ONE man has spent five years, and thousands of dollars, single-handedly recreating the iconic Warthog truck from the Halo video games. Bryant Havercamp, a phone technician from Michigan, built the incredibly-detailed replica completely by himself, using traditional fabrication methods, a 3D printer, and the frame of a 1984 Chevy K10. The fully street-legal recreation is based on a 3D model extracted directly from the Halo game, allowing Bryant to match the truck’s measurements to the in-game version. Bryant told Barcroft Media: “Most people when they see this thing are just absolutely floored with how realistic it looks."
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MotorTranscript
00:00Most people, when they see this thing,
00:03they're just absolutely floored with how realistic it looks.
00:30I'm the owner and builder of the replica of the Warthog from Halo.
00:51I've built this thing from the ground up completely solo on my own.
00:57Five and a half years of labor, thousands of man hours,
01:02thousands of dollars, and the few times I've nearly killed myself
01:06in the process of building it.
01:09I'm a big Halo fan. I've been ever since I first played it.
01:12This was back in like 2003.
01:15I'm trying to build this thing as close to the actual Warthog as possible.
01:22So the Warthog started off as this stripped-down 1984 Chevy K10,
01:45just an old-school 80s pickup truck.
01:48The engine is based off a 1984 Chevy 350, but I've rebuilt it.
01:56It's really exhilarating because it's like one of the most bad-ass things you can drive.
02:14If I had to put a top speed on this thing, I'd say 85 miles an hour, redlining it.
02:25Yeah, I was surprised when we first decided to do it and bought the truck
02:29and totally stripped it down to just about nothing and started over with it.
02:35I found it interesting.
02:37I didn't know if it would ever run, but it sure did.
02:43So, structurally, first I started with the roll cage,
02:46built the roll cage, got it all centered and everything where it needed to be,
02:50and then I built everything else with structural angle iron.
02:56The hood actually opens up like a snowmobile hood,
03:00which reveals a 350 Chevy that I built,
03:04carbureted with a quick-fuel carburetor, long-tube headers, Vortec heads.
03:10I built a completely hydraulic steering setup
03:13so that the power steering pump feeds a hydraulic orbital,
03:17which powers these hydraulic cylinders on the front.
03:22I had to put custom-made tusks on the front, those things you can't just buy in a store,
03:26so I had to build those things out of metal from scratch.
03:29It took me about two weeks of welding, grinding, and fabricating,
03:33but I came out with two fully realistic tusks that I welded to the front
03:38to give it that authentic Warthog look.
03:41You have to put blinkers on it, so that's what these little guys are, LED blinkers.
03:46And these are projection high beams,
03:49because you have to have high beams for it to be street-legal.
03:52Your normal headlights, the off-road lights.
03:55I used a 3D printer to construct some of the tricky bits,
03:58like the rear-view camera cover,
04:02different odds and ends like the covers for the front headlights.
04:07There's different things that are just hard to craft,
04:09so a 3D printer is actually the best way to go about it.
04:12So a lot of measurements went into every little angle,
04:15every piece of it, to make everything fit together.
04:19I'd say the hardest part about building this thing is probably the things I didn't expect.
04:25I've had to rebuild the engine three different times for different reasons.
04:33The dashboard is completely functional.
04:35There's a speedometer, there's a fuel gauge,
04:38there's button switches for all your lights and airbags, the heater.
04:43And these seats are actually racing seats I bought off of eBay.
04:48They're fitted with a four-point safety harness to keep you strapped in.
04:53Thus far, I've spent at least $10,000, $11,000 in material costs.
04:58As for the value, it's hard to say how much it would actually sell for,
05:02but ballpark figure.
05:04If it sold to a diehard halo fan, I could probably get upwards of $100,000, I think.
05:15Everywhere I seem to drive this thing, it turns heads.
05:18Pulling to a gas station, people are stopping to take pictures, asking questions about it.
05:22People may not recognize that it's a Warthog,
05:25but they just think it looks cool, so they want to take pictures.
05:29We were just pulling off the highway to use the gas station,
05:32and I saw it, and I knew exactly what it was.
05:34I told my wife, I was like, oh, there's a Warthog over there, we've got to go check it out.
05:38I grew up playing the first Halo.
05:42When I had it up and running, and for the first time ever,
05:46I was able to actually take it out on the road, take it for a test drive,
05:49and just the feeling of driving this unique, beastly-looking machine down the road
05:54that looks like nothing else, just puts a warm, fuzzy feeling in your heart.