125. 2400HP F150, Honda's and Mitsubishi's, Tuning, and Link ECU w/ Alex Chud and Andy McPherson
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Most time you see a car get strapped down, it picks up 50 horse. Maybe you get some hero and it picks up 150, but this thing picked up 500 or better every hit. You know, my buddy was doing some Pikes Peak stuff. Oh, it's way down on power. I'm like, I mean, at 8,000 feet elevation, I'm sure it is. I'll get after it harder. You know, I send him a tune up and I label it, bring a trailer.
Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host, Harris AKA Minnoxide. I'm a man of many automotive aspirations and I'm here with my Ford loving co-host, Dan. Mr. Gunner Garage.
Yep.
There's not a Ford in here, is there?
No, but I feel like all the crew we've been hanging out, these are the most Ford guys I've gotten to hang out with so far. So they seem to like to put a Coyote in about anything. So I'm fine with that.
And today we're at A-Star Fab. Fab, fabrication, doesn't matter.
Same thing, right? Yeah.
And today we got Alex Chud and then Andy McPherson on. So some of the internet may be familiar with your build. And then obviously you have competed as well. So tell us a little bit about yourselves. And then we'll start with you and we can kind of just go from there.
My name is Andy McPherson. I'm the owner of A-Star Fabrication here. I got my roots, we'll say. I did my first Honda swap in 1996 and kind of just been at it ever since.
Okay, so. And then, well, we'll do a quick intro of you as well.
Yeah, I'm terrible at this, so.
Who are you, what do you drive and all that.
Okay, I'm Alex Chud. I own a company called Alloy Works. Used to be called Budget Billet. We do all the DI block offs for the LTs and Coyotes, some Hemi intakes and other small billet parts. You may know my vehicle or my truck. I have the 19F150 that we took to the Sand Dunes on some Super Scoops. Was at PRI last year in street mode and then this year in sand mode.
Okay. So I got familiar with your truck. The video I first saw it was you leaving PRI doing that wicked burnout.
Yep. Yeah, we had the Super Scoops ratchet straps to the back of it. When we got there, we were able to load in right there at the docks. And when we were leaving, we're not going to wait in line for multiple hours to get out. So, I went over to the... Do you know what the name of the strap company is that's always there? I don't know. They're always at PRI. And I bought some straps and we just strapped to the back of the chassis and then went out of there. I don't know if I was allowed to do the burnout, but...
Did you get a ticket or an email?
No. Well, good to go then. Yeah, good to go.
Well then, okay, so you've been at this for quite some time then yourself. So, you said your first build was in 96?
Yeah, I did my first B-Series swap in 96.
Okay.
And kind of stuck with the Honda stuff, almost Honda, solely Honda, probably for 10 or 15 years. And not to be rude to you Honda guys, but the money into a Honda kind of fell off real bad. The stuff was real cheap for a long time. And we kind of found our niche in the Evo market for a while. We still do a lot of Honda stuff. I'll say the people still in the Honda game that have been in it for a long time at this point are a little bit older, a little more seasoned, a little more willing to build a serious car at this point. So we still do a bunch of Honda stuff. And I mean, we'll branch off into anything, you know. I get a little picky on, you know, what we tune, what ECU, stuff like that. So, I mean, we kind of still stay in a niche market, but like, I mean, walking around, you see LS, LT, Coyote stuff, you know.
Oh yeah, a ton of, there's a lot of variety here. And I was telling Dan yesterday, like, I feel like I just fell into a time warp. There was nothing here newer than like 2010, I think.
Yeah, no, I, being honest, I don't like working on new stuff. So, you know, almost, almost every car in the shop is a 100% rewire on standalone. So, you know, it gets difficult and, you know, not a lot of people like say, you know, like even when Alex not just first came in, but, you know, when he's like, hey, what would it take to put a standalone on, you know, my 19 F150? And, you know, you tell somebody like, you know, without blinking an eye, like 10 or 15 grand to rewire a car, put ECU, digital display, stuff like that. And usually they're on their way back out the door more instantaneously because of, you know, HP tuners or something else like that, that they may be more used to or more accustomed to. We kind of, we stay away from any stock ECU tuning. So we'll just say for the average person looking to rewire a car or put it on a standalone, generally speaking, it's mainly older vehicles, we'll say.
Well, it has to be, because nowadays you can't even, everything is so wired together and inner, you know, you just take one thing off and the whole rest of the car doesn't work.
So like, this is literally what we did is, I literally told them to go home and unplug the PCM. And because, just because Ford, right? I know some weird stuff with explorers and stuff like that and having to constantly, you know, window pro get programming problems or whatever, just crashing the can in general. So I just told them to go home and unplug the PCM and whatever doesn't work, it probably never will again, you know? There's a chance that we figure out and write a custom can stream for it. So I just sold like a 2009 Porsche Cayman S that had a Honda K Series in it. And we were communicating back and forth on can. So we had the factory gauge cluster working, ABS back working with like a link ECU. So, you know, some of, you know, I won't name another brand, but a lot of other manufacturers will say would lock the can. So you're never going to talk to the factory car with just say Holley, right? You know, maybe it will eventually or whatever. Maybe, you know, they offer something for this gen Camaro through some gateway or something, you know, but it's not going to most ECUs aren't going to natively, openly talk or communicate with not even just a modern car, anything with Cam, you know, so, you know, there's not me. I'm not smart enough, but I've got some friends and customers that, you know, can sniff out can on a newer vehicle, supply me with data or at least help me get on a roll so that, you know, we can at least get back the gauge cluster, you know, get the car functioning again, you know, on a standalone. But again, once you have to add that into the cost, your average, you know, blower Mustang or ZL1 Camaro, you know, they're not looking to do that. They're just looking to whatever, do a pulley swap, even if they're doing piston rod cam, something like that, they're not really looking to build a race car, you know. So, and yeah, a lot of this stuff is still a street car. We'll say the import world might be a little different, you know, it seems, you know, easy to sell a Evo customer, a standalone ECU when, yes, you can tune the stock PCM, you know, we just don't.
Right.
You know, we just instantly make the move, you know, we're going to put whatever plug and play ECU in it, whether it be Link or something else.
And is that your go to Link?
Link is for sure my go to.
Okay. So when do you get involved with using that? Has that always been the case or? No.
So I had a long time relationship with AEM. I was sponsored, we'll say, back in the AEM V1, V2, kind of turnover, whatever this would be, early 2000s. And I really tried to stick it out with AEM for a long time. Wasn't too fond of the Infinity switch over. Never really found my niche in that. So long story short, I had tuned a couple Link ECUs and a buddy of mine became Link ECU tech support for US and then helped kind of expand the Link brand in US and brought a couple of the guys over from New Zealand. And we kind of struck a deal and they sponsored me a ECU and a digital dash for one of my EVOs. So, and you know, just like anything else, learning curve, you know, I fell hard on it. And eventually after many hours, I just kind of figured it out and never turned back, you know. And again, I like it because it's, it's more open and easy to manipulate. You know, you're not less constrained than a lot of other stuff that I've done.
So that makes sense.
It's been our go-to. So that's why when Alex asked, Hey, I'm interested in putting a standalone in my, you know, 19F150. Well, I think this was the first Gen 3, you know, Coyote motor on a standalone in the world that we know of. So I'm like, well, it'll run the engine, you know? He was on a 10 speed trans at the time. And I was like, well, sure, eventually we could maybe control that transmission, but not easily right off the rip. So I'm like, yeah, I mean, you know, go put a Turbo 400 in the car and, you know, I'll wire it up, you know? And being honest, I thought this would never happen. And he says, okay, what do you need? And walks out of the car and drops me a deposit. We ordered some parts and, you know, wired it up.
Tons of custom stuff.
Yeah, tons of custom stuff later. A couple, you know, a little crank sensor and custom cam sensors in it. Got it running.
So, so how'd you guys meet then? How far does that go?
Yeah, was that when the relationship started or?
Oh, man. So he came by here a few times.
Yeah, like early, like 2016, 2017. I grew up like two miles, three miles north of here. So going down to like Woodward Dream Cruise, the Woodward Dream Cruise or the Pontiac Loop is like mile north. All the videos that you see of people doing rowdy burnouts during the Dream Cruise, it's like a mile south of here. So like anytime I go down to Woodward, cruise down Woodward, you drive by here. And if the door is open or there's people outside, you'll drive by and there's a bunch of race cars. And if it's too early in the day or too late at night, the door is shut and it looks like an abandoned building. It's like the need for a speed shop. You never know what's here.
Yeah, so he just kind of started stopping by and...
I sold you a blower off the CTS-V and then I bought a turbo for a 01 Cherokee.
Yeah, some beater Cherokee he would take. There's like a Holley Off-Road Park, I don't know, 20 minutes north of here. And he would go jump this Cherokee up there and was like, hey, you got a turbo for this thing? And I'm like, I mean, I got a whole bunch of garbage piece together, you know? And he went home, welded this crap together and got rolling. And then he had this F150 he bought with a blower on it and started stopping by. And eventually he pulled the blower off, put a turbo kit on it. And, you know, again, it was just tuned on stock ECU by somebody else. And did good.
It was just two wheel drive didn't hook up. And wish I would have bought a four wheel drive truck and did it. And I was like, s***, I can figure this out. So went on the eBay, bought a front diff. The guy wanted 200 bucks for it. And then I offered him 175. He said, no. It was like two months later, he lowered the price to like 159 or 160. So I snagged it and I was like, jokes on you. Some CV axles for 25 bucks for the driver side and like 30 or 40 bucks for the passenger side from the junkyard. Welded some brackets in and turbo 400, some Duramax transfer case. And yeah, it was like it was meant to be swapped.
How difficult was it? How long did it take you to do all that?
It wasn't, so it wasn't too bad. So the motor in the truck, when I did the swap, the motor was already blown and I've had a hoist at home at the time. So I pulled the cab off, pulled the motor out. The frame, I mean, when you think of it from a manufacturing standpoint, they're not going to make a bunch of different frames and knuckles and everything. So when I pulled the cab, basically, I went to the junkyard, looked at some four-wheel drive trucks, went home, realized that the front sway bar has the hole for the front diff already there. And then the front knuckles are the same. They're just not machined for the IWEs, which are like the four-wheel drive vacuum actuated hubs. So I got some four-wheel drive wheel bearings off eBay, used because new ones are expensive. And then threw those in the two-wheel drive knuckles through some used CV axles and some front diff with 150,000 miles, I think, in it. Welded some brackets to the frame. It was super easy when everything was out of there. So I was able to use that one hole on the sway bar mount to kind of locate the one side and then used a floor jack to raise the other side of the front diff up and took some measurements, had his employee, Adam, laser or plasma cut me some mounts and just tig welded them in. Put it back together.
Didn't you say at dinner last night, I think it was like a thousand bucks all of a sudden.
Oh yeah, like all of a sudden done. Like the CV axles, I ended up buying whole knuckles, like the knuckles with the wheel bearings in it off eBay, but then I realized that they were the same knuckle and I just swapped the wheel bearing out because it was easier. I didn't have to do a realignment or anything, so I swapped the wheel bearings. I have those knuckles somewhere. I think the knuckles were like 200 bucks for knuckles, both sides with wheel bearings. CV axles, I blow boots on the CV axles all the time, and it's cheaper just to buy used CV axle than it is to put a new boot on it. And they're anywhere from like 30 to 50 bucks at Trams in Pontiac. So, yeah, so whatever, another 100 bucks on 300 there. And then the front diff was whatever, 150, 160 bucks. And then the transfer case I use is 899, re-manufactured on eBay. And when the chain stretches, you just buy another one.
That sounds about the same kind of price as like doing a Honda all-wheel drive swap. Yeah, I was like, CRV parts.
Man, until you buy real parts for it.
Yeah, well, most of the guys we've been talking to, you're grabbing CRV parts off the junkyard.
So like to do a legit all-wheel drive Honda B-Series, I'll say you're going to have.
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Almost 25K just in driveline. Oh, really? Between like a billet ball housing, you know, say a PPG 1-4 handcuff, nice drive shaft, Waggon van viscous coupler, having the viscous coupler redone, you know, limited slip for the front, limited slip for the rear, having the rear end redone, you know, not even getting into like mounting brackets or anything. The B stuff is actually more expensive, I would say, than doing a K. A K all-wheel drive and front-wheel drive basically share the same gear set, where the B series all-wheel drive stuff is basically an elite of its own. It's its own transmission, and they just crank the price up. I'm assuming probably not as much want for it. You know, and you can't just sell it to front-wheel drive and all-wheel drive guys. So it's just more. So you can go buy a CR-V and basically rob everything out of it by one. You need two short axles for the rear, but you could basically build an all-wheel drive setup for the price of whatever you pay for a CR-V. You know, it won't be super strong, but you will have an all-wheel drive Civic for a thousand bucks, you know. So, but yeah.
How did that switch from Hondas to Evos happen though? Like, I'm sure when you looked out there to see what was available, what made you choose Evo over something else?
