Roadster Shop Builds Monster Chevy Colorado Prerunner

Beautiful fab work turns up on every inch of this desert-ready Chevy

The Roadster Shop in suburban Chicago is best known for its classic hot rod and muscle car builds. However, the shop also showed off their off-road building chops with this LS7-powered Chevy Colorado Prerunner build. This DIY Garage video documents the entire build from a bone-stock pickup to the finished, Baja-ready machine.

The transformation to ColoRADo started with removing the cab from the rest of the frame. The reinforced frame build comprises much of the timeline. When it’s done, however, the strength of the chassis looks like a work of art. With characteristically gorgeous fabrication work the Roadster Shop adds in some enormous fender flares that house giant, knobby 37-inch BF Goodrich T/A tires.

Those tires hang almost entirely outside the stock Colorado’s silhouette thanks to a supremely beefy suspension setup. The fab work on the custom 4130 chromoly suspension might be the real centerpiece of the whole build. The massive control arms and trailing arms allow for 22 inches of suspension travel in front and 27 inches in the rear. The Fox coils handle that massive travel to allow the Prerunner to traverse the desert at high speed. A set of Wilwood brakes with six-piston calipers round out the handling bits.

For power, Roadster Shop turned to Wegner Motorsports for an LS7 engine. The dry-sump engine includes a FAST intake, among other goodies, and puts out a healthy 730 horsepower. That power gets to the ground via a 4L80E transmission and Currie free-floating 9-inch differential. That should give plenty of oomph to the ColoRADo and allow it to make it from stage to stage without issue.

The detailed build photos complete the picture of a gorgeous Prerunner that was basically scratch-built. The cab looks to be the only remaining stock bit on the car.