I originally wrote this build thread on the HAMB forum but have since found this place and I figure I'll be asking plenty of questions of you guys, so I'll duplicate my thread here.
I'd never even heard the term COE until about 4 or 5 years ago. To be fair, pretty much ALL of our medium to large trucks here in the UK are cabovers.
Then I saw
this article
about this truck:
and after that I was smitten.
I started collecting pictures of COE trucks from the web and had a pipe-dream of one day owning one.
My girlfriend and I have a small part-time catering business that we're looking to expand, mainly selling food at music festivals over the summer in the UK. It can easily take us a day to get our kitchen/marquee set up and ready, so when this converted fire truck rocked up next to us one year
and was selling food within 45 minutes, I was envious enough to start looking into food trucks.
Fast forward a couple of years to Oct '11 and my girlfriend and I are working in Florida. I start looking at my wish list of american cars and searching for something I can buy over here and ship home to the UK. I started looking at cabovers again and a plan was hatched to look for something we could convert into a food truck.
Well there wasn't much that was suitable in stock form, I was already leaning towards a 47-54 GMC/Chevy. I was also considering importing an Airstream trailer and converting that into a kitchen. Hang on - what would the bastard offspring of a COE and airstream look like..?
That thought kept me awake all night as I scoured the internets to see if someone had done anything similar. In about 6 hours I only found these two:
and
I thought both looked awesome and so when my gf eventually woke up I started the pitch. Luckily, it took all of 30 seconds for her to get on board (she's a keeper!). She's since confessed that she thought it'd never get off the ground - ha! that'll teach her...
So I then started looking for a builder who could make this project a reality. I had a couple of places in mind whose work I really admired (my background is in aircooled VWs), so I emailed one of them - Wayne at the Intergalactic Custom Shop in the UK.
I'd been a fan of Wayne's work for years after seeing his V8 bug - The Phunky Phantom:
And later, his insane 1700bhp 7 sec 1/4 mile splitscreen dragster, Mental Breakdown:
I was stoked when Wayne emailed back to say he'd love to build it!
Originally I'd thought about using a Isuzu NPR chassis and engine, but Wayne had a mate who just happened to be selling Wayne's old '82 Chevy G30 based RV. It used to be Wayne's tow vehicle when he went drag racing, so he was confident the 350 chevy v8 and turbo 400 box would be ample for our needs. Plus it was already converted to run on LPG (pretty much essential given UK 'gas' prices).
So the search was on for a cab. After months of looking, emailing potential leads and more looking, I eventually found this 1950 GMC which seemed to fit the trifecta of condition, price and location:
and contacted the seller Steve at desertclassics.com, who was really helpful in separating the cab from the chassis and sorting out transport to the port in LA.
Almost 18 months to the day after that sleepless night, the cab arrived at Intergalactic:
(this photo always reminds me of the bit in King Kong, where our captured hero gets put aboard the boat bound for New York)
If you got this far, thanks for reading. Comments and feedback always welcome!
Take it easy
Mack