While we all love a good muscle car, full-size American pick-up trucks are currently hotter than a stolen doughnut in an outback cop shop in summer. Classic trucks are everywhere, and their simple construction means it’s pretty easy to build them into any style you like. Judging by his low-riding, smoothed-up long-bed ’69 F100, Queensland’s Daryl Willsher is all for that.

First published in the January 2025 issue of Street Machine

“I’ve always been into utes; even with my model cars, I’ve always had pick-ups,” Daryl laughs. “The F-truck was the right thing for me to build because of this. I chose a long-bed because everybody does short-wheelbase, and I chose a ’69 because I was born in 1969.”

Daryl tapped Gold Coast car crafters Rides By Kam to handle the entire build, including sourcing the truck itself from South Dakota. “At the time, I owned a business and just didn’t have the spare time to sort a build out,” he explains. “I looked at heaps of F-trucks in the USA that had been customised to work out what I liked, and then I got a guy in the US to do a render for me with my ideas. I took that to Rides By Kam and showed them what I wanted.”

What Daryl wanted was a low-slung classic truck that sported bulk customisation for a properly unique finished product. The RBK team then began the search for a pick-up they could cut up to suit this brief.

“The truck was a junker,” laughs Daryl. “It was a farm truck. It had hardly any rust and the panels were straight, but it was from a farm and had lived a life. This was why I wanted Rides By Kam to find and buy it, because they knew what they were going to have to do to it and had people who could find the best starting point.”

Any street machine worth its salt needs a sweet stance, so Rides By Kam’s first order of business was to give the longboy an altitude adjustment. The stock frame was cut off behind the cab and a whole new rear clip was fabricated out of box-section steel, while the factory front section was boxed in for structural integrity.

Ford’s I-beam front end made the F100 an icon as a heavy-duty workhorse, but it also makes it impossible to get a visually pleasing ride height from the big pick-ups. The answer for RBK was to replace the front and rear suspension with a Scott’s Hotrods SuperSlam independent front end and four-link rear end.

The lower ride height and new wheel-and-tyre package meant the stock tray had to be cut out and raised. A new floor was then custom made with wider-than-stock strengthening ribs, and a set of more generously proportioned wheel tubs were installed. The body was then coated in bright Platinum White pearl paint from PPG, which is close to a contemporary Toyota hue.

“I was going to paint it the same white as a ’56 F100 I saw from America, but as that truck was featured in more places, I realised it had a yellow tone to it,” Daryl says. “One day, I was following a late-model Toyota and saw its colour in different light as it drove along the road, and I realised that was the colour for me.”

Diehard Ford fans should look away now, because this classic Henry is built Ford-tough with Chevy stuff. “The truck was built to drive 150km a day in peak-hour traffic on the M1 Motorway,” says Daryl. “I talked to Rides By Kam about the engine options, and they suggested the LS, so we went that way, despite it being to many people’s disgust.”

This is no junkyard slapper motor, either. Daryl looked past the cheap option of second-hand engines, as he wanted good grunt with factory reliability, so he jumped on a BluePrint Engines 6.2-litre LS3 crate motor. Kitted out with upgraded internals, 10.7:1 compression, a beefy 225/238/113 hydraulic-roller cam and 72cc heads, the alloy late-model small-block is sold as a dyno-proven 530hp package. Considering the top-dog 390ci FE V8 originally available with the ’69 F100 only made 255hp, the LS provides a sizeable improvement in overtaking grunt and highway manners.

“The truck has performed beyond expectations, and I’ve done 4500km in it since I picked it up from Rides By Kam in April 2023,” Daryl says. “Rob and the guys at Rides By Kam did a fantastic job; they know what they’re doing there, so I was happy to let them do what they do.”

Daryl’s already got his next project tucked away and ready to go to RBK. “I bought a ’69 Mustang at auction while I was high on painkillers after a snowboarding accident,” he laughs. “That one will be going to the Rides By Kam guys as well.”

We can’t wait to see how Daryl and Rob will flip the script on one of America’s most iconic classic cars!

DARYL WILLSHER
1969 FORD F100

THANKS
Rob Zahabi and his sons Cooper and Mitch at Rides By Kam; No Life Automotive Renderings; Bendworx for the tray; Nathan at Livin Loco Garage for the engine cover graphics; last but not least, my partner Karen for taking care of the build invoices.