If you’re a business professional, you almost certainly have a business card. But if you’re in the business of building custom cars, your “business card” is your portfolio of previous projects. Unfortunately, it can be hard to get noticed in an increasingly crowded field of professional builders and fabricators, so you have to come up with something uniquely cool and special to stand out in the right way.

In an effort to stand out from the crowd, Seattle-based Northrup Fabricators took a 1937 International truck and turned it into the Trophy Rat. Part rat rod, part race truck, it’s a four-wheeled example of what Ken Northrup and his crew can really do.

While the cab may be borrowed from a 30s International, and the LS6 engine plucked from a C5 Corvette, the rest of the Trophy Rat is pretty much a custom job. Ideally built as a daily driver that can still exceed the performance of your typical rat rod, Northrup may have gone a teeny bit overboard when giving the Trophy Rat 14-inches of suspension travel.

A project two and a half years in the making, Trophy Rat features plenty of high-tech goodies beneath its rusty cabin, including 2.5-inch King shocks, a Racepak IQ3 dash, and a four-link rear suspension. This is absolutely one of the coolest builds we’ve seen in awhile, a true passion project that does what it does rather well. It’s this kind of fresh attitude and ideas that make us love our hobby, and enthusiasts like Northrup who can bend steel and rubber to their whims are what make this hobby great.