The Longbed Queen

EVERY NOW AND THEN YOU COME ACROSS A FAMILY HEIRLOOM, PASSED DOWN FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION. The Ford truck you see before you was passed down to Kimberly Miller 10 years ago by her grandfather, Stanley. As you can see, Kimberly embraced the opportunity to make this ’80 F-100 her own. She did not disappoint!

At the time, she had another truck she had planned to customize. Instead, her grandfather convinced her to sell that truck and take his.

After going to the DMV to square away the paperwork, her grandfather decided to take one last drive in the truck. On the way home, he got into a wreck where another car ran into him. Everyone was OK, but the truck really needed some work then.

Over the years and through a lot of trial and error with other shops, work was either done incorrectly or kept getting pushed back for various reasons.

Kimberly decided in 2016 to take the truck to My World Fabrication out of Terrell, Texas, where work really started to progress. Shawn Brockway helped her decide to do a full custom chassis, 2x4 box tubing with a Mustang II front suspension. They were able to do a rearend swap to a Ford 8.8 out of an Explorer, and the truck was stock-floored and a triangulated four-link installed.

From there, the truck went to Brent Kelly out of Mississippi. Brent was able to get the motor running, ran all new brake lines, and raised the bed floor and wheel tubs. It then made its way to Soulless Innovations in Gulfport where Martin Fountain and Mathew Lawson built a custom brake assembly, custom overflow tank, full cell, and installed the electric fans for the radiator.

After leaving that shop, Kimberly spent a fair amount of time driving the truck around to work out any kinks with the motor. It may have left her on the side of the road a few times during this period, but she has some pretty great friends who came to lend a hand when she needed them the most.

After taking the truck to a few shows in 2018, Kimberly was at Last Resort Show in Louisiana where she ran into Trey with Finer Paint and Bodyworks. They discussed taking on the task of completely disassembling the truck all the way to the bare frame. While the truck may have been out of her hands at the other shops, she really wanted to take this opportunity to work on the truck herself, too. So together, they painted the frame and body, as well as apply bedliner on the inside of the cab, under the cab and the exterior. Rather than replace the chrome trim, she opted to airbrush what would have been chrome.

It was always intended to be bagged and body dropped, but the plan of restoring the truck was to keep the original look. At the grandparent’s request, she did not shorten the bed like most other custom F-100s. The look of the longbed and bullnose was the goal. Every detail, even with the choice of the wheels, Kimberly wanted to maintain that original look. So, the best option to do so and complete the look was to use American Racing Daytona wheels.

The dash components remained the same while the dash itself was painted to favor the exterior. Door panels and kicker panels were bead rolled and painted to complement the original look. Kimberly then had Joe’s Upholstery install a distressed brown bench seat, while the door and kick panels were custom made by Kerry Delatte of Killer Kustomz. The kick panels were even airbrushed to mimic speaker grilles!

One of the best, yet mostly unseen, details of this truck is how they took the initiative while painting to keep the two original stickers from the manufacturer, leaving them untouched and as they were straight out of the factory.

Kimberly debuted Stanley at her own show, Altered Metal, in Louisiana, and has since taken home awards such as Best

Truck at the Park & Recreation Show. She has some pretty solid advice when building a truck like hers: “Don’t cut any corners and build your dream regardless of how long it takes or how many obstacles you are faced with.”

Special thanks go to her mother Victoria Douet, grandparents Rose and

Stanley Douet, Angie

Ellis, Lindsey Morris, and Acrophobia for sticking with her through the process.