When you have time on your hands, especially time that's forced upon you by an unexpected injury, most wouldn't be able to find the strength to get more done than when you were totally whole. After Bruce Rivera did a broadside dance with an F-150 (damn fullsizes) in February of 1999, he found himself in a coma for two weeks.
When he came back to consciousness, Bruce found that he'd been pretty banged up. With severe trauma to the brain, a busted-up right arm, a handful of broken fingers, a missing digit on his right hand, and a shattered right femur, he wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Even with all of this against him, he worked on healing himself and eventually got into rebuilding his former love, a '94 Isuzu that he'd only recently bought back from a deal that fell through to sell it. With a still banged-up body, Bruce waited just long enough to be able to walk with a gimp, trying to save up enough dinero to get into rebuilding his truck into what it is today: one bad mother. Today, both are healed up nicely. The Isuzu now takes home trophies just about everywhere he takes it, and these days, you wouldn't even notice that Bruce has been through hell and back to get here.
MT- Hey Bruce, you got a few minutes to chat with me?Bruce: I'm kinda busy right now. What up?
MT- Uh, nothin' bro. I just wanted to talk to you about your truck. I got the film from Joe Greeves today from the cover shoot. I think we have a winner here.Bruce: You mean I don't have to drive all the way to the other side of this friggin' continent to get my truck shot? All right!
MT- Yeah, bro, the stuff looks really good. You're going to be sporting wood for a long, long time, even without a mega dose of Viagra. So, you got a few minutes to talk now?Bruce: Hell yeah! Whatcha' wanna know?
MT- Well, since I've known you for a few years now, let's trip on down memory lane for the sake of our readers, shall we? Let's talk about when you sold this truck and got it back again. Hello? Is the swelling off your brain yet?Bruce: Dude, it's Monday, give me a break. OK, I sold the truck to a friend of mine who got it featured the first time in Mini Truckin' and took all the credit for it. Later, this special person decided not to pay me for the truck. Before the truck could be repossessed by the finance company for nonpayment, I repossessed it my damn self. I found it in a parking lot with the paint and graphics slashed to bare steel, the interior all cut up, all of the stereo components thrashed, the batteries dead, laying frame without the means to get off the ground, and it had a pair of bent wheels.
MT- Oh man! Was there any bloodshed?Bruce: No there wasn't, even though there probably should have been. I got into my bike accident shortly thereafter, so I wasn't exactly in any position to be bustin' out the whoop ass, you know?
MT- So, when you healed up enough, what did you do first to get the truck going back in the right direction?Bruce: It was a good year and a half before I was able to work on my truck again,but I guess the first thing I did was to swap out the old suspension (some crappy trailing arms that the interim lucky-to-be-alive owner had installed) for a triangulated four-link. After that, I had a 3-1/2-inch body drop done by Art of Noise in Lake Worth, Florida.
MT- I bet that when you saw your ride laying body that you really started to feel as though you were getting somewhere, right? I know that when I saw my Dakota laid out on its pinches the first time, I nearly crapped my pants.Bruce: I never thought of my truck like it looked. It was like...whoa!
MT- Damn, dude, you're a friggin' wordsmith, aren't you? Do you usually use sign language? Sign me some more information, bro, our readers are getting lost.Bruce: Alright, I'm going to lay it down for you right now pal. You'll be telling me to shut up if I start flowin' everything about my ride. You ready?