At 10 feet tall, bright yellow and a gross weight of 33,000 lbs you will need a big sandbox to play with this TONKA truck that Ford recently made. They wanted to show off their new F-750 “medium duty” truck by igniting the imagination of every person who played with TONKA trucks growing up. Of course there are a lot of new features of the truck itself like the 6.7 liter Powerstroke diesel engine and runs and drives much quieter than previous generations. The dump bed on this behemoth TONKA truck is large enough to be the ultimate sandbox in which to play with the toys that inspired the truck itself.
It seems fitting in multiple ways that they chose TONKA for this special truck, as the origin comes from the Dakota Sioux word for “Big” or “Great” which is very fitting besides the obvious unbeatable toughness of TONKA trucks themselves. TONKA toys have a long standing history in Minnesota, the company was started in 1946 in Mound as Mound Metalcraft. The original plan was to make garden implements but their buildings former occupants had several toy patents and didn’t want to produce them and approached Mound Metalcraft about producing the toys.It wasn’t before long until Mound Metalcraft changed their name to TONKA Toys Inc. Choosing the name TONKA presumably due to the proximity to Lake Minnetonka. They are the go to toys for all kids for the last 60+ years.
While we wish Ford had plans to make this behemoth available to the child in all of us, we’ll have to satisfy ourselves with staring at pictures and the knowing that we can still have the scaled-down version that inspired hours of enjoyment.
