We’re on location in the Pitbull rocker booth with Kenny Hawk and Ken what do you know about building special vehicles here at SEMA? This is our vision of a 1946 Dodge Power Wagon Wrecker. The Wrecker is what we call it. So it’s a little bit hot rod, it’s a little bit off road, it’s a little bit rat rod, a little bit over the top. Yeah So I mean you come up with some really cool ideas like the gear rings around the outside of the headlights and where do you get that inspiration from? Hey man we just like just inspiration from the rat rod scene and just kind of like let it naturally create itself as we go through the build process.
So what can you tell us about the front end, you’ve obviously used a WARN winch up here? Yeap, so we we produce a whole line of products our Hawk off-road line of products for the Jeep JK and JL. So what you have here is our new JL bumper that has been modified it’s been actually shortened and slightly modified to fit and accommodate the front of our Wrecker. So we did that just to kind of pay tribute to some of our other products the same way with the rear bumper, it’s actually a JL rear bumper that’s been shortened as well. 16 inch Bilstein coil overs the whole way around HID projector headlights in the front. Lots of magic happening in here that’s what this is this is air coming out and going in and squeezing and things happening to produce horsepower.
Okay so this functional? Yeah so what you have here is a compound turbo setup two turbonetics turbos one feeding the other and they as it spools up kicks in to the next one and gives you crazy horsepower and that’s all I’m gonna say about that. So you haven’t put it on the dyno or have you? No we have not put on the dyno because basically we just got it running right before it was supposed to be loaded up, drove it around the block, put on the trailer and now it’s here. Paint is barely dry. So we know it starts, we know it stops. That’s it that’s all we know. Hey let’s keep moving down the truck. All right sounds good So you built this for Pitbull Tires is that right? We did. So the premise of our new show, that’s gonna be on Amazon Prime, oh yeah and it goes out on social media is that we build these kind of vehicles for companies.
It’s a promotional piece. So Pitbull tire has been a great sponsor they approached us and said hey build us something sick, that we can take around to events and showcase what we do. So what you have here this door, it was a disaster, so what we did is we grind it down to bare metal, we use a chemical spray, it’s actually a microscopic layer of copper on there and then clear coated with a satin clear and then we did its hand lettering on it. Aged it so it gives you that old patina finish.
Oh yeah yep yeah and that’s what we kind of played with all different types of patinas all over the outside of the vehicle to give it that pieced together, hey look what we built out of the junkyard, kind of thing and in the back you weren’t satisfied with just a four-wheel drive? Right, we wanted to see a 6×6 so, BDS sent us two suspension systems for a JK. Right. Right because our axles are already set up for JK suspension. oh. So this is a Ford 9 inch passed through axle that was already set up with a right axle bracketry for a JK and we went ahead and modified their four link suspension in the back our Sterling ten-and-a-half in the very rear has the same JK bracketry on it.
373 ring and pinions from revolution gear, OX lockers front rear, JE Reel drive shafts, all linked together to create a really bulletproof drivetrain and this is a modified JL bumper as in the front? That is, squeezed it down to fit the proportions of our build yeah and where did this come from, this looks like you designed it yourself You know when I was a kid I remember drawing wreckers right and tow trucks cuz it was it was a lot of fun and I remember that so when we built this I just sketched something out real quick and handed off like this is what we’re building to my to my artist and he did the final rendering and I’m like you know what I don’t know if this is even what a Wrecker is supposed to look like. This is what I drew as a kid and it turns out that regular Wreckers never looked like that. I found this at the local scrapyard laying in a pile of stuff, dug that out, repurposed it.
It’s got a big WARN 12,000 pound winch on the back and we’re gonna put it to use and have you tested it, is this a functional Wrecker? It definitely does wreck things, yes. I will show you one other cool thing we’re gonna come around here all right so what Wrecker is complete without a set of tools? Right. So Gearwrench tools, always been a good sponsor of ours, a great company to work with they produce awesome tools. So they sent us out one of their toolboxes, a tall toolbox we cut it in half, flip them around and welded them back to back and then they sent us out these really awesome tool set. So when they go out the idea is that this is a recovery vehicle, somebody breaks down, we’ve got all the tools to get him back on the trail and probably not the GearWrench handle? It’s not the original GearWrench handle, it was a good handle, but it wasn’t a great handle for this truck so these were laying in the back boneyard, I snagged him up, welded him up and back in business.
Nice, that’s awesome. Kenny, this is the kind of tire that every guy that goes out in the muck wants to own, what a great choice but. Yeah. What was your reasoning behind it? Well you know we’ve run rocker tires on almost all of our builds. I love them. They’re on our tow rig that hauled this thing out here. You know so they wear great, they’re great off-road. This is a 44 inch Pitbull rocker. We run them like 10 to 15 pounds of pressure out on the trail tons of contact patch I mean it’s just a great all-around tire.
They’re mounted on these awesome race line beadlock wheels. They send them out raw steel. We scotch-brite them and did the same for patina finish as the rest of the vehicle. Mounting them up with these VB concepts bike lug nuts. It’s just a winning combination you know these we run race lines and these and these Pitbulls on a lot of builds and they hold up great.