Win a 550-HP 1979 Ford F-150 Ranger 4x4 Restomod + $23,000 Toward Taxes

What you're looking at

1979 was the last year of the "dentside" F-Series, the 1973–79 generation that has quietly become the cool one, and Ranger was the mid-level trim badge rather than a model. This truck keeps the shape and throws out almost everything else. Under the hood is a 5.0-liter Ford Coyote V-8 with a Power By The Hour control pack, a one-off cold-air intake and dual exhaust, quoted at 550 horsepower. Behind it sits a 6R80 automatic and — the detail that matters if you actually intend to use it — a gear-driven NP205 transfer case rather than a chain-drive unit, feeding a Ford 9-inch out back.

The rest reads like a well-funded build sheet: Rough Country suspension, four-wheel disc brakes, 17-inch KMC beadlock-style wheels wearing 35x12.50 Venom Power all-terrains, and a three-row aluminum radiator with a 16-inch electric fan doing the thinking that a 1979 cooling system never could. Outside it is High-Metallic Mocha Brown — a genuinely period-correct color choice instead of the default satin-black-everything treatment — with LED headlights, a true Lund visor and a smoothed rear roll pan. Inside, black on black, tilt column, digital gauges, Vintage Air and a Bluetooth stereo. Mileage is described only as a few miles since completion.

Why it matters

Dentside trucks have been climbing for years, and this is the version of the story most people daydream about: original sheet metal, modern drivetrain, air conditioning that works, and enough tire to make the 4x4 badge honest. A 550-hp naturally aspirated Coyote is well north of a factory Gen III's 460, so this is a built or aggressively tuned combination rather than a crate motor dropped in as delivered — the specific recipe and any dyno sheet aren't published, and that's the first thing worth asking about.

Be realistic about the rest of it too. The 6R80 is a stout transmission but it is working for a living behind that much power and 35-inch tires in a heavy four-wheel-drive truck. A lift plus 35s on a leaf-sprung dentside makes steering geometry and driveline angles something you want to inspect rather than assume. And these trucks rust in predictable places — cab corners, rockers, bedsides, the bottoms of the front fenders — so on any ground-up build the metalwork photos matter more than the paint photos. No builder is named anywhere on the listing.

The fine print worth knowing

Entries are donations to New Beginning Children's Homes, Inc., a 501(c)(3) (Federal ID# 27-5011514) that is also the named sponsor of the drawing. Tiers run from $3 for one ticket up to $5,000 for 7,200 tickets, so bulk buyers get a far better per-ticket rate than someone dropping in three dollars. There is a genuine free route: a handwritten mail-in request to the address in the official rules, and notably the rules give mail-in entrants the same bonus or multiplier entries as the best paid promotion running when the request arrives. Entries close at 11:59 p.m. Pacific on August 13, 2026, with the drawing on or about August 26. Odds are one divided by the total number of valid tickets entered, which means nobody knows them until the window shuts.

On the money: the sponsor pays $23,000 toward federal prize taxes, which helps but does not cover a six-figure prize at top-bracket rates, and it does nothing about state tax. There is a cash alternative of $85,000, reduced to $63,750 after $21,250 of withholding — take the truck or take the check, and the math there is worth doing before you enter. Dream Giveaway publishes past winners with their winning ticket numbers, and the rules reference an independent firm that selects the winner. Worth knowing for the charity-minded: NBCH is IRS-classified as a church, so it does not file a public Form 990 and Charity Navigator lists it as unrated for lack of published data — there is no public program-expense breakdown to check.