Say you’re living in Arizona or Kansas or some other state in the Union and you want to get yourself a 79 Series Land Cruiser. That’s the pickup truck version from Toyota’s Land Cruiser lineup that came out in 1999 — except it didn’t come out in the US of A. So getting one of these no-frills utilitarian four-bys is virtually impossible. Unless.
Unless you are Proffitt’s Resurrection out of Western Colorado and you were able to get your hands on the shells of a few 79 Series from another job. All that remained was finding what goes under the sheet metal — engine, chassis, transmission, things of that nature. Proffitt’s all-under-one-roof custom restoration shop chose their favored R2.8 Cummins diesel engine, bolted on a H55F 5-speed manual transmission and plunked it all on a 1993 Land Cruiser FZJ80 chassis (which needed to be lengthed twenty inches to fit the longer 79 body).
The lean and mean truck got a few more improvements in the form of Bilstein shocks, a winch by Warn on the ARB front bumper, and RAZR mud terrain tires from Maxxis. Topping it all off with a cherry red coat of paint and proudly retro pinstriping, the truck made its debut at the 2017 SEMA show in Las Vegas. Most recently it’s been seen at the 2018 Overland Expo West, rocking a roof tent and looking happy to be stateside. Learn more at Resurrection Land Cruisers.
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