Coyote Swapped 1955 F100 | A Drive Along Through the Arizona Mountains

Hey, so we're at a different location. We are not in Gilbert, Arizona this time, so thankfully we don't have to say that again. Anyway, so I'm Jason with Fat Fender Garage, and we are in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona, and if you look at the beautiful terrain, it's just absolutely stunning up here. And we've got a 1955 Ford F100 Gen 3 Coyote Swap 5-speed manual Tremec, and so we're having a good time just kind of cruising up through the mountains. We're just going to run it through its paces, put the last 150 miles on it before we ship this thing out in the next couple days. We want to make sure that it can handle all these little weird terrains and windy roads. We've got a full chassis that we sell. So, this is engineered and designed for Ford chassis, specifically, this platform just handles well. As I'm just carving through these mountains, like everything is just super tight. I feel solid on the road, and aside from the fact that I'm in a bench seat and kind of sliding around a little bit, this thing handles like a dream, and so I just feel really connected with the road. It's super, super tight on the steering wheel, and it just handles like a dream. It's soft. We've got Rytek coilovers on this chassis, and they're set up where the rebound is just nice and soft and gives you a good, comfortable feel. We've got pretty much all brand new, everything, everywhere, wiring. We painted the engine compartment. We've got new dash. We've got a new wood bed in it. Everything is new, minus the sheet metal. The sheet metal is probably like a 15, 20-year-old paint job, but it's in decent enough shape that the guy's like, hey, I want to drive this thing a lot and have a good time in it. Lean against it. Not feel terrible about scratching it, and so that is the purpose of this build. It's meant to be driven and driven hard, which actually allows us to kind of go out and have a good time with it because we can drive it hard and not feel like we're worried about putting a scratch in it. We'll give you a little preview under the hood so you can just kind of check it out real quick. So we're cruising around. We've got the Gen 3. We've cut the cover off it, as you can see, and it's basically ready to go. We're driving it. This has a manual brake set up on it, so we're running the Wilwood master cylinder, reverse mount master cylinders with the reservoirs outside, and we've got their Wilwood pedals underneath here on the 53, 56 as we do that. If you're going to have some good quality brakes, then anything about Fords, that's about as good as it gets right there. But yeah, so everything about this truck is 1955. You can see the grill. In 1955, you've got this little V-shape right there, and some of them will actually have another piece of trim that goes in there and the little V8 emblem, extra details. Nice truck. It's fun to drive. We're going to have a good time with it, and hopefully you guys can follow along and watch and see what it's like to cruise around in a 1955 F-100. Beautiful terrain up here in the Superstition Mountains. This is actually one of my more favorite places to go. Summer, Arizona, lake, those things are meant to go together. So just to kind of describe my feelings on this chassis that we've got under here for this F-100. It's one we've sold that is for 1953 to 1956, and it's really been through a lot of revisions even before we came out with the first one, moving things around, adjusting, talking about different ride heights and coilovers and what's important. We didn't really want to race to the bottom with the cheapest price come by. That wasn't really the purpose of it. There's plenty of other companies out there that are fixated on price and trying to be the most affordable and best option, and we're just not interested in competing against that kind of vendors and stuff. We want to produce a good product. Something that we feel that is going to perform, handle, and last, and the function, the assembly of just the whole rest of the truck, not just the chassis is important to us. Since we build trucks, we're concerned about all kinds of other aspects of a chassis rather than just here's your chassis and you figure out the rest. We're concerned about the rest and how all that comes together. Up here on a single lane bridge here. Pretty cool. Here at the lake. It's awesome. I love it. Anyway, so we're going to check this place out. We've put about 45 miles coming out here. I was just kind of carving up these curb roads earlier and it really has done well, but we decided to stop and put the cameras on and kind of show some of the beautiful Arizona terrain that we have. This truck's headed to Alabama. So far, the truck's handled very well mechanically. There's a few things that I think we may do electrically, I've