Heavy Metal Special:
We certainly didn't see it at the time, but in retrospect, October '83 may have marked the epitome of lameness in the annals of Four Wheeler history. The theme of the issue was (gasp) "How To Chrome Your Truck", and our cover rig screamed "What's Wrong With This Picture?" with chromed leaf springs and shackles (ugh), chromed double steering stabilizers (double ugh), chromed steering linkage (triple ugh), and chromed front lift blocks. (What on earth were we smoking that month?). Anyway, the rest of magazine wasn't much better.
Included here for your pleasure is our "Pick the Winner of the Custom Bumper Contest," in which we recruited several aftermarket companies to fab up some one-off rear bumpers for us (using lots of, yep, chrome), and a story on rollover tech ("Roll Over But Don't Play Dead") that wouldn't see the light of day in our magazine now. But heck, we're happy to remember the carefree days before liability lawyers strangled all our worst project ideas in their infancy, so here's a slice of what we were doing the same month that the U.S. defeated the army of Grenada (okay, so it was kind of a lame month for everyone).