109. Mandrel Bends, Performance Exhausts, w Haze Performance

It can't be, that's one of the things a lot of fabricators over at MAP, you know, wanted to start their own businesses and stuff, and it's just like, well, you know, maybe not the best idea. Just knowing how they operate and everything.

Yeah, it's not for everybody. Yeah, that's one thing you quickly realize, is that some people just are really good at working for other people.

Yes.

But hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host, Harris.

Yeah, oh, we were going to fire through the intro, and this is where we landed. We're rusty.

Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host, Harris aka Minnoxide, here with my co-host Dan, Mr. Gunn and Garage. And today we are at Haze Performance. I f***** that one up, didn't I?

No, Haze Performance, you're right on. You're right on, Haze Performance.

I was gonna say something. I don't think the coffee worked today.

You were gonna talk about how it's a fabrication performance.

You're interrupting my flow now. Performance fabrication and parts supplier?

Exactly.

Nailed it. You can tell it's been a few weeks since we've done an episode. Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host Harris aka Minnoxide here with my co-host Dan, Mr. Gunnigaraj. And today we are at Haze Performance, who is a performance fabrication and parts supplier. Nailed it. Perfectly.

First time.

Do intros are the best thing ever? First time. Yeah, that was the only time we did that intro.

Way for the blooper reel to come out.

Well, nonetheless, hello everybody that's listening. Today we are out here at Haze Performance. And honestly, this has kind of been an episode in the making. I got introduced to your existence from Dave Rasmussen, which the last time he was on was episode 64, so like 50 episodes ago. So I'm glad we finally made this happen. But go ahead and tell us a little bit about what your business is, especially when it comes to tubage and such, and what it is you do, especially on the performance side of things.

Absolutely. My name is Bryan Haze. I'm the owner of Haze Performance here. Primarily what we do and sell is mandrel bends. So we have a mandrel bending machine where we can bend tubing from 1.5 outside diameter all the way up to 3 inch tubing. So we sell polished tubing as well. So it's all polished, ready to weld, washed, ready to go. We also have some other products coming out right now. So we're kind of expanding the catalog and getting some more stuff out there and just get more products. But that's kind of where we're at the moment. And yeah.

I think that nails it perfectly. I was talking to somebody else who's in the space when it comes to the fab side of things. And you kind of have everything you really need to build an exhaust, right? Is that a good way of describing it?

Absolutely. So if you brought a car into the lift, you know, we could, everything and anything, we could build it right here. I mean, we just had a, I can't remember the year off the top of my head, but a classic Bronco that was fully restored in here last weekend. And in just the weekend, we were able to build pretty much the whole exhaust from scratch just from the Mandrel Bends, V-Band assemblies, mufflers. We use a lot of Vibrant mufflers, Vibrant Ultra Quiet mufflers for this particular instance. But yeah, we can pretty much, in a couple of days, have you a brand new custom exhaust ready to go for you.

So before we get more into like how you've, well, I guess how this came to be, you used to be one of the MAP guys, which I think has officially become like 20% of our entire catalog.

I think so, I think so.

We've had so many MAP guys on this podcast. So what was kind of your history there? You were there for a little while?

Yeah, I was there about, probably about two and a half years in total. I had a little stint in the middle there. But when I first started there, I was the co-founder's assistant. I was Kyle Nelson's assistant. So it was a pretty cool opportunity to get to see every facet of the business, even from accounting to mandrel bending, the fabrication aspect of it, the CNC machines we had to make oil catch cans, like Evo X Coil catch cans, things like that. I didn't really get to play around too much with the dyno. That's more Kyle Larkin's area. But yeah, it was a pretty cool place to work. But that's where I started out, just kind of all over the place, doing a lot of project management, I guess, and organization of things, because at MAP, my boss, Kyle Nelson, would show me like, all right, well, I know we have the material we need in that cargo box over there that's full of crap. You know, and I don't have the time to look through it all, but you go look through it all. So that was kind of my first stint there. And then I left to try to do my own thing, ended up not being as great as I thought it was, and went back to MAP. And my second stint there, I actually got to the manufacturing manager position, and definitely got to see a lot more, or got to deal with a lot more of the intricacies of the business. But yeah, it was a very cool experience getting to work there and getting to see all the stuff that they built and still built, and how they develop new products. And even just like, you would come in to work, and you would hear something rolling up on the dino when you're making an Excel spreadsheet, and you're just like, all right, well, I found my break. So you run over to the dino and go check out.

That's such an awesome way to take a break. When I used to work in that corporate stuffy setting, it's like nothing really cuts it apart. But you hear an engine startup, it's like, all right, what's going on over there?

Oh yeah.

And you have an excuse, it's work related.

Exactly.

So that's cool.

And when you get to the dino, there's inevitably six other people standing there. So you're going to have a conversation of like, oh, what is that? Who is that? What kind of power are they making? And then they had the actual TV, the TV that would show the readouts and everything right there. So it was a pretty cool place to work, that's for sure.

Well, it's like we had Kurt Thomas on as well, and he was talking about how he built his car on his 15-minute lunch breaks.

Oh, yeah.

Just a way to go apparently. Seems like a lot of people cut their teeth over there.

Oh, yeah. There was a definitely at MAP, I mean, one of the things that Kyle Nelson really strive for is like, hey, you don't need to have a degree in this position. If you show the willingness to an initiative to do the duties of the role, then they're more than happy to guide you in the right direction, of course. They're not just going to leave you out to drive, but you don't have to have a degree exactly to work there. At least that's how it was when I was in Cottage Grove still. I mean, I think they still have a little bit of that energy to them, but I haven't too much experience with their actual Appleton facility now.

I have a feeling that that's going to be something that's, it seemed like you had to have a degree to do about anything now, and I think we're finally going to come back around to where that's not, so you can't get anybody to go to work right now. Plus, that doesn't always, not everybody has the ability or the wherewithal to go to college, right? So I think that's kind of a crap way of doing it. It's much better to find somebody that might have those skills and then train them on the job. You might find yourself a better candidate anyway at that point.

Absolutely, and they're committed to the company as well. We had one individual that I worked very closely with, I mean, he started off in the packaging area, so he would package up all the products and do some QC work as well, and he actually ended up being a CNC machinist at the end of the day. So, and he didn't have any experience in that, he just, he had a, you know, he's like, that's pretty cool, I don't know what that machine is, and had the drive to actually go and learn more about it and pursue it, and MAPerformance was like, hey, yeah, if you're willing to go for it, we'll teach you and we'll get you at least the baseline, and I think he's still working in a machining center now, just in Minneapolis somewhere, if I'm not mistaken.

So for anybody that's listening that's not Minnesota based, so MAPerformance wasn't absolutely like a huge staple here. I mean, and once everything kind of went the way it did, a ton of talent got dispersed through, honestly, a ton of shops throughout the city. I think that's a good way of describing it. And like I said, quite a few of the people on this podcast have been former employees of over there. So definitely really cool to see people starting up their own shops or ending up at top tier shops and all that. So definitely interesting to see. What does your learning process look like, right? So how did you end up doing this then?

Well, so my time when I was a manufacturing manager there, we had two CNC mandrel benders, and one was very old and one was brand new. The very old one that was refurbished in quotation marks, was on its kind of last legs all the time. So when I took over as manufacturing manager, there's not really anybody you can just call to be like, hey, can you come fix my mandrel bender? So you kind of just got to figure it out, and I have a technical background, former technician and all that jazz. So it was me and one other individual at MAPerformance, Jim Thomas, he was the head fabricator there and ran that team. So it was me and him who were just always, the bender would go down and like, all right, drop everything, fix the bender time, let's figure out. So I really got to dive deep into the machines. And then also one of the first things I did when I started initially at MAPerformance was kind of a little bit of a, my boss kind of scared me a little bit with this one, Colin Nelson. He's just like, yeah, so we just had this $150,000 Mandrel Bends bot, figure out how to get it here, how to run the electrical, you know, just have it ready. So when it gets here, we can just throw it all up and ready to go. It's like, oh, okay, I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out. And I did eventually. And so that's kind of how I really got to dive deep into it, and I personally really like electrical works. I always been my kind of cup of tea, I guess. So when it comes to PLC, you know, basic automation systems, like a lot of these are logic controllers. A lot of these mandrel benders use. That's all pretty simple to me. So that's how I kind of got into it. And then working at MAPerformance, you know, just seeing an opportunity that we didn't exactly jump on being at MAPerformance because we just didn't want to invest in that particular area. So that was one thing that I thought was a massive opportunity. And when I ended up leaving MAPerformance, I thought to myself, well, why not try to go out on my own and start my own individual shop and do what I was hoping to do at MAP.

Well, I can't imagine that. Was it an easy decision to do that or were you exploring going elsewhere? Because again, a lot of people were like, do I start my own business or do I go work for someone else?

Well, when I left MAP as the manufacturing manager, I didn't leave at the last day. So I had left about a year before their last day at the facility. Because I'm looking at all the numbers. I figured out which direction the company was going. I just asked my boss and said, if we're just going to continue down this road and we're not going to pivot, try to do anything different, I don't want to be the guy to sit here and lay everybody off. And I ended up leaving before then. Sorry, I kind of forgot the question there.

That answers a question. That would have been a tough position to be in as well, too. We saw that a lot during COVID as well, too.

Yeah, that was the other fun part. I was the manager there when that was all going down. And a lot of people had a particular view on vaccinations. And a lot of other people had a very other particular view. So we were just trying to be like, hey, let's just work. Let's just figure out something where we can all come to work and be happy and go home.

