What do you choose for your personal vehicle when you regularly photograph some of the finest rides in the country? As an active automotive photojournalist for the last 30 years, I have been driving stock Accords and Acuras for more than a decade, reasoning that I would probably never be satisfied with a custom of my own.
All that changed, however, when I saw Don Fuselier's Super Stepside at a truck show in Daytona, Florida. Experiencing lust at first sight, I had to find out more about this unique pickup. My first surprise was that it wasn't a truck at all. The donor vehicle for his four-piece fiberglass kit was actually Don's '83 Caprice four-door sedan. When he told me the body could be cut and the kit mounted in two days, I was impressed. When I added the cost of the kit ($4,700) and the easily obtained donor car (approximately $2,000) to the bottom line, I was sold. The kit fits almost 50 different General Motors cars (Buick, Olds, Pontiac, and Caprice) from 1980 to 1990.
Not long after seeing Don's truck, I bought Super Stepside kit #4 along with a single-owner '89 Chevrolet Caprice four-door sedan as the donor car. Since so much of the original car is left undisturbed, Fuselier estimates a reasonably talented backyard builder can mount the one-piece rear clip, the tilt frontend, and the two rocker panels in a long weekend. Don and a friend showed me that the transformation could occur even faster. We started Saturday morning and had the basic body mounted by Sunday afternoon.
Although the looks change drastically, being a re-body means that all the essentials from the donor car remain in place and all the critical factory engineering is retained. Since I always have my cameras handy, I documented the process and produced the 32-page illustrated instruction manual, now available on Don's Web site (www.superstepside.com), that shows how anyone can complete the conversion. To me, the kit is a great combination of engineering excellence, easy installation, breakthrough styling, and low price.
Construction is fairly straightforward and begins by removing the hood, the front fenders, the grille, and the bumper. The tilt-forward, one-piece front clip comes with built-in brackets that use the original bumper bolts. The one-piece rear clip requires the back half of the Caprice body be removed just behind the front doors. A line is drawn on the roof and floor and cut with a Sawzall, and brackets supplied with the kit fasten the rear clip to the shortened rear framerails. Two rocker panels connect the front and rear clips.
A lot of donor car pieces are reused, such as the original Caprice taillights, which were trimmed and reinstalled behind four Corvette-style holes in the fixed Stepside tailgate. The stock fold-down license plate bolts to the new fiberglass clip and hides the original Caprice gas tank and filler. Although the kit comes with procedures for installing headlights, I liked the look of the '99 Malibu headlights and had Don french them into the body.
My goal from the outset was to make the vehicle essentially unidentifiable. Since both clips made a dramatic change in the styling, I only had to worry about the doors and interior. Shaving the GM door handles and adding amber LED turn signals to the stock sideview mirrors helped the camouflage process. A Pace Edwards electric Bed Locker tonneau was chosen to cover the new hardwood bed floor. In addition to adding to the truck's aerodynamics, it's weather-tight, closes like a safe with the remote, and is strong enough to stand on top of. Since the truck is driven regularly, the bed was equipped with a 20-inch spare wheel. The hinged storage compartment holds highway essentials like the floor jack and jackstands, along with a second Optima battery for the elaborate stereo system.