THE BULLDOG

Making Everthing Else Look Like The Flea-bitten Varmints They Are

CHRIS SHELTON

IN 2017, RANDALL ROBERTSON, FOUNDER OF RTECH FABRICATION IN COEUR D’ALENE, IDAHO, DEBUTED A CHEVY TRUCK THAT KIND OF CHANGED EVERYTHING. Named The Duke—an homage to John Wayne—the Cumminspowered ’72 crew cab with the stubby nose is big, bold, uniquely stylish, and has tons of swagger. If a truck could single-handedly stop a fistfight in a saloon or steal your girl, The Duke would be the one to do it.

“He’d just finished The Duke and it was at SEMA,” recalls Ramiro Rodriguez, who commissioned Randall to build another four-door a year or so prior. “Randall invited my brother and me to go see The Duke. Man, it’s a beautiful truck.

“Well about a week later, Randall forwards this photo to me,” he continues. Someone Photoshopped The Duke as a Blazer, something Randall admits he was already itching to build. “Randall’s like, ‘It’s gotta be built and I’m gonna build it.’ And I said, ‘Well I gotta have it.’ And that was that. Within a week he was working on it.”

An Rtech truck looks a lot simpler than it is, which partly explains why Randall moved almost every operation in-house. The crew-cab doors in the other builds, for example, aren’t Suburban pieces. “They’re actually too short if you want any back-seat space,” Randall notes. So Rtech makes them from conventional pickup door components, fabricating a bunch of stuff that nobody will ever see.

But the lack of two extra doors doesn’t make Ramiro’s Blazer— nicknamed Bulldog for its stocky stance—any less complicated.

Because the medium-duty cowls and firewalls differ so greatly from light-duty parts, Rtech based Ramiro’s Blazer on an actual medium-duty cab.