Winslow Bent Performs with Previous Vehicles to Protect Their Tales

Final time we noticed Winslow Bent he had began an organization known as Legacy Basic Vehicles in Driggs, Idaho, simply west of his dwelling in Jackson Gap, Wyoming. At the moment, he was displaying Autoweek his newly refurbished 1947 Dodge Power Wagon, a truck so fully and completely restored that we did not even wince once we heard it might price its purchaser $225,000.

Legacy takes vans just like the basic Energy Wagon, Diamond T, and Studebaker all the way down to the naked metallic, makes that naked metallic higher, then builds them up from there with new interiors, new wheelbases (the place needed), and new, extra highly effective and dependable crate motors making rather more horsepower than this stuff ever had when new. Since beginning the corporate in 2008, he is accomplished about 120 such truck rebuilds, every ranging in worth from $200,000 to $450,000, “relying on the complexity of the construct.” Construct time is “multiple yr however lower than two.”

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That was six years in the past. Within the intervening years, Bent has gone considerably Hollywood. Or a minimum of YouTube. We stumbled throughout his YouTube channel, This Previous Truck, by chance. Right here was this smiling man with what he admits is “loopy COVID hair,” speaking about one thing known as a 1942 Ford Marmon-Herrington four-wheel-drive SnoGo. A SnoGo, it turned out, is a big machine that attaches onto the entrance of a truck and actually chews up all of the snow in entrance of it. You name within the SnoGo when the common snowplows have piled the snow too excessive to maneuver anymore. The SnoGo is available in, eats all of it up, and spits it out.

To point out the seriousness and severity of the SnoGo’s operation, Bent fired it up and tossed in a couple of watermelons—okayersploosh!—they received devoured and spat out, their remnants launching right into a discipline about 30 to 45 toes away. Fairly the shock to search out that the man with the watermelons was our outdated buddy Winslow Bent. He had began this YouTube channel and gave the impression to be having a good time.

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“A whole lot of my enterprise is, I’ve to supply plenty of autos for individuals,” Bent instructed us later. “So I spend plenty of time driving round locations like Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, and sort of assembly these loopy outdated timers which have cool items of equipment round and, consequently, I’ve simply had this rising listing of those outdated timers which have wonderful items of apparatus.”

Accumulating Truckers’ Tales

So he felt an obligation to doc all of it. He noticed his job as a historian, gathering these truckers’ tales whereas there’s nonetheless time to do it.

“They’re dying, , and once they go, the story of those vans and what they did, it goes as properly.”

So he began filming their tales and importing it to This Previous Truck on YouTube.

He sees the tales of those vans because the story of the Previous West. After the cowboy, the horse, and the wagon, there was the truck, and the truck did all the things.

One in every of Bent’s energy wagons.

“You take a look at post-WWII, the entire growth that occurred within the Western United States, you may have dams, logging, bridges, telephones, energy strains, and all these things, it was the railroad that introduced it out to the central hubs, and from there, it was onto vans. The vans did an unimaginable quantity of labor constructing out the Western U.S.”

Every truck had a particular process and was upfitted for it.

“I used to be simply at SEMA, and I believe one thing like 60 % of individuals will do one thing aftermarket to their truck. And the identical was true again then. So you would get your 1935 Diamond T truck, and you are like, ‘I want to change this factor so I can use it to haul cows to market, I want to position phone poles.’ So what I am discovering is, not solely the outdated vans and the cool guys that used to function this stuff, however they’ve these actually humorous tales about how they choice and make the automobile work for them. It is actually intelligent, simply to see what individuals got here up with. So mainly, my principal drive is simply, I really feel it is a necessity to report this stuff.”

Once we spoke to him in 2021, he had 4 episodes within the can and up on the positioning—there are 11 now. If of a cool truck story, particularly if the proprietor continues to be round and might speak about it, contact Bent.

Within the meantime, watch a couple of episodes. And begin saving up in your personal refurbished 1947 Dodge Power Wagon. When you order now, it will be able to go by Christmas 2025. Perhaps sooner.

This story initially appeared in Autoweek in December 2021.

Mark Vaughn grew up in a Ford household and spent many hours holding a hassle gentle over a straight-six miraculously fed by a single-barrel carburetor whereas his father cursed Ford, all its merchandise and everybody who ever labored there. This was his introduction to goal automotive criticism. He began writing for Metropolis Information Service in Los Angeles, then moved to Europe and have become editor of a automobile journal known as, creatively, Auto. He determined Auto ought to cowl System 1, sports activities prototypes and touring vehicles—nobody stopped him! From there he interviewed with Autoweek on the 1989 Frankfurt motor present and has been with us ever since.