't come out that good because I went out super early in the morning dawn and I was a little bit too dark had to get back to work so I came in this fine Saturday to try and take a little bit more time and tell you the story of these trucks in more detail because I really like them and there's there's a lot of history and backstory to how we build them and why and I thought you'd appreciate it so let's take this one out for a ride and talk about it a little bit so the model is called the icon thrift master which I get a fair amount of for because there's certainly not thrifty but that was the original name for this model back when Chevrolet introduced them we also called the TR so there's a little bit more synergy with the BR in the FJ and our other production models but thrift master is the right proper name let's see what can I tell you so basically we take 1947 to 53 Chevy 3100 throath Master five-window pickups I try and find trucks that are still original paint and have really good body integrity really nothing else matters it's all about the body and then we have our way so I when I was a younger guy I restored several of these probably I don't know eight of them and the end of the day every single time I love the look of them but I'd finish them and I Drive it and I was over it like within a couple miles the reality is the original drawers they just drive like crap they were farm trucks so kind of the expectations that I have and I think my kinds of customers are going to have you know in a modern context is truck needs to go and it needs to go quickly and needs to stop just as quickly and the steering needs to be refined and the ride needs to be precise and comfortable so a couple years ago our good friends that do the majority almost all of our custom chassis is the guys up at Art Morrison Enterprise Craig Morrison who's the GM their art son he loves these trucks too so he bought one and he went ahead and engineered a modern chassis for it for his own truck he was down in LA I had the opportunity to drive the truck a fair bit and it rapidly rekindled my interest in this model because suddenly gone were all the limitations that I have experienced with the vintage model and suddenly like game on we could do all sorts of cool stuff so the first couple trucks I even used predominantly reproduction new bodies but I really wasn't happy with the quality of those bodies so I've gone back to using originals and then I'll use the licensed aftermarket sheetmetal as needed but basically what I try and do what's really a big fun part of my job at ICON if you can call it a job is that we're dealing with so many different vehicles from so many different eras that the design work is a blast even if just because one one vehicle would be okay we have to think 1930s or we have to think 1970s you know or whatever it is I'm a personal fan of Art Deco Art Nouveau streamline Moderne and that kind of era up into the late 30s even early 40s and I'm a huge fan of Raymond Loewy who's the really the guy who coined the term industrial designer and quite the rock star so when we started out on this project I decided to put myself in the sort of theoretical shoes of Raymond Loewy so like if flowy had been on the design team when it came to all the smaller details on the vehicle what would he have done you know because again you know reality of modern car manufacturer obviously way more nowadays but even back then you know they had to cut corners they had to settle for good enough here and there and like Raymond Louis autobiography never leave good enough alone so started by making a list of all the things that I saw opportunities in a lot of material choices that could be upgraded so we redesigned the door panels redesign the armrest the handles the window regulators all the - pieces steering wheel shifter tilt knobs turn signal indicator all the in - knobs for lights wiper fan vent temperature and probably my favorite element was this - because the original trucks have this like stamped stainless situation that was an ashtray and a speaker for the AM radio and that was all it had to do but I wanted to integrate the modern pioneer 8100 NEX head units with apple carplay and obviously air conditioning and a host of other things had to be integrated so I took inspiration from that original design and then I lengthened it and continued it over to the left of the gauges so now you have still this era-appropriate design but then the audio compartment closes behind this lid so keeps it nice and sanitary until you need it then you just tap and drop and then those dash panels drop down and that was a feat of engineering to put it mildly a really talented guy on our team knocked that out much smarter than me a cool thing is we use gas shocks from our C cars to control that last bit of rotation and it's just kind of cool nice and subtle so by doing that I lost all of the area where we would traditionally put knobs and switches so we designed this under - piece that simply follows the ribbed lines of the bottom of the dash anyway and then that creates a location for all the knobs and then for all those knobs we designed new knobs and those who CNC and nickel plated and brushed and then black enamel filled the gauges we did in partnership with our good buddies over at decoded digital so they already had a kit designed for this truck but then they let me design the aesthetic of it so I stuck to their basic interface but then the indicators and their hash marks and the font and the numbers and all that fun stuff and the coloration I got to play around with which was good fun they're really cool gauge setup you know they have all your traditional readouts and then there's two digital screens where you get things simple as you know odometer and trip meter all the way through to quarter mile timing zero to 60 check engine light warned you hey idiot you left your parking brake on or whatever you need and still keeps it kind of nice and vintage steering column was