Chevrolet K5 Blazer 2nd Gen

GM called this generation the Rounded Line, which is an odd name for the shape everyone else calls the squarebody. Both readings are fair: the panels are flat and the corners are square, but the edges are all slightly softened, which is why the trucks photograph better than their outlines suggest. The 1973 body is the more elegant of the two faces, with a single-bar grille, round headlights and a long unbroken flank. The 1981 restyle squares it up with stacked twin headlamps and a heavier grille, and the 1989 change to a GMT400-style face is the odd one, a modern grille bolted to a sixteen-year-old body. Details reward attention: the K5 emblems disappeared in 1988, and from 1987 the badging switched from C/K to R/V so buyers would not confuse these with the incoming GMT400 pickups. The half-cab of 1976 is the biggest visual change of all, adding a fixed roof section and a full rear pillar where there had been nothing but sky.

No factory Blazer competition programme is documented at any point in nineteen years. General Motors had stood outside official motorsport since the Automobile Manufacturers Association banned factory-supported racing in 1957, and unlike Ford, which walked away from that agreement in 1962 and promptly went desert racing with Bill Stroppe's Broncos, GM stayed out of it. So the Blazer has nothing to put beside the Bronco's outright Baja 1000 wins in 1969, 1971 and 1972, or the International SSII that took production four-wheel-drive honours in 1977. What it has instead is a second life as raw material. The squarebody chassis is cheap, immensely strong and endlessly modified, which is why it became a fixture of privateer desert running, rock crawling and short-course competition long after Chevrolet stopped caring, and why the racing that matters here happened in the hands of people who bought the trucks used. The Blazer's competition record is written by owners, and it is still being written.

The squarebody is the American truck the 1980s ran on, and the Blazer is its two-door open-topped face. These were the vehicles of ski towns, county sheriffs, ranches and construction sites, and they turn up in the background of nearly every American film shot outdoors between 1975 and 1992 without anyone ever making them the star. That anonymity has flipped completely. Squarebody culture is now one of the biggest movements in the hobby, with its own forums, its own restoration industry and its own aesthetic of two-tone paint and steel wheels, and the K5 sits at the top of it because it is the rarest and most charismatic shape on the platform. Chevrolet has kept the name alive on vehicles that have nothing to do with this one, most recently a crossover, which has only sharpened the affection for the original. The 1973-1991 Blazer never had a defining film role. It has something less glamorous and more durable, which is that a whole generation of Americans grew up in the back of one.

Owning one is mostly a conversation about sheet metal. Everything mechanical is cheap, understood and forgiving, and a well-maintained 350 will run past 200,000 miles without any special attention. The body is where the money and the time go: rear arches, cab corners, rockers, floors, the tailgate and the seam under the rear top all rust, and a truck that looks clean in photographs can be soft in every one of those places. The removable rear section leaks on almost every truck that still has one, and the seals are a perennial project. Fuel gauges read optimistically because the sending units corrode, wiper linkages seize, and the heater box is a weekend job to reach. Diesels need a healthy battery pair and glow plugs that actually glow. What owners say, over and over, is that the truck simply keeps going. It is heavy, it is thirsty, it is loud on the freeway, and it will start on a January morning and carry four people and a cord of firewood up a logging road.