A group of Ross High School/Butler Tech students who recently modified a truck won state and national prizes and are being featured in the March issue of Diesel World magazine.

The students reconfigured a 2003 Dodge truck by installing a tractor engine in it and turning it into what they called “Farm Boy’s Fantasy.”

The Ross High School/Butler Tech Engineering Design program senior project was the work of Jake Fritz, Nathan Gander, Zach Habermehl, Tommy Hall, Doug Loos, Alex Spade, Nick Zaenkert and Ben Warman. The instructor was teacher Eric Huhn.

“Everyone here told us we couldn’t do it,” Huhn said because a tractor engine is much larger than a truck engine and can’t simply be transplanted. But the students set about proving the naysayers wrong.

One of the biggest challenges was finding a transmission. The kind of engine the students were working on couldn’t take a modern computerized transmission, so they had to search for one that worked with hydraulics and finally found one dating back to the 1970s.

“We worked on it just about every weekend. We took it to my farm and worked in my shop,” Zaenkert said.

The seniors took a dented 2001 Dodge Ram pickup truck and replaced the engine with a diesel engine from a John Deere tractor. They also re-engineered the suspension system, installed a new custom interior and designed a unique paint scheme.

After it was finished, the class took it to competitions, winning prizes through the summer, including Gold at the National Skills USA competition in Kansas City, Mo., competing against 20 teams.

“It was a lot of work doing the presentations, but it was all just really cool and fun,” Zaenkert said.