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“Cars and trucks have always been a big part of my life,” says Louis Guzzo of Livermore, California. “My dad was mechanically inclined, and he would get a different car every few years. I grew up just poring over the details of whatever the latest thing was.”
That interest in all things automotive led Guzzo to buy a ’57 Chevrolet Bel Air two-door hardtop in high school. Initially motivated by a 307ci small-block V8, he soon swapped that powerplant out for a livelier 327-cube mill backed by a TH400 automatic. “It had some Moon Discs on it, and I cruised around with it like that for a while.”
Later he stepped things up once again, upgrading to a small-block 383 that was paired with a five-speed. Over time the street machine was also outfitted with plenty of go-fast performance parts as well as a killer black paint job. Although Guzzo still owns the car, in 2017 the build reached what’s more or less its final form, so he started looking around for another project to take on.
“After high school, I had a ’70 F-100 long bed that I used for hauling work – I’ve always liked the Ford stuff, too,” he says. “Coyote swaps were starting to become popular with these trucks around the time that I was starting to look for something new to work on, and that combination really interested me.”
That triggered a search for a fifth-generation F-Series short bed, an effort which led to a ’67 F-100 for sale in Modesto, California. “It was in pretty solid shape – it had a straight-six with a four-speed behind it, and it ran,” he says. Guzzo brought the truck home and drove it as it was for a time while he put together the game plan. “I’d been talking to Roadster Shop about the Slammed SPEC chassis they had developed, and that ended up being the foundation for the project.”
See Holley’s big selection of parts for 1967-72 Ford F-100
He also started looking into what his options were for a 5.0-liter DOHC Coyote V8, eventually landing on a 460-horsepower Gen 2 crate motor from Ford Performance, which he paired up with a 6R80 six-speed automatic transmission. “Once I had everything in my garage, I started building the chassis and figuring out what modifications I’d need to do in order to run the lines for air suspension and so on,” he says. While he envisioned the truck as a fun street cruiser, much like the Bel Air, he decided to take a different approach with the F-100’s overall finish.
“I had this expensive paint job on the Chevy, and while it looked great, I found myself hardly driving it anywhere because I was always worried about it,” he says. “It was almost too nice. And patina trucks were becoming more popular at that time, so I decided to go that route.”
He refers to the F-100’s look as “faux patina.” “The paint that’s on it is something that my buddy Tommie Bryne and I came up with after we cleaned up the bodywork,” he notes. “The truck was originally Pebble Beige, and I liked that color, so I wanted to bring some of that back as well. We finished it off with a PPG satin clearcoat.”
Guzzo also shaved the emblems off the sides of the hood, sealed up the stake pockets in the bed, and fabricated the sheet metal surrounds for the exhaust exits through the rear quarters. “Since it’s on air bags and sits so low, we couldn’t really run the exhaust out the back,” he says. The bed floor also sits nine inches higher than stock to make room for the handsome 20-inch Detroit Steel D-Town Smoothie wheels, which are outfitted with hubcaps from a ’53 Ford. “Everybody was doing baby moons and stuff like that at the time, but I wanted something that had a little more design to it,” he says.
The truck gets its sinister stance from an AccuAir air suspension system that’s matched up with QA1 shocks, while stopping power comes courtesy of a Baer big brake kit. Inside, a bench seat and dash pad from TMI Products as well as a Vintage Air AC system and Dakota Digital gauges provide the F-100 with the creature comforts and modernity needed for the amount of miles that he planned to put on the truck.
“And that’s also why I chose to go with a set of Holley RetroBright LED headlights,” he says. “They’re much, much brighter than the factory headlights, and that was important to me because I do a lot of night driving with this vehicle on cross-country trips. And at the same time, they maintain that period-correct look.”
Guzzo put the finishing touches on his faded-but-fast bumpside in the spring of 2021, and in the time since, he’s driven the truck to the Grand National F-100 Show in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee and back no less than five times. The F-100 also earned Long-Hauler status on Hot Rod Power Tour and ventured out to Bowling Green, Kentucky for Ford Fest last year. He’s also taken the truck to a number of events both up and down the west coast as well as in other parts of the country, earning more than two-dozen awards along the way.
Looking ahead, Guzzo says he’ll be bringing the F-100 out to Tennessee again for the Grand National F-100 Show and heading out to Conroe, Texas for the Lone Star Throwdown, along with a number of other events across the country this year. And he’ll be using the F-100 to get to all of them, of course. “I don’t like trailering cars,” he says. “I like to drive them.”
He also tells us that this build is dedicated to his late wife, who sadly lost her battle with cancer in 2018. “The license plate is her initials and birth year, so it’s kind of like I’m taking her with me on all of these adventures.”
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