Texas Chrome Shop Website
It wasn’t a surprise for anyone attending the 2009 Great American Trucking Show in Dallas to see a heavy contingency of custom rigs entered in Overdrive’s Pride & Polish truck beauty show. After all, trucking is big in Texas. The surprise was just how good the boys in the Lone Star state are when it comes to customizing their rides. Texas-based Z-Bar Transport, Lindamood Demolition, Bill Hall Jr Trucking, and trucks customized by the Texas Chrome Shop hauled away more than half of the Pride & Polish trophies.
The truck capturing the most attention at the 11th annual GATS was the Mendez brothers radical Project 1 Peterbilt. Raul Jr. and Roland Mendez rolled in their beautiful rig off the trailer with the paint still wet and a few trim pieces still needing to be bolted on before the judging began. The San Antonio, Texas, entry built by the Texas Chrome Shop ended up winning the prestigious Best of Show honors beating out the Chrome Shop Mafia’s Ivy’s Poison, another brand new limited mileage show truck. “We have customized 650 customer’s trucks over the years our little shop has been in business,” says Raul Mendez Jr. “But this is the first truck owned by our family to be customized. Roland came up with the concept two years ago,” explains Raul Jr. ” Steve Cervantes, our in-house artist, sketched his idea out and we let the drawing hang in on our office wall until this last February. We’d just look at the picture and talk about what we wanted and how to get it done.”
Roland says they rolled their ‘98 Peterbilt 379 into the shop in February to start the work.” The last four months we’ve worked night and day getting it done. Everyone in our shop had a role in how it turned out. Everyone took a lot of pride in their job and it shows.”
“Project 1 is the Texas Chrome Shop’s way of letting the country know what we can do down in San Antonio,” adds Raul Jr.” We can turn anyone’s dream [of owning a radical custom show truck] into a reality. The guys we have in our custom and paining shop are some of the best in the world.”
Custom fiberglass door panels, killer sound system, and creative design were just part of the reason the Texas Chrome Shop's Project 1 caught show judges and show goer's eyes.
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