1977 Dodge B100 Tradesman Restomod Rocks Our Music Festival Dreams

Sometimes you walk past a classic van on the street and immediately buy it. Well, you sometimes do that if you founded Legacy Classic Trucks, anyway.That’s what happened with this 1977 Dodge B100 Tradesman, which has been restored and updated so it is now “exclusively made for partying.”A rebuilt 5.2-liter Chrysler 318 V-8 engine helps make the van road-trip worthy, while a large lithium battery can power the TV/VHS player and AC units for days.

Today’s popular music festivals don’t shy away from a 1970s vibe when it comes to tunes and clothes. If you want your wheels to feel right at home in that sort of environment, Legacy Classic Trucks might have you covered.

Legacy, a longtime vehicle restorer, often modifies old Dodge Power Wagons and Jeep Scramblers and works on national park buses. For this much hipper restomod endeavor, Legacy started with two things: a 1977 Dodge B100 Tradesman donor van and the idea that Coachella can be a verb.

The van came to Legacy Classic Trucks’ founder Winslow Bent when he happened upon it on his wedding day. The van was parked on a street in Chicago. Given the collection of old VHS tapes and an outlaw country music cassette in the tape deck, Bent purchased the van “on the spot,” Legacy said, with dreams of restoring it in time for him to drive it the 930 miles from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where his shop is located, to California for the music festival.

A Van Made for Partying

“There are few things cooler than a super clean, well-restored van,” Bent said in a statement. “Our new Legacy Tradesman van restoration is exclusively made for partying.”
That attitude explains the mix of new and old technology inside the van. The exterior has the same classic paint scheme but added a pair of moonlight windows in the back. Inside classic touches include a vintage TV/VHS player, disco ball, lava lamp, and orange shag carpet. From the modern era, there’s a lithium battery with enough energy capacity to power the TV, a beer cooler, an 18-speaker sound system, and a pair of air conditioning units for up to two days on a single charge, the company claims.

Motive power for the B100 comes from a rebuilt 5.2-liter Chrysler 318 V-8 engine that produces up to 450 pound-feet of torque. Bent and his team also replaced the brakes and suspension.

With this year’s Coachella festival and Legacy’s Tradesman restoration both complete, Legacy has now added Tradesman vans to its list of old things that can be made fresh again. Legacy’s Tradesman commissions start at $45,000.

For more dope vans from the 1970s, check out this list or head on over to Bring a Trailer, which, like Car and Driver, is part of Hearst Autos, to search for your own donor model. Or maybe you’ll find a ready-to-go option, like the custom 1973 Dodge Tradesman B100 that sold this past week for $24,000.

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Contributing Editor

Sebastian Blanco has been writing about electric vehicles, hybrids, and hydrogen cars since 2006. His articles and car reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Automotive News, Reuters, SAE, Autoblog, InsideEVs, Trucks.com, Car Talk, and other outlets. His first green-car media event was the launch of the Tesla Roadster, and since then he has been tracking the shift away from gasoline-powered vehicles and discovering the new technology’s importance not just for the auto industry, but for the world as a whole. Throw in the recent shift to autonomous vehicles, and there are more interesting changes happening now than most people can wrap their heads around. You can find him on Twitter or, on good days, behind the wheel of a new EV.