The 2012 Cheap Truck Challenge Intro

Our hobby of making 4x4 vehicles go off the easy paved roads isn’t as cheap as some other hobbies. Take Frisbee for example; all you need is a Frisbee and maybe a dog. Or fishing; grab a rod and some worms and find a body of water. And don’t forget hiking; just go outside and walk and violà! You’re hiking. You can do all of these cheap, or you can buy the top-of-the-line Frisbee, fishing rod, or hiking boots and now your hobby is expensive. Four-wheeling is no different. Cheap Truck Challenge, which began last month, is an attempt to show that wheeling can be done in the dirt on a close to dirt-poor budget.

The goal is simple. Imagine you’re a kid flipping burgers or mowing lawns all summer long, and you want to buy a truck and go four-wheeling (this isn’t hard to imagine if you are in fact a kid mowing lawns this June, July, or August). In Cheap Truck Challenge we’re showing you how we bought three different 4x4s on a budget of $2,012 and then fixed them up with another $2,012. After that we are going to wheel the bajeezus out of them (as many a kid with a low-buck truck will do) to have fun—er, we mean to scientifically determine if there is a single best way to build a low-buck, no-frills, cheap, ugly 4x4 (and have fun doing it).