Words: John Gunnell
Brian Klassen calls his creation a “Toter-Home.” The combined car hauler and motorhome drew big stares and big crowds at the 2018 Pontiac-Oakland Club International (POCI, at www.poci.org) convention and, a few weeks later, at the Iola Car Show (www.IolaOldCarShow.com).
“The divider wall, which is also the bed, is on wheels,” said Klassen, a native of Morris, Manitoba. “So, it moves all the way back when there’s no car being hauled inside, and we have a larger motor home with a third living area.” The divider wall can also be rolled forward to make room for Brian’s 1967 Beaumont SD396 hardtop. That’s a Chevelle-based Canadian Pontiac.
Klassen’s Toter-home is a heavily modified Cummins-powered 1959 GMC that was once a gravel truck. On the outside of the body is a ‘58 Pontiac motif. Other features of the vehicle include a circus-like yellow and orange paint scheme. “The colors are actually White Rose colors,” Klassen explained. “White Rose was a gasoline company that was mostly seen in Eastern Canada in the 1960s. We put White Rose logos above the cab.”
Brian said that he has belonged to POCI for about three years, because he noticed on the club’s site that both his Beaumont and his GMC were covered by the club. “The Toter-Home was just a dream I had,” said Klassen. “A dream or a nightmare, depending on how you look at it.”
Klassen said he is in the custom liquid manure business. “We have long winters, so basically we work very intensely for five months each year and we’re off for seven months,” he told us. “My employee and I built the Toter-Home in two-and-a-half winters, working at it full-time in the seven months. We had a lot of time and we had the big shop. The back end was completely built in our shop.”
Klassen and his worker put a 5.9-liter Cummins diesel engine in the vehicle and backed it up with an AT545 Allison automatic transmission from a school bus. The differential is from an FL60 Freightliner, one of the lightest trucks in the FL series, with an empty weight of about 25,500 lbs.
“I used the FL60 differential because I wanted small tires,” Klassen explained. “The crew trucks had small tires and tall gears, so I put that little FL60 differential into it. Then, I used International Highway Tractor Air Ride in the back. The front also has air assist. I took some of the springs out of the front suspension to drop the stance. Then I air-bag it up when I’m driving. We also dropped the cab four inches on the frame. We dropped the frame mounts four inches to accomplish this.” Getting it lower to the ground eases loading of cars.
Klassen said this was the Toter-Home’s first season of going to car shows. “We’ve already put 13,000 miles on it,” he pointed out. “It gets a lot of attention wherever we go – especially in Texas. I went to a show down there and talked to people steady from 9 o’clock in the morning until 2 in the afternoon. When I say steady, I mean I had no breaks at all. That was a pretty busy place.
“Originally I had planned for the Toter-Home to have different taillights, which were from a ’58 Chevy with the bubble on the side, but that just didn’t work out well,” Klassen revealed. “Then I found that GMC and Pontiac were together on the POCI Website, so we went with the ’58 Pontiac style decorations.”
