Supply Meets Demand
The biggest problem Lucas seems to have is holding on to any of these vehicles long enough to actually use them himself. He’s had a handful that were most of the way through the conversion process that he had intended to keep for his own, but invariably a customer would come along and see his handiwork and decide they just had to have it. As problems go, that’s a pretty good one to have! It also had the unintended result of informing his business model, at least a little bit. Typically, he will have the process well underway by the time he sells the truck, which allows him to finish it up the way the customer wants it. “It doesn’t seem to fail that you finish it out the way you think it should be done and then everyone else says, ‘I wish this was different.’ They’re kind of made to order, kind of not. I prefer to make them to order, if that’s what the people want.”
Most of the time it takes Lucas about 6-8 weeks for the Excursion builds. For the six-door pickups, it’s more like 4-5 weeks. It’s not terrible. He says, “We got it kind of figured out; we have all of our templates made and all of our measurements written down and everything goes pretty fast. The more you do, the better it is!”
Lucas’s work doesn’t come cheap, but he’s encouraged by the falling prices on trucks right now, because even though it’s still expensive, “it makes it more palatable for the everyday person” to do the conversion. “The Excursion community really loves them,” he says. “They don’t make them any more, so that’s the main thing. People are looking to replace them and there’s nothing out there that they like. There’s no company that makes a 3/4-ton with a diesel they can pull their campers with.”
So what’s next on his plate? A new challenge. “We’re going to attempt this winter to do a six-door of a new 2017 aluminum Super Duty. We’re going to try! It’s going to be definitely a different animal than these steel bodies. Someone’s gotta try it, I think! Let’s just go buy a $70,000 pickup and cut it in half, you know? Gotta learn somehow!”