Chip's C/28

A COPO C10 Fresh From the Foose Factory

- John Gilbert

Chip Foose is a truck guy. His first car was a ’56 Ford F-100 Big-Window that he still owns to this day. We used to see Chip’s root beer brown ’56 F-100 parked in front of his office back in the early ’90s when he was a designer for Hot Rods by Boyd. Chip was fresh out of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and his office walls were covered with concept illustrations that included a few Harley-Davidsons rebodied as a two-wheeled ’57 Chevy Bel Air, a ’63 Corvette Sting Ray, and maybe even an early Ford Mustang.

That was when Boyd’s shop was a maze of industrial units collected one-by-one leading to the original freestanding building at 8400 Monroe in Stanton, California. It was something to see; the cement walls of neighboring tilt-up industrial units were concrete sawed open to mount steel man doors to provide a quicker route to the other sites on Monroe. At the back building in the row of units owned by custom painter Dick Vale, there still might be the Oscar of CadZZilla on the wall. An Oscar is a fullscale illustration of a concept car being built into reality. Fans of the TV show Overhaulin’ will recollect the episode where Chip’s ’56 F-100 got the full Overhaulin’ treatment and came out of surgery with a passel of body mods and a glossy coating of Raven Black urethane.

In 2007 Chip was commissioned by the Ford Motor Company to lend some of his magic and design his vision of what a Ford F-150 FX2 Sport pickup should look like. The truck came out as the ’08 Foose F-150 and Chip got serial no. 1. Folks who have visited Foose Design at lunchtime when the shop is open to host tourists might recollect seeing Chip’s Foose F-150 parked in the driveway in front of the chain-link fence surrounding the shop complex.