Watch a Master Mechanic Turn a Non-Running Honda Pickup Into Evil-Looking Mini Monster

That's why we're paying tribute to these people on autoevolution with a month dedicated to their DIY work. It means doing all the work to build a custom car yourself, because people have families to feed outside of their hobbies. Mad4Motors on Youtube is one of those people that takes this quote to heart, and then some.

To most people, a rusty, non-running early 2000s Honda Cab-Over Pickup is nothing remotely worth fixing up and making look beautiful. But when you know what you're doing, the only limit is your own vision. First thing's first, something was going to have to be done about all the tree pollen, and another miscellaneous crud may have caught itself on the Honda's paint job.

Nothing a little pressure washer action can't solve, visually satisfying stuff, to say the least. Once done, the master DIY mechanic shows off the chunky all-terrain tires he has planned for his ride. If your idea of a tune is modifying a car up to its eyeballs and flashing its ECU, remember that a tune can also be as simple as fitting a pair of fancy spark plugs to make a non-running truck smoke back to life again.

It's hard to say for certain what kind of engine sits under the cab of this truck. But before work on that can begin, he'd need to lift the truck. He does this by adding a custom lifting kit which he shows us being welded together with ease and poise that only comes from years of practice. The resulting 45 mm or so (1.7 inch) suspension lift will accommodate the new, chunkier rubber with room to spare.

M4M doesn't take his truck to the local body shop to fix his Honda's rust patches and dents throughout the hood and the quarter panels. Instead, he chooses to fix them himself, in an absolute Alpha-male move. He even removes the whole front clip to sandblast little spots of rust before the truck ever touches a paint sprayer. The job he does using a body-shop bonding agent and a ball-peen hammer to remove the dents throughout is an old-fashioned art form that we love to see carried on to young viewers.

Even the rear pickup bed is given a salon-like treatment with the full assortment of sanding, buffing, and rust correction. It's great to kick back and watch as years of use and abuse at the hands of workers and weather disappear under a constant torrent of microscopic sand particles reducing the rust to the same atoms Thanos turned the infinity gauntlet into.

The dented rear of the truck bed was fixed by attaching a hook to the underside and slowly pulling on the metal until it un-furls like crumpled sheets pulled flat over a mattress. So to say, it looks a lot more effortless than it almost certainly is.

Once that was all done, it was time to crown this king of the Kei-trucks with a menacing matte-black paint job. And because M4M likely didn't want to ever go to town on this truck with a sandblaster again, he added another layer of textured truck bed lining onto the paint on the truck's bodywork.

While a head-scratching choice initially, to say it's made the truck look ready for the next Overlanding adventure is an understatement. Even the plastic front fascia gets the textured liner treatment all around. When the new wheels and all-terrain tires finally find their way onto their new host, the build comes together to make for one of the most striking and stunning transformations we've ever seen a little Kei-car undergo.

What was once a truck that some would deem ready for the crusher now looks ready to accompany the next Overlanding trip. Imagine how smug one must feel if this little truck skips rugged trails along while bigger SUVs get stuck.

The final triumphant shots we see of the completed truck fill us with the kind of satisfaction that can only come when someone who takes the "Built, not bought" mentality to heart and actually pulls through in making their project look like several million bucks. This isn't the only vehicle M4M's touched on his channel, but you can find more on that there.