"All these years I've been taking old stuff and making it look new ... and now I've taken a nice truck and made it look old," is how Tim Brogan describes his '56 Chevy. The 45-year-old from Blue Springs, Missouri, has been building custom rods and trucks since he was 16 and doing what he loves professionally for the last 12 years. This past December he joined forces with Jason at Rock's Rod & Custom in Raytown, Missouri, where the two have been cranking out some interesting projects.
Tim recently sold a '32 Ford roadster, which was a nice finished hot rod, and decided he wanted to build a "low-buck" classic truck, but with a chassis that could cruise the fairgrounds slammed with 20-inch wheels. See, Tim's son Matt is into mini-trucks, and he figured if he built something like this, it'd bridge that generation gap between the two as well as bring the old and new trucks together.
Instead of finding a clapped out old truck to start with like he intended, Tim found a '56 Chevy that was in the middle of an amateur resto that had already been painted; new glass and rubber were installed along with being set up for a small-block and automatic; and it had a Camaro rearend under it.
Tim took it to the shop and blew it apart and built a new front clip out of 2x4 tubing that was kicked up and narrowed 4 inches each direction. He added a Heidts universal front crossmember and Total Cost Involved tubular A-arms, disc brakes, dropped spindles, and a set of Firestone airbags to set the frontend on the asphalt.
Out back he step-notched the frame, narrowed a 9-inch rearend, built his own three-link wishbone suspension system, of course included another pair of 'bags so the 20-inch American Racing Torq-Thrust IIs would tuck the fenderwells.
The '93 Chevy 350 was rebuilt by Jason at the shop and runs vintage Chevy valve covers using adapters--it provides plenty of worry-free cruising. The paint wasn't quite up to par as far as Tim was concerned, so he decided to patina it for the barn-fresh look, followed by swapping out the cherry chrome grille and bumper for old painted ones and--bingo--the truck was done!
Check out detailed pictures of Tim's handwork on the chassis at www.rocksrodandcustom.com, and Tim, keep those rocks off the running boards!