So I didn't choose Evo, Evo chose me. So I had done, I had a couple customers that had Evos that, you know, I'd build a turbo kit for, or, you know, basically at that time, I only had a two-wheel drive dyno. So I had one of these, like, whatever, I keep looking at this one, but it's blue by you. I had some kid with a electron pearl blue or electron blue Evo come by, and he literally wanted to buy, like, some HID headlights or something, and I was like, dude, kid, don't waste your money on this. You know, like, don't go put some fake aftermarket HID headlights in this car. And I walk outside, I hear him crank this thing over. It basically doesn't want to start. They finally get it running. And I walk out there and I'm like, what ECU is this car on? And he looks at me and says, AEM V2. And I said, I could make that thing run better. And that was literally it. So he tells me who was tuning it. I know the guy, I'll say he's well respected in the community, been real fast. And I'm like, I feel like this guy could tune a car. So maybe there's something wrong with this car. You know, I mean, sometimes you're going tuner shopping, but you just don't want to admit to yourself that you built a piece of crap, you know? Yeah. So I said, well, I'll do you this. I'll give you my phone number. You give me a call later tonight. You come over to my house. I'll plug into this thing. We'll go out and drive around. You give me a half hour. Either I'm going to get this car driving better immediately or I will put the old tune up back in it, charge you zero dollars and send you on your way. Because whatever, I do Honda and some other stuff. I'd never really messed with an Evo as far as tuning it. So we go out, we drive around, we make it from my house up to the mall down the road, mile and a half. And he's like, oh my god, I can already tell how much better it is. And I'm like, I don't really think there's anything wrong with this car, it just seems like the tune up's really bad. So I get it taking some hits down the road. And I give him the option. I said, either I could tell his basically his dad was going to pay this bill. And it's like midnight now. So I say, I give you two options, either I'll put the old tune up back in it and send you home, or I'm going to lock this thing down at say 15, 20 pounds, kind of slow. Knowing that you'll have to come back, I'm going to password protect this thing and send you home to protect my money. So he says, well, I don't want back in it what was in it before. So I'm like, all right, whatever, I'll lower the boost a little bit, password it, send him home. So he come back the next day, I end up tuning the car up. And then this kid, this is the auto swap car. So it's got a six bolt and a Evo eight. So him and his brother went and bought this car. Again, stock ECU, somebody else tuning it. And so at the time, this is still the AEM days. So I put AEM V2 box in the car, turn it up on like a 3794. I'll say a 67 mil 35R for those that don't know some old FP turbo name, you know. So we get it running pretty hard, high 50s, low 60 pounds of boost. We spray it with a hundred shot and it's fast. You know, on the street, it spools fast. It got it pretty good. We went out and beat a bunch of GTRs with it. And everybody else's 1500 horsepower car with what probably made 800 wheel, you know.
What timeframe was this?
This is probably eight, nine years ago. So many years ago, something like that.
Yeah. Just on know what period. You're period correct, you know.
So, I would hurt this car all the time. I didn't quite understand yet that the difference between this thing and a B-Series, you know. When I was torque spiking the s*** out of these things and hurting head gaskets and just didn't quite grasp it yet. So, there was a lot of trial and error with this thing, but we were out with it five nights a week street racing it. And this thing took a W every time we took it out. And even if this thing got hurt on Friday night, I would have it back at the street races on Saturday. I don't care if this thing needed piston swapped in it, head redone, welded deck, valves, head gasket, whatever. I would fix this car overnight, no matter what was wrong with it, you know. I even bent, folded some aluminum rods up in it once on like a Friday night and had it back out of the street races on Saturday. Like back on the Correlo steel rod, just right in the car, pulled ahead quick and dirty, honed the block, even though the rod had been hitting the cylinder wall and just packed it back together. So the Evos just kind of started flooding in.
Okay. So like to you for like business wise, like people started coming in.
So like, you know, it was like, all right, well, there's one, mind you, I still don't own an Evo at this, at this time period. So like, I had like nine of these things in here at a time. And this is all we were doing was just, you know, it'd be seven silver Evos in Michigan. So we'd have seven silver Evos, you know, one white, one black, whatever. So one of my customers, this is probably six years ago, six and a half years ago, was taking apart a silver Evo, putting everything into some white Evo chassis he bought. So he put the silver car for sale, and I kept trying to basically low bomb. Sorry, James, if you watch this. So I wait until he lowers it real far. And I bought the chassis for a couple thousand bucks. And then I found another totaled car that still pretty much had everything with it for like another 1,700. So basically I was able to almost put together an Evo for 3,500 bucks or something, you know?
They don't give them away like that anymore.
No, no, you don't find these deals anymore. I've seen them cheaper actually, but just not often. You know, sometimes people don't know what they have. So, I just...
It's like the deal for you the other night.
Oh, yeah. So like my plan was that I was just going to build like a 500 or 600 horsepower street Evo. And as I put it together, I was talking to one of my machinists at the time, and he's like, hey, you want to half fill this thing? You know, and like my employee sits there looking at me, and I'm like, just fulfill it. And he's like, I thought you wanted a street car. I'm like, just fulfill it. You know, I'm just going to give up before I even put this thing together, that we're just going to build a race car. And so I drove it for maybe about a year, even with the filled block in it, we'd do some street driving with it. Hadn't been to the DSM shootout in probably 15 years or something. Went down to the shootout with one of my buddies, Garrett, this kid Marco, and a couple of my buddies, you know, and we're coming back from it. And I think the car went whatever, 940 or something like that, you know, which whatever is a fun street car, you know. So I get back from there and like, you know, we just drove whatever, three, four hours back. We've had a long weekend and we get back and I'm like, I'm gutting this car right now. You know, I'm pulling the back seats out, I'm cutting up the doors. And over this following winter, because shootout's kind of late in the year. So over that winter, my buddy Garrett at the time was doing like a 25, five chassis in a Mitsubishi 3000 GT.
Okay.
So it was 4G swap 3000 GT. I think it's still the world's fastest 3000 GT actually.
I can't imagine. Do a lot of people build those? Because they're few and far between.
They just suck to work on.
Really? I want one real bad. I've had several people talk me off that ledge.
I think there's another one.
You don't want one of these? So he was doing a chassis on it and I'm like, this car had been done, whatever. I'll say whatever, half chassis, three-quarter chassis, whatever you want to call this car. I'm looking at both of them and I'm like, you know what, I could do this too. I could three-quarter chassis a unibody car. This should be easy. So, and I'm always a small shop, me and one guy, me and two guys, whatever. So me and my guy Chris of the time, Subaru guy, literally, car was sitting here in the corner, never moved. We cut it apart right where it sat. I jacked it up. I strapped this thing to the roof, pulled most of the chassis out from it, welded it up. And now we've got a three-quarter chassis of them. So just kind of fell into my lap, you know, we'll say. So now I wanted something different, you know, so I sold, I had a Fox body notch and this port, this K-Swap Porsche I was talking about. And I'll say I came up from first car, low rider truck. So I've always kind of been into low rider truck stuff. S10 was my first car. I always wanted a cyclone. I had a couple of typhoons 15 years ago or something. So eventually as I was kind of selling stuff off, and me and him were at PRI this year, and I'm like, you know what? I'm doing a cyclone now. Now's the time I'm going to end up too old where I'm not going to be able to cut up a car, full chassis something anymore. Eventually I'm just going to, my body's not going to work anymore. So, excited. Now is the time. And I've got a pretty, like I mentioned yesterday, I've got a pretty nice built like aluminum rod LS motor and nothing wrong with the LS, but there is, there is. We like to make some parts and stuff like that to try to help support our racing addiction. And there is like nothing left to make for an LS. China has already made every part there is for this motor. There's nothing left. So, I'd like to do something different. Alex here has got a Coyote, again, same deal. Never tuned a Coyote before, never messed with one before his truck. And, you know, whatever I think this year, new motor, new injector, you know, so we'll say starting not from scratch, but you know, a little bit of a base point, fourth hit, truck made 2385. So what am I doing messing with an LS motor? You know, this, the Coyote just makes more sense. You know, I mean, I come from an overhead cam, you know, I'm used to a little bit smaller bore, little, little shorter stroke, but you know, it, it makes more sense than some push rods to me right now.
So somebody that gets it.
Yeah, you know, I mean.
We got that recorded for you, Dan.
I would hope we've advanced in the last 70 years, but you never know, right? You know?
You can put them together relatively cheap for the power level, right? Like factory heads, factory crank, factory cams. I mean, my motor's nothing special. Factory crank, it's an iron block, non-sleeved iron block, some fancy prototype head gaskets that have been working pretty sweet. Well, let's start from the beginning, right?
Yeah, tell us about that whole thing, because how do you get to 2385 in a street truck?
So initially, it started off as a Roush nightmare. So it was supposed to be a daily driver. I had a different vehicle that was like my toy, you could call it, and I was like, I'll just get like a little supercharged, cowdy truck just to play around with. He'll be the daily driver. They were basically, it was before the F150s got huge. So I bought it in 19, sorry, no, it was a 19. It was leftover. I bought it in 20, like beginning of 20, and it was a 19. So they had like a $10,000 rebate. Everyone in Michigan gets employee discount because everyone knows someone that works for the big three. So I got like a, I think I paid under sticker for like my nightmare F150. So it was like a no brainer, either buy a base model truck or buy a truck with a blower, buy a truck with a blower. Well, I found out that these Coyote motors were way sweeter than what I was working with to begin with as a race car. So I sold the race car at the time.
What was the race car at the time?
Race car. It was a, I had a ton of them. It was a 09 335D BMW. So that was also supposed to be a daily driver, just a diesel BMW, but it had some custom ground cams, head studs, hybrids, big fuel pump. And I sprayed it with like 150, 200 shot nitrous. We took it to some dyno day. It made 496 and like seven or 800 foot pounds of torque. And then we sprayed it and it made almost 1100 foot pounds. So it pulled up to this diesel truck dyno day at the local Lions Club or wherever it was. And all these people are talking smack. And I go put down like more power than 90% of the trucks. But I sold that thing, got a new daily, then started modding the truck, got a twin turbo kit for it. Then it was still 10 speed stock motor, twin turbo, twin 67s or something. Had Midnight build the trans in it and it just was two wheel drive. So it just blew the tires off everywhere. It kind of got out of control too much. And that's when I decided to basically four wheel drive swap it. We took it to the track. It blew up the rear diff. It was September at the time. So it just sat for the rest of the winter and tore it apart and started that four wheel drive swap. And part of the issue when I four wheel drive swapped it is no one else has, no one else really had done it before. And it's not like there was a couple of tuners that said that they could figure it out, but they haven't done it yet. So I didn't want to be the test dummy. So with the Mustang, when you four wheel, when you 400 swap a Mustang and go into HP tuners and change it to a manual, change ECU to a manual, cause it's already there. And F150, it's not there. So they weren't sure how they were going to do it or if it was even possible. So I was like, screw it. I'll just put a standalone in it. The truck had a AMS 2000 for boost control. I was like, I can sell this AMS 2000. It'll pay for the ECU. And then I won't have two different, say, boxes or ways to control the truck and everything will be together, right? And then four-wheel drive swapped the truck, dropped the center console off to Andy because the ECU sits in the center console of the truck and then gave him some measurements. He did the whole wiring on it. And then it was standalone. I had a built motor for it, but it was middle of COVID. So the classic six-week lead time for a motor turned into eight months. Yeah. So it went stock motor, well, sorry. When it was two-wheel drive, I blew up the stock motor, put a junkyard motor in it. Crap, I'm trying to remember this.
So you had a stock motor.
Stock motor, blew it up, bought a built motor. My dad convinced me to buy a built motor for it. It took forever to come in. So I ended up buying a stock motor from, or a junkyard motor in the meantime, put the junkyard motor in when it was two-wheel drive still. Was it still two-wheel drive?
It was still two-wheel because it wasn't, it was two-wheel and then you never had the, I'll spare their name, built motor in the car when it was two-wheel. It was only when it was four-wheel. So he did the all-wheel drive swap, built motor and stand-alone basically at the same time, if I'm thinking right.
Well, I think it had the first shootout, first DSM shootout, it was four-wheel.
The first one had to go back to the stock motor.
Had to go back, yeah. So that's the story. Yeah, built motor, yeah. So it went four-wheel drive, TH400, built motor, stand-alone, like. Okay.
They did take care of this.
They took care of it and, you know, it was middle of COVID, s*** happens, you never know who works for them, blah, blah, blah. Well, I'm no longer having anyone build my motors anymore. They're just going to be built by me. And then if something goes wrong, there's no one to blame but me. But basically put the built motor in.
What, like 500 miles maybe?
Yeah, it went and took a test hit, and it self-destructed within like 500 miles, right?
And this thing, all right, so again, my first Coyote, right? We get this thing running. I'm kind of looking at the oil pressure, and I'm like, I mean, I just don't know anything about it, right? That seems low, right? Used to Honda and Mitsubishi, and I'd do some stuff for the Mitsubishi to make them have them, you know, real high oil pressure. So I'm like, man, this seems bad, but whatever, I don't know no better. So, and I'm like, this thing just doesn't sound right. So I think we literally like, you know, driving around on 20, 25 pounds, something like that, he goes to take a hit with it. And I think I turned it up another whatever, five PSI or something. And he calls me and he's like, yeah, it like blew up. What do you mean it blew up? Like, there's no way, you know, like, yeah, I'm not just guessing, like, there's no way that, you know, this thing just leaned out and burned up or something. So somebody ratchet strapped it back up here.
Mark Ratchet strapped it back, I pulled the...
Yeah, we were messing with it. And, you know, he pulls one valve cover, and then we end up pulling the other valve cover.
There's a timing chain hanging here, cam cap's broken.
Oh, s***.
Yeah, so the, basically, it was supposed to be new everything. I don't believe the heads were new. Basically, on any overhead cam car, the cam caps are put on the head, and then they line hone it all together.
You know, like, them caps are married to that cylinder.
Those cam caps were only fit.
When I did mine, I laid them all out, so they all went back on right where they were supposed to go.
I can't take cam caps off his cylinder head and put it on mine. It's just, it doesn't work that way. Well, the cam caps on my motor were not from that motor. They fit, but you would...
They've been like hand sanded out.
Like hand sanded like with a dremel.
Like somebody had like ovaled these things out to where the cam would actually spin.
You pull the, we pulled the cam caps off and there was like some cams or some of the caps, you could see where the cam was riding on the cap in one spot and some, it wasn't like touching at all.
