Steamin' Jeep!

International correspondent ROBB PRITCHARD has seen some weird and wonderful off-roading apparatus so it’s not often that something stops him in his tracks and makes him ask: “What the heck is that!” The steam-powered 6×6 Hauk Designs Jeep Wrangler did exactly that, though. But was it all just fake showmanship, created to wow? No siree, this is the real deal. A steam-powered off-roader. This is its story.

“Why?”

This was my very first question to the Hauk Designs staff.

“Why would you want to create a 6×6, steam-powered Jeep Wrangler?”

“Why not? Money can’t buy the exposure you get building something really cool that no one has seen before,” build boss Kenny Hauk explains.

And it also helps to have your own TV show where the more insane your ideas are, the higher the ratings you get. It’s called Road Hauks and for the most part, is a pretty typical fly-on-the-wall American entertainment series. With this build, they wanted to go all out and create an absolutely incredible showcase vehicle.

All engineering companies need to demonstrate their capabilities and, while some have conventional outlets such as racetracks and Sema booths, Hauk Designs decided to display their skills in a decidedly unconventional way: by drag racing a steam train. Why not, indeed.

Apart from a crazy idea, the build started with a cheap, standard 2008 Jeep Wrangler. A 500kg boiler and a 200-litre water tank were going to be mounted on the back so it required a lot of work to make that happen.

The chassis had to be extended and needed to support all the weight so the design necessitated it being a 6×6. Chopping the body and chassis rails wasn’t a simple job. With so much weight on the back and with it intended for (admittedly rather light) off-roading, it needed to be extremely robust with nothing misaligned or weak because they couldn’t afford for it to fail.

If the chassis were to collapse, pipes holding 800psi of superheated steam might rupture... and the results of that would be catastrophic.