Silver Bullet

Packing 574Hp, This Glistening, Heavily Modified Two-Door Fj Is The Jewel In Pro Customs’ Crown.

- Carly Dale

MAN, this FJ is the bomb!” I accidentally say out loud, to no one in particular. I’m out scoping cars for both business and pleasure at the Adelaide Auto Expo, and I’ve just spotted a heavily customised humpy glistening under lights. This silver FJ is a fusion of new and old, with all the classic custom FX-FJ tricks – chop top, flip bonnet, rollpans, recessed number plates, two-door conversion – but in a classy, modern-style build.

I feverishly hunt around but can’t locate the owner. Thankfully, there are prominent Pro Customs flags right beside the beast, so I’m soon in convo with Anthony Lanzotti and his talented Pro Customs team, the builders of this amazing ride.

With a build of this calibre, there’s only one place to start, and that’s with a bare body. Anthony says they had the added fun of starting with a tinworm-infected example that had also received its fair share of knocks over the past 60-odd years. Thankfully they planned on binning a heap of it anyway, then modifying the rest.

Very little of this humpy remains untouched. The roof’s been chopped two inches, for that on-point, custom FJ look. Working lower, the Pro Customs crew have welded the back doors shut, then extended the fronts by 150mm using infill panels.

The forward-tilting bonnet kit is an AutoLoc product, but it required some serious tweaks to work with the FJ’s curvaceous hood. “The kit was designed to work with a flat bonnet, so it took a lot of mucking around to get it to work properly on the FJ,” Anthony says. “There are guides and rollers at the front and there was a lot of trial-and-error involved, but the owner really wanted it, so we went through the process. It probably took around 100 hours all up.”