And you could still see where like they had hand jobbed the cam cap to make it work. So we're like, holy crap, you know? He calls this place, they agree to take care of it, he pallet it up, ships it out. He young enough, so he ambitious, swaps another stock motor in it.
This is the week before the Dream Cruise.
Yeah, this is right before the Dream Cruise.
Dream Cruise Wednesday.
Yeah, it was like, yeah.
And you're still running on an F150 firing order though, right?
Yes.
Yeah. So they're not horribly expensive. Would that cost you 2,500 bucks?
He still had the stock motor.
I still have the stock motor.
So he had the second stock motor still sitting there.
Oh, okay.
So he just swapped the stock motor back in with, whatever, oil pump, gear, head stud. I don't even know if it had head studs.
It didn't have studs. I locked the cams out. I swapped the lockouts from the built motor back to the junkyard motor. Because the junkyard motor before was on the stock ECU, so I locked the cams out. Was that, that was, no, Tuesday night, I blew it up. And then I drove it back up here Wednesday. I pulled an all-nighter, threw the motor in. Cammas would have been dream crews. No. I've done a few of those. Blow it up. Andy likes to do this thing where he sees me chug and smoke down the road, blown up and turns the other way.
Yeah. So he goes, takes a lot of test hits fairly close back behind us here. And I go to a couple of different gas stations at night on my way home. I only live like a half mile from here. So I was driving down the next road, the next main road up here to get something at night at like two in the morning. And I know you just want to take a test hit. And I see him like pull up. This thing is just chooching out like driver pipe, you know? And I'm like, keep going. He'll cough. It's that bad, you know? He calls me a couple of minutes later, and he's like, dude, did you see that? And I'm like, yeah, it looks like you blew that thing up, you know? And he's like, I think it like broke a piston or something. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, it probably did. You know, because this was like stock motor, stock motor. I don't know, 28, 30 pounds. I think we might have got one of the stockers up to like 32 pounds, something like that. And I mean, it's not like we're regapping the rings or anything, you know, just trying to flood it rich to, you know, keep it from buttoning the rings and breaking the piston. And it butted the rings and broke the piston.
So well, at 19, what's a, that's a Gen 3. What's the compression on one of those?
Who the f*** cares? Who the f*** cares? 12 to 1. So he calls and I was like, He says, who cares? Yeah, it doesn't matter. It doesn't sound easy, you know? So he calls and he's like, you know, we kind of chatted about it at like whatever, one, two in the morning that night. And this is probably like, again, like, Wednesday night.
This is a race Saturday.
So there's a race, was it Friday or Saturday? There was a race.
It was Saturday. It was at Lapeer.
Well, then you might have blown it up Thursday. You blew it up Thursday. So then he calls, we talk about it again Friday. And I'm like, bro, you can just like skip half a day of work. You could just stay up all night and throw a piston in it. Just hot swap this thing, you know? So he pulls the one cylinder head off, smacks a piston in it and heads out to Lapeer Dragway, you know, about 45 minutes north of us. And I'm waiting, you know, I come to work in the morning. So I'm like, somebody will keep me updated, you know, I call him, you go into the track still. He's, yeah, yeah, I'm on my way. All right, all right, this is gonna be sweet, you know? This thing is gonna go fast. Like I know it is. Everybody already messaged me, bro, what happened to Alex's truck?
All right, Dan, on a scale of one to ten, how much do you think your wife loves you?
Ooh, it's got to be like an eight, solid eight.
So I think it would be great if she used your credit card to go to ToonBySean, shawn.com to get you a Haltech ECU for 5% off using cobalt oxide. Is that math out?
Absolutely.
I don't think we tell her about this ad until it runs though.
And I'm like, you tell me, man, I haven't seen nothing yet. It's been like, you know, it's probably been two minutes this thing tried to make a hit. It makes it out about 40 feet.
That's when I found out you got to hone them ATI balancers.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
And you got to remember, I went from a 335D diesel BMW where you just tune the thing and throw more air at it to race car. So I'm learning as time's going on.
So you learn like I do. I've blown a few motors too.
Yeah, you have to. He's had a good life learning so far. It hasn't even been that expensive, to be honest. So yeah, he left the line. You can see and this is when I was like, dude, you got to put a rear end in this thing. I mean, you can see it like the rear wheels like toe out or something. Like you see the whole wheels do this as it just like bends the tubes, and it stutters off the line a little bit, makes it out 30 feet, 40 feet, and just sends the front like four or six inches of the crankshaft with the damper off.
Oh, I'm sitting there and you hear the balancer bouncing off the frame rails, and it wasn't until I hit the brakes it like dipped the front enough or something happened to where the balancer had enough space to get out. And I'm sitting there, I hear something banging around, I don't know what it is. At the Lapierre track, the walls are like super close. The balancer in the video, you can see the balancer hit the ground, bounce between the front frame rails of the truck, it hits out, hits the wall of the track, bounces up and over, like the hood of the truck hits the ground, looks like a Beyblade, does like these crazy spins. We were spinning this stock motor to like 9,000 almost, like 8,800 or something, just pushing it past what we should be doing. And this balancer makes like a full quarter mile pass without me, like the whole track without me. Got a slip floor and everything.
Did you really? Oh yeah. Yeah. I guess part of the truck made it.
It like wasn't that bad. I'm pretty sure like it went like six something to the eight.
Yeah, so that was finally the end, at least for him, that was the end of stock motors. Yeah. So I think when that one let go, I think again, it was late, late in the season.
Yeah, it was like September, October, like one of the last events of the year.
Yeah. So like he just went to, it was like, I won't say an open track day, but not like a race, you know, it was an event, you know.
And that's when it got back halfed, was that summer.
I was going to ask when you decided and why you decided to back half it.
Because the rear axle flexed so bad.
The rear axle, it was supposed to just get a cage. I have a buddy that works at one of the airbag companies here and he was showing me some crash test videos of these aluminum trucks. And it's like really bad.
Really?
Like really bad. There's this bar on the frame rail that sticks out like a foot that's behind the front tires. And it's everyone with F150s pops that out or cuts it out to try and save weight. Well, that bar is to where if you get into 25% or over front end collision, it takes the front tire and pushes it away from the body. Without that there, that front tire basically rips the whole side of the truck off. He was showing me these crash test videos or pictures where that bar wasn't there and like the front tire was like in your torso. Oh, s***. Like bad. So I had those cut off on my truck, of course. So I dropped it off to get a cage over at EC1 race cars in Davison and I had him basically quote me out for the back half and it wasn't that bad. So I just had him do the whole thing. So they chopped the factory frame rails at like the there's six bed bolts. So it starts after the first bed bolt and then stops before the last one. So the bed still uses for the factory bolts, but the cage is tucked below the bed rails. So it's like sleeper. I don't know if they'll certify, but more so just so I don't die.
It'll 850 certify.
Okay. So now you can add proper drag link and all that s***.
Yeah, so now it's four link, nine inch rear end, Vikings in the front, Aftos in the back, all the fancy stuff. When you look at it, you can't tell there's chassis work done to it unless you get close. If there was a tonneau cover on, you'd never know.
So you have the bed to go on. Oh yeah, you had the bed on it.
I think we saw that wasn't it over there at Matt's?
Yeah, the bed's at Matt's. It just wasn't on there because we had this.
I don't know. Every time I've seen it's been like a different state of something.
Yeah, I mean, we just have fun with it, right? Yeah. My buddy bought a sand car and we went up to Silver Lake. Silver Lake Sand Dunes is like two and a half, three hours from here. My buddy bought a sand car. We went up there a few times and driving up there, we just made a joke of like, we're going to put some sand paddles on my truck and bring it to the sand dunes. I think it was Memorial Day weekend, my buddy Matt Goczek let me borrow his paddles for, he has a set of super scoops like 36 inch big tires or 33 inch big tire that they glues and bolt paddles to. I bought some adapters and bolted them up to the truck, took the bed off and brought up to the sand dunes. The motor was already hurt. I mean, before the new motor that's in it now, that motor has had like three sets of head gaskets, different head studs, can't keep a head on it with the old motor setup.
Yeah.
So I was like, screw it, it's already hurt, might as well take it up to the sand dunes and have some fun and it did like really well. It was a ton of fun, but sand everywhere.
Yeah. I think the lakes are freezing over right now.
Yeah, that's what I want to do next. Yeah.
Maybe somebody watching this owns a set of studded tires that want to loan Alex so we can go do some cool stuff out on the ice, maybe.
Yeah.
I want to start a set of radials and go out lake drag. I think it would be a blast.
I just picked up a set of tires. I mean, I don't have the studs in them, but you can add the studs off Amazon for my Lincoln.
I got a perfect idea for these guys. Dude, you know who else just pitched an idea like this to us like three weeks ago at PRI?
Scully.
Scully. So our buddies that do Nitro Cross are formerly known as Nitro Cross. They're trying to take their rally cars and go do some crazy ice racing. It'd be cool to get those two guys together and then you're f****** F150.
They do some, where is it? Wisconsin, they do it? They do ice drags on the lake?
Yeah.
Yeah, that'd be sweet.
So my daughter's gonna start drag racing snowmobiles on the ice. She's got an event coming up the end of this month and then another one end of February. So yeah, we do that quite often up there.
You ever seen the snowmobiles with the ice skates on the front?
Like the full blown like thousand horse snowmobiles?
Like 1500 horse. Speed needle or something? I think the world's fastest is called Speed Needle. It's a bunch of it's done by Hypersport, if that makes any sense. Craig over at Hypersport makes like a billet block that mounts a Hayabusa cylinder head. I know that they, I think from what I hear, they don't like the name Hayabusa with it because it's, I think you might be able to get like a full billet cylinder head from them now too. So there'll be like, you know, 75, 80 pounds boost, methanol, you know, a four cylinder sled and they...
Have a 16 inch ice skater.
And they did a ton, they were talking to us at PRI last year. They did a ton of research and testing on different designs of ice skates. And at first, like, I mean, we've all seen enough snowmobiles before. You see this thing sitting there and it's wild looking. It's got the whole like fiberglass outlaw front end on it. And you know, I'm like, man, this thing just kind of looks odd. You know what I mean? It was probably until Friday or Saturday at PRI when I'm finally looking at it. And I'm like, this thing has ice skates on it in the front instead of like the, I don't know, you call it the carbide, you know, yeah, the carbide skis. And I'm like, holy crap, this thing's got ice skates on it. And we started talking to them. And I think it might be the Bain brothers, I think is what it was, or Bain Racing, something like that, owns the SpeedNeedle.
Okay.
And there's like only one or two lakes that they take it to, and they like zamboni this thing. So they're, you know, I'm assuming there's no suspension on this thing. It's, you know, the front nose has got to be a quarter inch off the ground or something. So they actually run a zamboni over the lake and super smooth it out before they run this thing.
Oh, really?
So, yeah, and it's like 200 mile an hour and not even.
I know that. I think some of the records are set. So we do speed runs where we're at. And it's like 200 and some miles an hour. I want to say it's even, it could be in a 220, 230, something like that.
You familiar with the Grinch?
I think so.
It's like a green supercharged on M5. Yeah. So I think it's kind of the same group of people involved with both of those. This one's a turbo sled.
Okay.
You know, and the Grinch is a blower now. It might have been turbo in previous life forms, but last I saw it at least was a, you know, big blower on it.
So.
Okay.
Yeah. No, they get ridiculous.
Yeah.
We usually do the, I don't watch too much of the guys that are going that fast because it's like, that's not even, you know, that's like going to Texas 2K and being like, this is really cool.
I'm going to go watch all the twin turbo Lambos that I can't afford.
But yeah, as far as I know, I think some of the speed run records are set on the lake where I got a cabinet. So. And you're in? Shattuck, Wisconsin.
Okay. And I want to say that I'll look it up after this. And like I say, I think there's only one or two lakes that they'll even go to that they can get smooth enough for it.
Yep.
So yeah, it's got to be.
It might be. I know I've seen this Grinch one before, whether it was online or at the drags. I don't know.
Yeah.
But yeah.
Yeah, that's fine.
If all the big dogs are showing up, then.
Yep.
Yeah, it's got to be. There's a couple of places within a couple of hours here that get pretty serious. And I'll say the Link ECU is very big in the snowmobile community.
Okay. Okay.
So over the winter, I would say we sell at least seven to 10 ECUs to people that, you know, say, oh, it's nothing you're used to. I'm putting it on a snowmobile. I'm always like, you know, what kind of snowmobile? You know, oh, it's a drag sled. You know, and it's a lot of the, it's like a ZX 1200 or 12 Z1. It's like a 1200 CC two-cylinder.
Okay.
Arctic Cat motor or something like that.
A lot of the, I'm not sure what Arctic Cat does for four strokes. So I ride Yamahas, which are basically like Yamaha R1 engines.
The Apex motor probably.
The Apex, my wife rides an Apex with the R1 in it.
Yep.
Mine has the, I ride a Sidewinder. So it's the 998, which is still a two-cylinder, just under 1000 CC, but it's got a turbo on it.
Yeah. I tuned a side by side with a Apex motor swap in it.
Okay.
Like, it was actually like one of those weird Arctic Cat, whatever.
So Arctic Cat and Yamaha have been in bed together for a little while anyway. Like, Yamaha makes the engines for a lot of Arctic Cats.
This was a swap though.
Oh, was it?
The Apex motor was an actual sled motor swapped into like a wild cat or whatever they're called. Side by side.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And Uncle Scott's are different.
