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I first caught sight of this thing when I was cruising in the middle lane of I-10 at the speed limit and I got passed by what appeared to be a very fast green farm tractor on the highway. What the . . .? Catching a glimpse of a guy with his beard being speedily dragged backwards, I immediately thought, “That’s Ralph.” I didn’t know why he was driving a tractor on the highway or how he got one to go so fast, so a while later, I went over to his shop, Armadillo Cycles, to find out just what the hell was going on.

Pulling up to his shop, where the sign in the window says, Sorry ― We Are Open, I could see the John Deere green and yellow trike parked alongside the shop next to a pocket bike, another just-started trike project using a CBR 600 frame stuck in the middle and capable of carrying a hell of a lot of people for some reason, a new Big Dog, a trailer with a future-build bicycle trike chopper inside, and an old chop with a beer keg implanted where the engine used to be. Yup, I’d reached the right place.

After a photo shoot and getting to hear this thing run (hard to miss standing beside it coming through those straight-pipe twin flapper stacks at ear level) I asked Ralph how this all came to be. Like most things strange, it involved adult beverages. “We was drinking tequila one night and I came up with the idea. I grew up on a 1,100 acre ranch in Wichita Falls and I thought that it’d be a nice dedication to my grandfather and my grandmother,” said Ralph. “My dad, James Sellers, was a trike builder too and it just came together in my mind that night. Way back when, my dad cut a Volkswagen in half, put a front end on it, welded it up and as soon as it looked like it’d run, he fired it up and drove it across the U.S. He passed in 2006 so it’s a dedication to him too.”

Ralph had previously built a trike with his dad, but even though he’s a diehard old Harley guy, he said, “I wanted something faster, something bigger, something weird, something neat, and something different. We already had the 350 Chevy engine, I’ve got two or three engines lying around, and I already had a Turbo 350 tranny.”

Most of the stuff to build this trike around the engine was as close as Ralph’s shop as he described the rolled tubing frame as “made from a little bit of everything.” The bodywork, and in this case I do mean bodywork as there’s quite a bit of it, features a real tractor hood if that’s the correct tractor term. “The hood is actually a Ford 9N, the one with the inspection door on top, that was laying in a field in Chaparral [New Mexico]. The rear fenders are just trailers we widened a bit. The box in the back was just something we hand built pretty much,” said Ralph. ”The steering is out of a race car and the steering wheel is just some custom wheel we had.” The straight axle rear is suspended by dual coil-over shocks of undetermined origin and has Centerline wheels shod with 295/50×15 tires featuring street legal tread-depth and seem to hold air pretty well. That’s about all Ralph seems to care about them. Up front a set of chromed four-inch-over inverted forks hold a 16” late ‘80s style sportbike wheel with a pretty hefty dual-disc setup to complement the rear drums. Check out the left-side dash for the front brake controls, actually pretty simple and clean. The single-spring seat is, to quote Gomer Pyle, “Surprise, surprise, surprise,” off a tractor and Ralph did the recovering himself without any intentions of cutting Alligator Bob’s grass. “It works and it’s pretty comfy,” said Ralph.

Getting it into the livery you see here was not as easy as just having Chaparral’s Wild Bill Grable lay on the John Deere trademark green and yellow graphics and paint. “When I called John Deere to use their name, they said, ‘You can use our name as long as you don’t use our name to make money as a primary deal. I still have the letter they sent. If I sell it, I have to take their name off of it,” said Ralph. “You’d be surprised at the people that are John Deere collectors. My God, they go nuts over anything John Deere. We take it to Roswell to the UFO fest every year and they go nuts. We shot a video in the parade there with David Blaine. September 24, 2008 it came out on TV with David Blaine.”

As far as how it drives, Ralph paraphrased the John Deere slogan and said laughing, “It drives like a Deere. At a hundred, it runs real good, it’s smooth. It’ll probably do 120, though, it still had more throttle to go.” Drive it he does too as he said, “I drove it from El Paso to Wichita Falls, 580 miles, and another 120 to Dallas and then back. I’ve also driven up to Oklahoma City.“ At this point, Ralph’s mechanic Mike cuts in, “What about the time you drove it in the snow?” Ralph replied, “Oh yeah, I was driving in the snow up in Ruidoso, New Mexico. After that, I was going to mount a ski on the front and snow chains on the back, but the chains wouldn’t fit ‘cause the fenders are too close to the tire.”

It was quitting time at the shop and Ralph said before leaving, “It’s been a blast. It’ll get up and go. Kinky Friedman’s signed it, David Blaine’s signed it, but it all faded off. Jay Leno’s got a picture up of it in his museum. It only took three months to build, fastest we’ve built anything.” Then in true Ralph tongue-in-cheek style he added,” We do it real fast no matter how long it takes.”

Contact Ralph at armadillomc@att.net or call 915-759-7573.