noticed, but those are super minor things we'll have done in a couple hours today when we get back. We've got about 540 miles on this thing right now and we'll have 600 miles before we ship it and I think that's, based on how it's running right now, I think we're going to be in pretty good shape. One thing I've noticed is this truck actually has a little bit taller sidewall on it than typically. We have 18 inch wheels on this thing and so we've probably got an extra three quarter inch sidewall because of that. And so, man, this thing is like smooth. Just on the road, it's just super smooth. It just really makes a huge difference. The lower the profile, you definitely feel the road a lot more, a little bit harder surface. This definitely feels awesome and 18 inch, I think, is just big enough that you can get by with it. It looks really good on this truck, especially for kind of more of a vintage hot rod, not too modern. Still keeping kind of an old classic, old school, resto mod style, although it's a heck of a resto mod with a full chassis, wheel width, disc brakes, all four corners. It's really just a nice setup, but we still got this old quilt on the seat. We actually got a nice upholstered seat underneath it, but he promised his wife he'd keep the blanket because that was one of the things she liked when they initially bought this truck. So, it'll hopefully last some miles for him, but probably eventually wear out over a few years and he'll have a seat underneath it. It hopefully is in good shape and the blanket is old enough that it hasn't stained the vinyl, so time will tell. For creature comfort in this, we've kept it real simple. We've got classic instrument gauges, which do the trick, more of a vintage look. There's no digital to it at all, so you have just that analog look, but it goes up to 140 miles an hour. And then you have resto mod AC system, and so, again, very simple with just some black three knobs on there to let you do what you want to do. We're going to pull over here and take another little break and we'll keep going. On the inside of this truck, we actually repainted the dash. We added a little AC valance here on the bottom that would allow us to install the controls and the vents in that rather than cutting up the dash and then disrupting the integrity and the look of a vintage classic pickup truck. We didn't really want to modernize this thing. If you'll note that the gear shifter is just kind of a stock gear shifter. We're using a 16-inch low car S-shaped style shifter for the Tremec, and it fits perfect on a bench seat, and it kind of retains that 1955 look. We've got the ignition on the left-hand side, the ignition switch on the left-hand side. If you recall in 1955, you actually had two. You had a power button, and then you had a little push button right here on the left that would actually, you'd start it with, and so they were 6-volt back then because in 1956 was the first year that the trucks went to 12-volt. We did get rid of some extra fluff, so we got rid of the choke cable and the throttle cable, those things that would have been extra, and we don't need it for a Coyote. We have welded those up before we painted the dash to kind of retain a little bit more of a basic look. This truck has sun visors in it, stock, but we've added a little clip that allows us to keep these up and pinned in a location. One of the things that kind of sucks is when you take off in a Coyote and you've got all that torque and thrust, and then all of a sudden your sun visor hits you in the head, especially if you're a tall guy. I'm kind of short, so I don't have to worry about that too much, but at the end of the day, it's still kind of annoying even if you are kind of short. The customer, like I said earlier, lives in Alabama. His name's Marvin, pretty, very nice guy. He's flown out once. He got really close to work, so he took a little trip down to Arizona when he was in Salt Lake and was able to stop by the shop as we were just starting to put the chassis together. So that's been a couple months ago, and we are basically done with the truck now. This thing's just a dream to drive, just handles. Like I said, if it wasn't for the bench seat and me sliding around, this thing would just corner like crazy. It just really hugs the road well. It's got a good ride height, not too low. We can actually go, I think it's a little bit lower than this, about another inch is kind of our standard. We kind of custom set this one up for him, so it's just a little bit different than traditional. It might be like another half to an inch lower, but it's got a good ride height. He was concerned about being too low, and I don't blame him. In Alabama, who knows what those roads are like. We're going to head back, and I hope you've had a good time watching this video, and enjoy the rest of the footage as we cruise back to the shop.