No, no. It was, I can't remember what his name was. Lives right up by Silver Lake Sand Dunes. And I know if you hurt something up there and you need a machinist, they always send you to this guy. And he made his own billet trans case and everything for it. Was using like, you know, gears out of some Chrysler front wheel drive trans in it. And I mean, he is smart. You know, math this all out. And we've done a couple other side by sides with that Z1, which is the Arctic Cat, whatever 1200 two cylinder motor. There's a local dude that's got one that makes like 650 horse that street drives it. And then we did some tuning on one of the world's fastest side by sides. That was again, the Z1 motor, the Easter Race and the Outlaw, probably three, four years ago, something like that.
That's becoming the whole side by side thing. And now they're getting drag strips and stuff set up for that.
We were down at FL2K after the Cletus race. And the guys that were pitted next to us went like 850 or something. In some side, I mean, had a ton of work done to it, but like stock cage, some can-am with a bunch of motor work that looked stock. And he went like 8 something. I was like, holy s***. That's crazy. They said he was street racing and all this other stuff.
That crowd seems to force him on the end of this thing.
Oh, yeah.
Well, talk to us a little bit about this Cletus race that you did. Because you keep bringing it up. I haven't ever really talked to you about it.
It's a sore subject. So basically, this last year was the first year with the built motor. This year was the second year with the built motor. I'm going to use the restroom. You're good. Basically, the old motor setup was sleeve Gen 3 block, ported, frankenstein Gen 3 heads. Some I don't know brand half inch head studs that were in it, and copperhead gaskets, top fuel hoops, brought to the sand dunes. Had fun with it. When I was at the sand dunes, I killed the trans, so got it back, got the trans fixed, still had the hurt motor. Threw another set of, I think I went through like two or three sets of head gaskets last last, or this past summer season, you could call it. And then the clearest race was happening, and I didn't get invited to it until like a week before. And I had my like block machined already. I had rods, I had pistons. I didn't have head studs. I didn't have heads. It was like half the parts were there, but I was like, it's going to be a winter project. Seasons over, it's... When was the clearest race? Like late September, I think. The all wheel drive clearest race, something like that. But basically he messaged me on Facebook and said, the spot's mine if I want it. So I was like, hell yeah, why not? I sent my nephew down to On3. The guys at On3 had a couple of GT350 motors, and I bought a whole long block for the heads. Got some valve springs from a place called PSI. They're out of Michigan. They have some like super high pound Yodi springs. So most people run 1281Xs in like the Gen 3 stuff. And I'm trying to spin this thing to 9,500, 10,000 RPM, and like 45, 55 pounds of boost. So I got these crazy Andy called PSI for me. Got these crazy valve springs made. Sent my nephew down to pick up a long block for the cylinder heads, because I couldn't find GT350 heads anywhere. And I'm throwing this motor together like five days before the race. Like this is, this is Monday, I send my nephew down and we have to be in Florida the following Wednesday to race. So Tuesday, I think it's Wednesday, I finally start assembling the long block, the short blocks all put together. So basically, it's a Ford Performance iron block, stock crank, MGP aluminum rod, stock GT350 heads, some PSI valve springs, some custom head gaskets we made for it. Fun fact, the Voodoo or the iron block is not the same as the Gen 3 or Gen 2. It uses a different head stud. So I put in this long block together on Wednesday, and I find out that they don't make a 625 head stud for this block. So I had to call up ARP. Well, we're not going to say that. I got some custom 625 head studs made for this thing. Throw this motor together. Throw it in the truck Friday. We go to our buddy's shop that has a hub pack Naver Racing over there in the Wixom area. And we put on the hub dyno first. On wastegate, I think it made what? Nine low mid to high nines. And then basically every pole, you added what, 10 pounds to it?
I think I stuck 10 in it and it made like 1,300 something.
Waste, on top of wastegate.
Yeah, so I stuck 10 on top of gate. I think it made 13 something. Stuck 10 on top. Made 18 something. Stuck 10 on top. Made 23 something. And it was kind of, small motor comes up real fast. So it was getting hard to try to stop it without really bogging it. I would almost prefer that it kind of zinged right past it. It'll kind of keep the motor alive a lot longer than trying to bog it out and get it to build the big boost way down low. So I think I tried to put, I think I tried to whack it with like 50 or 55 pounds, because I think it just over 40, it made 23 something.
It was like 42 or 43 pounds in the log.
Yeah, and I tried to stack another 10 or 15 at it, and it kind of just like blew right through it, didn't pick up anything. It didn't even pick up the boost because it basically it just wasn't enough load. And I'm like, almost like if you're messing with a water brake dyno, any time you're dealing with a small motor, and it's going to pick up all of its power over the course of like 500 RPM, it gets hard to grab it fast enough, you know, so it just was kind of blowing right through it, and kind of looked at Alex, and I'm like, let's just, we don't need to hurt this thing here, you know. Obviously, we're close enough, you know, to be able to comfortably turn the boost up to whatever we were going to need to, you know, to no prep race it, so let's get it off of here, and go try to make a couple hits with it, you know. And I don't know where you left off at, but it was getting pretty late, and we pulled back up here, and I was trying to raz him, and we were with a buddy of ours, Nick, and them two were driving down to Florida together, that you should really unload this thing now. And go try and take some test hits here. Oh, we just want to hit the road, you know. And I'm like, you should really unload this thing while I'm still here. Take a couple hits with it, you know, whatever. Six, one, half a dozen of the other. They hit the road, and then, you know, eventually I remote it in. What was it been? If the race was Tuesday morning, I remote it in.
It was Wednesday, so we left Saturday night.
No, that was Sunday.
No, that was Sunday.
So they left Sunday night, and then maybe like Tuesday night, at like 2.30 in the morning, I remote into this thing. Maybe third, well, at first, probably four hours earlier, they tried to take a hit, sent me a log, super lean, no fuel pressure. He had just put three brushless pumps in it. Luckily, he took the old pumps with him, swapped back to just the, whatever, four or five 25s in it, and took a hit, no timing in it, super slow ramp. It was a slug. I put too much in it, just to take a guess at it, so I could try and find a happy median. And third hit, second or third hit, neck messages me back, oh yeah, that's the one. You know, and I'm like, ah, thing was still soft for like the first one second. You know?
We're testing the back of the Freedom Factory, back of the Freedom Factory, on like gravel. Like we can't even make, we can make like a 60 foot, and that's about all the space we have, is like enough to do a 60 foot.
Yeah, so I tried to get after it a little bit more, and I kind of don't, you know, and I was hearing back in like 30 seconds, and all of a sudden, boom, communication stops for like 10 minutes. And he calls and he's like, oh, it's like won't move. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he's like, oh, it's like stuck where it's at. Like we're gonna have to drive the trailer to the truck. It won't move.
Yeah, we ended up, yeah, we took a test hit in a different spot. So we were behind the Freedom Factory and then we moved and we were testing between the like Circle Track and Braidington. There was a straight road there. So we tried to take a hit there and something in the trans. I didn't know at the time. I thought maybe it killed a transfer case and I just go get a transfer case, throw a transfer case in it. It ended up welding the, not the direct drum. Planetaries or something. Yeah, it ended up welding like the planetaries to something. I'm not a trans guy. It ended up welding parts together and the trans was, it literally.
Unintentionally.
Literally, you watch the video, you hear like clunk clunk and then all four tires lock up and it's like boom. So we ended up basically bringing the trailer over from where it was parked and back the trailer up to the truck and then jacked it up and we tried to fix it that night before the race because the race didn't start till 10. So Franco and I pulled an all nighter. Five o'clock in the morning comes around and like employees from the Freedom Factory are like rolling into work, driving past us and like we're like laying under this truck trying to drop the transit like four or five in the morning. The one guy at the Freedom Factory, Josh, I'm pretty sure is his name. He rolled by us and like we're like half awake under this truck trying to get it done. And there were some tools we needed and he like went and grabbed us tools and brought special tools we didn't have and got the trans out and realized that like, there was no way we were making the race in time. It wasn't something simple, but we ended up squatting at the Freedom Factory because it was the week before FL2K. So people started rolling to FL2K like Thursday, Wednesday night, Thursday. So we ended up staying there. While the all-wheel drive race was going, we found a local guy, Cooper Bugetti, gave us this guy's number. We brought the trans by. He stopped everything he was doing and rebuilt the trans for me. I dropped it off at like 11 and got it back at like four or five same day.
Holy s***.
Put it back in, got a truck running again Thursday. We were trying to see if we could find some like street action or even like getting to test and tune at FL2K since we're already drove 19 hours from Michigan to Florida. And we ended up staying till like Saturday night or Sunday.
Something like that, yeah.
Yeah, because we found a cash days and we went to a cash days like 30 minutes away from Bradenton or something ended up getting rained out. And then one guy decided to race us for a hundred bucks in Orlando. And then we went home.
How is the street action out there? I haven't been to FL2K yet.
Couldn't tell you, to be honest. Thursday, Friday, we were trying to dial the truck in. So we were making hits like outside of the track at the other track. So like Thursday, Friday, we didn't really go out and see.
It rained a bunch on you guys.
Yeah, I heard FL2K was a little bit of a boss this year.
Yeah, it rained a ton, like a lot.
I think some of the FL2K days, I'm still like calling down, checking on them, hey, you guys are going to go take some test hits later, make sure I got the Wi-Fi on my laptop with me. And yeah, yeah, you know, I'm talking to Nick or him, and yeah, yeah, we're going to go take a hit in like an hour, you know, okay.
When it dries up, oh, it's raining.
I go get some food, you know, come back to the shop, call them, and they're like, dude, it's just pouring rain down here again.
Basically everything that could go wrong.
It was in between those two hurricanes down there.
Oh yeah, that's right.
So like when he was leaving to go down there, I kept kind of watching it, and it was like, dude, you might be like driving down to a hurricane, you know? Like it's not looking too good, you know?
Literally there was a hurricane the week before we got down there. And then I think the day after we left, we got back like Sunday, I think Monday, Tuesday, another hurricane hit.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Didn't they just clean up the Freedom Factory too? Wasn't it like all like-
Well, he was like running the jet boat down the eighth mile. Yeah.
Yeah, but yeah, that trip, it was fun. We met a bunch of cool people, had a good time, got to watch some of FL2K. But everything that could go wrong went wrong. I lost a TransTemp sensor. A TransTemp sensor failed, a pressure sensor for my wastegate failed. Like the universe just wasn't happy with me, but we weren't prepared. I mean, it was a completely fresh setup, different compression, different injectors, different everything. Never made that power before. The Trans, at that point, well, I guess it was just freshly redone, but it was never built to hold 2,400 horsepower. We were just kind of seeing if we could do it.
Just kind of winged it, you know?
Yeah.
See if we could do it.
There's some things that you don't rebuild until it breaks, right? I mean, you're just going to go, well, we'll see how long this lasts.
Well, the truck's been real...
Even originally, right? You know, like, again, like he said before, he never had a race car before. So he's going to build this TH400. He went with a guy, Rich Bewick or Detroit Gearbox. I'll say he's kind of famous in the...
Monster truck.
There's a lot of monster truck transmissions, you know? So like, he understands like, you know, a big boy Reed case, you know, high dollar transmission. So...
Yeah, I think when I...
He went to Rich and, you know, talking to him and Rich and it was like, you know, I don't know, just tell him, you know, at the time, like, dude, maybe one day, this thing will make 1600 horsepower. You know, and it's like even thinking to yourself, like, man, that's not a thing. It's a little 302, like 1600 horsepower. That's like way down the road, you know? Well, then stock motor, you know, stock motor puts up with, you know, sometimes, you know, between 1000 and 1200 horsepower for, you know, a hundred hits on this thing. Yeah. And then he puts built motor in it and it makes X, right? Who knows, right? Like, throughout this whole time, like, with the stand alone, I drove over to his house, we installed the wiring harness and we fired it up for the first time. And it wasn't late. It was actually early in the afternoon. Like middle of the day, I drive over there, boom, we get this thing running. I'm like, whatever. All right, it's not like catching on fire. Let's back it outside, you know? And I'm like, all right, well, I do not like riding in customer vehicles. This is like, it does not happen with Andy, you know? So like we cruise around the neighborhood with this thing for a little while, probably put two miles on it maybe, you know? And I'm like, whatever it drives, you know? You can get it to my shop. He's like, huh?
I live three miles away.
Yeah, and I'm like, whatever, just meet me up at the shop in a minute, you know? And we'll continue. So he gets up here and I'm like, eh, how's it drive? He's like, sweet. I'm like, yeah, we don't need to put this thing on the dyno. We'll just drive it around out here. And you know, we get it up to, you know, 10, 15 pounds like immediately. And I'm like, well, whatever, you're probably happy for the moment, you know? So eventually, you know, it goes 20 pounds boost, then it goes 30 pounds boost, then it goes 40 pounds boost. And we've never dynoed this, so every time, everybody's like, well, how much does that truck really make? And I'm like, I don't know. We don't know. We just do Wallace Racing Calculator, horsepower versus weight, you know, or mile per hour versus weight. And, you know, it would spit out, depending on the eighth mile hit, like, you know, 1800, you know? So all right, well, the truck makes like 1800 horse. So then we do a new motor for it. And throughout this time, it had swapped from, like, some VS racing turbos to some HPTs.
Yeah, it went from 67s to 70s, 80s?
Yeah, it had, what, some 67, like, on threes on it or something.
60s, 67, 66 VS, and then it went 75, or 76.
78, 75s.
Yeah.
