Earl Bauers father, a farmer, surprisingly passed from a sepsis. Instead of moving to the town and singing along to rock n´roll, he is now, as the oldest son, the man in the family, at only 17 years old.
The Bauers are not totally poor, but Earls father was always parsimonious, not investing into the equipment, and his 10 year old farm truck, never being properly maintained, falls apart. His mother doesn´t want him to spend too much, so he looks for a truck that is durable, versatile but also looks the part in front of the town hall.
Rules
Trim and Variant year: 1959
Fuel: 92 RON leaded
Techpool: 6 million total cost (trim+engine combined), no negative TP
Price: 10k max
Any kind of Pickup or Ute body
Needs all realistic fixtures: Headlights, taillights, turn signals, wipers, fuel cap, etc.
Cross-Ply tires, at least 80 profile, no need to go full 100
negative quality not more than -3
Priorities
High:
Design (Earl wants to impress the one or other girl at the next town and uses the truck to attend Rock n´Roll events and doesnt want to look like Lil`Abner there.
Utility (it´s a truck)
Reliability (This thing is needed to make money, so it better works)
Medium:
Performance (Earl is 17 - he won´t be satisfied with something moving like a snail)
Economy (the less, the better)
Price (Earls mother is as reluctant to spend money as his father was)
Low:
Comfort (Working as a farmer is hard and Earl doesn´t want his ride to make it even harder)
Offroad (The truck should not get stuck on muddy country roads, then it would be useless)
Inspirations
Submissions O P E N until June 09, EOD GMT+1. An ad is required!
This reminds me of CSR72 - it’s been a very long time since we’ve had a '50s truck challenge, so this one serves as a nice contrast to the proliferation of competitions set in modern(ish) times.
Ludvig had his chance to give us a status about JOC5. He has been quiet, and I don’t blame him because I don’t know why he just disappeared, he may have really good reasons. To not kill off the challenge series completely, I was close to taking up JOC6 myself, as the creator of this series, when Hippo said he was willing to take it up. Fine, I thought, since hosting a challenge does not fit all that good into my life right now. So this is all legit, we can’t wait forever…
exactly, I thought that it´s finally a good idea to use a brief we did not have for quite a while. And even if CSR72 is more or less the same car asked for, … it has been approx. six years since then, so that seemed like a good idea.
Can we get some general info about what size wheels to use in mm/in/mm because it’s kind of difficult to find any info from the 50s/60s, translate from American to the rest of the world and then figure out what is the actual width to use between tread width, section width and rim width?
A common wheel size on the Chevy Apache was 70R15, about the width, not sure. Old tires were quite narrow, but these trucks had some wide ones, I guess everything up to 205 should be fine.
This is a great and interesting premise, personally takes me out of my comfort zone as I’m not really into Americana so I’ll definitely give it a whirl.
I do have a few questions just to sort my ideas out
Are we aiming at strictly American pickups like the inspirations or would a European or Australian coupe utility work just as well?
For “performance” are we aiming at the power levels of equivalent real vehicles of the time?
Finally how are you handling utility brake fade? As a vehicle with more load capability is going to end up with more brake fade and look much worse on pure numbers than a similar vehicle that can essentially carry nothing. My assumption is the inspirations are all four wheel drums.
Another question actually, 250k techpool? that’s like four single points
In the inspirations are a Holden and a Toyota, so … I am open for wildcards.
If the vehicle does not have inferior performance to a steam train it should work. Most work trucks rarely had a V8 and were stuck to inline 6, and these were really not fast.
Four drums are indeed period correct. Let me think a bit how I measure utility. Propably I am putting bed size and load capacity also into consideration.
I might have made a goof here because my reference car uses Primus 50s corporate techpool. It is therefore very likely that this number will be increased.
Yes, but techpool is no longer a new and unknown element and its many bugs are mostly fixed by now. And its maybe a bit too much from a realism perspective to have 5 points everywhere at a relatively early point in the game.
it seems basically impossible to build a truck of the sizes shown for 10k as well, even with generous use of negative quality and the cheapest options everywhere it still costs well over 10k
Not entirely impossible though. I have play at $10,000 to make tuning adjustments for a few hundred dollars here and there, but absolutely - as you said - with generous negative quality. On my side of things, I think it’s the brakes that suffer the most from the cost-cutting.
it’s not really possible to build within the price right now as the techpool needs increasing for the challenge.
@Happyhungryhippo I have had a quick look at the techpool numbers, and a blanket 3 points on everything gives, $4.58m for the trim and $2.11m for the engine. Maybe a combined $8m would work? gives leeway for unlocking some stuff but still relatively low so the vehicles are simple.
Seems reasonnable and should make it easier to build a decent vehicle.
Still not sure which exact amount, but the descision that TP budget will be significantly altered is hereby confirmed.
Yeah any chance of going down a bit maybe? i’ve done a quick look at some tyre sizes of appropriate trucks and they seem lower than that tbh. around 75 or 80 profile
