Working As You Go
Fischer said when he pulled out of St. Paul, MN, to head to SEMA, there was still a lot of work to be done. With his SEMA truck sitting on the trailer, he scheduled his trip so along the way he could stop at selected shops and get a little more done as he worked his way west.
“We were putting parts on the thing basically all the way to Vegas,” he said. One of the stops was at Diesel Brothers so he could attach a bumper. “We had parts being shipped next-day-air to meet us along the way.”
Often it was late nights of working on the truck … or as Fischer described it “late mornings.” He said the crew would work through the night, take a short nap in the morning, and do it again. At any given time Fischer would have four or five guys helping out on the project—often just buddies who would swing by the shop and lend a hand.
“If it wasn't for support from other people, you know, it's pretty hard to make something that cool come together,” Fisher said.
It wasn’t until Monday morning of the SEMA Show, when the truck was sitting inside the booth upstairs in the Las Vegas Convention Center before Fischer deemed the project complete.
What’s Next
Fischer has built five trucks for SEMA over the past six years. And with this one complete, everyone is asking: What’s next? What are you going to do to top this one?
“I've already got people hitting me up to do a 2020 Ram or a 2020 Ford,” he said. “I'm just like ‘oh jeez now we're, now we're just starting it all over again?’”
After such a complicated build, are there plans to get a little farther out there in design?
“My first build was probably, to be honest with you, the second most complicated one,” he said. “Then I scaled it back for the next three years, basically building the average guy type trucks until this year.”
His first truck was all white—everything powder coated white—with a big 12-inch lift. “It was a huge white Duramax,” he said. “Everything was painted white, from drive shaft to rear axle to you name it. It was white. Only thing that wasn't white was the frame.”
Fischer said he always has a snow theme in his truck builds. “That's kind of what I'm known for out there,” he said. “I always have snowmobiles because of my racing and background with Polaris.”
What’s It Worth
Fischer said it’s difficult to put a price tag on this year’s truck. Just from the dealer you have over $70,000 in the vehicle. Then when you start adding parts, the price adds up quickly.
“The cost to design and build the tracks would be like a $100,000 just in tracks … but you could never sell it for that,” he said.
But if you look at the workmanship on the tracks, the bogie wheels were cut to match the 28-inch American Force Wheels with 42-inch Fury Tires that go on the truck during the summer.
There was nothing cheap about this truck. But when you’re looking for the “wow” factor at SEMA, you either go big or go home.