And then now it's got 78, 80 HPTs on it. And he put the 78, 80s, yeah, 78, 80 HPTs on it. And, you know, we'll say on like lower boosts, like anything, I don't know, below 20 or 25 pounds, it basically didn't seem like it was any different than the VS turbos, you know, as far as fueling, airflow looked, all looked the same. I'm like, ah, that's kind of disappointing, you know? It's got a much money on some turbos, you know? It's kind of thinking magic was going to happen, you know, this thing is going to pick up all sorts of power. So once we started to not even lean on it, just turn the boost back up to where it was, okay, it's starting to come around at 35 pounds, it's going a couple mile an hour faster than it was at like 42 pounds. Okay, well, that's a big difference, you know? 40 pounds, it's going a lot faster than it used to. Okay, so I see where the money went, you know? It's working now, you know? And, oh man, I'm going to get lost here now. Where I was going with this.
Dino? That we never had on the Dino until the day before the Cletus race?
Yeah, so then the day before the Cletus race, when we put the new motor in it, it was just getting too late, you know?
It was kind of cold.
We fired it at like one o'clock in the morning, we'll say Saturday night for like a minute. Matt and Ed and a couple of our dudes were here and we got it running. We still had to wire in the new brushless pumps and finish wrapping everything up. So by the time it was like all wrapped up, it's like 7.30, eight o'clock. Well, there's like a house like 40 feet off the back of my building, you know? And this thing's open, up pipes, you know, Coyote at 9500 RPM. Yeah. So I'm like, I mean, in like a couple hours at most or an hour and a half, we're going to be out on the street with this thing, or I'm going to have the cops here anyway, you know? And I know that just from doing this previously, again, this thing makes power like this, you know, it doesn't stretch this out, you know? It makes nothing and then it makes everything. And that's hard to hold down on the dyno. So I'm like, we'll just try and take one hit on wastegate and see what it looks like, you know? And he had switched from like, we'll say a Bosch 210 to some 2600s. So, a good feeling, semi-situated, we take a little whack at it. Of course, it just like nukes the tire on the dyno. I'm like, all right, we're wasting our time. This is when I was like, I told him to call his buddy Chris, that's good friends with Safe Neighbor, see if we can get his hub dyno now. And I'll say, Safe's another, I don't want to say small guy, but he's not a co-op brand. Right? Moran's not going to go open up a shop for us at midnight on Sunday to rent the hub dyno. So, got a hold of him, got over there, and we'll say, as luck has it, it's just working.
And I'm sitting there in the corner, like, s******* my pants. Remember, I've never built a motor before.
Yeah.
I've built small motors, like, five-horse Briggs and Stratton's, and I've put head gaskets in my Yachty before, but I've never built a motor from scratch, ever. And now we're about to whack this thing with 50 pounds. Just s*** in my pants.
You know, as they're strapping the car down and they're asking us, like, you know, what do you think it's going to make or, you know, how long is this going to take? And I'm like, oh, it shouldn't take no time, you know, four or five pulls. If it looks good. Yeah, it's like, what are you going to do?
Like add two, three pounds?
And I'm like, well, if it looks good, I'll stick 10 in it. You know, after the first hit, I'll stick 10 in it if it looks good. I'll probably just stick 20 in it. And then maybe I'll go 10 and then maybe another 20 and we should be at 60 pounds. And I think they kind of were like, what are you thinking? You know, like, you're not going to just put 20. You know, at one point, I think I did. I think I did try and add 20 pounds and only picked up 18 or something like that. You know, and I'm like, I mean, I did stick, try and stick 20. I put 20 pounds on top of the dome and it picked up 18 pounds. You know, so it's making these big jumps. You know, like most time you see a car get strapped down, it picks up 50 horse. Maybe you get some hero and it picks up 150, you know. But this thing picked up 500 or better every hit, you know. And I just said, well, as long as it's kind of on the rich side, I'm not even going to stop and fix it. I'm going to quick calculate it, make a change, and turn it up anyway, so that we don't get stuck here until 2 o'clock in the morning. You know, like, Safe's got a family. I know he doesn't really want to be there. He's just helping out some homies, you know. So, you know, I'm like, well, we'll try and be as quick about this as possible.
It was Safe's injectors in the truck, because I only had 2,200 or 2,10s and couldn't get injectors in time.
Yeah.
So I ended up borrowing them out of his. He has 2 sets of 2,600s for his 2J. So we threw those and he let me borrow them. So he wasn't racing. So like it was a...
It was like a big group effort to get this thing together in four or five days, you know, like multiple shops involved, you know, and it was multiple friends, family, everybody just kind of help get it together. And then, you know, we'll say the...
You can see me in the background of the clearest video. You can see the truck on jack stands. You can when you're first driving around.
You know, the biggest thing is always, is making it there, right? You know, like, I don't, I'm sorry. I don't know if you own a, you know, if you've got a race car or what.
It's all Dan stuff. I'm passenger princess for the time being. All right, all right, all right.
So like, you know, as you run a business or a shop and you're always concentrating on a customer car or whatever, just making it to the event is a big thing, right? Just the fact that you left the shop and you're there. You know, whether or not this car is even gonna work is another story, right? You made it. This thing runs, it drives on and off the trailer, you know, and you made it down to Florida, right? Like that's sweet. You know, it'd be icing on the cake that this thing actually works, goes round, makes passes, maybe wins some money, right? You know, this is all like the Hail Mary, you know, but for me, you know, I'm always putting everybody ahead of my own car, own self, because to me, that's what the business owner should do.
That's typically the best shops that we've had on here, by the way, right? They never put their own builds first. Yeah, usually the best.
The reason, so there was a local turbo rebuilder, he's still around. And he's talking to me about having some machine work done. He was gluten for punishment. He was into Nissan 300Z, twin turbo, right? The worst car to work on. And his son was real into it. They had a few of these things. They were pretty fast. They were trying to get some machine work done. They dropped the motor off to some place. You know, and they kind of getting BS'd around and BS'd around and, oh, it'll be done by Friday. Well, they go up there on Friday to try to pick this thing up. And of course, there's nothing done. They haven't finished boring it, honing it, cleaning it, nothing. And you know, he's kind of like, what in the heck is going on? And they're like, oh, we don't have time for this right now. We're going racing this weekend and blah, blah, blah. We don't have time for your stuff. And he just, you know, ate these people alive about, you know, he doesn't give a damn about their racing program. And, you know, you've made commitments to your customer. And basically you're putting your shop race car over all of your customers, right? Which, hey, I can see both sides of this, right? Because the last minute, I might have to do this to make a race, right? Friday at the 25th hour, I can no longer help you. We're leaving, we're going, you know, or else we're not going. And I'm going to help you again, you know, but for days ahead of time to be putting off the customer just so that you can, you know, most likely half-hazardly barely make it to a race that you're not going to be competitive in because you have not put the time in, you know, is s*****, you know, because maybe you could have raced, he could have raced, and he could have raced, and instead, just I made it, you know? Only I made it because I just didn't make the time for you guys. I had to finish my own car, that, you know, as a shop owner is probably not ready, you know? Sometimes they are, you know? But it's probably at the next race, you know?
Well, we know that shop cars, they draw a lot of attention to the shop, right? So sometimes they're a necessity, like you go out there.
No, and they are, you know?
But you should be budgeting it into your shop time, right? Like, you're still paying your employees to work on stuff like that. It should have a slot in the mix, and it shouldn't be, you know, it shouldn't trump anybody else. It should be trot.
Oh, no, no, I get it. So like, you know, I feel bad, right? So like, you know, my Evo or the Cyclone or whatever car is mine, you know? If I post a dyno video of it, or, you know, hey, we just finished this, that, the other on it, you know? And I'm all proud of it. So I make this Facebook post, right?
Yeah.
And then all of a sudden, you got three comments in a row. Well, what about my car? Blah, blah, blah. You know, and it's three customers. And then no exaggeration. By the next morning, every customer car in your shop is messaging you. And nobody will directly say, well, I've seen you working on your car, you know, maybe they do. And when they do, you're like, yup, I was working on my own personal vehicle at 1 a.m. on Sunday night, you know, like, I mean, I get it, right? I've pushed to try to get everybody's car to make it. But at some point, it's a it's a rough industry. You know what I mean? Where where do you cross the line of this is my time, you know, versus shop time? Right? He knows I'm going to be here from when I wake up until when I go to bed. So that means that at one o'clock in the morning, I'm probably going to be here. So if I'm working on my own car at one o'clock in the morning on Wednesday night, I think I deserve that time. Yeah. Right. Well, a lot of people don't see it that way because you still have their car. So you owe them this work and this amount of time, even if you're on time, you know, and maybe, you know, if you do a lot of Mustang stuff, maybe they back off a little bit more than the Evo community or, you know, Honda guys, stuff like that. But, you know, you know what it's like to be excited that your first turbo build is going to be done. And it just needs tuning when it it needs six months of labor. You know, it needs six months of labor, a new engine, a wiring harness, and then tune, you know. So you get drawn into these and, oh, I'll have it done for you by the weekend, you know. Well, just because you've had to add 200 hours of labor to the car, they still think this weekend, you're like, oh no, no, no. Sorry, but, you know, remember when we just added this, like, $5,000 worth of labor that that's going to take time.
Yeah.
You know, so.
No, we hear that a lot in this whole.
Justin talks about that too. He's like, you know, I kind of want a shop to take their time too.
Right. Exactly.
No car shows up. Dino right.
If you're in this kind of s***, you should just know that none of it turns around and quick. I get shocked when somebody's like, not surprised that it's going to take three, four months to do something, especially if they're building a car sometimes from scratch. It's like, dude, your car's going to be gone for two years. I don't know what to tell you. Like, that's just the reality of it.
And, you know, when people think about that, they're like, well, how long is it going to... You only charged me for this many hours, and you're like, yeah, well, then just, you know, how about we do this from now, and we start the stopwatch, and you pay me like that, right? Well, I guarantee after two weeks, you're going to pull the towel, you know, you're going to throw the towel in. Well, I don't understand. I know you don't. That's why we just gave you a price on finishing it. You know, we're not going to go hourly. We're just going to quote you. This is what it's going to take to finish the car. You know, if X, Y, Z, you know, like, how much does it cost to rebuild the Evo motor, right? Well, whatever. It's going to be, you know, $9,700 if the crank and block and cylinder head are usable. What if it's not? Add $1,700 for a billet crank, add whatever for a block, add whatever for a cylinder head, you know, and then you get it and you're like, oh, by the way, this thing was already punched out to Max. Boar has three sleeves in it that are all screwed up. Like, and you get it apart and you're like, well, you don't even have anything anymore. Yeah. You know, like, and I can't even like, put the stuff back together. You know, like I understand it drove on the way in, right? But it's just this like pile of garbage, you know? So then, well, let's source a cylinder head. Oh, they don't make those anymore. You know, we can get this Evo 7 head from overseas. It'll take a couple of weeks, you know? It just, I mean, you get it, you know? It just, nothing goes the way you want it to. And then, you know, maybe they see their buddy who is an over-prepare that has all these spare parts and had his ducks in a row and his car comes in and you yank a motor out of it. And three days later, they see him driving it again. And they're like, well, why couldn't my car be like that? And you're like, you got to go and spend like an extra $100,000. You know, like, you know, some of these guys have, you know, spare transmission, spare transfer cases, spare motors, you know. And that's how they're able to, you know, recoup the car back so fast is, is that they really only need 20 hours of labor to fix this car. It doesn't need six months of waiting on parts and, oh, let me see if I can source this. Oh, the, you know, it's a Ford Berra engine and we're ordering stuff from Australia and they're on vacation for 30 days, you know. Like, you know, it's, it just depends what you're working on, you know. But yeah, I mean, a year on a full build, depending on what it is, is nothing, you know.
Do you even start a build until some parts are here? Because I know some people let everything be here first.
It really depends on what it is. A lot of, a lot of our stuff will be, you know, like engine, wiring harness, turbo kit, right? Something like that we'll say, or just a lot of engine work. So like, unfortunately, we're going to have to pull the motor out to see what we can salvage first. So, basically, I like to quote, this is what it's going to take to remove the engine and get it torn down, and then we'll kind of have to recoup and build a price list after that. But this way we've locked in this, if we get it out, we get it apart, and you know, you were thinking six grand, but it's really going to be 15 grand, then you owe me this, whatever, a couple thousand bucks and, you know, here it's all box and labeled, have a nice day, you know?
Okay.
Or, you know, okay, we can save it, but we're going to need this cylinder head, and you know, or you want this billet cylinder head made overseas, so that's going to take six months. So what we're going to do is we're going to take the motor, we're going to hold on to the transmission and the drivetrain. You need to come and get this car, right? You need to take this car home.
Yeah, free up the space.
Yep, and when I've got this thing where it's motor, trans, you know, turbo kit sitting next to it, and it's ready to go back in the car, you know, hey, so and so, I've got everything all together, you know, let's schedule for next week, we'll get the car back up here, and we'll go on to the next problem, right? You know, because maybe, yes, this thing blew up, and it was driving, right? But we've never actually seen this car run before, you know? So we're gonna put it all back together, we'll clean the injectors, and you know, we'll do our due diligence, but then, now it runs. And you know, the turbo is smoking like a banshee, and you know, then you just open up the next can of worms of this project, you know? It seems like if it's got one can of worms in it, it's got more than one can of worms in it, you know? It's got a whole trunk full of them, you know?
I do a lot of stuff myself, but as I've been busier, I've had to outsource a few things, and there's definitely been plenty of those phone calls where they're like, this is what we thought was gonna go on, then all of a sudden, you see your phone ringing, it's the shop, it's not time your car should be done, you're like, f***, f***, f***. You pick up the phone, and he's like, hey man, by the way, you're gonna need this oil cooler, you're gonna need this, I tore this apart, and this is f*****. He's like, we can just put a stock one back in it, or, I always love the or, we could order you some new shiny s***, and that's gonna cost you twice as much. And usually, I'm like, ah.
