Quote:
Originally Posted by '68OrangeSunshine
Here's my guess: I am a Stagehand. Had my card for 28 years. Besides legitimate theater, touring shows, operas, ballets and rock 'n roll, we also do exposition work at trade shows. Not just setting up the boothes, tables and carpet, but also installing displays in certain clients' boothes.
Sometimes we get to take home stuff the client
wants to discard after the event. It's called "swag" in the trade.
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I agree.
Quote:
Originally Posted by '68OrangeSunshine
My guess is there was a big auto show in Vegas [in the late '60s] and the wooden mockup for the "New Breed Truck" was in the booth. When the show was over the clients [GMC, Chevy?] didn't want to ship the bed back to Detroit, so they told the stage hands to tip it in the dumpster, and caught a plane out of town. But one of the locals had a better idea and swagged it...
Mystery over.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by '68OrangeSunshine
'67 Model Year was pivotal. There may not have been a production example for a Fleetside in metal yet -- Mid 1966 ? -- when they needed a mock up for a big Vegas car show. Skilled Detroit fabricators could knock out what they called a ''Buck'' in very little time. Then it was mated to a Cab/Frame, and airfreighted to McCarren Field. Show over, it was ''acquired'' by a local stagehand [or Teamster] and stayed in Vegas.
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I realize this is all in fun, but - I can't imagine this scenario playing out.
The industry uses clay (over a Styrofoam armature) for the design studio activity, and fiberglass if it is going to move at all.
The "car" shown below is a fiberglass mockup mounted to a square tubing framework to allow it to be rolled straight forwards or backwards (it doesn't steer).
Plus - the timing doesn't work. We have driving, representative prototypes three and four years ahead of production, well before we would be sending properties to a trade show.
It's way easier to make a metal bed than it is the complexities of a pickup cab. It would be relatively easy, inexpensive, and short lead time to create soft tools (kirksite dies) and bang out ten or twenty bed side panels for prototype and show usages.
K