So then what did the first few months look like? How did you decide to go this direction then? Like you just enjoyed doing this that much. You're just like, you know what? I'm gonna try to be the best in this space. Or what was that mentality kind of look like?

Well, how do I put it? Looking at the numbers from kind of having a century college, community college, business background, I could just see the opportunity. And I was like, wow, there's a very large opportunity here. And I always knew I wanted to, at MAPerformance, we build a lot of cool bolt-on stuff, but it's a lot of the same stuff. And that's manufacturing, and it's all fine. But you kind of get sick of building Wrex downpipes. It gets old after a while. So for here, if I can see my product being used on a Bronco build or a C10 or whatever other build, like I have a custom exhaust on my 300 TD over there from Stainless. And it's just cool to see that you can take these things and build it into charge piping, intakes, you know, obviously exhaust, downpipes, anything like that. But you can really make anything you want. Like the opportunity really opens up when you start fabrication.

Well, you said you had kind of a good being in that position, and you're able to bounce around all the departments. So you see where things are selling, what's selling. So that gives you a little bit of, okay, I get out now. This is where I think that hole was.

Yeah.

So that works out.

There was things that could have been done better at MAP. Like one of the things I really pride myself on is like, washing my tube. Like at MAPerformance, you'd buy a Mandrel Bend and you just get a Mandrel Bend in a cardboard box that's covered in lubricants and it's just all nasty. You got to wash it. It's just not very fun. Whereas a lot of fabricators or shops, they just want to buy the tubing, get to welding right away. They don't want to waste time washing everything out and scotch braiding and all that stuff. So that's why with my product, I always like to wash everything first so it's clean, ready to weld. And then I also have a orbital tube polisher. So it polishes the whole outside of the tube, makes it all look nice and fancy. So you can get some nice weld porn clips if you want.

I mean, I imagine that saves people a lot of time too then.

It does, it does. Cause at MAPerformance, it was the same deal, once a fabricator would get a cart of supplies for that particular job build, if it's cat-back exhaust, well then they would have to go right to the wash bay and start washing out the pipes right away. And I mean, that's a 30 minute task, because you got to get it all out of there, cause if you start welding with some of it in there, it can either cause issues with the weld, or it's just gonna burn off, and you're just gonna be inhaling that smoke, which I'm not 100% sure on the safety aspect of that. I know it is non-flammable, but I'm sure it is not very good to breathe after it's been vaporized, so.

Yeah, I would imagine not.

I would imagine.

So then, it's probably just easier for you to do it here before you even ship it out, cause you could just do all of it at once too.

Exactly, so I'll do a batch of 30-some bends, and then I'll put it into a agitating parts washer, which is basically just a tray that just moves up and down in a water tank, a heated water tank, and that just creates enough agitation within the tube to get all that oil and grease out of there, and then out of the tube, so then when it actually is all ready to go, it's washed, ready, so you don't have to sit there and get all greasy and nasty, and have a bunch of nasty rags laying all over your bench. That's never fun. And burn through shop towels. I've burned through a lot of shop towels in my day, so if I can keep that to a minimum, especially being a business owner now, I found out actually having to buy that, I'm like, holy crap, I'm not just going to wipe one thing clean and throw it away.

It adds up really quick.

It does.

Go check with these Sintas and some of those places like that. I was doing some network work for them, and out by the back door, they had, I'm talking like a mountain of trash bags filled with shop rags, already washed but couldn't go back into service. So, I filled up a Silverado pickup truck with a topper on it as many as I could get in it, because they were going in the dumpster. They were like, yeah, let's take them. And it's great. I don't know if I'll ever run out, but I can clean up an oil spill and just throw it away. I don't even have to worry about it.

Nice.

Yeah, that's kind of nice.

That would be nice to have. So, I'll definitely, because I go to ULON quite a bit for, because they have the one up in Hudson, so I pick up all my boxes and stuff from there, so I'll have to stop by and be like, hey, you guys got that?

I love your dumpster diving capabilities.

These were not in the dumpster yet, but if any car guy or shop guy is not going to turn down a bag of clean shop rags, because otherwise you're trying to use one all the way until it's like, there's no way I should even be using this anymore.

Well, I know all about that.

That's awesome. What did you have to do, so did you come out of this with, okay, you don't even have a piece of equipment, so you had to source everything for the shop here and find a space and do all that stuff. Can you kind of give us a little rundown on how that goes?

Yeah. So, I mean, I had always known my whole professional career that I've wanted to go out on my own at some point. So I'd always been kind of saving a nest egg for when that moment came and now it's here. So it does pay off in the end, but it's depleting rapidly. But that's the choice of business. But yeah, I just had to source everything, so my Mandrel Bender actually found it on eBay, believe it or not. I got a substantial deal on that one. But for most of the stuff, it's just a lot of Google searching and trying to figure out where's the cheapest deal or where's the best deal. There's a place, it's called Interplant Sales. They just sell machinery, used and rebuilt machinery up in, I believe it's Hugo. So I've bought a lot of stuff from them, like my air compressor, a few other things as well. So that's where I found that. And especially when you start talking to... I did a little bit of purchasing of engine machining equipment at MAPerformance, so I kind of knew... Usually how you purchase that stuff is you go to a distributor, you're not going to the actual vendor itself. So I had a few contacts already from MAPerformance where I could contact and be like, hey, what do you have available? What's around? What's the average cost? So I'm not going to go out there and buy a ridiculously expensive bandsaw or something like that or get screwed over. So that's kind of how it started out, just piece by piece, really. I mean, the first year was just trying to get everything set up and going. And I had done a good amount of bending at MAPerformance, but it was a different tooling, different style machine. So this being a numerically controlled machine instead of a computer numerically controlled machine, CNC. It takes a little bit more. I want to use the word finesse, but it's not the right word. But I guess finesse is...

It requires more analog input on your end, probably. Yes.

It's like, oh, I'm watching to see if I see that wiper die stock, if I see it tilt back just a, you know... I don't know if I can see five thousandths of an inch, but if I see it just like tilt back just a smidge, oh, I know I am probably at the end of that, or I probably need to insert my wiper die a little bit more because now it has that flexibility where it shouldn't. So it's just watching little stuff like that. I mean, every bend, you should really feel the inside of the tube because you can start to feel like, oh, if your wiper die is starting to get out of position or if your mandrel's not extruded enough from the machine, you can start to have issues. And with mandrel bending, everything's wearing constantly. So it's you're constantly changing, you're constantly having to move in your wiper, you're constantly having to change your mandrel position to get that perfect bend. So it's a lot of, I wish it was just put it in the machine and let it run, but there's a lot of little tweaks here and there that definitely took the first year. I got a few scrap bins of learning over there, but I got a pretty good solid base now so I can confidently get it all set up and run pretty quickly.

Well, what I've always wondered and thought was kind of a neat thing about CNC shops or any kind of metalwork, right? Your scrap is technically kind of worth something still. I mean, it's not as worth as what it was when you bought it in the stock form, but I see guys all the time like hauling in sheets for they've cut out stuff for CNC stuff and it goes out to the scrap yard. It gets a little bit, so I'm gonna stop having to pay to get rid of it anyway.

Yeah, you don't have to pay to get rid of it, but it's about 93 cents a pound for stainless tube. I think it's less for stainless chips because if it's stainless chips from like a CNC machine, they have a lot of coolant actually in there. So that adds to a lot of the weight. So they usually pay you a little bit less for the chips, but I don't have too many chips here at the moment. I don't have any CNC machines or mills or lathes or anything like that yet. One day, one day. But for just like a cut tube that's just that long, scrap tube that I should keep, but I would have a mound to the ceiling if I did.

Well, that's when it's worse, I mean, when you have the mound.

Exactly. But yeah, so you can always bring it over to JR's recycling over in Inver Grove. You can always bring it over there and get recycled as well.

Okay.

So what's the next year or two look like for you then? Expansion-wise, what are some more things you're trying to offer going forward?

For expansion-wise, the next product line that I'm going to have, that I'm going to be purchasing is going to be AN fittings. So I'm hoping in the next couple of months here, I'll have those on the site so that you can build any coolers or anything like that. I would also love to hire a full-time fabricator to be in here to be building exhausts all the time. That's one of the things that I would really love to do, but at this point in time, it's just like, if I have a fabricator, some fabricators, they're willing to do the bending stuff, shipping and more monotonous tasks. It's about finding the right person, but I'd love to have a fabricator in the building and then just, like I said, growing AN fittings and then if I had a fabricator full-time too, I could have, I could start sourcing laser-cut tubing for mufflers, because you know, with the muffler, you have the perforated tubing in the inside, you know, and then the glass pack. So I've found a few companies that do that style of, you know, machine work, but it's just, once I have that person in here, I feel like it'll open up a lot of doors for more fabricated products, like I said, a fabricated muffler, bullet style, all that thing, all that type of stuff. Flanges as well. I would love to have flanges that's on the docket, but that takes a little bit more R&D, because you have to buy a head, you know, measure everything out, make sure it fits perfectly, and then you have to, I would have to find the machine shop for, what's the word, basically sanding it down perfectly flat. As you know, flange that's not flat doesn't really work all that well. But yeah, that's-

So you want to manufacture mufflers and some stuff like that too in here then, huh?

Absolutely.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, that's the end goal, is to have a full product line of- So if you're building a custom car, you could just come to my site and you could buy your muffler, your Mandrel Bends, your V-Bands, your silicone couplers, your T-Bowl clamps, everything that you would need for your car, just in one spot. That's kind of the overall vision for Haze Performance.

Yeah, that makes sense. So like a lot of stuff you do, is it more for like individuals or for shops? Or do you have a lot of individuals just buying stuff?

