The 1985 Peterbilt 359 That Rewrote the Rulebook

Brought to you by J&L Contracting Heavy Haul | Owner: Malona & Jamie Williams | Built by Never Satisfied Builds

What Makes a Haul of Fame Legend?

Not every great truck earns a spot in the Haul of Fame. You can have a beautiful paint job, a polished engine bay, and lights that'll blind you from fifty yards — and still not make the cut. The Haul of Fame isn't just about pretty. It's about trucks that mean something. Trucks that push the culture forward. Trucks that make other builders go back to their shops and rethink everything they thought they knew.

To earn a place in the Haul of Fame, a truck has to do more than turn heads. It has to stop people cold. It has to represent real craftsmanship, real passion, and real ownership pride. It has to be the kind of build that gets talked about in the cab on long night runs, argued over in shop parking lots, and remembered for years after the show lights go down.

Outta The Ordinary doesn't just check those boxes. It is those boxes — and then about forty more nobody even knew to write down.

This is a Haul of Fame truck because it represents everything this culture stands for: a family that loves trucks, a builder who refused to settle, a crew that ground it out together, and a 1985 Peterbilt 359 that came out the other side as something the world had genuinely never seen. That's not hype. Ask anybody who walked the floor at Louisville in 2026. They'll tell you.

There's Buildoff Trucks — And Then There's This

Every year at the Mid-America Truck Show, the PKY Big Rig Build-Off raises the bar. Wall-to-wall, treetop tall — you know the drill. Chrome stacked on chrome, lights from here to Louisville, and enough custom fabrication work to make your head spin. But once in a great while, something rolls through those doors that makes even the most seasoned truck show veterans stop dead in their tracks and say four words nobody in this hobby takes lightly:

"I've never seen that."

That's exactly what happened when Randy Menkel and the crew from J&L Contracting's Never Satisfied Builds division out of Springfield, Missouri, pulled the wraps off Outta The Ordinary — a 1985 Peterbilt 359 that didn't just compete in the PKY 2026 Build-Off.

It won it.

And trust me when I say — the name says everything.

The People Behind the Build

Before we get into the truck itself, you need to understand where this thing came from — because the build is inseparable from the people who built it.

J&L Contracting has been a respected name in heavy haul and equipment transportation since 2005. One hundred percent family-owned and operated, they started by hauling equipment for Williams Construction and grew into one of the most trusted heavy haul outfits in the Midwest. These days they're moving machinery for major companies across the region, handling everything from permits and planning to safety protocols and transit logistics. When J&L shows up, the job gets done right.

Outta The Ordinary belongs to Malona and Jamie Williams — and the truck is a direct reflection of who they are. It's not a flashy investment piece or a show prop. It's an expression of genuine love for trucks, for the craft, and for doing things the right way. That ownership pride is woven into every weld, every panel, every decision that was made over hundreds of hours in the shop.

Never Satisfied Builds is J&L's custom truck division — and if you spend five minutes looking at this truck, you understand the name immediately. This isn't a crew that knows when to stop. They know what "good enough" looks like, and they keep going anyway. That's not a flaw. That's exactly the kind of relentless standard that produces something like Outta The Ordinary.

Randy Menkel is the man who brought it all together — part project manager, part fabricator, part visionary, and fully the kind of guy who will pull parts off three different decade-spanning Peterbilt models at two in the morning just because he knows it'll be cleaner. His crew backed him every step of the way, and the result is a truck that belongs in the conversation with the finest custom builds this industry has ever produced.

First Outing. No Problem.

For Randy and the J&L crew, the PKY Build-Off was new territory. These guys are no strangers to the Mid-America Truck Show — J&L Contracting has been a well-respected name in heavy haul and equipment transportation since 2005, 100% family-owned and operated. But competing in the Build-Off? First time out.

You'd never know it.

Randy will tell you the timeline was intense — burning the midnight oil for weeks leading into Louisville. But he'll also tell you something else came out of it: tighter bonds between the shop crew. When you're grinding and fabbing and problem-solving together at 2 in the morning, something special happens. And that spirit is all over every inch of this truck.

Over 300 hours of blood, sweat, and seriously creative engineering went into Outta The Ordinary. And when it was done, they didn't just clear the bar. They moved it somewhere nobody else can reach right now.

Under the Hood: Where the Magic (and the Madness) Begins

Pop the hood on most custom show trucks and you'll find beautiful engine work — polished, cleaned up, maybe some custom plumbing. Pop the hood on Outta The Ordinary and your brain just... stops.

Because almost everything you'd expect to see? It's gone.

Randy and his team started with a Cat 5EK — 650 horsepower of legendary Caterpillar muscle — and then proceeded to make it nearly disappear. The fuel filters? Moved behind the fuel tanks. The ECM? Behind the firewall. The injector harness? Frenched directly into the back of the rocker box. Every line that left the motor goes straight down into the frame and runs back through the frame rail. No spaghetti. No clutter. Just clean, purposeful engineering.

