The modern pickup truck is a marvel of engineering. These machines can pull almost unfathomable amounts of weight, achieve respectable fuel economy, and cocoon their occupants in comfort all at the same time. But what these trucks often lack is the retro looks everyone loves so much nowadays. One man has found a way to get the best of both worlds. Meet the Steamboat, a new Ford Super Duty with the meaty Godzilla 7.3 engine and all the modern features of a new Super Duty, but with the body of a 49-year-old Ford F-700 medium-duty truck.
I found the marvelous Steamboat at the 10th Annual Galpin Car Show this weekend. At first, I thought the truck was just a restored F-700 with a custom bed. Then, I started looking further and realized it’s way more than that. The shop that built it expertly blended new and old in a way that still has my heart fluttering.
There’s a certain kind of romance to an old truck.
Decades ago, trucks weren’t luxury cars and they didn’t have grilles that spanned multiple zip codes. These were vehicles made for hard work and part of their beauty follows their function. The owner of this custom F-700, Daveed, agrees, and fixing this problem was his motivation for this build. He wanted a truck that looked 50 years old, but didn’t want to give up the chassis, power, or features of a new truck.
If you’ve ever driven a really old truck, you know the butterflies in your stomach can be tempered by the driving experience. Old trucks tend to be slow, thirsty, bouncy, and have steering vaguer than an episode of Seinfeld. Their capacities also don’t quite match what a new truck can do.
Daveed created his dream truck with the help of Upton, Wyoming-based custom truck shop Jack’d Up Trucks. This small shop has been building custom retro trucks since 2022 and the Steamboat was a project kicked off in 2023.
Steamboat started life as a 1975 Ford F-700 medium-duty truck. These were trucks that were never sold with beds and weren’t really available to the Average Joe. Instead, these trucks were straight trucks, tow trucks, utility trucks, and emergency vehicles. Ford says the F-Series has been America’s best-selling vehicle line for 47 years. This F-700 is in the generation of trucks that made that statistic happen.
As for Steamboat itself, Daveed told me it lived out its original service life as a military truck in Wyoming before being sold as surplus. He told me that one particularly hard part about this project was just finding the cab. Lots of these old medium-duty trucks were scrapped at the end of their service lives and most of the ones that did survive are worse for wear 50 years later.
This truck was found to have very light corrosion and it still had good paint. The cab you’re looking at here is largely unchanged from the way it was found, seen below:
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The other part of the equation is the donor Super Duty. In this case, the underlying truck is a 2023 Ford Super Duty F-350 with four-wheel drive and a 7.3-liter Godzilla V8 gas engine. Daveed tells me the engine is in stock tune, which means an output of 430 HP and 475 lb-ft of torque. That’s delivered to all four wheels through the Super Duty’s stock 10-speed automatic. The Steamboat was equipped with a 361 V8 when new, and that engine made about half of the horsepower of today’s Godzilla.
Jack’d Up Trucks lowered the F-700 cab onto the chassis of the F-350, but the real magic is in how the shop integrated the old truck into the new truck in a way that you might think it was factory.
As I mentioned earlier, medium-duty F-Series trucks do not have pickup beds. So, how does this one have a bed that works so well? Jack’d Up Trucks took a bed from a lower-level 1975 F-Series and adapted it to fit the Steamboat. Part of the factory look comes from the fact that the Jack’d Up Trucks team took two F-700 front fenders, cut them, and inverted them before welding them together and attaching them to the bed.
Then, the Jack’d Up Trucks gang tried their best to color-match the bed to the cab. While the paint on the bed looks new compared to the patina on the cab, the color is right on target. The result, at least in person, is that this gigantic F-700 looks like it came from the factory with a bed.
I also love how Jack’d Up Trucks integrated the F-350’s features into the F-700 cab. Pop open the door and you’ll see the F-350’s steering column is present, but there’s so much more going on. The F-350’s power adjustable pedals, automatic headlights, remote start, and steering wheel controls survived the transplant. Jack’d Up Trucks also integrated the F-350 into the F-700 with a custom hybrid digital and analog instrument cluster.
These trucks have a screen in their instrument cluster where you can view fuel economy, towing data, the truck’s vitals, or a digital inclinometer.
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That screen is there on this build, but now it lives in a little alcove on the left side of the dashboard. The analog gauges from Dakota Digital look like they belong in the truck, but they’re custom gauges that read the F-350’s data. The goal here is to have as close to an OEM build as possible and I think Jack’d Up Trucks achieved that. You don’t even notice the custom gauges until you stare at them for long enough.
Daveed tells me that this is very much like having a brand-new truck with brand-new truck features, handling, and comfort, but with the looks of a 49-year-old work truck.
He says it handles just like a new F-350 would and fuel economy is about as you’d expect from a lifted F-350. All of this is great because it means he can own what looks like an old truck but without most of the downsides.
Jack’d Up Trucks even kept the truck’s towing equipment, so it could still tow 18,000 pounds from the hitch receiver. Toss on a lift kit plus 42-inch tires and this thing is simply a monster truck. Sure, the bed is now far too tall to truly useful. I mean, I’d have to lift an object over my head to get it over the bedside. But, golly, I’m so in love.
I agree with Daveed here that this truck might be the best of both worlds. So many people are into vintage style right now, but don’t want to deal with old-school technology. The Steamboat has already been on more than one road trip, including the one that saw it drive from Wyoming to California. It’s not a pretty show truck that gets trailered everywhere, but a dream truck that Daveed is driving great distances in already.
Yes, I know the Steamboat isn’t the perfect truck. It towers so high it could drive right over my Honda Beat without noticing. The lift kit jacked it up so much that you’d need a ladder to use the bed. All of that is true. And yet, out of all of the hundreds of vehicles at the Galpin Car Show, which included Beau’s Vector and a rainbow of Porsches, this big truck remains my favorite and, given the chance, I’d love to drive it. I hope it serves Daveed for a long time.
(Images: Author, unless otherwise noted.)
Lower it a foot so it looks like you actually could use it and it’d be so much cooler. As is just looks like another bro with too much money.
Because that is exactly what it is.
I’d love to do something like this only without the bro-tastic lift and monster truck tires. Still a neat build, though!
I hate goofy big trucks, but this just strikes everything just right for me. Not how I would do it, or spend my money, but that’s nice.
What a massive waste of time and money. Sorry not sorry.. this thing is stupid.
A vehicle this size with lift blocks is a cars and coffee rig. Axle wrap would limit travel and speed. A nice looking truck with few uses. Ever try to load or unload a lifted truck? Neither have most owners…
Axle wrap should be taken care of by those traction bars. Side loading on the suspension is the larger issue with those lift blocks.
Holy shit those things are huge.