An ‘Everything’ Rig

As the crow flies, Kirkland, Washington, is 8 miles from downtown Seattle. It’s known as the “The Little City That Could,” and its claim to fame is that Costco once called Kirkland home and used the town for inspiration when it came time to name its in-house line of products. It’s charming, quaint, and not at all the kind of place you’d expect to see a ’34 International chop rod—one with LED headlights, piggyback off-road suspension, and the V-8 from a mid-’00s Corvette—but it’s where Keith Northrup, the fabricator of the car you see here, has lived for more than 20 years.

The 32-year-old husband and father works out of his 950-square-foot home garage and lines his pockets by building furniture and doing other specialized metalwork, a skill he started to hone at 16 by working on his ’84 Toyota pickup. Northrup started competitive off-road rock crawling at 20 and has been building tube-chassis toys ever since. This project, TrophyRat, is much different from the many that came before it. Whereas past projects were off-road, trail-crawling 4-by-4s that put form firmly behind function, the TrophyRat took the best bits from trophy trucks, rat rods, and sports cars, and assembled them in a way that turned a jalopy into something brutal and imposing that doesn’t shy away from anything. Or how Northrup puts it, an “everything rig”; he says it’s his best build yet.

“You get people from every realm who like it,” says Northrup. “From off-roaders to hot rod enthusiasts to the old, mustached ‘Timber Tamer’ guy that’s out there just loving the old iron. The old guys that are the hardest to impress will talk your ear off now.” Northrup wasn’t itching to build the TrophyRat, but a buddy needed to unload a beat-up ’34 International that’d been taking up space, so Northrup obliged and let the rusty cab sit in his garage while he figured out what to do with it. Seeing how it’s such a rare and distinctive truck, it needed a special build that didn’t cut any corners and stayed true to the original while inventing a new aesthetic and improving performance in every aspect of the vehicle.

Northrup started doing things he’d never tried before, including cutting 8 inches from bottom of the steel body, shortening the bed by a foot, and carefully chopping 4 inches from the roof without making the rear window look wonky and disproportional. He tucked in the side windows a bit, reused original metal where he could, and TIG-welded everything together so that the new bodylines stayed as clean as possible. The reworked body looked great but didn’t mesh with the stock frame, so Northrup threw it out, went with what he knew, and started to fab a tube chassis for the truck. A long, tedious process made worse by the fact that Northrup still had to create custom suspension arms to accommodate the King off-road dampers with remote reservoirs, long-tube headers that would hang off the long-block V-8, and a slew of other odds and ends to cinch the build together. But three years and $50,000 later, he pulled the bows tight on the TrophyRat.

It’s scruffy and proudly wears decades of patina, but the build itself is very clean. Welds are smooth, electronics are hidden, and the only out-of-place pieces are the plastic GoPro mounts Northrup stuck to the International’s corroded cab. Little has been overlooked, and what at first seems to be haphazardly assembled slowly comes into view as thoughtful and meticulously formed. It’s a machine that blends off-color beauty with stunning, raw performance. The entire body can be removed from the tube chassis in about an hour, like a trophy truck, and 315 horsepower hit the ground after being sent from the 5.7-liter V-8 through a Turbo 400 three-speed automatic transmission to the rear differential. “I didn’t want to go four-wheel drive because we were testing it and I didn’t want to blow up a thousand dollars’ worth of axles every time we went out, so we stayed simple with rear-wheel drive, and I think we nailed it pretty good,” says Northrup.

That’s surprising, seeing how Washington’s wet, mossy environment and the truck’s bead-locked wheels wrapped in 35-inch Nitto Mud Grappler tires scream out that this is a four-wheel-drive vehicle, but it’s less surprising if you ask Northrup about his driving style: “Just hit stuff really fast, and try not to crash.” He’s an enthusiast through and through, and asking Northrup about his plans for his truck make you like him even more. “If we have it around long enough, it’ll be Sage, our son’s, first car.” Sage is one. If he’s anything like his dad, though, in 15 years he’ll be driving the TrophyRat around Kirkland, the charming Little City That Could.

Photos courtesy of Michael Sol Sproehnle & Shawn Howe

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