Let’s Chop It Up
“I just wanted to try it and see if I could do it, I suppose,” Lucas says. For his first 6-door, he did that all by himself in the shop. “I had a lot of time in it, but I figured, well, it looks like it should work. It probably took twice as long as it should have. Now we can do it quick.” That was about eight years ago, and since then he has perfected his process. He says, “I enjoyed that first one, and then this Excursion thing picked up once I saw how nice these 6.7s were. I thought, hey, that would make a nice Excursion. People really love them.”
Before we spoke to Lucas directly, we had our own ideas of what he was doing to make these trucks look so close to factory. Turns out we were overthinking it: he just cuts them in half and joins them together. Well, there’s more work to it than “just” that. He explains: “For a regular four-door Excursion we start with a four-door shortbox pickup, a 250 or 350, doesn’t matter. Then we get our Excursion donors out of Arizona so they’re not rusty. Up here in Minnesota we gotta deal with that sweet stuff, so we try to get rust-free donors.”
Next up, they essentially gut the interior of the truck and cut the Excursion in half. “We cut the cab off, and cut the frame on the pickup. We have to cut the cab and the frame on the Excursion and then join the Excursion rear frame section to the pickup front section and then the rear body of the Excursion on to the pickup.”
From there they do all the wiring that must be done, build all the panels, the headliner, and the carpet, and make all of the seats match. He says, “I have a place in Texas that makes all of my seat covers so everything matches factory, even on the older seats. What we’ve been doing a lot is Super Duty buckets in the front—some people like the buckets in the second row too—then we’ve been going with an Expedition second-row seat, just because it’s a little more updated look and a more comfortable seat. Then we stick with the Excursion third row. We try to get all the leather to match, all the stitching, so it looks like it’s factory.”
We wondered if joining an older rear half with a newer front half posed any issues, but Lucas eased our concerns. “The only thing we use out of the old parts is the body and the frame section,” he says. “The frame section we sandblast and repaint. We use all the driveline and everything from the new truck as much as we possibly can. Everything in there is brand-new. By the time we rebuild it all, it’s good as new.”