Yeah, twice as much sounds good.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, yeah, it's just how it is, or, you know, I'll get, you know, hey, can I make an appointment to have my injectors cleaned on my Evo? You know, yeah, no problem. I mean, you wanna bring the car, or you just wanna bring me the injectors? You know, oh, I was thinking the car. Okay, so you don't know how to work on cars. That's fine, you know, that's what we're here for. You know, so yeah, go ahead and, you know, next Wednesday at 5 p.m., you can drop the car off. You know, and if everything's all good, you should be able to pick it up by 6 or 7 tonight. You know, if they're really clogged, then maybe tomorrow afternoon, you know, we'll have the car all set for you. And then, you know, this is the Evo, and then a Subaru pulls in. Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, you know, it's basically some three-cylinder Evo rolls up, and you walk outside, and you're like, oh, this thing blew up. Oh, no, it just needs the injectors clean. And you're like, no, it doesn't. I can hear it. You know, shut it off, crank it back over. Ra, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, you know, you hear one dead hole. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, all right, let's just chase which cylinder it is real quick. All right. Okay. Cylinder one's dead. Let's see what's wrong with it, you know? Let's grab the compression gauge. Oh, it's the injector. Okay. We'll just grab the compression gauge. Zero. Okay. So yeah, it needs a motor, you know? Yeah. And, you know, all of a sudden the kid was signing up for a $150 job and now all of a sudden, he's signing up for a $15,000 job, you know, and you're like, sorry, I don't like, hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, you know, we've seen even, you know, a car go to a dealership and get a fuel injection cleaning. They pour like Napsol is what like that BG fuel treatment is. It's like a solvent. I think what you do is you like pour a bunch of this crap in there and you run it for a minute and then you go run it really hard, right? I don't think the ethanol sensor really knew what this stuff was. So it went on like the E100 map on kill and just like evacuated some exhaust valve and like broke the piston. And the dealer is like, Oh, your car is all set, come get it. And the kid drives up, picks up his Evo, fires it up and calls me. It doesn't really say anything besides he just needs the injectors clean. And I'm like, dude, I literally heard this and was like, who is here in a Subaru? And walked up to the window and looked out and I'm like, Oh no. And like booked it outside. Like don't even shut it off. Like this thing blew up, you know? Oh no. It kind of sounded like my old Subaru. I'm like, Oh God, yeah, this thing just blew up dude. Come on, man. How far did you just drive it? Oh, 45 minutes. Wow. That's impressive. You know? It's really laggy. And yeah, it's a three-cylinder man. Like, you know, even like a bad three-cylinder, not like, Oh, the injectors unplugged three-cylinder, like pumping fuel into this thing, you know? So, you know.
They do sometimes go the other way. Like you thought it was something horrible and it wasn't. Those are fewer and far between, but yeah, I bought a Fox body one time really cheap and it was running like s***. And I don't know if you, you've been around as long as I have, you probably timed some old school twist distributor s***. Well, on the Fords, you had to pull this little tab, you know, in order to do it. And they never f****** put it back in. And so it ran like s***. I ran out to a Ford tempo ad, pulled that f***** off and plugged it in and it ran like a top. So yeah, it's not always that way, but it does happen.
I'll say this, I had one get toed in and he says, it's got a ton of engine noise, you know, and I'm like, oh God, you know, it's gonna be block crank head, you know, it's just gonna be scrap, you know. And it shows up and the tow truck driver starts this thing and backs it off the tow truck and I'm like, come on man, just roll it off, you know, trying to like leave it running, like, where do you want me to park it? Like, come on man, you're just killing this thing. And I like walk over and look in it and I'm like, AC compressor is like sideways, you know, like the AC clutch is like sideways in this thing. And I'm like, I literally think this thing just like broke the AC compressor. I'm like, walk inside, grab a razor blade, slice the belt off of it, walk back outside to do from burn, drive it in the shop, you know, I'm like, call the guy, hey, so about this engine. He's like, oh, what do you think? You know, I'm like, well, I got some good news for you. You know, I got some bad news, but I got some good news. He's like, oh, what's the bad news? I'm like, oh, AC compressors are kind of expensive for these cars, you know, okay. I'm like, good news is, is that's all that's wrong with the car, it needs AC compressor, you know. Sucks, because, you know, you just turned a $20,000 job into a $300 or $400 job, but hey, you know.
You don't want to take the dealer approach, man?
No, no, no, I don't want to take the dirt bag approach.
Yeah, just warranty the whole drive train.
Yeah, it's going to need a whole engine, you know. Yeah. Really needs AC compressor, you know. So, I mean, I've seen stuff like that, but for the most part, these things are DSM, so it just needs an engine.
Yeah.
That's just what it is, you know.
It's kind of good to get to something that breaks often, right?
Yeah, well, I mean, we don't work on Subaru's, but yeah, I mean, that would be like the optimal repeat customer, you know, is, you know, leave a Subaru on a stock ECU and just let somebody else remote tune the motor out of it all day long, and then you can just keep selling them to them, you know. But at some point, the customer will blame you for building the motor, so.
The circle of life.
Oh, it is too, you know, like, you know, as long as, you know, you get the customer out there and, you know, if it's an EVO, we'll say whatever, you get it up making 40, 50 pounds of boost, and you let them drive it for a while, and then they eventually understand that it's theirs, right? And that the factory warrantied this thing to 200 horsepower, and it makes 800 horsepower now that I'm not paying to fix that anymore. You know, like, you got through break-in, we turned the boost up, we turned the boost up, we turned it way up, that's yours now. You know, this is no longer mine, you know? At the beginning, it's mine, you know? Through break-in, lower power, that's my engine, right? That I'm going to pay to repair, but once it gets past that point, I mean, just like, you know, a Coyote, it's part of racing, you know? Even at, you know, we hit the dyno day one, this thing makes 2,385 and it makes 2,386 and breaks the, you know, breaks the rod in half. What do you want me to do? You know, I'm not paying for that. Yeah. You know? I mean, and I get it both ways, you know, if we jumped in a, you know, Subaru or Evo, Volkswagen, something like that, and, you know, we torque spiked this thing at 3500 RPM and snap a rod in half. Like, it's probably my fault. You know, if it, even if it kills the piston, almost at any RPM, I look at that like I failed. You know, if it broke a stock piston or ring gap was too tight, something like that, you know, some freak anomaly, sure, that's not me. If it breaks a rod at low RPM, I feel like I failed. If it breaks the rod at 9,000 RPM, you didn't buy good enough parts. You know, this is no longer my fault, you know? But there's certain instances where, you know, other local tuners or whatever, you know, when you're talking and, oh, this thing died today on the dyno, where did it break at? Like at what RPM? Oh, it was like 4,500 RPM. And I'm like, oh, that's your tuner. You know, like, okay. Built motor, this, that and the other. Broke a rod at 4,500 RPM. That was the tuner's fault. You know, or, you know, poor build, lost the waste gate line, something like that. Had a reasonable boost cut set up for 9,000 RPM, but made all that boost way down low at 4,500. I could see that. You know, and if it melted off on the exhaust because customer, you know, I wouldn't want to pay to fix that, you know. But if I, if I truly believe that I'm the reason that something got hurt, I'm going to do anything I can to try to help that customer, you know, even if we're pushing it, you know, and I'm like, oh my God, I kind of, I didn't suck, I just kind of failed them on that pull. You know, like I could have done this, that, you know, or, you know, I've ran, I've had them run out of gas on the dyno and, you know, kick a head gasket or something. And you're like, oops, sorry, you know, half the time the gasket doesn't work. How much fuel is in it? All your good, you know, okay.
Well, yeah, it's usually, nine times out of 10, once you start digging into s***, you can usually find the culprit. It's like forensic science at some point in time, right? Like when you said you found your cam caps all f***** up. You don't really know until you start digging into it.
We thought we killed the trance, remember?
Yeah. When this thing broke, his built motor that was, you know, two of my houses, you know, like this thing blew up and I'm like, oh my God, you know, like it's getting late. It was kind of cold out. We're pulling this thing apart in the parking lot. And I'm like, just waiting for him to like snap on me, you know, I'm like, we're homies, but like, you know, I only known him for a couple of years at this time. So I'm like, you just never know when $30,000 gets involved at what somebody's going to do about it. You know, like, you know, this kid, he could leave to, you know, and tomorrow be bashing me all over the internet. And it's like, I didn't fail you dude. And you like try the best you can to, you know, scramble back together your relationship. And this person will just go and bash you to oblivion. And you're like, dude, I really don't want to do this, but you know, here is the truth. I'm sorry you don't understand, you know, like your cam broke in half and the gear fell off of it. That did not happen from my laptop, you know, but you know, like, if you don't know, you don't know. And the person truly believes that you've screwed them over and you're like, oh my god, like, I just need an educated customer.
Right.
You know, it's not...
Oh, is that not what kill mat means?
Yeah, exactly, you know, like, I love to send it, you know, like, you know, my buddy was doing some Pikes Peak stuff, you know, and, you know, I send, you know, oh, it's way down on power. I'm like, I mean, at 8,000 feet elevation, I'm sure it is, you know, I'm like, I'll get after it harder, you know, I send them a tune up and I label it, bring a trailer.
You know?
And I'm like, whatever you do, when you come back to Michigan or to less elevation, do not run that, you know, and like just my theory behind it, right? I'm BMW engine, I'm pulling timing out of it because torque, right? I am trying to torque limit this motor so it doesn't dimensionally change itself. And well, it doesn't make any power up there. So why don't I just roll a bunch of timing back at it and I'll stick some boost in it and it just will make what it used to back here, you know? And I like call a couple people like, hey, does this sound about right to you? And they're like, well, it's just not going to make the same power out there. I'm like, yeah, but why not?
Yeah.
You know, why don't I just get after a little bit more?
Air's less dense, just needs more air.
Yeah, it just needs some more air and it might have to spice the timing map up a little bit because I'm, because I'm taking it away to save the rod. But now it's down 250 foot pounds of torque. So why don't I just put some of it back in, you know, and dude calls me right back and he's like, oh yeah, oh yeah, feels just like back home. And I'm like, all right, all right, now I know that definitely don't run that when you come back home, you know. And, you know, call me back. Hey, we got second. Sweet, dude, it's a lot better than it broke, you know. You know, as the tuner, you're sitting there like, you know, he goes to an event that I can't make it to and you're watching, you know, got something to do in like an hour, but I'm still sitting there watching the live feed, you know, and something happens, you know, and you're like, oh no, did I fail? You know, call, huh, nobody's picking up, what, you know, most racetracks, you got no service anyway, so eventually you hear back from somebody that's at the track and they're like, oh no, the trans brake was unplugged or this happened or, you know, we ran it out of gas, we didn't turn the CO2 on, the nitrous bottle was empty and you're like.
Or the classic Alex where you turn the boost past the boost cut. Yeah. Like at roadkill.
Yeah.
Yeah. Back when the truck was first on the stand alone, basically Andy would turn it up to a certain point and anything over a certain PSI, he would turn the laptop and I would have to.
Yeah, and I'd just be like, here, you know. That way you did it. You know, and so like I don't want to like.
We go to road club like 48 pounds on scramble or something. Yeah.
So like I don't. I come from import drag racing, right? Yeah. So like 85 pounds of boost is just fine. You know, like that's, I'm not scared of that. So like, but this is your money, right? So like, sure. We'll stick another 20 pounds boost in it, right? I'm not scared, but are you? Right? So like here, I would highlight right here, I would enter this, I would highlight this section, I would interpolate this, and that's how I would do it. You know?
Oh, okay.
You know? Boom, does it, you know? Neither one of us are even thinking. He was going in to race the Swede who had that Volvo, if you know what I'm talking about. Had some drag and drive stuff, and I think it's been like sixes or fives or something in the quarter. You know, this is a, this is a bad girl. So, he won Roadkill, what, three, four years in a row now, or something.
We got top eight out of, was there?
128 cars, he made it to like, down to like the top four cars, you know? So we're going into semi-finals, and I'm like, dude, I'm telling you, there's gotta be 50 pounds on the scramble. You know, like, we just need to leave something kinda reasonable in there. We gotta turn it up in the 60 foot.
We're racing the dude that wins every year. Like, he's had this car for, I don't know how long, he's just dialed it.
Five or six years. Yeah, he's got this thing working.
Yeah.
You know, it's got FuelTech on it, traction control, everything all worked out, so I'm like.
Volvo, wagon.
You know, nice long wheelbase car.
Yeah.
So I'm like, well, we're just gonna get after this thing. You know, and like we're dead either way. Like try to weigh 2000 pounds more than this thing, you know.
2000 pounds more than anyone else in the finals.
So I'm like, make sure it's got like 48, 50 pounds on Scramble. So it does. Okay. Something's gonna happen. And mind you, this thing's already missing a rocker. He cranks it over. And it's like, vroom, and as it fires, I hear it like clank. And like, I kind of make a face so he looks at me. And I'm like trying to listen and I'm like, it don't sound right no more. It's like a seven and a half cylinder, you know? And he's like, he like looks at me. And I'm like, oh, you're good. You know, so this is like a joke now that, oh, you're good. And like now I have to be like, you're good, man. No, but for real, you're actually good, you know? Cause like I knew something was wrong, but we're like 30 feet away from pulling into the semis, like at a local, at a local big event where more normal non-drag racers are out here watching this. So like, this is my business. Like we got to get this thing out there. And you know, this is a crowd favorite. It's his truck. So I'm like, all right, you know. Yep, it's good. You know, he pulls in. It's got all the boost in it. Leaves, makes it out, I don't know, 50 feet and jumps after the scramble. And mind you, it's, we had to cut the bottom. This is the day we had to come back here and cut the bottom of the four link off. So it's dragging the four link in the concrete.