Surprising, every once in a while you get like an e-mail, you know, from a guy who wants like a particular bend, which we don't really do too much custom bends because it's just for setting up the machine for certain sizes. If you're just changing it for one bend, you know, it's not worth it at that point in time. But I have a decent amount of individuals that just purchase stuff for their personal cars, their own personal builds, but the bulk of it is just custom shops that are doing this on a more regular basis. And just from a business standpoint, it's a lot easier working with those folks that are gonna be buying again to build a relationship. And I like to set out if you are a custom shop, I have a wholesale system, so then you can get a discount if you're buying wholesale for Mandrel Bends, anything I produce, Mandrel Bends, straight pipe, flex couplers, T-Bow clamps, and soon to be A&F things.

So are they keeping some of that stuff in stock too? Like they're buying multiples from you at a time and be like, okay, they've got their own bins and they're kind of keeping some of that stuff on hand?

Yep, so they would have like five flex couplers ready to go and an assortment of 90s and 180 degree bends or 120s, what not. Just in stock, so if a customer comes in and they want a custom exhaust, they'll be ready to go. Or they can order it from me and I'll ship it out next day. So either way works.

So we're talking a lot about exhaust. Do you do any cage stuff then too? Do you bend any of that kind of stuff for?

No, all my bending is all thin wall tubing. So for mandrel bend stuff, there's really no need for a thicker material because it doesn't crinkle on itself. Where a thin wall tube will actually create a ripple and crinkle on itself, which can slow air velocity and cause decreased performance. But for a piece of DOM, which is a really thick tube, you can just put that on what's called a rotary draw bender, which is pretty similar to a mandrel bender, but it doesn't have the key aspect, which is a mandrel, which is a component inside the tube holding the form of the tube to the actual perfect round shape instead of it getting crinkled in on itself. So you could bend a DOM tube without having any issues on a rotary draw bender. Or, I can't remember the style of it, but they're readily available where you can just go on Trick Tools and buy one for a couple hundred bucks. That can do that. But that's just limitations to, you can't have a four inch DOM tube and bend it on that because that's just going to be too much material for it.

Right.

But it's something I've thought about, but I don't know, I'm not an engineer. So when it comes to cages and stuff, especially selling materials for that, I'm just not familiar enough with the space.

Well, that makes sense. If they can get into that, and I've seen some of that equipment, it doesn't seem to take up a lot of space. That's something that's probably a no brainer for a shop that's doing a lot of cage work. But this stuff you have here is kind of bulky, and then it's not worth it for them to invest in that to do the few bends that they may do. It's a lot easier to buy from a supplier like you at that point.

Yeah, absolutely. And they don't have to worry about tooling costs and the overhead for everything on the machine. And it's a three phase power machine too. So yeah.

I was gonna ask about the power here.

Yeah, so I have, I think it's a 200 amp in, and I have full three phase, 480 and 220. So I can run pretty much anything here. I mean, 608's a whole different story, but that's getting to some real crazy equipment.

Yeah, yeah, that's like whole manufacturing facility.

Yeah, that's my neighbor. It's like a cardboard recycling plant or something. They have a bunch of machinery over there. So I know they have a massive power in, but obviously I don't really know too much more about their power requirements.

Right.

How goofy does it get on the custom stuff? Like you mentioned different angles and such. What's the weirdest one you've had a request for?

Well, it wasn't so much... We didn't realize that it was going to be super hard at first. It was a C10 pickup with a 427 in it and it was lowered.

I like this.

Yeah, it was a wicked truck. So we built the exhaust and the customer calls us a day after, and he's like, hey, I'm driving, it's hitting. It's hitting the axle. It's like, oh, that's weird. I mean, we test drove the car and put it through its paces. We didn't think we hurt anything, so it's just peculiar, and then bring it on back, we're looking at it, test drive it, we're not seeing the issue. And I talked to the customer again, he's like, well, when I put my four-wheeler in the back, and when I put my super bike in the back, then it hits. And it's like, oh, well, I just assumed you weren't towing things with your muscle truck. You know? But now that we know you're towing things with the muscle truck, well, we gotta move that exhaust up basically into the frame. And then we actually had to oval out one of the 3-inch tubes, or excuse me, 2.5 tubes, because it was just such a tight fit that there was just no way, it wasn't physically possible to fit that size tube through there. So we had to oval that one out a little bit. But that was definitely, it's just one of those things where you're dealing with the customer and you're just like, well, you gotta tell me these things if you're putting 800 pounds of stuff in the back. Because I would have never imagined that they would be putting actual payload into the cab, or into the box of the truck. Because I've never seen that before. I think it's awesome, personally. But yeah, that was one of those things where it's like, well, if you just would have told me this in the first place, it would have been an easy one to fix. But other than that, though, there's always just a little, especially with custom work, there's always something little. The last Bronco we had in here, it's just like one of the brake line breather lines was, there was just no other place to put the exhaust, so we had to move some stuff around. And the shop owner was just like, well, it didn't have to go that way. And it's like, well, to make it fit without hitting, it does. But there's always those little things, especially in custom work, but it's definitely cool to see because the opportunities are open. So you can build anything, and it's pretty cool to see when it all comes together. We called it this Bronco exhaust. We had a big X-pipe in the back under the bed, so we called it the quadrupus exhaust. Because it just looks like a little octopus kind of thing. But it's cool to see it all come together, I guess.

That's awesome.

So, Dan, do you see yourself doing a lot more of that as well, especially if you were to bring someone else in here?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I would like to have a backlog of cars. That would be nice. I would like to only have cars in here that I'm working on, though. Don't want to have them stacked up in the lot. But that's definitely something I want to move into. And especially, I would like to have, as I grow as well, I would like to bring in 18 gauge, because all my tubing is 16 gauge. So it's a 0.065 wall. We're 18 gauge. I can't remember the wall thickness off the top of my head. But it's a little bit thinner material. So if you're drag racing, I've had a lot of drag racing guys, who are like, oh, you gotta have 18 gauge, because it's just a little bit lighter, and every ounce counts for drag racing. So that's definitely another one that I'm looking into for adding on to the collection. It's just the inventory. The inventory overhead is the hardest part with that one.

I was gonna ask that, right? So what kind of investment does it take to get something like this going, right? Because I can't imagine this is something that me and Dan could start doing in a weekend.

It's taken a lot more than I thought.

It always does.

Yeah. That's just the way she goes. I've learned a lot about along the way. But I mean, just tubing alone, my last tubing order was $20,000. Holy s***. Yeah. It adds up very quickly. But you got to think about long-term, it's like, well, if I can sell this in the next couple of months, you have a significant return. So it's just that holding cost. Can I manage the holding costs?

Right.

Well, if you wanted to get like 18 gauge, right? Like, what's the minimum amount that you would have to spend for it to make sense?

Well, for machinery standpoint, the reason it's so advantageous to me is it's very easy to swap over a mandrel from a 16 gauge mandrel to an 18 gauge mandrel. It just threads right on. You don't have to change any other tooling because the outside diameter is all the same. It's just that inside diameter. So it would be a very minimal investment from a tooling standpoint. But you have to order, I can't, for three inch, let's say, I have to order about 313 feet, at least one bundle from the mill. Because you can't do half bundles and stuff. It has to be a certain quantity here else it's just not worth it for them. And then you're also paying for the shipment of that bundle too from Tennessee. So it adds up pretty quick. Whenever I try to do any of my mill orders, I always try to batch it up as much as I can. So it just minimizes the actual transportation cost.

So you would try to get three, two and one inch order. I guess what's the most common that you're getting?

Right now, as I'm selling, surprisingly, one five. I think a lot of hot rod guys are building stuff with one five. I didn't think I would have as much sales in one five. But yeah, definitely that's probably my hottest mover right now. Three inches is about the same as one five though. So it's equivalent. They're about the same, one five and three inch.

So two is probably your least common then?

Yeah. My two inch as well. My machine was originally used for handrails. So they would make stainless steel hand railings. So my two inch tooling is a little bit wider radius or CLR. So you're not going to be able to use that bend in as tight of a situation as like a 15D style bend. So I think that plays a role into it. But with the tooling cost being so expensive to get a smaller CLR, it's just one of those things where it's like, well, I don't sell too much of it. So it works for now. But hopefully, as things grow, I can get more tooling and have more options.

Well, that's one of the things that comes to mind, right? Because like him and I are doing this drag and drive in April. Oh, by the way, listeners are doing a drag and drive in April. Shout out to...

We haven't picked a car yet, but we're planning on competing.

Yeah. When they reached out to us, Dan was like, we're in, do we have to let you know what car we're bringing? And I'm like, Dan, what are you thinking about right now? So, he's perusing Facebook Marketplace.

I mean, when are we not, though?

Yeah, right? Exactly. I saw this meme on Facebook where it's a guy scrolling through there, and he's like, I should get off Marketplace, puts his phone down 30 seconds later, now what? Picks his phone back up, goes to Marketplace.

Yep, that's how it goes.

But again, we're going to be kind of thinking about drag racing and all that quite a bit, especially as we get, that's right after Texas 2K or whatever. So, I think that's a good portion of our audience when it comes to that sort of stuff. So, that's why I'm just curious, right? Because again, it's like, what do people need, right?

Absolutely. And a lot of people want aluminum too. That's another big opportunity. It's just tooling cost again, because tooling cost for aluminum even goes up even further because it's like a high-density plastic, essentially, to prevent it from scoring and things like that. But that's definitely something I would like to look into as well. But I've never done Mandrel Bending of aluminum before, so it's kind of an unknown.

