When we are not making videos, geeking out on fire and forestry, or working in the shop, we are teaching people how to burn, and helping put fire on the ground around NorCal. While much of this work is ‘unpaid’, in the traditional sense, we’ve got kind of a unique ‘crowdsourced burning’ thing going on. Lookout donations, YouTube revenue, channel sponsorships, and Lookout merch sales are all adding up enough to allow me to do this work, even if the burn project, itself, often can’t pay me to be there. So THANK YOU to everyone who shares our content, sends some PayPal or Patreon cash our way, or buys some merch.
The Lookout’s first major sponsor was QTAC, a local, Chico, California company that makes slip-in fire pumps for trucks and UTVs, and also, custom wildland fire engine and rescue trucks. This spring, they hooked us up with one of their top-of-the-line Tsunami Pro wildfire skids (this one holds 150 gallons of water). I used it on a couple burns in my 2WD diesel, but felt pretty naked without 4-wheel drive, and almost got stuck a few times on slippery roads. We asked The Lookout community for donations, and the Reis Foundation and several individual donors stepped up with enough cash for me to trade up my 2WD Dodge for a 4WD one-ton that was the same vintage. Our skid unit fits in a standard pickup, but it takes up the entire bed, and there was no space for all of the tools, hose, and fittings, so I needed to either convert to a flatbed or utility bed for the whole rig to really work for us. I opted for a utility bed, but I couldn’t find a used one that would fit my particular truck, and new ones were close to $15k. My buddy and metalworking mentor, Dave Richer, encouraged me to just find a long-bed one and cut it down to size. This sounded straightforward enough, you know I love a good project!
After about a month of prowling Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, I found a really clapped-out old utility bed. The bottoms of all of the boxes were rusted out, but the doors and their frames were in pretty good condition, and the latches all worked, so I borrowed Dave’s trailer and hauled it home. Once I dug into it, I realized it was really beat up! But we had a plan, and I cut into it. Back in the early 2000s, my brother, Nils, and I built a house together, and over the years, he has taught me to never let not knowing how a project will unfold stop me from starting it, so I broke out the angle grinder and cutoff wheel, and away we went.
Once we had the bed the right length and some of the box-bottoms rebuilt, we took the bed off my truck, and tried to drop the new bed onto the frame. The leaf springs were in the way, and we ended up having to cut steps into the box-bottoms we had just fitted. We also had to figure out how to build a new subframe for the bed, and attach it to the chassis of the pickup. But this all worked out, eventually. We also realized that the boxes were too narrow for the width of my axle and tires, and also, that I hadn’t really figured out the center of the fender, properly. So we cut the fender holes wider, and added flares.
I got an old front bumper from a 1960s GMC semi from my buddy David Irle, and we modified it to have steps, and cut-in LED lights. We made the tailgate from scratch, including the latch and chains, which took a lot of noodling to get all fitted.
I got a friend to paint it all. It turns out that paint and body guys are really detail-oriented, and he treated the whole project like it was headed to a hot-rod competition. He added bondo, sealed the seams, and really did it right. This took a long time. The box was prepped down to bare metal, then primered, filled, sanded, sprayed with a seal coat, two coats of metallic silver to math the cab color, and 3 coats of clear lacquer. His bodywork made our lumpy welds disappear. We also sprayed bedliner on the insides of the fenders and on the bumper and tailgate, followed up with body color over the top of it. Deluxe!
My kid is taking welding at Chico High, and his welds are as good or better than mine, so he handled most of the welding, built brackets for the new bumper, and helped with a lot of the grunt work of getting the bed on and off several times.
We had our first gig for it the day after it was done, with First Rain Land Stewardship, in Nevada County, California!
Thanks again to our sponsors and supporters, and especially the Reis Foundation, for their major gift that helped us to trade up my old truck to this one!