Star Attraction: Laurie and Linda Read’s International Loadstar

Words: Chris Smith · Photography: Mark Smyth

With an airbrushed mural on its tail “Blown Budget”, and an “Electric Orange” paint job the 1966 International owned by Laurie and Linda Read really looks the goods.

There is no denying the 1966 International Loadstar “Big ZZZ” owned by Laurie and Linda Read is a head turner. I first met Laurie and Linda at the Castlemaine Truck Show last year. They had entered their Loadstar into two categories, Best Custom Truck and Best Ute. Deservingly it won both its categories but left many confused to what it is.

The person behind the build is Andrew Henry. He works for Laurie in his company Belly Dumpers Australia, working in civil construction building roads. Andy, as he is affectionately known, has been with Laurie for 21 years and Laurie’s kids all know him as Uncle Andy. Laurie reckons people think Andy is his son. As Laurie says he’s not just a mechanic or an employee, he is family.

This sentiment came from Laurie’s dad Ian as well. When Ian died 13 years ago he left Andy an old International.

“In the will he gave that to Andy. After 12 months he decided he was going to hot rod it,” Laurie explains. He says it was this that got the ball rolling with Andy creating his first International rod. Laurie says he was proud of what Andy had done and they looked for another International project.

“We looked at the next project, we found an International AS and Andy restored it in his spare time,” Laurie explains.

It’s fair to say that between servicing 12 Volvos Andy often has spare time on his hands. When he’s bored he likes to tinker. Laurie says after finishing the AS Andy was once again bored and looking for another project. This time however the stakes were higher.

“He was getting bored again and he wanted something that was tough and something that no one else had, so we looked around for an old Loadstar,” Laurie explains. He says when they found one he was originally going to turn it into a prime mover. However Andy drove it around the paddock and said no to the prime mover idea and suggested he turn it into a ute.

Andy has got a somewhat second sight when it comes to building machinery and when Laurie came home from a big job he was confronted by a lot of ideas of what to do next.

“I was away working at the time and when I came home Andy had all these ideas, we had an old FM12 that had been smashed so we started using the diff and front end out of that,” he explains.

It was a case of sourcing as many parts as they needed to put the beast together. This is also the stage when the truck started to morph into a ute, when Andy put on a 1994 Dodge Ram tub.

The 56,000 lb diff on airbag suspension was thanks to the smashed FM12. The pieces kept on falling into place and even the 653 Detroit Diesel engine and Allison auto transmission was found in a bush.

“There was a mate of mine up in Drouin (VIC) who had an old ACCO, it was covered in 12 foot of blackberries,” Laurie recalls. “We went down and took it out and started it with jumper leads and a couple of batteries and it fired up straight away.

“He owed me a favour and I said, I’ll have that and I also got the Allison automatic on the back of it. We gave it a wash and a coat of paint and threw it in the truck and did nothing else to it,” he says.

Andrew did all the fabrication and a lot of the panel work. He did the extra dummy tanks that sit behind the real tanks. The dummy tanks sit at the back of the front two tanks and house the batteries and the air tanks. Making it look very truck like are the two 5” exhaust stacks. The very pronounced front grille is the original which has been slightly altered so it looks a bit different.

The cabin is painted “Electric Orange” like the Ford Focus. It was painted and panel beaten by Royans in Melbourne. They did all the paintwork.

The mural on the back “Blown Budget” was done by Race Paint. Finishing off the outside is the Texas bull bar. However such a cool looking ride wasn’t riding so well. It was pretty rough explains Laurie.

“We found that the truck rode too rough so we bought a couple of small air bags, which we stuck under the front springs, which made the ride much nicer,” he says. The whole job took Andy 12 months to complete in between working on keeping the Volvos on the road.

Laurie reckons it’s much better than buying something like a F650 ute. He is really happy with the end result and hopes that it can be used in some ads or events in the future.

Rear Vision: where are they now?

Do you know where this truck is today, or have an update on its story? We would love to hear from its owners, drivers or anyone who helped build it.