About Us
I’m Billy and I’m the man behind McKinnon’s Cruisers. I started McKinnon’s Cruisers after I built my 1984 FJ 45 Troop Carrier for our wedding in 2016. I had a lot of interest in the build, people started following along on the progress of it and after it was done we were approached by many people to build cars just like it. The build of the Troopy is the reason we are where we are today. It’s the car that put us on the map and the car behind the McKinnon’s Cruisers brand.
As a kid my Dad was always in to cars, to this day he still is. We would spend hours down in his shed working on them. He had a lot of old cars, but they were mainly 40 Series Land Cruisers, shorty’s, ute’s and troopy’s. I guess this is where my love for them began. The utes were his work horses for his maintenance business and his shorty’s were his toys. We would always be swapping V8’s into them.
After cars being a big part of my childhood, in my high school years I tossed up between becoming an apprentice Motor Mechanic or Carpenter. I decided to go down the Carpentry rout and left at the end of grade 10 to pursue that. The cars never stopped though, I always kept them as a hobby. I would either be working on cars or out driving them every chance I would get. So, in 2010 I built my first 80 series chassis swapped 47 series. Back then there was nothing around like it. I had found a car that had been built in America and it sparked the ute to come to life. From then on, I bought and swapped cars, filled our paddock up with wrecks and continued to tell my wife, what’s one more! The hobby I once had quickly spiralled into what is now McKinnon’s Cruisers and there is no looking back.