So you'd have some learning to do as well too, which I'm sure a lot of skills probably transfer though, maybe, hopefully.

Oh yeah, I mean, it should be pretty similar to Mandrel Bending stainless steel. It should be easier, in fact, because it's just a much more malleable material. But you never know. There's always little things that creep up, you know. It's just like my tooling manufacturer messed up on one of my, what's called a pressure die. And so it just sits a little bit lower. So whenever I slide my tube in, if I don't have a spacer in it, it just scores the side of the tube. And so when you're going to polish it, you're sitting there all day just polishing away, trying to get that scratch out of there. But, you know, if you add that little spacer in it, just those little things, you know, that's obviously applicable to just my tooling, but there's always those little learning curves.

Do you ever get any requests for titanium?

Not really, to be honest. I think titanium, I mean, it's just, it's so expensive. I would love to bend it, but I mean, I think I looked it up one time and it was like one stick, one 20 foot stick, so they come in 20 foot sticks, is like almost $5,000. And it's, that's one stick, you know? And so if you mess up one bend, you know, it's a big expense.

Yeah, hundreds of dollars or, you know, maybe even thousands.

Yes, it can add up very, very quickly. So that's, it's something I would love to do, but in the future, when I have a little bit more, if I have a little bit more funds to play around with.

The learning funds is what I like to call it.

Exactly, because the only way you're gonna learn is you gotta fail to figure out what's gonna, you know, what you need to do to actually make it work, so.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, like that's kind of like where I'm at with like everything that we're building with Minnoxide. It's like, oh, all right, we can breathe a little bit this month. What can we experiment with? Like the experimental fun funds? Yeah, no, I totally get that. So then do a lot of people go the stainless route then?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, for stainless, you have high strength, high heat retention. You never it's never going to rust. You know, you get some cool colors when you weld to. So it's I feel like that's that's the one everyone really wants. And especially in racing, you know, when you're dealing with really high horsepower applications, stainless is definitely the way to go.

Oh, OK.

Because it can mean, like I said, it can retain that heat more. So you're not going to have as much heat soak under the engine, things like that in the engine bay, I should say. But yeah, so there's a lot of reasons for stainless and it can't go wrong, can't go wrong. It's not too much more expensive than aluminized stainless steel or excuse me, aluminized mild steel. So it's just like if it's only a little bit more expensive, why not go to stainless rather than just a mild steel?

Can you explain to us a little bit about the grades of stainless? Because I've seen that too. I bought some tube and stuff too at one point in time, but I didn't know. I just bought myself two little straight shots. Again, before I knew you were down here, I just come talk to you. But it was where I went from my X-pipe that was made to go to the stock headers, and then I put headers in, but it necked down there and I didn't want that, so I cut off entirely and had something weld into three inch pieces for me. But that's when I was looking at the different grades of it. So can you run that through that a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely, so there's a 301 stainless, which has, essentially the thing that makes stainless stainless is nickel and chromium. So 301 stainless would be like the least amount of nickel, least amount of chromium, and it's the nickel and the chromium that prevent, you know, that allow for the corrosion prevention, things like that. So then you go from 301 to 304, a little bit more nickel, a little bit more chromium. 316, you know, again, more nickel, more chromium. Then there's 304L, which is low carbon. So that can help with welding. Because if you have, you would have to, after welding, you should anneal, which is essentially like a heat treat over the weld. But with a low carbon, you don't have to do that in a high production manufacturing process. So like with my flex couplers, they're all 316L for the, because the actual manufacturer of them, they don't have to actually anneal, which then saves cost at the end of the day. But, yeah, so there's 304L stainless and 316L stainless. And then there's, if you're looking for super high end, you know, never gonna rust with high heat retention, there's a 321. I haven't, I don't really have an experience with 321. It's on the more expensive side. But again, it's just more, from my understanding, it's more nickel and chromium in there that just allows for that higher heat retention. And I believe there's a higher structural integrity on 321, but I guess don't quote me on that.

So what's the one that you mostly use, then?

304 stainless. Because that's the more nickel and chromium you have, usually the higher the cost. With 30, like, excuse me, there is also 419, which is a much, again, much less chromium and nickel in there. But I don't really do anything with that, because you can even have a 409 stainless. Like, I have a 66 Dermax, and it has a 409 stainless muffler, and it's already rusted after a year and a half. So it's like, it's stainless, but not really. Right. So I use 304, because you're just never gonna have any issues with that. And higher the grade, more nickel, more chromium, more corrosion prevention. So like, 316 is mainly used in, like, chemical plants. Marine applications use it a lot, from the acidity of the saltwater and things like that.

Okay.

So that's kind of the low down on, on stainless grades, I guess.

Yeah, I think 304 is what I see most often.

That's the most common for automotive use, because it's just like, any more than 304, it's not 100% necessary. It's good to have.

Cost efficient sort of deal, yeah.

Exactly, exactly. So that's the bulk of it.

Does anybody know what the cyber truck's made out of?

304 stainless steel. Is it really?

All right, okay.

I think they used 304L on the Starship one, on the actual spaceship. But yeah, it was kind of funny, if you look at the original, it was the original Starship, they had like a water tower company, contracted to do their welding. So it's all like flux core, just terrible MIG welding. So if you see like the original Starship, it just looks terrible. The welds are garbage. But now they've actually got it 304L stainless and professional like pipe fitter welders on there. So it actually looks legitimate and not like someone just had a Harbor Freight welder and just kind of made one in their backyard. But you never know with you Lonnie could have done it.

Right.

You know, I love learning about like little things like these are like the little niche things like there's so many aspects to a car that we really don't know about. Like you talk to somebody in Fab and then they might not have anything, any clue what the tuning guys are doing. It's just, it's definitely a wide variety we get on here. So that's why I'm kind of glad to learn a little thing or two because I don't damn might know these things because he's old.

Well, there's all kinds of, I mean, if you even want to get down to like, there's a whole specialty just in bushings.

Yeah.

I mean, there's like, there's got to be a nerd out there that knows everything about bushings.

Oh, and you know what? I actually watched like a whole suspension video the other day on the HPA channel. Do you watch HPA? Oh, not really.

Not too much.

No, the High Performance Academy. It's just like they go so into deathless on those guys. But yeah, that's a fun one to watch. I'm curious, right? So like, where does your education come from? I'm assuming you being a business owner, you're still trying to learn things. Yeah. Like, when you clock out, because you totally have a punch card here. For sure. Like, what does that continued education look like, right? Because obviously, there's probably a goal in your head you're trying to get to in the next like five or 10 years or whatever. How do you get there? Because I'm sure you're doing some self-learning, self-taught stuff.

Oh, yeah. It sounds ridiculous, but there's a thing called the Tube and Pipe Journal. It's a very interesting magazine that you would not expect. It is all just tube and piping manufacturing. I started reading it when I was at MAPerformance just to kind of get a better idea of like what's going on with the industry. Because you can see like, oh, they're talking about how all these steel mills have high tube inventories because all their production is getting cut. So then I can call my tubing supplier and say like, hey, I would love to take that off your hands at a cheaper rate. So stuff like that. Also, I went to UTI after high school. And really, I went through the automotive diesel industrial program there. So that's kind of the full kit and caboodle, I guess.

How long is that program?

It's about two years, about two years. And then I went to the Mercedes specific, it was called the Elite Star program out in California for four months. Just learning Mercedes specific systems and their platforms and things like that. But really from UTI's core training, Automotive, Diesel, Industrial, they give you a lot of... If you're willing to sit and actually listen to what the instructors have to say, there's a lot of people there that are just like, oh, I just want to work on cars, and they don't want to actually listen to the lectures. But if the teachers, I mean, there's some stuff that I still think about them like, oh yeah, I remember Mr. Klingzick telling me that in a lecture a long time ago. That makes sense now and I'm actually seeing the correlation in real life. So they gave me a really, really good base to work off of. And then being at Mercedes, you get to work on a lot of different systems, from electrical systems to fiber optic systems, the hydraulic systems, they deal a lot in hydraulics. They had like the hydraulic suspension, things like that. So that was kind of cool to see. But yeah, they kind of, for me going forward, it's a lot of YouTube videos, believe it or not.

That's what I figured.

Yeah, like Titan CNC, I watch their stuff all the time. Titan CNC. Okay. They just go over everything, anything, everything CNC. They have a lot of training courses as well, like if you want to just get the basics of like what a mill is, what a lathe is, how they operate, the tools they use, how to run them, things like that. They have that whole thing on YouTube. So that's always very interesting. But a lot of, and then for car stuff, I mean, I try to always, I try to read books as well, just trying to like, I'm reading a lot of marketing books at the moment, which is, you know.

I'll give you one that I would highly recommend.

Perfect. There's a few that I've read.

Actually, I'm just gonna say, like, so like, for example, one of the ones that's really crucial for the success of this podcast, especially in the last six months, is 100% due to Alex Hormozzi's $100 million offers, leads. I don't know, he's got two of them right now. And then his like podcast, right? Which is great for a lot of people that listen to this, because they, I know you don't listen to my podcast. It's okay, all the time. I'm not heartbroken about it. I know you should be listening to other things, but that's one of the ones that I listen to all the time, because I'm thinking about how to take, to me, this is a business to the next level. So I know I have a lot of business owners and shops and people that do monotonous stuff that listen to this. So that's always a fun one. And you will learn a lot on the marketing side of things on that front, too. So that's the one. I'll send it to you after it's worth checking out. Awesome. Yeah, I got cozied up with a shop and an Airbnb in the past, and I was like, man, these guys are watching videos on like, I think it was like, not tooling, but it was kind of like some new welder, whatever, like, you know.