And while they were at it, they rounded off every sharp casting on the Cat block, plugged every unused bolt hole with an Allen-headed plug, and covered it over. If it ever needs to come back, they can grind it down and find it. That's next-level thinking.

Even the oil pan got the treatment. No drain plugs visible from the front — they were moved to the back of the pan. One plug, and that plug does double duty: it also houses the oil temperature sensor. Unplug it, drain it, done.

The power steering system? Integrated so cleanly you'd miss it if you weren't looking. And just for a little extra flair? The antifreeze is blue — Komatsu blue — because on a truck this detailed, every decision matters.

Engineering Firsts You Won't Believe

The front clip is where the real heavy lifting started. The stock 359 steering box sits clear back under the cab — a notorious challenge for anyone trying to clean up a Peterbilt's front end. Randy's solution? Change the whole front clip. They went with 379 frame horns, sourced a 389 axle stamp (originally from Randy's own Back in Black truck, ordered fresh with drum brakes to fit right), and made it work. One thing leads to another. That's the J&L way.

The cooling package is 379-spec, with the charge air coolers down low instead of over the top. That created a new problem: no room for the traditional assist lift cylinders. And Randy wasn't about to run hood rods. So what do you do?

You put a 19-year-old kid on top of the motor and let him think.

What came out of that conversation is what the team now calls the Ape Hanger — a one-of-a-kind hood support system with three points of rubber isolation: two on the air packages and one in the center. Never been done. Never been seen. Designed by a teenager with a fresh set of eyes and zero interest in doing it the way it's always been done.

The hood cables? Those are off a 2014 Dodge tailgate. Measured out exactly right, available at AutoZone, and probably the least expensive part on the entire truck. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest ones.

And if you're a Peterbilt die-hard fan, here's one for the record books: this truck runs parts from the 359, 379, 389, and 589. Every "nine" in the Peterbilt lineup, in one truck. Including custom air intake tubing sourced straight off a new 589 — and yes, they ordered new parts. Three 589s are sitting in the J&L lot, and they weren't about to rob them.

Legendary Lights: A Nod to a Good Friend

Roof cab lights on a show truck are a detail most builders think hard about. Randy had a conversation with a pretty good friend who made a suggestion: Legendary Extreme lights from 4 State Trucks in Joplin.

"Let's use some Legendary lights on this thing."

Done. The Legendary Extremes were fitted directly to the solid metal cab lights on the roof — not just mounted near them, fitted to them. And if that wasn't enough, there are 96 Legendary Extreme lights running underglow beneath the truck. Ninety-six. The underglow on Outta The Ordinary doesn't just light up a parking lot. It lights up a city block.

Down on the driveline cover, six Legendary Extremes run on each side — and true to the theme of this entire build, you can barely see how they're mounted. The bolts are almost invisible. The brackets disappear into the design. The lights just glow, like they grew there.

When you're building the finest custom truck at the biggest truck show in the country and you need lighting that matches that standard, you call 4 State Trucks. It really is that simple.

Inside the Cab: A Flat Floor, Four Speeds, and Internal Bleeding

Step inside Outta The Ordinary and the first thing you notice is the space. It feels like a different truck. That's not an accident.

Randy and his team flat-floored the 359 cab — eliminated the stock floor kickup entirely and went dead level. That's not a weekend project. That's roughly 240 hours of work to gain approximately two feet of legroom in a cab that was never engineered to provide it. They also took a 389 big hole, stretched it 3 inches on each side, and dropped it 3 inches in the center to capture every possible cubic inch of cab space. The result is a cockpit that feels open, purposeful, and completely unlike any stock 359 you've ever sat in.

The upper dash came out of a collaboration with Jamie Johnson at Rust 2 Rodz — conversations, sketches, hours of scrolling through reference photos, and a willingness to keep tweaking until it was exactly right. The lower dash was fabricated entirely in-house. The column is pulled from a 1995 379.

Floor-mounted air valves handle truck, trailer, and PTO — three valves, right in the floor, just like the old trucks used to have. It's a detail that sounds small until you see it, and then it hits you exactly right.

The transmission? Randy doesn't believe in close enough. The 5EK Cat is backed by an 18-speed transmission mated to a real four-speed auxiliary — not the fake overdrive setup that gets passed off sometimes. A genuine four-speed aux. That gives Outta The Ordinary 72 forward gears. In a 1985 359. Let that sink in.

Out back, 46,000-pound rear axles with full lockers on low air leaf suspension finish the driveline story. Those axles got tracked all the way to Denver to find them. When the truck they came off still wore an Alaskan license plate, Randy kept it. Because why wouldn't you?

Stepping Up: The 12 Gauge Stainless Step Boxes

Randy called on Jeff Battler at 12 Gauge Customs for these, and the choice makes all the sense in the world. These aren't polished aluminum boxes dressed up to look like something they're not. These are 12 gauge stainless diamond plate — and if you've ever stood next to real stainless and real polished aluminum side by side, you know immediately which one carries the weight of a build like this.

