Words: Tommy Parry

This Chevy started in Bryson’s hands as an heirloom. Once his Grandpa’s work truck, he inherited this car when he was 19 and his Grandpa had just passed away. As you might imagine, the car had a lot of old-fashioned styling. At the time, it had sheepskin seat covers, Lincoln chrome hub caps over steelies, a hole in the rockers and cab corners big enough you could stick your hand through them.

As a sentimental object, Bryson felt the need to give this truck a fitting workover. After pulling all the rust from the truck’s hide, he patched and painted it. Quite ambitious for a 19-year-old, but once it was pretty, polished, and running nicely, Bryson naturally got a hankering for a little more horsepower.

He scrimped every cent from his engineering internship and put together a 350 for many happy, smoky memories. Unfortunately, an electrical issue with the motor dogged his progress and he had to set his dreams with the truck aside until a few years ago, when he was 29.

These days, he has a few more dollars in his pocket, and he’s got a better understanding of how a real vehicle should perform. The plan for the truck is a custom chassis with fully adjustable suspension, a twin-turbo aluminum small block, an 8-speed auto and all the trick bits the cool kids have now. The truck build is very much focused around weight optimization and handling, and with his understanding of engineering and enough ambition for several projects, he began building his own chassis.

Seeing as the aftermarket suspension bits didn’t give him the confidence and reassuring roadholding he’d been after, he decided to design the suspension himself. “At this point a year ago, I had never run a welder other than to tack weld body panels in,” he explained. “I had to learn everything about fabrication myself by researching and practicing. I sat in my garage and learned how to weld pieces of scrap together. In that time, I built or purchased the equipment needed in order to build my vision.”

After building his own CNC plasma cutter, he studied roll center, chamber gain, Ackerman angle, KPI, bumpsteer and all of the fun bits of suspension design. “I then built my own MatLab and Excel models to understand exactly what I wanted,” he said. “To maintain positional tolerance, I ended up going with Boling Brothers mandrel bent frame rails bent to my specs, but the rest of the front suspension is totally custom.”

For the motor, he went with a fifth gen aluminum block 5.3 from 2014 and up GM trucks. With handling being the focus, an all-aluminum motor was a requirement. “I went with the Gen V motor due to its block casting’s beefiness and the new high rectangular port cylinder heads. I’ve read up a lot on the engineer’s SAE papers and the cylinder heads on these engines are very well thought-out. They should be a great platform. I plan on pushing the engine back 7” from its factory location and converting it to a dry-sump setup. The sump will allow me to drop the engine 3” and guarantee proper oiling when cornering hard.”

There’s still a lot ahead for Bryson, and the challenges aren’t getting any simpler. “I plan on learning and using composites and carbon fiber a fair bit on this build. The cab will be put on a rotisserie and redone along with all of the paint and interior work,” he noted.

Once complete, the truck will be driven! He plans on keeping it street legal… ish. The truck is meant to be a hardcore street truck with the ability to be used on track days. “One of my goals drag racing the truck is to go deep 9s with a suspension adjustment as well as a drag racing wheel and tire package.”

If you’d like to follow Bryson’s progress, you can see his thread here and his YouTube videos here.