Brown, who has tested his own limits of endurance after a 2003
Christmas Day snowmobile accident left him with massive spinal
injuries and a New Year's resolution to learn how to walk again,
said that his own personal ideas of what a vehicle's purpose
is sometimes puts him at odds with others in the customizing
community.
"When you see some guys, their cars never see the light
of day," the Brandon resident said of his creative mentality.
"I could never have something like that. I could build
it, but I could never own it."
Pouring time, energy, and cash into a custom-vehicle project
can be nerve-wracking at the best of times, Brown explained,
but doing so knowing the end product will be a workhorse requires
that much more extra attention.
"I haul everything from sheep shit to gravel,"
he gave as an example of how far he'll go in working his truck.
"But the biggest thing is the winter and other people.
Door dings and stuff like that, you just have to take extra
care and use your head."
While he admitted the truck is no "trailer-queen,"
Brown also said the razzing he gets from other truck aficionados
who have said the truck isn't meant for the trails isn't entirely
deserved.
"I'm not worried about taking it off road, but it's
the clean up. I was in World of Wheels this past spring, and
it was probably about two weeks of prep work to get it ready
as a daily driver," he said "You go mudding for
a day, it'll literally take you a month to get all that mud
out of there."
While Brown's penchant for practicality has been a primary
focus of his designing, he said the greatest satisfaction
comes from his ability to hand craft the various modifications
he's made to the truck.
"The biggest challenge is that fine line between it
being just nice, and having just way too much and being gaudy,"
he said of his apprehensions to bolt-on accessories. "I'll
build something before I buy it, just so it's a one off, just
so it's something somebody else doesn't have. Even if I do
buy it, I'll make little modifications to make it different."
Brown went on to explain he originally had no intention to
take the route he has with the truck, but the lure of bigger
and better got the best of him.
"I actually swore to myself that I wasn't going to do
this, but I should've known. This truck was pretty much bare
stock when I bought it, and I said I was going to keep it
pretty tame but that didn't last long," he offered. "It's
almost an addiction, it's being able to say 'you built this,
you did this.'"
While the plans for the future are to make the truck "bigger
but tamer," Brown said other people's reactions haven't
been the overwhelming factor in his efforts. Well, almost.
"This thing still turns heads like crazy, but that's
not why I built it…well, not 100 per cent anyway."
|
