FULLY UTILISED

HARDWOOD ROD & CUSTOM TURNS DARREN ISON'S HAND-ME-DOWN HT INTO A SMOOTH OPERATOR

-  JACK HOULIHAN

DARREN Ison can trace his HT ute's story back though three generations, in one way or another. "My old man always wanted an HT ute, but his dad would go, 'Why do you want one of those old piece-ofshit cars?"" he laughs. But Darren's dad was adamant, and if Granddad could see what that ute looks like now the Meguiar's Superstarsproven toughie on these pages - he might sing a different tune.

Darren's dad bought the ute as a driving-but-unfinished deal in Melbourne and shipped it home to Queensland. "It had a 308 and four-speed, so we got it running a bit better and did a few things - rebuilt the front end and whatnot," Darren says. "Being an old car, it still drove like a bag of crap, as they do. Dad just didn't really have time and sort of lost interest in it. One day he said to me, 'If you wanna do something with it, go your hardest!""

The ute had some history as an old-school custom, most clearly evidenced by the flared wheelarches it still wears. "There was a lot of bog in it," Darren says. "In the 70s and 80s, they just bogged things and smoothed out the lines. It wasn't done real great; the more we dug into it, the more surprises we found, but that's just old cars, isn't it?"

Although based on the Sunny Coast, Hardwood Rod & Custom (aka Tony, Danielle, Corey and Jesse Wilkins) has a long-standing connection with Darren's native Chinchilla. The team had done a bang-up job on a ute belonging to one of Darren's mates, so for him, it was a no-brainer to let Tony and the Hardwood crew take charge of whipping his HT into shape. They had a big hand in deciding the final look and layout of the ute, and Darren doesn't regret that an ounce.