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Well, uh... yeah. Anyway, here's my interpretation of how one may have looked.
Hudson did in fact build pickups until 1947, and they did a 1/2 ton pickup prototype in 1948 based on a cut-down four-door car and a '47 Hudson bed. I built something similar with the '53 Moebius kit, but I still wanted to take it a little bit further as Hudson never did produce anything larger. So...
I started out with the '52 kit, which is identical to the '53 Club Coupe with NASCAR specific parts- not that that'll matter for this project!
The Step Down Hudson was a unibody car, so I did retain some of the stock frame and spliced in the rails from a '55 Chevy. Suspension parts were dredged up from the spares box. The car body was cut down and a new rear cab wall was cut from .030" styrene.
I sprayed the body in Rustoleum Oregano, and robbed a set of 8-bolt dually wheels from everybody's favorite dually wheel donor- Monogram's '91 F-350.
Here's the still in progress frame- you can see the Hudson's lower unibody frame in place. I figure if Hudson had really tried such a thing, they'd have tried to retain as much of the unibody structure as possible, to lower costs, and as a selling point for the truck. "Car-like comfort, structural rigidity, etc..."
The majority of the car's brightwork was removed, and I added some fender-mounted signals from an AMT clear amber sprue. I'm still thinking of adding some cab clearance lights. Not sure what kind of body I plan to use- I'm thinking of a wrecker or dump body. I'm designing the truck to aproximate the specs of a 1-1/2 ton vehicle, so it won't have anything too extreme back there.
The engine I may use is another what-if, it is an 'industrial' prototype Hudson six with an OHV cross-flow head.