Like an Everlast laser welder or something like that?

Something like that, yeah, yep. And then some other thing comes up and it's like, they're just like paying attention. And I'm hearing all these words that I haven't heard since like high school chemistry, like argon and all this. I'm like, I don't know s*** about, f*** about this. So it's kind of cool to see like what different people are interested in. So Titan CNC, what else? Anything else kind of come to mind? Or is that kind of the go to fall asleep to that?

That's a big one for me, because they have a lot of videos, and they go over a ton of different CNC applications, from like CNC grinders to like heller equipment that's used for like creating all of the Chrysler engines and things like that, and he tours those facilities. And Trump is a CNC company out of Germany. They make laser welders and punch tools and things like that. I actually learned a lot about them from, again, YouTube. It was a very intre... I don't even know why it was a trucking YouTube channel that I was watching for a little bit, because, you know, just how it goes. And they were working with a company that made truck grills, and so they were talking about all the Trump punch machines, and I had just no idea what those were. And it's just a little punch that just goes around on a giant 4x8 sheet of stainless, just punching away holes to get those perfect grill designs out of stainless steel for big Peterbilts and W-9s and stuff like that.

So, you have your website set up, right? So I'm guessing everything you have here is inventory. How quickly are you gonna go through these baskets? Do you have any idea? Or do you just like to keep a ton of inventory?

I like to keep a ton of, or more inventory than I think I would need, because it does take a little while to get, you know, tubing from Tennessee. I do have some vendors in the Twin Cities area, EMJ and a few other folks that I'll use if I run out of particular, like, oh, I'm out of three inch and I have back orders, so I need to get tubing here tomorrow rather than, you know, two and a half weeks from now if I order to direct from Mill. So I usually like to keep a little bit more. I can't, for let's say 1.5 UJs, which is the 180 degree bend coupled with a 45 degree bend, just kind of look like a U and a J, hence the name. I sell through about 30 of those in a month. So it's a pretty good seller. I know a lot of hot rod guys are using that 1.5 inch diameter tubing.

So is that people all over the country then?

Yeah, it's everywhere.

That's pretty cool.

I try to only keep it in the United States just for marketing purposes. I feel like that's more advantageous to me at this point in time.

And plus also shipping out of country and all that. It exponentially goes up with a pain in the a** meter.

Yeah, and my shipping account, I don't do enough volume to get the discounts out of the bigger companies. So it's for international shipping. So mainly my three big states are California, Texas and Florida. Those three states are the bulk of my business, to be honest.

Oh wow, Florida. That's down there.

Oh yeah. But that's where all those big shops are. And in the winter, too, I see a lot of the sales up here start to slow down. Which you'd think people would be working on their cars in the winter.

Yeah, then that ends up being the case. It's kind of funny.

We talk about that with a lot of these shops here. Everybody kind of goes into hibernation mode, and then all of a sudden it's springtime and everybody wants their car in right now.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. Do you have some shops or some local ones here, even some other names that people might know that you supply your stuff to?

I supply all my stuff to, I don't know if anybody knows the name, but like Nine Mile Motorsports, they do some fabrication work on a whole assortment of different things. So they buy a lot of my tube. There's a company, KRW Performance in Chicago. They buy a good amount of my stuff as well. I can't remember the, there's one in Missouri as well that comes to mind, but I can't remember the name of that shop.

How did these people find you then?

I really don't know. Oh yeah. I'm trying to figure that one out. It's very, like I started the site and I was just like, all right, well no one's just gonna come to a random website. And then- You'd be surprised. Well, out of nowhere, there's a company called Fab 28 out of California, and my two inch is a very specific radius. It's five inch CLR, as we talked about before, which most people don't want because it's wider. They actually wanted that specific size because they were making a motorcycle exhaust. I don't know which one, which motorcycle in particular, but they were making a motorcycle exhaust, so they need an exact 180 degree bend with a five inch center line radius. And so, this is probably my second week of starting things up and things on the website, they just called me up and they're like, yeah, we want 30 this month. I'm like, okay.

It's like, holy s***.

I can do that. I can do that. So, I've sold a good chunk of change to them, Fab 28 out in California, in Northern California, I believe. But they usually stick to the two inch 180s. I've been trying to get them to do more two five stuff, but we'll get there.

Well, that's pretty cool, though. Right out the gate, all these different companies working with you. I mean, again, do you see a lot of sustainable work? Is it a lot of repeat customer stuff, then?

Yeah, that's the bulk of my business, is just shops coming back, so that KRW performance in Chicago, or Chicago land area, people in Chicago are.

Anything within 100 miles of Chicago is Chicago, to anybody that doesn't live in Chicago.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah, fight me on that.

But yeah, it'll be like every couple of weeks, they'll buy an assortment of stuff from us to build whatever exhaust. I think they just built a C7 exhaust over there. It's always cool to see too, you're just like, oh, those bends are mine, that's cool, to see it all come together and see what people do with them. So it's always a cool aspect of it, to see it all come together at the end of the day.

What's your kind of competitive advantage then, right? Because is there a lot of people in this space? I'm sure there's small shops like you across the country, but...

There's only, for small shops that do this kind of work, there's not many.

Okay, because it's difficult to get into.

Yeah, there's a high entry cost. But Stainless Bros, they're the big boys on the block. Vibrant, obviously, is another big boy on the block. So they're the ones I'm kind of gunning for, but kind of my competitive advantage would just be much lower overhead. So I can actually get a little bit better on the sales price, but not a big health insurance guy.

He's like, nah, later.

Yeah, exactly. Who needs that?

The payroll, okay, nerd.

But I'm sure as we grow, that overhead will grow a little bit. But that's kind of my competitive advantage right now, and especially a lot of the bigger places, they won't have all their skews in stock all the time. And if they do, you'll order something, and it'll be like two, three days, processing time sometimes. And that's not exactly what you want when you have a customer's car waiting on the lift, taking up space, and you're just like, oh, well, I told them Friday, and then it took three days to ship. So all my stuff, if it is in stock, it's going out next day, and bringing it to the UPS store that night. So it's getting to you a little bit quicker than the average.

Well, that's an all too common story that we hear with shops, especially during, again, these last few years with the global supply chain and everything. It's like, all right, got your car on the lift for what was expected to be a month, and then turns into three months, and then six months, and then every little thing adds three, four, five days. Like if we're waiting for you to ship your stuff out for three days, it's like, all right, cool, I can't do this until I do that.

Exactly.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, the nice thing about you being a solo guy, at least for the time being, you can literally just go run to UPS right now.

Exactly.

I have it in stock, go rip it. So do you think that might be a problem as you get bigger? How many SKUs do you have right now? Like 20 probably? 30?

Oh no, like 100.

Okay, so I was way off.

But that's just my SKUs. If it's, like I had an order come in the other day, it was a three-inch UJ, two three-inch UJs, and it was next day, early a.m. shipping for their shipping option. So I'm like, all right, this guy needs this for whatever reason. He's spending more on the shipping than he is on the product here. So like, yeah, that happened yesterday, and the UPS store in Hastings is very close to an Arby's, so I'm just like, well, I can go get Arby's for lunch, I can drop this off, it's a win-win, you know? So it works out in that regard, but eventually I like to set up average pickup times through UPS so they'll be coming by once or twice a day.

Oh yeah, that's a pretty cool setup too.

Yeah, yeah, because that makes it a lot more, and it's more of a predictable thing too. So for me, if I have a package, I'm shipping it out, because I definitely don't want to forget it in the back of my car. That's just, you know, it can happen very easily. So definitely don't want to do that. So if it's in the car, it's going to UPS that night. But as I grow, I would definitely like to have those two pickup times, and then you can set up that standard as well. It'll be like, hey, if you order after two, like at MAPerformance, if you order it after two o'clock, that was after our second pickup from UPS. So you're not going to get shipped out that day. Where now, I can still get it shipped out same day if it's ordered at four, but.

It gets tougher. So I used to work in a warehouse where I actually used to do shipping for the UPS section. That's like 95% of what I did was UPS stuff, and it was really cool. You had these specific times, and then it's like, oh, if you get that next day air, you had to sprint across the warehouse. All right, we gotta get this going. I like the Amazon people, they don't get to use the bathroom. It's not that bad. But yeah, it's like all right, the last pick up is at 8 p.m. And that next day air, all that, you gotta throw that on there. So yeah, that's pretty cool. But so I guess kind of back to my question then is like, so what happens when you have a thousand SKUs? Do you even get to that level? Is that kind of?

At MAPerformance, well, they had a SKU problem there. They were just, when they originally created them, they didn't create them in a organized manner. So another big portion of my time there was spent trying to organize the SKUs. And they had about, I don't know, it was like 12,000 SKUs. So it was very unorganized as well, but made some spreadsheets, made it all organized. It works. But I would definitely like to get there. And then it's just a lot of spreadsheets at the end of the day. You can do a lot with Excel. Functions, they come in handy. Make crunching numbers a lot easier because I am very much dyslexic. So doing mental math is not my cup of tea.

You can only go so far down the chain. You can probably hold six numbers in your head at most, and it's like, all right, we're f*****. Yeah.

So then having a spreadsheet, having it all visualized, for me especially, helps.

Yeah. So you probably have a little bit of an idea of where you want to grow size-wise. And again, seeing it from the size that MAP was, you kind of know what not to do probably.