Stainless has a depth to it. A presence. It doesn't just shine — it holds its finish in a way that polished aluminum simply can't match over time. And on a 1985 Peterbilt 359 that's built to look like the finest version of exactly what it is, that distinction matters enormously.

Then there are the mirror brackets. On most trucks, mirror brackets are an afterthought — something functional bolted on and forgotten. Not here. Jeff built these out of 12 gauge as well, fully welded and hand-polished to match the step boxes exactly. No mix of materials, no visual inconsistency, no weak point in the story. They're solid, they're clean, and they look like they grew out of the cab rather than got bolted onto it.

And then there's the piece that pulls it all together — the hood insert. The grill insert was custom cut to match the heat shields on the exhaust, tying the front end of the truck into a unified visual statement that runs from the tip of the nose all the way back. When everything lines up — the insert, the heat shields, the exhaust, the stainless work — it stops looking like a collection of custom parts and starts looking like a single cohesive design. That's the whole game at this level, and Jeff Battler understood the assignment completely.

This is what 12 Gauge Customs brings to a build — not just individual pieces, but a thread of consistency that runs through everything they touch. On Outta The Ordinary, that thread is stainless, it's polished, and it's absolutely flawless.

The Sleeper: 400 Missing Rivets and a Clubhouse to Remember

The sleeper started life as a Double Eagle. It ended up as something Randy's team simply calls an Ever Satisfied Built Sleeper — which should tell you everything.

The only original pieces left are the corners, the roof cap, and the basic framing angle at the very bottom. Everything else was re-studded, rebuilt with steel three times the original thickness, bonded instead of riveted, and re-skinned into a seamless, smooth shell. Somewhere around 400 huck bolts are gone — replaced by bonded construction that's stronger, cleaner, and more solid than what came from the factory.

Sound? Carmil Car Audio in Springfield hit it hard: 30 speakers total, with racks of eight on both sides. Randy's direction to the stereo guy was simple: "I want internal bleeding." Mission accomplished.

The back wall of the bunk carries a plaque from Jamie Johnson at Rust 2 Rodz — marking this truck permanently as a PKY Build-Off truck. Because fifteen years from now, when somebody's looking at this rig and wondering, they'll know. That's the kind of thing that separates builders who are thinking about next week from builders who are thinking about legacy.

The Details That Separate Good from Legendary

A walk around the rest of Outta The Ordinary is an exercise in discovering things you weren't supposed to miss.

Fuel tanks from Luma Tank were spaced 2.5 inches apart with filler necks positioned on the inside — cleaner exterior lines, no visual interruption. The rear panel is a single piece of aluminum skin pulled from sheet stock wide enough that it takes a search across North America to source it. A custom jig was built specifically to bond it under equal pressure across the entire surface. The airbrushed pinstriping and hand lettering on that panel came from Nathan Curry out of Nix — work so clean it reads like it was laid down by a machine, then you get close and realize it wasn't. 

Fender mounting uses receiver tube brackets — slide-in, pin-and-clinch-bolt design that eliminates vibration and allows the fenders to be removed cleanly when needed. Randy had two guys swinging sledgehammers at those brackets for two straight days before he was satisfied they'd hold. They held.

The suspension hangers are fully boxed. All castings and part numbers ground smooth and gone. A custom hoop manages the hydraulic hoses. The fifth wheel is super long, polished, and — here's the detail that will get you — painted on the bottom side. Look up through the stainless deck plate and you'll see the same quality of finish underneath as you see on top.

The bottom side of the hood? Same story. Paint as clean underneath as it is on top.

Because on a truck built to this level, there is no such thing as "nobody's going to look there."

Somebody always looks. And on Outta The Ordinary, it's always going to be right.

Outta The Ordinary, Built to Last

The Haul of Fame exists to celebrate trucks that matter — rigs that carry real stories, built by real people, for reasons that go deeper than a trophy. Outta The Ordinary earned its place here not just because it won the PKY 2026 Big Rig Build-Off, though it did. It earned its place because of what it represents.

It represents a family — Malona and Jamie Williams — who believe a truck should be an expression of who you are, not just what you drive.

It represents a shop — Never Satisfied Builds, J&L Contracting — that lives up to its name every single time.

It represents a crew that spent 300-plus hours solving problems nobody had solved before, on a platform everybody said was nearly impossible to customize at this level, and came out the other side with something that genuinely moved the needle for the entire custom truck world.

And it represents Randy Menkel, who looked at a 1985 Peterbilt 359 and saw something the rest of us couldn't see yet.

Mucho respecto, Randy. Mucho respecto to the whole crew.

You didn't just raise the bar. You put it somewhere most people can't even see it from where they're standing. But that's exactly the way it should be.