Entering third decade in business, De-Elegant Model Truck Fleet goes the extra mile in perfecting rig replicas
In summer 2007 at the Walcott Truckers Jamboree, Iowa small fleet owner Mike Aschenbrenner met Chicago-based Kuenn McClinton, who spent an hour and a half photographing the interiors and exteriors of the Aschenbrenner fleet’s flagship 1997 custom Peterbilt 379, ARI big bunk and step deck. But the photographer wasn’t just any magazine shooter or garden-variety custom truck enthusiast. In 2006, his De-Elegant Model Truck Fleet company (de-elegantmodeltrucks.com) celebrated two decades in business building incredibly accurate, to-scale models of big rigs for their proud owners.
What started as “a hobby,” McClinton says, De-Elegant’s founder, is now a family business that got its start in part via the pages of Truckers News’ sister magazine Overdrive.
McClinton was born in Chicago but spent most of his childhood in rural Alabama, where he gained an uncommon interest in the culture and equipment of long-haul owner-operators. Back in Chicago in the early 1980s, he went to engineering school and afterward became a city cop for a short period, in the process taking advantage of his time on the highway to build a budding association with vanguard big-bunk sleeper manufacturer Double Eagle Industries in Shipshewana, Ind.
Since the early 1970s, when he was still in Roanoke, Ala., McClinton had “pestered,” by his estimation, Double Eagle founder Ray Miller for pictures of trucks and sleepers from which he would work. “Mr. Miller was very gracious,” McClinton says, though at that time Miller “had no idea who this little kid from Alabama was.”
Miller remembers many phone calls from McClinton and describes him as a young man uncommonly curious about the specifics of certain Double Eagle customers’ rigs – and their jobs, too. “I remember so well asking myself, ‘I wonder if this young man’s curiosity is shared by his dad, or how else would it be that the young man would be allowed to get on the phone for such frequent and lengthy conversations with me?'” Miller says. “After all, it would seem someone would have to be getting concerned when they see his phone bill.”
The intrigue continued as Miller and company began to hear stories from their customers about being pulled over by a young Chicago police officer on the highways into and out of the city. “The customer would begin by telling me how they were so upset and maybe wondering why in the heck they were even being pulled over in the first place,” Miller says, “only to have this young cop simply ask them if he could see the inside of their truck and sleeper.”
Miller would later learn, of course, that this young officer and the young man on the phone were one and the same.