I've seen a lot of the mistakes. So it's just like creating skews, for instance, having a process for doing that right off the bat, so you're not having to go and redo all the individual listings later on down the road and creating just like a, I mean, I just created a ledger. So it just goes down the list. The product number or skew just increases as it's farther down the ledger. And you can easily search it. But at MAP, it was a very irritating thing because you would have our part number, then you would have a manufacturer part number from our vendor, if it's a bent up piece that we would use as a core support or something like that. Or something like that. So it would just be... Sorry, lost my train of thought there.

No, you're good. Just kind of like how I was kind of mismatched or whatever at MAP, but when it comes to like skews and such or...

Yeah, just having a process for doing that instead of just kind of flying by the seat of your pants. If you have a process, it makes it much easier in the end, and to ascertain like what's going on here and how this system is growing. And it's all about processes and systems, unfortunately, with business. It's not the funnest thing, but if you have good systems and processes and good people, I think that's the most important part about a business is having good people. Good books, good to great. If you're familiar, talk a lot about that. But...

What was this called again?

Good to Great.

Okay.

It was a book that came out about 2016, 2018, somewhere in there.

Was it by? Any idea?

I can't remember, but it's a study of, I think it's like 20 different companies that went from $10 million companies to nationwide. Walgreens is one of the companies, for instance, and they just study, they went and interviewed all the executives from those companies, from those time periods, and said, like, hey, what was the difference between what you were doing here compared to here? What were you guys doing differently in a lot of these? A lot of the things that kept coming up was you got to have the right people on the bus. Because if you have the wrong people on the bus, everyone's just fighting, you're going nowhere. But if you have the right people on the bus, then it just naturally goes in the right direction. Which at MAPerformance, there is at the end there, there's a little bit of wrong people on the bus. But, yeah.

Which happens, and again, I know we're kind of getting into the business side of things too, but one of the things that Alex Hormozzi discusses, which I brought up earlier, is one of the reasons you see companies get rid of their bottom 10% performers is because it just kind of brings everything down. You bring down the overall average, but if you just keep doing that, the people that are better just... Long story short, it's good to work around people who are high performers, and you kind of need that, too. And I think you see that a lot, especially in the automotive world, where things kind of start to trickle off for some companies, and then it's like, oh man, these guys used to be great 10 years ago. And then you get other companies that are like, way better than they were 10 years ago. It's like, s***, they used to be the cheapos in this market. Now they got a high quality product. So yeah, a little tangent.

I think complacent, there's a lot of people, once they get successful, then they just get complacent. I feel like a good chunk of some of the issues with MAPerformance, like they were building new products, but I just don't feel like they were doing a lot of this stuff that they did in their initial growth period, like going to more drag events and building actual, record-breaking cars and stuff like that, rather than just focusing on building bolt-on exhausts, which yeah, that's their bread and butter. They're making a ton of money out of it, but it's just not getting the same reach.

If you were to go, because again, you kind of mentioned potentially in the future maybe doing aftermarket exhausts for cars or whatever. What's something like, and this doesn't have to be an actual answer, but what's something that you would love to do an exhaust for?

I would love to build an exhaust for my GTI.

Fair enough.

Because the GTI, I love my GTI, but it's just not the best sounding car in the world.

Yeah, the guy that just bought mine, I was just telling Dan on the way here, he got rid of the muffler on it. And he sent me a video, he's like, I f****** hate it. I'm like, that's why, like my last car, it was just a catted downpipe stock exhaust, and it was perfect because it's a four banger. Anything more than that, you're out of your f****** mind. It's hard to get those to sound very good.

Yeah, yeah, and the drone, it can be really hard going down the highway, especially at long distances.

Well, they only have six, it's a six speed, right, or whatever. So it's only got six gears. Like my new one's got seven, so that's really nice, you know, just a little lower RPM, but it's like, dude, it's kind of rough. Like if you're going at 80, you know, your teeth are rattling.

But yeah, I just put a poly motor mounts in mine as well. So it's buzzing. It's buzzing. I've been trying to chase down a rattle in the car the whole time I've owned it, though. I have found the rattle, so it is subdued at this point in time. So I'm happy about that.

What was it?

My center console. I actually, I bought my GTI certified pre-owned, and I had the center console replaced once, and they replaced a few other assortment of things, because they just thought I was an insane person, because it was a very light rattle, and I was a technician at the time, and so when you're driving without music or something, you hear something, you're like, what's that? You start feeling around, trying to get it to stop and go.

Yeah, I hit a pothole at 80, and then the rattle came that never went away. So yeah, that was one of those, I think we went airborne moments, which I've done exactly four times in my life. Not fun. But yeah, I talked to Bryan May over at Radified, and he told me, I was like, one, like the clamps or something on the exhaust, whatever, he's like, yeah, like, because it was the only one, like when my car was cold, that was usually when I heard, like when I leave my house, like, all right, I hear this rattle, I hit a pot, like, you know, on the way to the stop sign, I'd hear it rattle three times, but then the car would warm up and it went away. So he was like, hmm, I don't know, it might be this thing. I don't know, it's the new owner's problem. He's probably chased it down by now. He did so much work on that car already. That'd be a cool one to build an exhaust for. Let me know if you make it sound good.

That's the tricky part. But I would like to play around with, especially like I said, I wanted to go into actually manufacturing mufflers in the future. So I really want to play around with the muffler design to see how we can affect the noise of it and control drone and things like that. And just really have some R&D into it to make a really proper exhaust.

Do you have some ideas already, like if you, and how mufflers work, if you've been watching YouTube videos and all kinds of stuff?

I'm a big Corsa fan.

Okay.

Everybody is. That's kind of like one of the go-tos.

Yeah. I had a, my first car was a 5.3 Silverado, and I had Dynatac Long Tube High Flow Headers and then High Flow Cats and a Corsa Catback Exhaust. And as a high schooler, it was phenomenal. It made me a lot of friends at UTI as well. It's kind of funny at UTI, everyone just knows each other by cars. So you just walk in and you're like, who are you? Oh yeah, Red Mustang. Okay, yeah, I know who you are. But yeah, so that was, with that exhaust, I mean, you'd be cruising down the road and on the highway and it'd be no issue at all, no drone. And then you would step on it and you're like, whoa, that just really woke up. So I would really love to figure out kind of how that, I think it's reflection or reflection technology that they use in their mufflers. I would like to learn more about that, but I've been trying to find books. I've been trying to find something on it and there's not much information on it.

I would just buy one and cut it open.

I was going to say, it's time to start buying stuff and cutting it open.

Yeah, honestly.

That's the first thing you would do and then figure out how it works.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, I mean, why not? Just go find someone, probably has one at Co-part somewhere maybe, just sitting, riding away.

I'm sure there's an eBay course of exhaust out there.

Oh yeah.

Well, if I find my old truck, I want that truck back. That truck was, that exhaust was.

Just drop your VIN on the podcast. Somebody will find it for you. It's happened before. Not a VIN, but yeah, people have found cars before.

White Silverado, 2009.

Yeah, I cannot wait for this thing to get big enough. Be like, hey, here's this person's old car from 15 years ago. Anybody know who it is? And just get some random Puerto Rican email me like, yeah, here you go. Okay, whatever. Okay. Swing and a miss. Dude, that's one place I really want to go, is Puerto Rico.

Yeah?

Yeah, the car scene down there is f****** insane.

I'm just trying to think of Whistlin Diesel's been trying to find a skid loader that got stolen from him for a while now.

That's a tough one, dude, because that one's like probably hidden in the middle of nowhere. Like somebody at 60 that stole it.

It's possible. Whistlin Diesel, you never know.

If it happened however many years ago, I mean, if that person was 30 at a time, now they're 50, 55. If it's middle of nowhere, they have no friends. Okay. I'm just trying to think logically here. You know, I had a whole train of thought, it's completely gone now. But nonetheless, so okay, so cutting up course exhausts and all that, how difficult would it be for you to get into that? I mean, I'm sure that's gotta be some product development that goes into that and obviously understanding how to do it. But do you have a rough idea of like the trajectory on that?

Oh yeah, I know how generic mufflers are built, you know, and how to, and you can use different pack materials to dampen the sound and get a little bit different tones and things like that. And how much packing material there is. So if you have a wider oval, you know, with more packing material, obviously that's gonna dampen the sound more. Whereas like if you have a bullet style muffler, which is the minimal amount of packing, with the perforated tube in the center, you're gonna have obviously less sound dampening at that point. So that's like kind of the very basics where, that's where I was really hoping there was a book on like, I've tried like Amazon books for like sound, you know, sound design and like how to affect sound, but I can't find anything. So if anybody has a muffler book.

No, I think that's Big Muffler trying to keep that quiet.

Probably, probably. I'll figure out their secrets one of these days.

There was a double one in there. He's like, that gave me a quiet.

There was a double one in there.

God damn it, dad. What do they do with, what do they typically pack in there? Is that like a fiberglass material or?

Yeah, the majority of them are fiberglass materials. Some are stainless steel mat, like, or like a stainless steel mesh, kind of like what you'd use to like clean dishes and stuff. It's actually a funny thing. We're using our Evo X catch cans at MAPerformance. We're actually just using like the stainless steel scrub pads as a baffling system to catch the oil. And it works great. It's a phenomenal system. So it's just one of those things where I'm like, I'm ordering this and I'm like, why am I ordering a hundred of these stainless steel scrub pads? Like, why am I doing this? And I had to ask Kyle and he's just like, it works great. Trust me, we've done it for years. So it's a...

I've seen a lot of them with that in there, to be honest with you. That might just be the standard, I think, for catch games.

It works. It works great and they're cheap, so why not? It's not broke, don't fix it.

What goes into building a quality exhaust?