done with our buddies that I did it so it's a pretty straightforward GM architecture based tilt column and then what you don't see is that in the engine bay it has a breakaway an intermediary shaft for safety which is really nice the pedals are the icons sport pedals same design language that we use in the other models with minor revisions to fit this particular pattern parking brake is kind of nifty I got lucky there though that was an off-the-shelf part that worked out nice we did power windows we left him looking analog we did that using new relic components so you just bump it down you bump it up but it looks like a manual one instead of some ugly modern switch kind of sucks for this seat we redesigned that we worked with a guy as a glide Engineering and then we recut the foam change the foam properties and quality and then we see in seed and designed our own covers for the hinge point and paddles for the recline lever the seats are covered in Parabellum collections lovely bison which is american-made grown whatever you call a bison but its American and in the truck this time we did the brown same with the Alcantara headliner in the carpet to match the paint in the wood so it has a really nice kind of monochromatic velvety brown situation going on which I really like seats center console it's really just an armrest actually and then it articulates up if you need to cram in three people and then we added this little storage pocket in the front of it where you can put your phone and then you can connect the phone to get your car play function there's a USB dock under the dash and then there's another one cleverly routed through the seat the seat bottom has gas shocks so you articulate that up there's a little bit of storage in there but really that's where we had the engine computer the computer and all the various electronics bits audio amplifiers processors so it keeps the firewall nice and clean but it's easy to service you don't have to yank the seat when you actually need to get in there the wiper system on the truck we use a slightly more contemporary better functioning stainless steel head rubber blade that goes to the original style arms that then goes to a modern Delco three-stage wiper motor with delay so gone is the archaic vacuum control and all that crap the glass on the truck is tinted you'll notice it's kind of a medium grey brown tint and that's done within the laminate of the tempered glass it's not a film which is kind of cool the rear view mirrors these peat mirrors from our buddies at United Pacific that keep the aesthetic again very retro but they have cool modern functionality because when you turn on the turn signals there's little LED arrows that light up in the mirrors just it's the little things that I kick out on more little things tail lights are done by our buddies at greening automotive forests I redesigned something that they were already making just mostly the tulip mount arm so those are cnc'd and they run a really nice light pattern and kind of a prismatic pyramid structure acrylic lens with the LED circuit board behind it so they keep it old-school but have kind of a modern tweak again you'll notice the caps on the end of the rolled sides of the bed we fill those cavities with little machined bugs and more LEDs and those become the reverse lights the tailgate on the truck is branded icon we do that by acid etching the steel so it's very very subtle we keep it tone on tone but basically the acid eats into the metal and we control how deep it goes to in essence create the aesthetic of a stamped icon we also do that on the spun stainless steel nickel plated and brushed hubcaps which are readily available in the aftermarket and then we customize them with the plating brushing and acid etching icon into them the wheels are designed specifically for this truck and they're CNC down a 6061 aluminum super lightweight really strong nice and durable the tires are zr rated is super-sticky tons of fun we've changed this stance on each one of these trucks I think this is actually my favorite so far but that's part of the discussion with the client as far as what they want the ride height to be if they want the truck level or a little dumped in the nose with a bit of a rake and then since its coil over suspension the client still has the flexibility to adjust the static stance a little bit probably a factor of about an inch and 3/4 it's up to them another fun thing that we change around on each and every one of the thrift masters we've built is the bed wood in the case of this truck were running IPE which is a Brazilian hardwood it's super super durable and it's used for decks and marine applications and whatnot our buddies the master wood craftsman at able and Baker do that for us and then it's 360 finished in a marine super durable urethane 360 degrees so no open ends the ribs for the bed are all stainless and again those are nickel-plated and then you'll notice the fuel filler is flush on the bed again that's nickel plated stainless and the gas tank is there in the back because it really helps with the weight distribution when you have a pickup with this much power you need as much weight in the back as you can get and putting the tank back there along with our overbuild nine-inch strange rear end really helps that weight balance it helps the truck hook up you'll also notice in the rear of the truck there is a reverse camera which is really nice to have it's kind of hard to tell where the bed is that camera ties directly to the Pioneer head unit and the audio system on this truck is kick-ass we've got some serious pretty much audiophile grade sound going down with just three speakers so we have two front and we have the base hidden behind me and then this system was designed for us by our friends at audison so they took this into their development lab into their sound room and basically whatever sound dyno'd whatever the sound version of Dino is and map the system for the dynamics of the truck and it