When Dickerson Custom Trucks was invited to participate in the “Big Rig Build-Off” as part of the 2024 Mid-America Trucking Show, the shop took the challenge head-on, transforming what was a run-of-the-mill 1996 Peterbilt 379 into a one-of-a-kind showpiece.
DCT owner Dustin Dickerson was hauling corn with the truck as recently as last fall, and he said it was still a nice truck at the time. After receiving the Build-Off invite, though, the Thorntown, Indiana-based shop launched the truck to the stratosphere.
“We've been [building] semis for about 10 or 11 years, really trying to raise the bar, not only on the whole industry, but ourselves especially,” Dickerson said. “We've tried to always outdo the one we did before, and that's what we were striving to do here.”
When Dickerson Custom Trucks was invited to participate in the “Big Rig Build-Off” as part of the 2024 Mid-America Trucking Show, the shop took the challenge head-on, transforming what was a run-of-the-mill 1996 Peterbilt 379 into a one-of-a-kind showpiece.
DCT owner Dustin Dickerson was hauling corn with the truck as recently as last fall, and he said it was still a nice truck at the time. After receiving the Build-Off invite, though, the Thorntown, Indiana-based shop launched the truck to the stratosphere.
“We've been [building] semis for about 10 or 11 years, really trying to raise the bar, not only on the whole industry, but ourselves especially,” Dickerson said. “We've tried to always outdo the one we did before, and that's what we were striving to do here.”
The truck, featured in the video up top, "wasn't a piece of junk by any means,” Dickerson noted, when he and his team set about the project. They reskinned the entire body with 389 skins to reduce the number of rivets, added a 389 hood to give more room for the massive engine, gave it a fresh paint job, and much more.
That motor alone -- a Cat 3412 pulled from a D11 bulldozer -- proved to be a huge undertaking.
Dickerson had to take off all of the dozer drives, the auxiliary pumps, oil coolers and other parts that weren’t needed for a truck. It has custom headers and a custom air induction system. They used a bell housing that would fit a 3408 to give some additional space, then pushed the motor forward a little bit and moved the cab back four inches to accommodate the 389 hood.
“And we were able to get that underneath there without having to stretch the hood skins,” he said.
On the rear of the truck, all of the cross members were fabricated in-house by DCT. Once those were added to the rig, they boxed in the frame. With all the work on the frame, Dickerson opted to go without a belly pan or deck plate to keep the driveshaft visible. “We put so much effort into getting that drive shaft on top of the cross members, I just couldn't bring myself to cover it all up,” he said. “So we did the no-deck-plate look.”
The rear suspension is also custom-built, with “an old locomotive look to it,” Dickerson said, “where the wheels are hooked together. I thought that was pretty neat.”
While the interior was still a work-in-progress at the time of MATS back in March, the most noticeable, and interesting, feature inside the cab had started to take shape. That's the lack of a traditional dash in favor of a full-cab-width 4K touchscreen that will give all the same information a traditional gauge package would.
Dickerson said his shop built a computer operating system for the truck, writing all the code “to monitor all of our pressures and temperatures, the speed, RPMs, all the air pressures. Anything that you would expect to have with a full gauge package semi, we’re going to have displayed on that dash.”
Switches that would typically be toggles or rockers will be touchscreen buttons, “right down to the ignition,” he added.
When everything's complete to design, Dickerson said the truck will be biometric, so the door will have a thumbprint reader to open, then another thumbprint reader inside the truck will signal the power-up mode. DCT brought in a graphic designer “to have a startup sequence that every time you fire the truck up, it plays just like a lot of your modern vehicles. So, we've really tried to raise the bar on our own abilities, you know, force ourselves to try to evolve and do some things that haven't been done."
It sure feels like they've "pulled some of that off,” he added.
All told, the build up to the point of MATS had taken 10.5 weeks from the first wrench turn. DCT’s partner in the build, the Hurricane Specialized fleet out of Franklin, Indiana, will eventually take ownership of the truck after a year or so of DCT touring with the rig.
Because the truck is going to Hurricane, that’s sort of the theme of the truck, with its nickname being “Storm Surge.”
The truck's paint scheme features the Bomb Pop color from Paint Huffer with some tweaks to it to ensure it's unique to this truck. The green stripes are a spin on Kawasaki Green with a pearl and other additions from House of Colors, along with other tweaks. Those green stripes are then outlined with a silver pinstripe.