It doesn't have to be TIG welded. TIG welded, I feel like, is just that extra artisan style, I guess. But a quality exhaust is you gotta have a sufficient amount of sound dampening to control that drone. Because if you're driving down the road and it's just bah, all the time, no one's gonna want to drive that. It's gonna sound like crap. It's just gonna annoy everybody. But then also, you gotta think about, I was actually just talking to one of my friends about this the other day, is about the mounts themselves. If you have really rigid, hard exhaust mounts, well, that vibration's gonna transfer up in the vehicle. So then, if you're spending $3,000 to $4,000 on a custom exhaust and you just want your, let's say, for instance, is that Bronco, you're not using this for racing or anything, so you're just using it to cruise around town. You don't really want to feel the whole exhaust vibrating beneath you. It's just you want more of a tame, normal, modern car feel. So it's a little stuff like that. And every application is different, obviously. So if you're trying to build an exhaust for a race car, well, then you're probably not even gonna have any muffler in there because you want to just have as much flow through as possible. And less things to go wrong, especially if you have on race cars, you know, if you blow up a turbo or something, and then a bunch of oil gets packed in there. It's like my GTI when I had my IS38 blow up on me. It was a good couple of days of driving around very, very smoky trails behind me, getting all the oil out of the exhaust system. But going back to what makes a quality exhaust is, I really believe in stainless steel. I think it's a phenomenal product for exhaust, just from its heat retention, its strength. And obviously, being in Wisconsin and Minnesota area, plenty of corrosion and salt up here, so you're never having to worry about that is a huge benefactor as well. So anywhere up here, I don't know why you would build an aluminized mild steel exhaust, just because you're just going to have rusting issues in the future. Whereas if you can pay a little bit more for stainless and never have that issue in the long run. So that's kind of what it takes to build a proper exhaust.

So are you just like overhead pressing all these things? I mean, I can't imagine these are light. What do each one of these tubes weigh?

They're not that heavy, surprisingly. It's probably like 30 pounds, I believe.

What are those, 20, no, 15 foot sections?

20 foot sections. So they're all 20 foot sections. So you can carry them pretty, now in the bundle form, very heavy, very heavy. But I have a forklift out back and you can kind of get creative with the forklift sometimes and make it work.

Yeah, just dead lifting a pack of 20 of them.

I have been a little over zealous sometimes and I'm like, I can pick up that side bundle and get that out of there, like slide out a piece of cardboard or something. It's a bad idea. Don't do it. Just get the forklift.

Let's think longevity of the spine. Yeah, yeah.

Back's not gonna like that tomorrow morning, that's for sure.

Can you give us, so we've been talking about all this for a long time, I probably should have let off of this. Can you explain to us what goes into a mandrel bend? So you said there's something that you have to insert into the pipe that kind of helps keep it shape?

Yeah, so there's a mandrel, which essentially you slide the tube over, which just, it's a, well, I can grab it if you want.

Sure, why not?

It'll be a little bit easier to explain.

Yeah.

It's nasty, but you know, it's the beauty of manufacturing. So you have a mandrel, and essentially you have to set the depth of your mandrel just before the point where the bend die starts to curve in. Because essentially if you don't, if you have it too far back, you're going to get an ovaling effect. And if it's too far forward, you're going to end up snapping these flexible ball heads off that keep it in that perfect round form as it goes through. So that's kind of, you would insert the tube over this piece, and then this gets put through a bend die and a pressure die and a clamp die, which it's kind of hard to explain without seeing it. I'm a very visual person, but...

You got any bending you could do right now?

Unfortunately, I don't have the machine up and right. It's set up for 1.7, or supposed to be set up for 1.75, but I'm dealing with the tooling issue with my tooling company.

Right, yeah, yeah.

Getting that resized, so unfortunately, I don't have anything set up at the moment.

Yeah, fair enough.

But next time, next time.

Next time, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna come over here and watch you play with your tubes.

That works.

I don't know, we gotta come up with a company slogan over here. I don't know.

Well, one of my buddies, his name's Nom, he had a great, when I worked with him at MAP, he actually was our tube bender, the tube bender operator. He worked at MAP for a long time. He's a guy you should talk to as well. He's done a bunch of Crown Rally stuff and driving school stuff. What was the name again? I believe it's how he pronounced his last name. Super cool guy, super fun guy. He made half the, like, you'd be sitting at MAP typing away on a spreadsheet, and you know, it's an industrial facility. It's pretty loud. And then you'll just hear him belching out, singing, whatever, like Michael Jackson in the middle of the day, just having a good time. He's a great guy to hang around with. But yeah, sorry, I want a tangent there. He has some cool cars though, too. So another person to talk to if you get the chance. But yeah, sorry, I lost my track.

So has that kind of covered a whole process, or were you halfway through it?

No, it's pretty much the whole, like, so essentially the, almost messed up there. Ah!

Get that bad boy closer, you're almost perfect. There we go, we're fisting. All right.

Perfect. But the clamp die connects to the bend die, and then that rotates around, like clockwise essentially. And then the pressure die essentially keeps the tube pushed up against the bend die, and also it moves forward with the tube itself to prevent slippage from the clamp die itself, because that's a lot of force that you're bending the stainless steel tube around. So that's kind of how that works. It's hard to explain without seeing it. Like visually showing it.

Yeah, I expected more of that thing to be bendy than just the end of it there.

It doesn't seem like that much. My three inch one, I have to go to a six ball. It's currently a three ball style, like this one, but I have to go up to a six ball, because I'm just getting a little bit more oval, ovaling at the end of like a 180 degree bend than I would like to have. So that's one of the things with my next tooling order getting from them, so. It's always a lot of purchase orders out, unfortunately.

Yeah, so it's just the tip that bends?

Yep, just the tip, and then everything just kind of drags around it, so.

Huh, yeah, that's pretty cool. So are you spending like an entire day here? Like, you're probably pretty busy at this point if you're cranking out orders of 30 for people.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it depends on the day, or really the week, sometimes there's slow weeks where I'm just kind of, all right, watch a YouTube video, I got my inventory set up, I got some Facebook posts put out and whatnot. But most of the time, it's just moving in groove, and I have too many projects as well. So I got my 300 TD that I've been dinking around on forever, so finally getting that up and running, and then my GTI, getting that up and running, and well, I would have liked to race this summer, but now it's next summer.

When you say race, more like Mexico, or more like?

No, I want to do Time Attack.

Time Attack, okay.

I would really love to do Time Attack. I was a big Gran Turismo guy growing up, so I did a lot of Time Attack racing on Gran Turismo. So that's where I would really like to go into, and that's always been the goal with the GTI, is to get into Time Attack events, and especially with grid life now kind of blowing up like it is. We'll see if I can get in for next year, because that place is always, every time I've tried to buy a ticket, it's packed. But yeah, so I'm hoping to get that into at least grid life up in, oh my god, I'm blanking on the name. Road America, Road America. So I'm hoping to get that.

That's the one I want to try and get to next year too.

Yeah, so it's, I've never, I've had my GTI on an autocross track, but it just didn't really get to open up the legs, you know, and autocross is fun, but it just, I kind of had a bad experience that my first time going to, so they didn't let us walk the track and like we only got four runs and two of the runs. I'm like, where am I supposed to go? So I drove off track a few times, but yeah.

It is very confusing when you're just relying on the cones to tell you where to go. It's, yeah.

I could just hear Piero laughing right now. You noob. But no, I've done exactly one autocross in my last car. I had a blast with it, but yeah, it depends on the track setup too. Like I was able to open it up, but that was more like described to me as kind of like autocross meets road course, because I think I was able to hit three digits for sure. Okay, not often you do that on autocross. Yeah, so like especially since you're on a hybrid, like you're probably not getting into a boost a ton.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not really. I mean, unless we're under anything under 2,800, it's.

Just a dog.

Yeah, but once 2,800 comes around, it goes.

It lights up, yeah. Yeah, again, the new owner of my car sent me a video of doing like a rolling burnout in my car. I'm like, Jesus Christ, just launched it. Cause like I never, I never used the launch control that car. I was just like, you know what? I can't have, let's not.

Yeah, let's not risk it.

Let's not risk it. This is a daily driver after all. He sends me a video and I see smoke coming across the video. I'm like, all right, got it.

He's having fun. He's having fun with it.

Just absolutely ripping it.

Oh yeah.

You know, that was a blast of a car. And you're making more power than mine was too, which again, not a ton of power, like in the grand scheme of things of depending who you talk to, but like, you know, I was making 340 wheel and what was it? 390 foot-pounds of torque, so not bad.

Not bad at all. And especially on a tighter track too.

Yeah, especially on like, yeah, yep, exactly. Yeah, no, it's a great, that's gonna be a fun one, a time attack. I cannot disclose what Dan and I have swirling around for potential ideas in the future, but that's more budget-oriented.

I feel you there, I feel you there.

Yeah, I need to figure out the merch situation. We gotta come up with some cool designs or something. Then we can start funding time attack projects, but that's a later problem.

If you want to look at another one that will be opening up, I don't know when exactly, but the Optima Ultimate Street Car Challenge. That one's a lot of fun, because then you get to do, you go to do stop box, and then you get to do autocross and the road course. So you've got a car that's kind of suited, good for all of those things. So that's a really fun one. We really enjoyed it.

I really would have enjoyed the Optima Ultimate Street Car Challenge with that last car. The road course, I wouldn't be able to keep up with you, but then again, Jay and that little cute RX-7 of his, he was able to put up a fight. He was in the top third with the fast guys. He was the slowest of the fast guys. So that'd be a really cool one to check out. That's a super cool event. The stop box really has me intrigued. I really want to try that. Yeah, that'd be fun. Well, shoot, I think we're slowly starting to wind down here unless you had any more questions coming up, Dan.