kicks ass it really pumps the paint on this truck is a velvety brown that we derived starting from the current production BMW m6 sedan color the carpet is the hargarten square weave from Germany and that's edge hemmed in the Bison basically the leftover trimmings from the hides we used for the seat what you can't see is that the floors the firewall the rear of the cab the roof and the doors are all extensively lined in dynamap you also may notice that the cabin floor as well as the underside of the fenders the inner portions of the bed and the underside of the rear fenders are all coated in a heat cured polyuria which again helps to control vibration sound and temperature and it's a way better corrosion barrier than the conventional spray-on oil-based coatings that the the volume companies use kind of struggled with cupholders because we've learned everyone kind of expects to have some cupholders but if you put it here in the armrest then you can't put your arm there to reach the cup you're kind of doing some gaki maneuvers so actually poach the articulating cup holders from the current production Mercedes G wagon and we put those down here in the rocker kick panel area and it's nice you just reach down to gain access they're out of the way they don't hit your leg and they work really nice let's talk about the chassis just a little bit more again it's developed by our dear friends at Art Morrison enterprises it's built specifically for this generation of truck we do a bunch of tweaks and changes some subtle some not from the one that our Morrison retails but basically it's the same structure so in the front we have independent suspension and in the rear we have a four link setup using johny joints not Himes we have a tunable sway bar as well and the frame rails or 180 wall 2 by 4 into 2 by 6 and then we take that chassis we D a surface sanded then we silica blast it then it gets epoxy primer powder coated and then we do the final black powder coat which is a milspec one coating really there's no paint anywhere on the truck other than the body parts are trying to avoid paint wherever I can and talk about the drivetrain a little bit fun fun fun so we are running a General Motors Chevy performance ear odd which is the 5.3 l m4 and then to have just a bit more fun we added the Magnuson superchargers so air to water interpol trackable power loads of torque super fun and it makes lovely noises really like the way it sounds check it out I was just something about the supercharger whine just floats my boat for the running a four l85 e as super robust and I have to worry about it popping under all that load running a 3/4 ton driveshaft again a little bit of extra robustness cover our ass given the way that I Drive and likely my client is going to be driving the Beast cool thing about that motor too is you get a two-year 50 thousand mile warranty from GM it's fully emission certified running cats running a evaporative canister and that's it no air injection or smog pump or EGR any of that crap so it's nice it's not stinky it's efficient serviceability is super simple we always give all of our clients a USB stick with the truck on their key chain that itemizes all the content and as care and feeding instructions and owner manual etc but the thing with this motor is choosing the most Universal diagnostic obd2 protocol so pretty much any service shop is going to be familiar with the system and have the diagnostic tools to aid in servicing it and really that's internationally it's a really sexy system I like it a lot you'll notice the running boards are painted body color so we did some research and decided to run this 3m film like you know vehicle wrap stuff that's a semi-gloss and really can't see it unless you hunt for it and it really helps protect those and add to their longevity the badging on the exterior the truck has all been redesigned as well being the font geek that i am i designed the side thrift master icon badges taking a inspiration from the original font on 3100 which was the original side badge in the front we tried to play with the stock one but decided to start over again did our own it's pretty simple form painted in sets CNC aluminum brushed nickel plated and then the lizard on there is pretty notable the little bugger is only about inch and 3/4 size and he's seeing seed out of a solid chunk of billet it's pretty incredible we're able to get that level of precision at that scale and really happy with that totally an efficient disaster to make but he looks super cool so it's worth the hassle I think I guess that's my whole story um haven't sold at many of these trucks I kind of went overboard on them I think just kind of my way in designing them so the reality is the cost is pretty extreme but I've got about a year-and-a-half backorder on them so fortunately there's been enough people interested enough people that can see the value thankfully and I wish I could afford one I'd like to keep this one in fact there's so much fun so that's pretty much it I know it's kind of a long video but I really appreciate you guys taking the time I wanted to really kind of go through the steps of it in more detail so as always thank you so much for following the brand please spread the word I don't do any promotion for our social media or YouTube channel but the more the merrier so any car geek friends please share with them questions eight one eight two eight oh three three three three is the phone number the website is icon 4x4 dot-com Instagram is icon 4x4 twitter is icon design Facebook is Jonathan ward and there you go that's it enough shameless self-promotion get on with your day you

Channel: Jonathan Ward

Views: 40,293

Rating: 4.9441342 out of 5

Keywords: icon, icon4x4, icon tr, thriftmaster, icon thriftmaster, jonathan ward, chevy, chevrolet, classic chevy truck, classic truck, hot rod truck, erod, chevy performance

Id: OY6jKXp76bk

Length: 22min 53sec (1373 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 19 2016