a COLD WAR ERA overlander built by PIKES PEAK racer

"I don't really subscribe to the status quo," master fabricator Scott Birdsall says. I guess that's why he turned a government nuclear fallout van into the ultimate overland vehicle.

[CARISMA is our show exploring car culture through the eyes, lives, and rides of different enthusiasts across America. See the full playlist:    • CARISMA   ]

This 1953 Ford Vanette was made for the state of California to drive into irradiated areas if the Russians ever nuked us. Lead walls, built-in Geiger counters, and a singular mix of optimistic postwar design and evil undertones.

"Driving around this kind of stuff is kind of a whole, you know, f*** you to everybody else."

Scott's a pro racer and the owner of Chuckles Garage, a hot rod shop in Santa Rosa that does straight-up ridiculous things at an incredibly high level, like turn a Toyota Hilux into a Bonneville land speed racer. He set the diesel record at Pikes Peak in Old Smokey, a 1949 Ford pickup that he later sent off the mountain when in a spectacular crash in 2023. So the Nuke Van is kind of par for the course, as nuts as it looks.

The van was sold off at a surplus auction after the Cold War and eventually abandoned before making its way to Scott. Though he kept the rough patina'd look, he transformed everything else: 5.9L Cummins with an ATS Aurora turbo, MBRP four-inch exhaust, new axles (Dana 60 up front), Bilstein remote res shocks, leaf springs off a Ford Super Duty, custom exhaust, and more. Inside, it's a "really nice Tahoe cabin, with custom bamboo woodwork, bunk beds, heated floors, a home theater setup, custom seats, and on and on.

And it really is built to get you wayyy off the grid, with four huge anti-gravity lithium batteries, full roof-mounted solar system, wired up to code like a house, he says.

For us, it's one of the coolest things we've ever seen. For Scott, who grew up a poor kid in Fort Bragg with car posters on his walls, who gave up a safe job as a manager at Home Depot and put his life savings into opening his own hot rod shop, it's a just another way to have fun and make his mark on the culture.

"People say I have a car problem, but it's not a problem because I've got five employees in there. It supports them and their families. I get to go to work and do what everyone else does after in their free time. Like they work a 40 hour week and they think, oh, I can't wait to go home on the weekend and work on my race car, work on my hot rod or whatever they own. I get to do it all day long."

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Produced, shot, and edited by →   / tomgorelik  

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