Indulge yourself in the memory of a really cool erector set and an idea. It’s almost as if life couldn’t get any better than tinkering with stuff. These ideas, like sparks, always lead to something bigger. One thing just leads to another and pretty soon you have a pretty cool-looking off-road machine. Michael Hendricks of Santa Margarita, California, had an imaginative idea and got to work on it. Let us explain—it’s lightweight, it’s bombproof, and it’s a Toyota. Well, kind of. It’s actually a tubular-bodied hybrid of mostly Toyota parts and Mike’s suspension ideas.
While on our mission to find fresh air, warm sunshine, and hard-core ’wheeling, we found Mike and what he calls a 2000 “Rockota.” The Toyota/rock-buggy was built for two reasons: (1) to go rockcrawling and (2) to try out his suspension ideas. We usually see vehicles with huge power, beefy axles, and low-geared diffs on the trails that we frequent. The Rockota showed us that nimble lightweights with ultralow gears have a statement to make.