Pat Callinan's Dream Ford F-150 Build

Over the years there’s been no shortage of interesting 4X4s parked in my driveway. For me, at least for the last 25 years, a decked-out go-anywhere 4X4 has been a tool of the trade. Wrap-around awnings and induction cookers are just par for the course when feeding a hungry crew a hundred kays down a dirt road for weeks on end. Sure, I put a lot of effort into how they look (in no small part to the good-looking kit I partner with), but they’re always function over form. At least until this rig.

You see, I’ve been lusting after an F-150 since before I could walk. Some of my earliest memories are playing with a little orange F-150 Matchbox car in the dirt, pretending I was off on a faraway adventure. So, when Ford came to me and asked me to be part of the Australian launch I was near beside myself. A 4X4 I’ve wanted my entire life, and I was about to get the opportunity to do whatever I wanted with it. To build something just for me. The Ranger and the Everest had already ticked all the boxes we needed so I could have a little fun here. Enter, ‘Project Thirst Responder’. Hey, it’s a big red truck designed to cure your thirst, whether that thirst is for beer, water, coffee or even gin and tonic!

First things first, it needed a stance that’d be more fitting of an F-150 wearing the Mr 4X4 plates. A big set of 35in Rugged Trek muddies from Cooper Tires, 20in KMC “Wrath” alloy wheels with a zero offset, a suspension lift from the team at Outback Armour. I’ve gone for the adjustable shock absorbers on this build, and the transformation as you dial them up and down is really quite brilliant. Around town for a plush ride, you dial them down (I tend to run them five clicks from the left). But then on high speed dirt or over the rocks when you want maximum control, wind them up for more control. I settled on seventeen clicks to the right, and found it to be a nice option through the Flinders Ranges. Yet what really surprised me with the F-150, was the lateral stability. No doubt a combination of the slightly wider stance and the Outback Armour setup, you could really throw the rig into the corners, and she’d sit flat and firm all the way through. No rocking and rolling, despite having a rooftop tent and solar panel at the upper extremities. The wider wheels and changed offset necessitated some 50mm Bushwacker pocket flares which I grabbed from Upfitter, and they certainly got the F-150 looking the part.

Pop open the tailgate (it’s electric, how cool is that?) and inside the custom-built ORS storage system is a full-blown beer keg full of Mountain Culture’s finest ale called APL, plumbed into a Kegland beer tap system called the ‘Benchy’. It can run on 240 or 12 volts, and of course I’ve got it plumbed up to 12-volt. The unit has two taps, so one feeds from the 50-litre commercial beer keg, while the other feeds from a 9.5-litre mini keg, which at the moment houses my personal gin and tonic mix. However, you could easily throw whatever you like in that mini keg – espresso martini ladies? The team at Westside Auto Electrics in St Mary’s opted to swap the 12-volt ciggie socket over to an Engel plug for the Benchy, to ensure it won’t fall out over the bumps. I had the whole setup put on a Bedslide from Upfitter to make accessing all the ins and outs easier. Offroad Systems (ORS) even mounted spots for my schooner and coffee glasses. And that’s where this unit really does come into its own. That giant beer keg eliminates the waste from 6.5 cases of beer. And the gin and tonic keg also saves on even more rubbish. The result on the road is brilliant – we generated around one quarter of the waste we normally would.

The Engel MT-V60 is a fridge / freezer model that looks new, butisn’t. It’s a five year old model that I had kicking around my crew car for years. I sent it off to Emu Plains Smash Repairs and they expertly bogged and sprayed it the same colour (Rapid Red) as the rig. And gee, it looks great. Engel supplied some new stickers to complete the look.

It's got a whole bunch of the usual bread-and-butter mods like the Night Hawk VCT driving lights up front. You can vary both the intensity of the output as well as change your colour temperature, from a piercing cool blue right through to a warm yellow light. The comms are sorted via a Uniden Xtrak UHF which boasts a replay function (which I love). But the electrical system is where the Thirst Responder really shines. There’s two 200Ah lithium batteries at the heart of the system and they’re kept charged by REDARC’s brand new Alpha 100. It can bang power into the batteries faster than you can say ‘I’m charged”. What used to take 5-6 hours of driving, now takes an hour or so. And the RedVision system controls the everything, from the dimmable Night Hawk camping lights to giving me the ability to turn on the Benchy beer chiller from inside the cab or even on my RedVision App. It keeps both batteries topped up either through a 240v hookup if we pull up at a caravan park for the night, 12v while the F-150 is running, or 180w of solar through the panel up top on the Bushwakka tent. There’s a pair of REDARC’s RedVision screens, one mounted up the back and a second on the dash that let me monitor charge levels, run the Night Hawk camp lights etc, and a 3000W RS3 inverter from REDARC that gets used on the road to charge camera gear and run the induction cookers, coffee machine, pizza oven or even the air fryer.

But back to the Alpha 100. One of its finest features, is that it allows the starter battery to be charged from your auxiliary batteries! You simply hit the ‘Recovery’ button, and within a few minutes your flat starter battery is replenished. No more ‘walk of shame’ with the jumper leads haha.

Like the Everest and the Ranger, the build sheet on the F-150 meant it had to go through a specialist insurer (a.k.a. Club 4X4 Insurance) to make sure it was actually covered if the worst was to happen either out on the road filming or back at home. An insurer that puts price over product is never going to understand.