I hold the scramble, it swats its a** down and digs the four link bars into the cement of the road.
Just crushes the tire, because this thing's heavy.
Yeah.
And we're still, you know, this was day one on Drag Radio. Like one test hit on the street, and yup, I don't know, we'll just leave that much air in it and try it tomorrow again.
Yeah.
Well, we get there and we're like, oh wow, this is like sticky. Roadkill, you know what roadkill is, right?
Roadkill Nights, they drag race on the road.
I've seen the event, I've not been here, but I've seen it on TV.
Yeah, we're like doing test hits here, well, at the legal track right around the corner, some private property and we go pretty fast. And I'm happy with it, I'm like, we'll just keep it here. There's like no need to go any faster than that. Like there ain't no way anyone else is going that fast on a radial, like on the street. Like we're actually like not pouring the puddle, we're doing a burnout, popping in four and leaving. And like, we go pretty fast for a radial in a 4500 pound truck. And these guys rent an Airbnb, these random guys had an Airbnb across the street, ran them at the time, we're friends with them now. But they stopped by and they had this trackhawk and they wanted to like race us on the street or whatever. And we showed them where the test spot was, so they go make some test hits. They were racing a different class, so we didn't care. And I told them what I ran over there and you didn't want to race no more.
And they totally thought that we were like BSing them. So we get out there and first lick, when I turn around, they're kind of all standing there. And they were like, you know, all hype, like, you guys aren't b******* and that thing's fast. You know, I'm like, dude, we told you we weren't lying about what it went in the eighth. So when we get down to the semis, you know, he makes it out, I don't know, 50 feet, hammers at the scramble. Wop, bop, bop, bop. You know, this thing just bucks like three times and it's just over. You know, this Volvo is 250 cars in front of him, you know, and I'm like, oh my God, I'm gonna cry, you know? And I'm like, what came flying out of this car? And like-
You watch the Slow Mo video, you can see chunks of cement getting dug out of the road.
Tyler, with the Trackhawk.
Yeah, the guys that wanted to race us like three days or two days before, every round we went up, they were up there helping us.
Yeah. So we're like standing there helping us get video and stuff. And like, we start kind of walking away, and I'm like, I have to know what that was. And he's like, well, let's just walk back out there. And I'm like, all right, yeah, let's do it, you know? We walk out there and I'm like, it's like chunks of concrete. And I'm like, still not fathoming where this came from yet until we like watch one of the videos in slow-mo. And I'm like, oh. And then we watched a couple of the other videos and we're like, oh, this has been doing this all day. It's been like bury in the bottom four link brackets on the axle housing or no chassis side. Was it chassis side? It was chassis side.
Yeah, it was chassis side.
Chassis side four link brackets. So you had to like, whop the bottom two holes right off of it.
Cause it, Yeah, what the hell?
It just moves too much, you know, and obviously bouncing the four link off the ground isn't helping us. So, see you dice the bottom, bottom bull holes off of it.
So, then we put the slicks back on.
So what do you do when it comes to like set up, right? Do you handle everything like A to Z when it comes to building a car, or do you collaborate with other shops? Or what does that look like?
Um, I guess depending on what it is, you know, so like, you know, um, I guess the Puerto Rican saying is yo solo, right?
So I got to get out there here soon too.
I will build a car, wire it. If it's my own car, I'll wire it, I'll paint it, I'll build the engine. I might do all the machine work on it. I'll tune it and then I'll drive it. So like at no point, I don't do a lot of outsourcing, right? You know, so I might go, you know, and have somebody powder coat some parts for me or something like that. Um, I've got a machinist that I refer to as the professor. That, um, anything that we can't do, he definitely can, you know? So, um, other than that, basically, we keep 99% of it in house.
Okay.
You know, and we've got some good friends, you know, that own other shops. So I won't say that I'm not, I won't say I'm not collaborating with somebody else because I'll call another shop owner that I look at as my friend.
A lot of the shops down here, they're like all friends with each other. Right. It seems like.
So it's like that back home and they do do some collaborating, but I'm noticing it's happening way more often here. Like you guys are hanging out at each other's shops and.
Yeah.
Call each other.
Well, so like, you know, we'll say like he mentioned before, the dino over at Safe's, right? So Safe does a bunch of 2J stuff, right?
Okay.
And I'll build you a 2J, right?
For sure.
I'll do a 2J. He does a bunch of Haltech, right? I will tune a Haltech. It's not my favorite. So if we're online, you know, you look at the local forum and somebody says, Hey, I've got a 2J on Haltech. Who should I have tune it? And the first tag is Safe. And then three people tag me, and then two people more tag Safe. And then of course, the customer is shopping. Yeah. So they message Safe, and then they message me, looking for two different prices or availability, whatever it may be, you know? And I basically tell them, like, you should go to Safe. You know, you just said 2J and Haltech, right? This is his, both of his number ones, right? It's my number six engine, and it's around there for the ECU I would choose, right? So you shouldn't come to me, you know? You should go to whoever wanted to do this job. They wanted to tune a Haltech 2J car, that's where you should go, you know? Or, you know, if you called me with a Mopar or something like that, I mean, you know, we're not going to beat ourselves over the head trying to learn how to work on a Hellcat or something like that. It's just not what we do, you know? So there's enough variety, and there is plenty of business in the state of Michigan for all of us, you know? And, you know, whatever. I'm labeled as probably an import shop, right? And that's why we do a lot of import cars, you know? But we do this, you know, 3,000 horsepower LS car too, because he knows us, trusts us, and that we're not going to rob him blind, you know? We're going to do the work that we were paid for. And at the end of the day, you know, all at least help him get this up and running. And, you know, he's a tuner also, you know, for, he's done some tuning for the big 3 and works for BorgWarner Turbo now. So, and he's, you know, very, very intelligent and wants all of the data. There is too much data coming out of this car for one person to basically handle.
There's 10 widebands on there.
10 widebands. Holy s***. You know, 80 GT, it's got, you know, pre and post temp sensors and, you know, there's just a lot there between, you know, shock travel data, you know, drive shaft speed, all these EGTs and 10 widebands. Like, you know, if you want to make some quick changes in between rounds, you know, you're going to look at a very small portion of that data and you're going to, let's get it back out there for next round in 15 minutes. You know what I mean? So, you know, I'll still work with him after the fact. You know, like, he's going to do some drag and drive stuff, so, you know, and maybe, you know, somebody else, they're, you know, I've met a lot of people, they're comfortable tuning a car, they're very proficient at it, they're very good at it, but they've never turned something way up, you know. You're going to turn a V8 up to 50 pounds or an import up to 100 PSI, and like, they're totally capable of it, they're just scared, you know. So, why not? You know, and especially not remote, you know, because the emotion's gone, I can't see this thing, you want to hit this thing with a Honda? Let's do it, you know. We're going to do this in four hits, too. We're going to go from like 10 pounds of boost to 100 pounds of boost and four pulls, I could do that for you. You know, this is just literally math, right? Right. So, you know, we'll just say it's on gasoline, it's going to make two horsepower per pound an hour of gasoline, right? I mean, this is pretty simple to math out what 3,000 horsepower is going to be. So here's 3,000 horsepower where the fuel, I f****** hope the motor makes it, you know, because if not, this thing might hydro lock, you know what I mean? Like, you know, like wide open throttle stuff's pretty easy. So like, you know, you can figure it out. But again, you know, like most of us don't really try to poach off the next guy, you know, like a lot of us have our own thing going, you know, and same deal. Like, you know, if, you know, there's an Evo on Haltech that ends up over at Safe's place, hey, good for you, man, you know. And I doubt he will, but if he has any questions, I'd be more than happy to help. Or if there's some other big racers that run Coyotes Local, and a couple of them have reached out, and they'll talk to Alex, they'll talk to me, and, hey, can we run some timing numbers by you? Yeah, for sure. Well, I got this much timing in it, I bet it blew that gasket. Well, how do you know? I'm like, I did that. I listened to those other Coyote tuners too at first, right? They're just like, oh yeah, you just put 25 degrees in it everywhere, and let the knock sensor pull it out. And I'm like, that's not how this works. So we'll just start way down here at, say, 17 degrees of timing, and we'll see what it wants. Well, lo and behold, it doesn't even want 17 degrees. It wants less, you know? Once you start really leaning on this thing, and I'm like, dude, what are these guys even doing? And I can only imagine the dyno plot looks like this as the ECU tries to pull the timing out of it and stick it back in. So it's like, you know, you're like, come on, guy. You know, even the torque converter couldn't smooth this out, you know? Like, but-
That was crazy. And then trying to figure out the firing order of the F150 when we first did it.
Everybody, every big tuner in the Coyote world promised us.
There was a few that said otherwise.
There was one. There was people that knew it was different, but they were still wrong on what the firing order was.
Or they were scared. Remember, this was back in-
This is whatever, 21.
We put it to the gen three came out in 18. We put it on a standalone in like, what, 20?
20 or 21?
And nobody knew.
So like, no one had data on this stuff.
That the F150 was different, you know? So they kept feeding us a firing order. And I'm like, I mean, sure, it runs, but I'm freaking six cylinders.
Well, it keeps changing through the generations, Gen 1. The difference between the Mustang and the F150. At one point, you only had to change out intake cams. And then it was like, it was like a whole mess.
Well, they swapped the firing order because the- So what I heard from-
In cab vibration or something like that.
What I heard from an engineer locally here is that in cab vibrations from the Mustang firing order in the aluminum body. So they switched it back to old firing order to get rid of the vibrations, I guess, is what I was told. But I ended up putting some painter's tape over all the spark plug holes without spark plugs and turning it over. And then just writing down which one popped in what order. Put a TDC in and turn it over.
I mean, there's ways of finding it. Yeah, you just got to go hard school, right?
It's harder than most people think. So like I did ask Aston Martin that the firing order is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Well, no, it's not. But they don't know what it is. And the techs at Aston Martin don't know what it is because why do they need to? They just put the spark plug wires on where it tells them to. They don't even know what this means. You know, so I'm talking to a buddy about it, you know. Go grab eight compression gauges and eight balloons. Screw the compression gauge in, put a balloon on the top, and watch it sit there and fill up the balloons. And write down in what order do they fill up, you know. Hey, that's a pretty good idea, you know. So that's what I had done in the past was, you know, I've got a bunch of compression gauge hoses that, you know, I just screw in and we just hand crank a motor over and watch the balloons fill up. It's super easy to watch and, you know, write it down. And I was just doing some 32 Ford hot rod with a 92 Ford Tora show motor in it. With like some way spark weird, like you're talking early Mustang ignition setup.
Yeah, the Dura spark.
This was different. It had like that BIP and PEP or something like that. It's like the crank sensor and the cam sensor are both wired to the ignition control module and the ECU. So they're like five wire cam and crank sensor. And it's just a second signal shared, right? And it was messing with the ignition timing beyond belief. And I finally got to the point where I'm like, I don't care. You have to listen to me. Here is a set of LS coils. You're going to go and wire these into the car and then we're going to go drive it tomorrow. You know? And I've listened to this thing, bang, pop, lock up the starter for like days. And I'm like, I'm not going to fix this. There is something else hardware related wrong on your car. And he wires up the LS coils and it's still kind of being, it's running now, but I can tell it's still like not right. You know? And I'm like, I need to know the firing order. So we literally took his spare motor on the ground, put a timing belt back on it. We were trying to put our hands over the plug holes and I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to get my compression gauge and balloon set up. Roll this thing over, watch it, write it down real quick. And literally I wrote it down, boom, fired it in there, sync timing real quick, boom, fires up, idols. Cool, I'll talk to you tomorrow. I'm leaving. I'm totally done for the day at this point. I'm so pissed off.
Well, that's a weird one too, because that's a Yamaha motor.
It is.
Yeah.
And at the end of the day, everybody has tuned one of these things on a standalone ECU. No, they haven't. They don't even know the firing order.
No.
You know, like they just don't. And good point. Why do you need to know? You know, working at a dealership, you don't need to know. You just need to know that the spark plug wire from that back cylinder goes to this position on the coil. And that's all you need to know. You know, you don't actually need to know. So it's like getting stuck on that oddball stuff where, you know, you're just getting ran through the wringer, you know, and I mean, you build the best you can on it. You know, so.
I almost bought a Ford Probe that had a 90 show motor swapped in it. They didn't have it running right yet. And I was like, I don't know if I want to get into that can of worms.
And it's a neat motor. It doesn't make any power like we remember. Yeah. Yeah, no, horsepower is different nowadays. I know. So this thing is not cool, you know? Like you're like, man, I remember those tour shows were kind of quick. They came on a five speed. They were kind of fast.
Yeah.
Oh, man. Yeah.
No, I just broke up my 93 Cobra not that long ago to go to the podcast we were doing. And I'm like, it's just not the same. The Fox bodies don't have the same appeal to me as they did at one point in time.
Do I love that car though? That was my first time seeing that car. I think it's, I like that.
It's a beautiful car.
I think it's cool.
It's all show and no go.
Do you guys not live near each other?
So that's about an hour away from me. Yeah.
Okay.
So we just started filming. We're starting to do more of like a casual style podcast, get four buddies, shoot the s***, you know, get a little more f***** up than I should and throw the cameras on it. And we're doing that at his place now. We used to have a studio at Ratified Motorsport for about a year after my last cohost ditched us and went to California.
Okay.
So I needed a studio, but yeah, now we're back at his place and I have some making up to do. So now I drive to his place, instead of him driving to our studio an hour away. But no, it's like every time I see this guy, it's like, how many different properties do you have cars on now? I think we did the math on it. There's like six different f****** zip codes.
No, technically two of them are in the same zip code. It's three properties, two pole sheds, and yeah, I have-
Don't you have something in a shop too that you-
I own four post lifts with cars stacked on them.
