Eleven pages of SEMA show coverage...wow...can you believe that? And to think that we only scratched the surface! Chances are you've never been to the SEMA show because it's closed to the public as an industry-only event. The Specialty Equipment Market Association puts the show on every year in Las Vegas around Halloween time.
It's a huge show, covering untold numbers of square footage (okay, they do know how many square feet the show takes up each year...but if you want to know, go to www.semashow.com and look it up, as I'm not going to regurgitate the trivia here) and an endless sea of people looking at the hot cars, trucks, parts, and models.
Every year, the representation of eight-lug pickup trucks and SUVs is impressive. When people want to build a truck that really gets attention, they turn to a heavy-duty truck to do it. We saw more cool things than we can possibly show you. That's unfortunate, but we're doing our best by blasting out 11 pages in this issue. I shot a few photos, and my cohort, Larry Saavedra, shot a few, but the bulk of the assignment went to Joe Burnside.
Hailing from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Joe is an electrical engineer who absolutely, positively, undeniably, loves his diesel pickup truck. He has been a regular on DieselPlace.com and started getting comfortable with taking photos of his latest project and then writing about it. One day Joe was reading 8-Lug and my editorial said something vaguely along the lines of: "I need help, send me photos and info about your truck." At least that's how Joe retells the story. He thought about it for a while and then decided there was nothing to lose and he sent in a small story about installing an air intake on his truck.
It was OK, not great-but there was something there. This guy obviously had a deep love for heavy-duty trucks and he wanted to share that with others. I gave him a few pointers on the use of his camera, and a few more pointers on how to put the story together for a magazine format, and he went out and made it better. Just like that. Good Karma, I think.
Joe has done several stories for 8-Lug now, and you will be seeing them in these pages over the next few issues. Hopefully, he will stay busy and keep working at it so you will see lots of his articles. Anyway, Joe came out to Las Vegas and attended the SEMA show with his camera in hand and notebook at the ready. I'm happy to say that his work is equal to a lot of full-time professional automotive journalists. Well, not happy for those other guys, but happy for Joe.
Speaking of good work, we are particularly pleased with our Tribute Truck article in this issue. Mike Minter of Arlington, Texas, wanted to build a truck that looked like it would belong at the fire station. He succeeded brilliantly and we wanted to make sure our photo layout did it justice. We managed to convince one of the El Cajon, California, fire stations to let us take photos of the '09 Chevy in front of its building. Then the guys said they'd pull the big fire engine out for us if we wanted a better background. Then one of the guys suited up for the shot. It just kept getting better and better. When you put out the extra effort to make something nice, sometimes the Karma multiplies and it ends up even nicer than you had planned.
Now, I'm not sure what Brandan Gillogly had in mind when he scheduled a photo shoot with Kelly Bise and his '05 Dodge dualie, but the results are nothing short of spectacular. Brandan, the feature editor at sister publication Truckin', did not have to shoot this truck for us. He has no obligation to 8-Lug, and there won't be any kind of a bump in his bi-weekly check due to his consideration (I might, however, have to buy his lunch out of my own pocket after he reads this). Brandan just did us a favor. And he recognized that this truck was special and deserved a bit more attention than usual.
That Karma thing can be contagious.