By Brian Lohnes

BangShift.com

We have to thank BangShift.com forum member (and college chum!) Paul Lafayette for the tip on this bonus eBay Pick of the Week. We believe this to be the most off-road-capable Jeep Forward Control truck ever. It has been battle tested as a competitor in the hellacious Four Wheeler Magazine Top Truck Challenge. The Four Wheeler site says this rig had more reader votes than any other “by a wide margin.”

See the eBay ad here.

We don’t know how the truck fared in that competition, but we can say that this thing has all the parts and pieces to make it an unstoppable force on nearly any terrain thrown before it. There’s planty of power on tap with a 520hp (modern) LS6 mill. There’s plenty of axle strength with Dana 60 units front and back, and there’s more than decent ground clearance with big 44-inch Swampers on all four corners.

We like the part where the seller tells potential buyers that the truck is road legal and passed the state inspection in New York, but he wouldn’t recommend the truck as a daily driver. We think it would be the perfect whip to take to drop the kids off at school with. They’d need to throw a rope ladder down to get out, but the soccer moms in their mini-vans wouldn’t know what to make of this big fellow.

We searched high and low for video, but failed to unearth any. Note that, in the photo below, it’s climbing a wall at a coin-op car wash.

By Rich Truesdell

Automotive Traveler

Featured in two magazines and in the Hemmings 2007 Classic Car Calendar, this might well be the best compact Dodge A100 pickup on the planet.

It’s no secret that I call Cars and Coffee my private hunting ground for feature vehicles for the many magazines I contribute to. Every Saturday morning more than 300 interesting cars and trucks vie for a coveted parking spot in the lot between the Ford and Mazda buildings. Several years ago I shot this eye-catching Dodge A100 and it was ultimately featured in the January 2008 issue of Cars & Parts. (It’s now featured in the September issue of Hemmings Motor News as well.) Look closely at this truck and you’ll see why. It’s a near-perfect example of the breed of compact pickups that were the domestic response to the sales success of the wide selection of the versatile yet under-powered Volkswagen trucks that were popular in the late fifties and early sixties. Besides the Dodge A100, Ford responded with its Falcon-based Econoline while Chevrolet’s initial response was the short-lived (1961 to 1964) Corvair-based Loadside pickup which featured an innovative side ramp making it exceptionally easy to load cargo.

But this truck is equipped with a Mopar V-8! Read more at Automotive Traveler.