VIDEO: Driving To New Heights

LOWNDES CO., Miss. (WCBI) — A purple jungle gym on wheels is the best way to describe it from the outside.

When you’re inside, it’ll take you on a ride like you’ve never experienced before.

The all-terrain vehicle with enormous wheels can glide through high water and climb the tallest of rocks, whether in drive or reverse.

Columbus resident Mark Cheezum, who owns Chizo’s Custom Fabrications, built the all terrain buggy from scratch.

“This started when I first started working at the Air Force base probably in 2009”, recalls Cheezum, “…we went over to Grey Rock [in Alabama] and I watched those guys over there and got the bite, had the itch, and I had to fix something that I could go out there and ride with, and started kicking around the idea of building my own buggy.”

Cheezum said the project took five and a half years to finish and cost around $8,000 dollars.

“Building or designing something, not totally from myself, but taking some ideas from some other folks, putting it all together in my shop, making it work the way I want it to work, at a very minimal cost”, Cheezum said when asked what he enjoys the most about the hobby.

“I don’t have thousands and thousands of dollars to go out and buy these high dollar parts that everyone else is buying, so I had to do it all on my own.”

For most of us, driving is cruising down the highway, with the air conditioning on, all four wheels on the ground.  But for people like Mark Cheezum, that just doesn’t cut it.

“It’s really no describing, seat to the pants”, said Cheezum, “Once you get in it and realize, hey, that’s a hole that will swallow a fifty-inch tire, but we walk through it like it was nothing because we had three other tires that were pushing it.”