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Old-school American pickups are beloved for their curvaceous, bulbous designs, and they remain stars on film and TV to this day. One Thai shop is creating its own tribute to golden-era trucks by building a Ford F-100 lookalike on top of a modern Ford Ranger.
The build is the work of Icon Cars, a shop based in Chonburi, Thailand. The shop’s bread and butter is giving makeovers to Thai market mid-sized pickups, modifying them to resemble their full-sized brethren from the U.S. The company has a good eye for recreating the aesthetics of the Ford F-150 and Toyota Tundra, but now it’s turning its eye to designs from the 1950s.
The company’s efforts are still in the early stages, but it’s clear they’ve understood the brief. The modern Ranger wears foam and cardboard that ably reimagines the bulbous front and rear fenders of the 1950s-era Ford F-100. The hood has been shaped to match, while the front fascia has been reimagined with suitably vintage round headlights and an appropriate grille design.
Challenges still remain, however. The biggest of which is the Ranger’s crew cab body style, with a whole additional row of seats in the back. The F-100 never featured such a layout, and the extra doors throw off the proportions, somewhat.
The heavily-raked windshield is also a big change compared to the vintage design, which featured wraparound glass that sat at a more vertical angle. The complex divots and kinks in the doors don’t look very fitting either. The latter could readily be smoothed out to match the flat-style doors of the vintage truck, but the windshield poses an altogether more difficult challenge.
Early renders posted to Facebook give us an idea of how the finished product may look, nonetheless. In some ways, the raked windshield gives it a retro-modern look reminiscent of the Chevrolet SSR.
Overall, though, it’s great to see vintage American truck culture taking root overseas. It’s even more exciting to see it reinterpreted on a more modern truck by a shop on the other side of the world. It’s clear the project still has a long way to go. We can’t wait to see how the crew finishes the build and ties the overall aesthetic together.
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