BangShifter Ken Melrose has us all beat by a mile. The man recently restored a 1951 Dodge M37 truck with his dad which makes him a boss but the fact that he repowered the sucker with a 3-53 Detroit Diesel and backed the screaming engine with a 5-speed Spicer transmission makes the whole thing even better. Ken shot us an email the other day and thought that we may like a video he made of himself commuting to work in the straight piped, olive drab, pile of perfection and guess what? He was right! With Jerry Reed tunes playing in the background and the engine making its raspy angry noise at the fore, this is about the most BangShifty thing we have seen in a long time.

The footage was taken over the course of a week that Melrose parked his normal commuter Ford truck and took the big Dodge to the office. We’re not sure what he does for work but we’re going to take a wild guess that this was the only such contrivance in the parking lot and he probably did not need help finding it among the hybrids, mom buggies, and non-desrcript commuter pods that filled the rest of the lot. Yes, all of those things would outrun this truck in a drag race or certainly out pace it in a fuel economy contest but none of them drip even a bloody ounce of the sheer neato that this one does.

We’re guessing that Ken is going to see this and when he does, he needs to send us some build photos from the construction of this rig. We want to see that 3-53 finding its way home and how they got it in there so nice. In the film you’ll see under the hood and the Melrose boys did a fine job of packaging the whole works up under the M-37s flat hood. Square-jawed cool on display here. Listening to him pull a couple of gears with the engine in its “happy place” is great!

Oh, this is a non-turbo 3-53 so there is NOTHING squelching the angry tone of this little monster!