These Guys Are Building An Off-Road Chopper Using Comically Huge Mud Tires

It’s fun to experiment with putting flavors together, isn’t it? There are the classics, of course, like banana and Nutella, peanut butter and jelly, or tuna salad and melted cheddar. Then you have the things that maybe shouldn’t work but do, like green grapes and hummus (trust me, and please try it sometime).  

If there’s one thing that Grind Hard Plumbing Company is about, it’s building whatever makes their bonkers hearts happy. It doesn’t matter if no one’s done it before, or if conventional wisdom says it’s probably going to be a terrible idea. To them, at least half the fun seems to be in the planning and execution of the project. How it works in the end is somewhat important, but it’s the journey and the problem-solving along the way that are the true party pieces of their builds. 

Some time ago, they built a unimog that rolled on a set of four 46-inch (you read that correctly) Mickey Thompson mud tires. It was powered by the V-twin engine out of a KTM 1190 Adventure. As you’ll see at the beginning of this video, it turned out quite well. It looks out of its mind in the most wonderful way—but of course, the best part is, it operates pretty flawlessly. 

When you’re a group of friends who likes to build things, though, sooner or later you find yourself recycling your old builds into something new. That’s the thing about having a DIY personality, regardless of whether you build vehicles or something else. Sooner or later, you start repurposing your old material in your mind. After that, it's not long before you can’t stop thinking about how that new, exciting project is going to turn out.

Thus, the GHPC’s newest project, which will apparently be an off-road chopper that uses both the 1190 Adventure engine and two of those four 46-inch mudder tires. It’s going to be long and involved, and it’s going to involve a lot of fabrication work. The back half of this video is spent getting a general feel for the layout of the thing after liberating the necessary components from that previous completed build.  

The plan at this point is for it to be a winter project, precisely because it’s going to be so involved. How will it turn out? They’re expecting the handling to be a nightmare and may end up incorporating power steering just because those tires are going to be so difficult to turn. Making a map of uncharted territory is half the fun though, right? This will no doubt be an interesting build to keep an eye on.