Skipping the Chrome for Polished Stainless Steel
September 25th, 2009
The B150 new - complete with Metallic Walnut Brown paint and huge white bumpers!
If you take a walk through any custom car show, you’ll find lots and lots of chrome. It’s the most striking way for a customizer to say, “Hey, look how much work I’ve done on my car!” A much more difficult approach is to fabricate your grill and bumpers entirely out of stainless steel, and then polish them to mirrored perfection. If this sounds like a lot of work, even for a customizer, it is. But when you take a new van, work on it for over twenty years, and still have plenty of customizing planned, then you have long crossed over the border of customizing and are deep into the land of obsession.
Doug King bought his Dodge B150 van in 1986. It’s hard to believe he would want to part with that beautiful Metallic Walnut Brown paint and those huge white bumpers, but Doug had a higher vision. How much higher? Custom fiberglass gull wing doors on the rear and passenger side for starters. And then there is the paint, which garnered the Best Paint award at this year’s National Truck-In. Dodge Viper Red, covered in flames, which is even more stunning than the pictures suggest. The custom mural on the rear gull wing is an homage to several Mountain album covers from the ’70s, airbrushed by a guy Doug only knows as “Hippie.” Mechanically, nearly everything under the hood is new, including all the wiring. Doug removed the slant 6 and 4 on the floor transmission, replaced it with a Mopar Magnum engine and a Gear Vendors Under/Overdrive transmission.
The custom version in 2009, and still improving!
But as great as all these customizations are, it’s not the gull wing doors, Dodge Viper Red paint, custom mural on the rear door, or drivetrain upgrades that impress. Quite simply, it’s the stainless; especially in the hands of a guy like Doug. “Working with metal is my passion. That’s what I do. That’s my first love, it’s my hobby, it’s my profession, and it’s what I do at home for enjoyment, ” he says. Doug has worked at ESMW [the custom fabrication company that powers Cut2SizeMetals.com] for almost 20 years, and has spent a great deal of that time welding stainless steel.
Stainless steel bumper
He has a reputation for quality and attention to detail, so it was no surprise to his coworkers that he spent 60 hours on just the polishing of the grill. The front and rear tubular stainless steel bumpers were also a significant investment of time. Doug miter-cut the tubes, welded on caps, and polished them with such care that, unless you see the before pictures, you’d swear they had been made as one piece.
Stainless steel bumper and grill
Working at ESMW also gave Doug another opportunity. The bright aluminum flames on the dashboard were cut from tread plate on ESMW’s waterjet. “I really put the technology of ESMW to work on this project,” Doug says. And while the flame cutouts are undeniably unique, there is little doubt that Doug’s craftsmanship is what really makes this old Dodge van a work of art.
Aluminum tread plate flames cut on waterjet
Mural from Mountain Album Covers
More aluminum tread plate flames cut on waterjet
