Amphib Alaska Frogtruck

The Amphib Alaska Frogtruck is a home-built amphibious truck made by Stan Hewitt, aged 77 at the time it was featured by Popular Science. It was designed to cope with the mud flats, bogs, ice fields, snow slopes, rivers and lakes of the Alaskan tundra, and was described as the first amphibious vehicle able to fully retract its drive assembly.

Design

The truck weighs about 2.5 tons and runs on rubber tracks about a foot (30 cm) wide, which can be raised clear when afloat. A 260 hp Chevrolet Trailblazer engine drives both the tracks and an outboard-type propeller drive. Top speed is quoted as 30 mph (about 48 km/h). Building it took two years and cost around $130,000. It is painted green.

History

Hewitt's earlier amphibian used ten wheels instead of tracks and managed only about 10 mph (16 km/h) on land and 7 mph (11 km/h) on water. In 2004 he decided to redesign the vehicle around the fully retractable rubber-track layout. Photographs in the archive, dated February and May 2008, show the instruments, the outdrive, the tracks raised, and the vehicle leaving the water at Ward Cove and on its trailer.