Mini-trucks are hot rods for people who know how to set up emails on their phone
Mini-trucks cop a lot of grief online for much the same reason that people hack on Limp Bizkit: fashion. There will be some people howling at their computer or phone screens right now at that statement but I'd say you people need to read Jazzy Green's story first [CLICK HERE].
I agree there are plenty of crappy mini-trucks around, there are just as many bodgy cars of other styles too.
Being one of the last styles of vehicle to use a body-on-frame construction, with simple chassis designs and construction techniques makes mid-size utes (as opposed to full-size jiggers like F-series Fords, Chevy Silverados, or Dodge Rams) the perfect vehicle for novice fabricators to get a start on.
The simple construction means it's easy to swap a bunch of cool engines into these vehicles, while the range of body styles, chassis lengths, and drivetrains (4x4 versus 2WD for the main) means there are plenty of ways to use factory hardware to build a highly individual ride before you get to fabricating one-off parts.
It was almost a right of passage for young tradies near me to buy their first four-cylinder ute to get to worksites and immediately wind the torsion beam front-ends right down. Pair that to some heavy lowering blocks in the back (with a flipped leaf pack for those truly commited to the Low Life) meant you instantly took a daggy grandpa ute and made it a tar-scraping sled for beer money, and you did it in a morning.
I've got a lot of mates who built mini-trucks but I have to give a shoutout to OGs like Alex Anderson (RIP "Alex Who") as they seemed to knock out cool rides like the ute below (now owned by Mike Finnegan) and they were never scared of driving them huge distances.
Look at the chassis below and you can see how easy it is to chop it up and rebuild it however you want. Swap those leaf springs out for a custom four-link - the brackets are available and cheap to buy online. If you know someone with a welder you could have it done in a day or two, depending on the style of rear-end you're going for.
With the cheap purchase price of utes and body parts like tubs, many mini-trucks were the entry point for budding fabricators who weren't scared to chop up their rides to build something cool. They weren't scared of wasting money because it wasn't a deal-breaker to find another chassis and swap that in if something truly catastrophic happened.
Today some of the top custom car builders in Australia are guys and girls who came through mini-trucking ranks, and now they're building seven-figure show-winning and pro touring machines out of epic classic muscle cars.
The fact four blokes could take a running, driving ute and have it down to a rolling chassis in a fairly casual morning (despite none of us being highly experienced on this particular model of ute) shows just how simple they are to work on. If you're looking to get into a project car you can do a heck of a lot worse than a late 70s or early 80s Toyota Hilux.
Forget the dribblers on the Internet who talk rubbish about mini-trucks. Most of those booger-eating bin-dwellers forget that it's really easy to bleat on the Internet, but much harder to go out and put your money and time into a project car that you can, later on once all the elbow grease has been burned, will drive you out for delicious kebabs.