No, I just figured we made it all the way through this. You probably should ask what Mandrel Bending in is and how it works. So I kicked that one in there at the last minute.

Yeah, I mean, is there anything that we may have missed before we jump into the usual three?

I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Pretty much went through most everything. Other than just like the only thing I can think of would be tube polishing. You know, that's just make a little advertising here. You know, having a polished tube is just a little bit nicer than just a standard annealed outer outer outer coating for the tube. So that's something we definitely offer. I don't have the pictures on the site yet, but hopefully this week I was actually probably today. I was going to do it today, but had a little change of plans. But we're getting those put up on the site here soon. So any bend that you're going to order from us is going to be polished and ready to weld.

When it comes to, so actually that kind of brings up a good question. When it comes to like imperfections, right? Like for example, if you get like hotspots like inside of like a cylinder, that's a problem, right? Like a really big problem. Is that something you have to kind of consider when it comes to like exhausts as well? Or is it usually not as big of an issue to worry about like imperfections?

I mean, if you're dealing with like a rear mounted turbo, you know, then if you're going to be doing a lot of 90 degree bends, you know, you're going to be slowing your velocity down quite a bit, and that's going to affect how fast your turbo actually spools. So in that case more so, but for hotspots, I mean, you'd have to be creating some real high heat, you know, out of the cylinder. So maybe like a rotary engine car or something, you know, just spitting flames out the back. That would take a little bit more. But I think the only real reason you go like up to a 321 would be like a 321 grade stainless would be a high heat situation, high horsepower, high vibration. Just because like I said, for when we're talking grades earlier, just has that more nickel, more chromium, more heat retention, and it's just an overall stronger material.

Yeah.

Do you find yourself learning a lot more about chemistry in this or not really?

More than I thought. I was not a good student in high school, believe it or not.

I don't think any car enthusiast was. What?

Crazy. But yeah, I definitely learned a lot more. Like I saw 316L probably two months ago and 304L. I'm like, well, I don't always see that L on there, and I didn't know what it means. I just assumed it's the same, but it's not the same. It's just little things like that that just come across. So you do learn a lot of school stuff and what annealing is. It's just like a heat-treating essentially for stainless steel after it's been milled, stuff like that. So I find it very interesting. I'm not sure many other people would find it very interesting, but it's-

You'd be surprised, man. This little hobby of ours, people can talk forever.

That's a problem I have run into as a small business owner is I had a phone line, and there had been so many old guys that are just, I think they're just bored, and they just want someone to talk to. And I'm like, hey man, I like talking about cars. I can't sit here and talk to you about cars all day. I got stuff to do. And there was a point where I was getting like three calls a day from people who were just wanting to chit chat. I'm like, I love chit chatting, dude, but.

Yeah, we've had quite a few shop owners that have taken down addresses or phone numbers or whatever, just because it's not like nothing against anyone. It's just, I got work to do.

Exactly. It's like, I would love to talk to you about cars, but I'm a one man show. I got stuff to bend. I got stuff to cut. So I don't want to be.

Send an email. We'll see how serious it is that we can move on from there.

Exactly. Exactly.

Well, sweet, Dan, you want to pop the usual three? Or you got a question? You got a question?

OK, so we touched a bit. So we talked about this. We talked about the Bronco. But so you're telling me anything. If I got exhaust, I want done too. If I need it, I bring you my whole car and you'll put it from will you build headers, all that kind of stuff or?

Headers we definitely can do. We would just have, I don't have flanges in house. So we would have to order flanges. Usually you can find a flange for almost almost any head out there. That's being put into a race vehicle, of course. So for headers, we just need to get that flange in and we can start going on right after that. But anything from header back, I mean, we can start and have it done in a couple, three days, and that's a full custom exhaust. So we can have it done pretty quickly. But the opportunities are limitless, essentially with mandrel bending and fabrication. Because if you want duels, we can do duels. If we want an H-pipe or an I-pipe or X-pipe, whatever, whatever you want, we can make it happen.

Okay.

What's your shop rate?

Shop rate is about 130 right now.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. So we're trying to maintain, still be on the lower end because it's still a smaller shop, but at the same time, it's...

I think that's a fair spot for you.

I think that's about average nowadays, to be honest with you. Yeah. The days of $90, $100 an hour shop rates are no longer.

Yeah. Especially with power and just insurance is a big thing for here. Because there's really no sprinklers in this building. So, I have to pay a substantial amount for insurance, even though there's only one flammable liquid in here.

I was going to say, there's not a lot of flammable s*** in here.

It's just hydraulic fluid in there. That's it. But yeah, I have to pay a ton for insurance because whatever.

But it's ruining everything these days. I mean, even racetrack fees. We were just talking with Michael Morgan down at US Air, and their rates are going to have to go up now next year because they're having issues with insurance. So it's, everybody's raising the rates and it's getting to be rough out there.

That's just the way she goes. Yeah. That's just the way she goes. We just got to adapt with the conditions that are given to us. Yep. Yeah.

I know literally everything's up insurance. I think this is kind of a natural spot to kind of plug Matt Nelson, who I've gotten like 15 referrals in like the last like two months or whatever. And he even saved money on my insurance. This is not somebody that pays me by any means like to advertise.

Although he should, I think at this point.

I know at this point. I mean, I get like a kickback of like Amazon gift cards, which basically just funds the SD cards for the show. But no, if anybody wants his email, just hit me up on Instagram, because it's kind of funny. Like people I've never talked to, people who have left me out of red, have reached out like, hey, I need that email. So, but no, like, yeah, insurance is a rough run right now, all the way across. Like the amount of people that are like, yeah, my s*** went up like 30%. Like they even tried to jack up mine. And then I was like, yeah, nevermind. I'm going to Progressive. Bye, b****. You know, sort of deal, but.

I'm out.

Yeah, no. But sweet. On that note, Dan, rip the usual three.

All right. At the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests to pick three cars. We need a daily driver, a track car and a show car.

Okay.

We'll see how many of these are getting Mercedes Benzes.

Maybe all of them. But for a daily driver, E63 S wagon, of course. Because just, they're the best. You can do anything. You can haul some plaque. You can haul a four by eight sheet of plywood if you want.

Really?

Oh yeah. It'll fit. Put all the seats down, it'll fit. Put a dog in the back. You're good to go. It can be a truck. It can be everything. And they're just ridiculously fast on top of it. And comfy. But so for that's for daily. For a show car, I'm a big Pagani guy. I like Pagani Zonders have always, I've always been a big Zonder fan, but that new Utopia or Utopia, whatever you want to call it, is pretty wicked as well. I don't know. I'm just a big fan of that purple Pagani Zonder that Lewis Hamilton drove, then it was crashed.

Yeah, that one. Okay.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of purple as well. So just purple and Pagani, perfect match.

So basically Hamilton's before he crashed it.

Yes.

Or after. It might be more affordable now.

Yeah, probably is. But track car, I do love my GTI, even though I haven't gone full blown on the track yet. But I think an AMG Project One, if you're familiar with that car, everything that I've seen from that car, I mean, they're breaking records at the Nurburgring right now with it. It's pretty wicked. I believe it has the KURS system too, if I'm not mistaken.

Again, what that is?

That's like the go fast button in F1.

Yeah. Just come back to me. Yeah. The AMG one. Yeah. Okay.

So I think it utilizes like an alter stator on the flywheel, and then that just gives it maximum electric torque, which then spools up the engine faster, creates more, goes up to max boost, and then you're moving at that point.

And I think a good bit of people know at this point that that's basically a street legal F1 car.

Indeed.

Yeah. I think it just ran a 630 at the ring. I think that's what it was, 630. But speaking of b****** crazy cars, how about the ZR1 doing 233 miles an hour?

I would be terrified in that car, but it's wicked that it can do it.

I've done 189 in a passenger seat. I'll pass on anything faster than that. That's nuts.

Yeah. I'm all for fast cars. I'm all for fast cars, but that's a whole different level.

I like being able to bounce off stuff to slow down. Let's, yeah, if he went off that oval, that's, yeah, no, I'll pass. I'll pass big time on that. Yeah, that's a sweet, that's a good choice. I don't know if, I think I've only heard that once or twice on a show, maybe.

I mean, they're all kind of Mercedes because Pagani has a Mercedes V12 engine in it.

Yeah, you've finished that one in there.

Of course, of course.

Not bad.

Of course.

Well, sweet, on that note, where can people find you?

They can find me at Haze Performance, or HazePerf, performance abbreviated, hazeperf.com. They can find all our products there, and kind of more of what we do and what we have available. We also have Haze Performance on Facebook, and then Haze Performance on Instagram as well.

Sweet. You're a big F1 guy then or no? You dropped an F1 car in there. I had to ask.

I'm just a big Mercedes guy. I'm all about it. I'm all about it. And what they were doing before, the funding cutbacks with the Active Toe and with the Curse system, things like that, I thought that was just absolutely awesome. Cause I go on a little rant about Mercedes, their whole thing is win Sunday, sell Monday. And they really push a lot of the technology in their road cars with their race cars. So being-

Too bad their race cars suck now.

Yes, so they're not pushing much at the moment, but they'll get there.

It's a little rough. They might come back. It was a rough few years there, but hey, they were the goats for a little while.

Exactly. 10 year, 12 year sprint.

You don't win eight Constructors Championships for no reason, boys. So, well, sweet. On that note, thank you very much for coming on and making this happen. Dan, thanks for existing and we'll see y'all next time. Sweet.

Awesome.

That's how to cook the crumble.

Perfect. Well, hopefully it wasn't too boring.