Pal O’ BangShift Mike Casella has been featured on these pages many times. He’s the guy who literally makes and saves unobtanium parts every day at his job in the machine shop at Then and Now Automotive which is located in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Just because Mike is making and tinkering with stuff every day doesn’t mean that he goes home and stares at a television screen when he’s off hours. No way Jose, Mike is always scheming stuff up, from drag cars and hot rods he’s built, to this, a project that he calls “Mini-Max” which is a scaled down version of the motor home he and his wife cruise around in to get away from it all. Built completely from scratch and featuring all kinds of hand machined stuff like the wheels, lug nuts, mirrors, even a damned tiny trailer hitch, this is a wild project that really highlights Mike’s talents.

We’ve compiled more than 70 photos below featuring the truck from the last stage of the build you saw it in back in February to now in its completed form. But we’re not going to let you off that easy. There are some specific things we want you to pay attention to as you cruise through the photos below.

Firstly, let’s talk about the cab. Mike was not happy with the way cab version 1.0 came out so he decided to kick it up a notch and make a buck himself that could be then handed to an ace body man that could lay up fiberglass and produce the piece. Casella went to a local flower shop, bought a case of that green foam they use to jam flowers into and glued it all together. He then hand carved an exact replica of the full sized motorhome cab. Just that easy…year right! After he was satisfied with the carving job, he shipped the foam to his pals at Manheim Body and Fabrication, a bitchin’ body shop in Manheim, Pennsylvania. (Give ’em a call if you are in the area and need work done! 717-665-6061). Those guys actually molded the cab out of ‘glass and shipped it back up to Mike. He then cut out the windows and added stuff like mirrors and other details. You’ll see all this stuff below, but we wanted to fill in some gaps. (Apologies as some of the photos are out of order, I am trying to get a handle on some new blog tools we have….the bad assery of this whole thing overrides the sequential order…trust me).

Mike couldn’t help himself with this thing and kept adding details like mud flaps, a steerable front axle, the trailer hitch (which is truly amazing when you think about the fact that he WHITTLED IT BY HAND ON A MILL! The handmade steering wheel is way cool but the fact that he made a tiny directional stalk to mount on the steering column? Yeah, that’s insane. Insane in a good way, not in the Hannibal Lecter way.

In what was basically the final step, Mike had the whole thing wrapped with the exact same scheme that is on the full sized motor home he cruises for R&R away from the shop. The thing is a dead nuts replica and as you’ll see in the photos of it completed and sitting next to the “real” one, it is large enough for the two dogs to walk into and chill out. That was the original intention of this thing, to be used for a place for the dogs to hang out. Yeah, Mike’s got an overly active imagination and we’re thankful for it. This thing really is over the top.

Oh, and he said if he still has it in a year it’ll have a motor of some sort in it. We totally knew that was coming.

SCROLL DOWN BELOW TO SEE ALL THE PHOTOS OF THE MINI-MAX COMING TOGETHER FROM SCRATCH! WILD!