I was rolling down the highway one afternoon, heading down to the U-Pull to shoot another roll of virtual film for the Junkyard Outtake. There was road construction underway and big rigs were everywhere, but this one caught my attention.
It’s an early ’90s Chevy Kodiak chassis and cab–and cab, and more cab! I’d never seen one like this before.
Look at that thing! It’s as if someone grafted two regular cabs together.
Wild guess #1 (the long answer): Consider that the new-for-’88 bodystyle Chevy trucks debuted with a regular cab and an extended cab; Kodiaks and TopKicks didn’t make the switch until ’90, while crew cabs and Suburbans stuck with the ’73-’87 style bodies until 1992. Therefore, if this conversion was done during model year 1990 or 1991, no passenger doors would have been available for this bodystyle. Since the needed doors weren’t being produced yet–and necessity being the mother of invention–someone resorted to making this hodgepodge.
Wild guess #2 (the short answer): Someone had an extra regular cab lying around–you can guess the rest.
Looks like they didn’t quite get the lines right.
This piece is clearly a one-off.
Sliding glass… was the back half derived from a pickup cab? HD door handles and grab handles… or was it a heavy-duty cab from the start? (Or even the rearmost section of the original cab?)
This probably wasn’t a pickup cab. There’d have been a transmission hump, otherwise; this floor is flat. (Unless they were really crazy, and made a whole new floor for their conjoined creation!)
From here you can also see the inside of that custom splice panel, complete with trim such as that used in GM vans of the day. Matching factory bench seats (both fronts) and door panels (same story) along with carpet cut to size… this smells like a rig which was converted when new.
Adding to the mystery surrounding this rig, I noticed its tabs were two years out of date, and it hadn’t been DOTed since two years before that. Oops?
All in all, it’s a rather unique rig. How do you suppose it came to be?
Well, you could have ASKED somebody with the company, but then you wouldn’t have as much fun writing the post, would you?
Or perhaps nobody was around.
The truck was left at a jobsite over the weekend.
this is made by a conversion company i happen to own one exactly the same they did make a bunch of these
Not only does the trim match but it’s all brown, which is both rarer than gray and was more common earlier than later in the run (in a portent of things to come, red and blue interiors that had been offered on mediums in the ’70s/80s were restricted to 1500-3500 models from the start of the GMT400 era).
This color of brown was an exclusive medium duty truck interior color. It was called Cognac. I think somebody hit the Hennessy bottle of few to many times when they dreamed up this truck.
Now that you point it out, it does look a bit darker and more orangey than the light-duty beige interior.
WAG. More conspiracy #1 than #2. I sold many a piece of sheet metal in my days as a GM parts dude. Looks like some one raided the parts bin(expensive) or used a fairly used or wrecked cab(cheap) to build this abortion. If one was to look at the floor pan of this vintage of truck the trans tunnel really isn’t that pronounced. Even less so on the MD Kodikicks. But I do think the coach builder(?) used a flat piece of steel to build the rear half. My last stint in the Gunshine state of FL I sold parts to one shop that built a lot of the 6 pack versions of these. 3 doors on each side. Hmmm. Now that I think about it those were the funeral limo versions of the medium truck world.
Now that’s legroom. Maybe this was built by some specialty company that specializes in low volume-unique job trucks? Dodge crew cabs in the 60’s used use the front doors as rears too.
I would have flipped the back cab around and gone with suicide doors.
…then left the windshield as the rear window. A crew cab fastback!
Not much of a view for the guys in the back seat looking at the headboard though. Also lost time due to motion sickness might be an issue. 😉
And always ridden in the back, and paid the driver a little extra to come around and open the door for you whenever you go anywhere…
Looks like a cut n shut with another front section dropped in Ive seen similar done to create twin cab TJ Bedfords and the like.
Nice catch.
Crew cabs are so rare in this segment that you often see them just use the front doors all around. FedEx Express has some Freightliner FLD crew cabs they used for driver training that appear just as odd.
Its also rare to see one of these set up with what appears to be a full 34 to 40k lbs rear tandem set and a flatbed/light dump body. This thing is really setup to be a good jack of all trades for a medium to large contractor.
In this day of everyone driving a new Hyundai or Honda it’s nice to see something with a little character. Maybe this is really an undercover FIMA vehicle equipped to deal with things not of this Earth. Did you guys see the first X-Files movie? Non-Potable water…Most Americans have no idea what that means.
The 1990s Cabover Isuzu trucks have crew cabs that look a bit like this as do other big truck manufacturers so this is probably a factory conversion. Unlike the mid-sized sedan market the buying demographics for these rigs does not mind or puts up with oddities like this. I like the meaty door handles these Topkicks, Kodiacks, and heavy duty Sierras and Silverados have which are easy to open with gloves. The next generation of Topkick and Kodiak used Chevy Express doors and I think that means there was no longer a crew cab.
You just blew my mind, I had no idea crew cab Silverados and Sierras were built from 1973-1992, I thought they switched over to the new body style in 1988. That must make those trucks as rare as 1997-1998 F-250s.