How many cars do you have?
We'll be right back.
I'd say, like I have a lot of parts cars. You talked about your BMWs and you said I had a lot of them.
I had like 10 or 11.
Yeah, so you're just like any other normal car guy. You gotta have a parts car and you gotta back up parts car and then you gotta get the car that was a good deal. You had to get it because you needed this and that. Yeah, so no, I have a lot of Fox body s***, but I have-
At 12, it's called a collector.
Yeah, I'm over 12. I just was buying up Foxes and rare s*** when I could get them for 10 to 15 grand a piece, 93 Cobras, I've got four of those, three of those. Saleen S351, Saleen Cobra. I've got two OJ Broncos. I got a white 96 and a 95.
Did you bring that whole list when you were on the show as a guest?
Yeah, I wrote down some s***.
I think you missed one, but that was pretty much-
What I did is I wrote down the production numbers because I don't always know. Because some of the cars I have are one of seven or one of 12 or whatever, depending if you break down the color options and all that s***. But-
Yeah, he did the Corvette owner thing. It's a one of six with a yellow seatbelt. We're all one of one.
When you're a car collector, those numbers matter, right?
Yeah.
So I just picked up a turbo coupe.
This one's number 750 something.
Yeah. Were these serial numbered too? Yeah.
It's a- Oh, man.
We haven't even talked about this thing.
I was about to bring it back.
No, I know.
We're going to get to that. Dude, did you see the f****** LS swapped lightning I said?
734? That's a ZipCard from Detroit.
Is it really? Yeah.
Oh, that's sweet.
That is pretty cool, actually.
Yeah.
No, I saw an LS swapped lightning at the show today, and I was like, that truck needs to be parked right next to that f*****.
At what show?
At the-
Oh, the show in Detroit.
Oh, okay.
That was our first time going to that.
I wonder who that was.
It's a black car.
It was in the basement? Okay. I wonder who that is.
I went over to go look at it. I was like, ooh, a lightning. And I was like, ah, bleh.
As he was doing the Ford stuff, I'm like, man, I always kind of liked the second gen lightnings, whatever, 2,099, whatever they are. You know, and I started looking and I'm like, oh man, I remember when these things could, at a time, you could have found a rough one, 2,500 bucks, three grand. They really weren't worth anything. Now, 2,500 bucks gets you like half a shell, you know, missing everything, you know? And I'm like, man, that would be kind of cool. The four wheel drive, swap one of those, put a Yodi in it, you know?
And I'm like, you'd be better off buying a short box, single cab. I think they were like the F150 Sport.
Yeah.
And you could still get them four wheel drive. Okay. And then just coyote swap that f*****. You'd be, you'd be ahead of trying to build a lightning for four wheel drive in it.
Eh, I'm not scared to cut something. Yeah.
I see that.
I don't whack a frame right now. I'll put a half, 18 on the front and you know, whatever. But like I said, I just, I just always wanted one of these things. You know, just always.
Yeah.
Since I was, since my first car, I knew what these things were. Didn't actually know what they were, but knew enough that that's what you wanted.
Yeah.
You know, and they were just unobtainable, you know.
I'm pretty anti-GM, but the Cyclone, the Typhoon and the Grand National are, they'll, they get me going.
Well, we saw you taking photos of that ZR1 today too.
I got proof of that. Yeah.
I mean, after working on them, the GM six cylinder, I'll say leaves a lot to be desired.
Yeah.
Whether it's the 43 or the 38, you know.
That 43 though, in like the NA form, that thing was pretty rock solid. If you just had like an S10 or something, that thing would go forever.
And they were. And then you get to, like when I own a couple typhoons, you know, they say it's tuning the glass engine. You know, it's got some hyper craptastic pistons in it on a stock rod, on the, you know, stock blazer camshaft. Like there is nothing done to these things. You know, they literally put like a low compression crappy piston in it, and that was it. That was a cyclone, you know? And after tearing up a couple motors, I was like, oh my God, this thing is terrible. You know, trying to buy, you could buy a set of eight pistons for a small block Chevy cheaper than you could for a six cylinder. And then you can buy a small block rod, but it's too wide. Cranks narrower. So you got to narrow the big end of the rod. So you can machine the rods and then you got two extra, you know?
Yeah, and it's still cheaper. It's just a 350 with two cylinders missing, kind of.
Kind of.
Yeah.
You know, it's the same bore size.
Yeah.
You know, but like, I mean, you get it, right? A four cylinder is a harmonic rattle trap. An inline six cylinder is perfect. And a V6 is almost as bad as it gets, you know, and then not knowing enough, I used to say a V8 usually torques itself to death, but that's only when it's massive, you know? We just don't. That's again, why the Coyote makes sense. Cause it's a smaller stroke engine, you know?
It's God's motor.
Yeah, I think so.
I always joke when it comes to GM s*** too, that even if they get rid of gas engines and all of them, you can't build any more and they start to die off, the last thing on the road will be like a late 90s Buick Park Avenue with a 3800 in it. It'll have like 482,000 miles on it, still rocking the same oil.
If those like little plastic coolant 90s by the intake manifold don't break off and overheat the thing.
The coil packs will go bad all the time, but they were a f****** piece of cake because they were right on top. I was swapping out coil packs like all the time. Easy.
Do you have a supercharged 3800?
No, I had my grandma got her old Park Avenue and it had like almost 300,000 miles on it when I got it and I was a teenage boy. I beat the s*** out of it. I used to go to stoplights and you'd gas and brake and the suspension was so soft, the bumpers would be like, bam, bam, bam, bam. It was f****** great. It's still running somewhere I bet.
You probably didn't even know me when there was that Buick parked in my side lot for Sean's.
Yeah, Sean's.
My buddy one day had a Buick Park Avenue, his grandma gave him. Yeah. He's like, my work wants me to get it out of their parking lot. I'm like, why is it sitting up there? He's like, it leaks gas. I'm like, okay. He's like, I got all the new lines for it. Can I just bring it over? I'm like, yeah, that's all right. I'm talking about like five years ago by with this thing sitting out back, you know? And finally the city was like, hey guy, and I'm like, yeah, all right. You know, and I forget what we ended up doing. Just called a scrapper or something like that.
I thought Blaine took it for like-
Oh, Blaine did take it. And then they threw it through a demolition derby.
Oh, sweet.
And then he gave him the money when he scrapped it afterwards. So, got something back out of it, but.
Well, anyway, what we were talking about here a second ago is you're planning on putting a Coyote in a Cyclone.
I mean, we're not planning. It's like a done deal.
Yeah, it's in there right now.
We bought parts. Well, I had some 2-speed 400 for it with a Chevy bellhousing on it. And I bought some whatever, JW or whatever. JW bellhousing for a Yachty. And them things are not cheap compared to a freaking small block Chevy. And I put the Chevy bellhousing for sale the day I got the JW. And that bellhousing sold literally in 30 seconds on Facebook, not even on Marketplace. I just posted it on my page. And two people showed up here like within five minutes. So the Chevy stuff is gone. So it's getting a Coyote. It doesn't like it in the front end very much, but it's going to happen. So we're committed at this point. We've bought some Coyote parts. And like I say, it just kind of makes more sense in the end. It's got a much better cylinder head on it, and we'll say power per dollar. Obviously, I understand what it would take to make 2,300 plus horsepower. And I know what that costs. And I don't know that I would get there with an LS at the same cost, being honest. Like, it would be hard, you know. I get to rev it really high.
It sounds like an F1 car ripping by.
Yeah, you know, this is more back to my roots, you know. We spend most of this crap to 10,000, 10,500, so that's what makes sense to me. So we'll just kind of... Just double it. Yeah, we'll just kind of stick with it.
It's like a double 4G63.
We'll just do it the same way, you know. We'll leave the... We'll put some valve springs in it. We'll leave a cylinder head damn near stock. And, you know, we don't have to go out there and buy some, you know, whatever, mast something, you know, $10,000 cylinder heads for it, you know.
So...
Do you see yourself working on more Coyotes going forward then? Or do you want to stick with like what makes sense a little bit older cars, not all the extra BS?
I don't mind working on a Coyote. I don't see myself working on a new Mustang.
Fair enough.
Right. OK.
So minus the car.
Minus the car.
Like race car.
Right. Like I don't mind doing an... I'll build an engine for anything, you know. I'll do diesel work, whatever, you know. So like building an engine is no big deal. It's an air pump. And, you know, we need to... We need to sustain some tolerances here. And that's about it. You know. So the motor I'm not scared of. I don't like to, you know, even like the Evo. Eventually, why I bought my own Evo, right, was so that I can actually say, hey, you know, this is what you should buy because I went and broke X, Y and Z on my own car. And this is what actually works, you know. And like I said before, just being honest, like there is nothing left to make for an LS. You know, like as far as, you know, some small accessories or billet parts or, you know, obviously there's innovation all the time, but like there you can just buy everything already.
Right.
You know, and the Yodi is just a little bit newer. And I think as the cost comes down on what a used engine goes for, you know, maybe when you start seeing like 2012 or 15, whatever, F150 starts showing up at pick and pulls and motors start costing $200 or 250 bucks, you know, you might start seeing like a, you know, a Coyote swap G body or something, you know, like, you know, you'll see a Hellcat swap G body in Michigan. You know, there's a few of them.
So you think that's going to be like kind of like the next junkie LS?
Probably not quite to that extent. It'll be a higher end. It's never going to be that cheap, right? You know, like you're never just going to put a valve spring and some cams in it, but you might put an oil pump gear and some head studs in one of them. Yeah, I think, you know, and make a thousand horse out of it.
The main reason I don't think it'll ever get to the LS is it's not they're not hard to work on, but I think they intimidate people with the four timing chains. You know, not, you can't go watch YouTube video, pull ahead, throw cam in it like an LS.
That makes sense.
It's really not that difficult though, like I've timed them.
No, they're simple, but I think it scares people. Yeah.
There's like a higher barrier to entry kind of deal.
If you look at one with the timing chain cover off and like the valve covers off, you're like, holy f***, there's no way. It's like, it's got tensioners and s***.
So if you've done like 350Z or this Volkswagen garbage, eventually, it's just we're going to put a timing chain on an engine. And that's just all there is to it. You've done enough BMW or even the new Supra motor BMW stuff, B58, S58, you know, like, you know, once you realize that that timing chain is on the back of the engine, you know, and that it is terrible to get to, right? I mean, it's just a timing chain, you know, it's not. I think a lot of people get a lot of people that could go and watch a YouTube video and put a timing chain on an LS probably shouldn't go and put a timing chain on a Coyote. You know what I mean? But if you grew up doing Honda Civic B Series and then we'll say graduated the K Series and then did a 350Z and then you pop the cover off of a Coyote, you know, like you're not even going to think twice, you're just going to be like, oh, how is it supposed to go? Okay. You know, and bang it together because you've already worked on all of the worst stuff that there was to time, you know, like 350Z's kind of crappy, same deal. It's got whatever three or four chains on it, you know, so. That makes sense. It's just not that bad.
Yeah.
So I would prefer a timing belt engine.
Okay.
Usually. Most of the time.
Well, is the gen three not a wet belt or is the...
That's only a four.
It's a four.
But that wet belt is just for the oil pump.
Just for the oil pump.
It's still a chain.
Okay.
It's still a chain to drive the crank to cam.
Okay.
But so like, usually, if you're looking for service ability in the import world, you can usually get, say, the cylinder head off of the engine faster and put it back together faster if it's a belt motor. Right, because you don't have some big sealed front cover and whatnot, you know. K-Series Honda is pretty simple, you know. And maybe that's just because I've done it so many times that it's very easy to put a K-Series timing chain on or pull the cylinder head. Maybe not in 100% stock form, but at least something that's built turbo, drag racing, whatever, you know. It's pretty reasonable, but a belt motor, to me, you know, like we pull the cylinder head off my race car and, you know, it takes like 13 or 15 minutes to pull the cylinder head, you know. And then you look at this Coyote.
I've done it countless times, what last time was like a record of like hours.
He'll like drive up here after work and be like, yo, I'm like, yeah, you could pull it in and put a head gasket in it or pull the cylinder head to do whatever. And like there's a zero percent chance that he is driving this home tonight, you know, unless we wait until tomorrow morning, you know, like it's not getting done. You know, there is just so much stuff that you have to remove. Where again, yes, the LS is chained, but since it's push rod, you don't have to touch it in order to pull the cylinder head. So, you know, I mean, if you, you've done an LS cylinder head before, I'm assuming, you know.
No, I don't f*** with those things, but I've done plenty of 302, 351.
It's like easier.
Yeah.
It's like that minus the distributor, you know what I mean? Like, and it, for some reason, I feel like, well, cause you don't have to like, try to glue down the intake manifold to cover the valley, you know, on an LS.
Yeah, no, it takes a, you need about four tubes of RTB.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then your distributor gear is in the wrong place, so it keeps shearing off. Yeah, I had a big bad one.
But at least it's in the front where I can f****** work on it.
I get it. But it's just, you know, it's what you know. And I mean, the LS, it is just easy to work on, you know, and you don't really have to, you know, on stock rockers set up, you know, it's a torque spec. It's not really a lash, you know, you're not expecting some 16 year old kid to go out there and adjust some frickin roller rocker or something, you know, like that's why those things work for the average junkyard build, you know, is it's a simple design for a V8, you know, at least to work on.
Well, it must have been easy because there's a million of them out there, man. They put it in front of everything.
So that's where I was going to. If F150, like, let's say to make the Coyote more of like a junkyard build, if Mustangs would have had an aluminum block and trucks would have had an iron block, I think you would have seen a lot more out of it. If that iron block or if they didn't have spray welded cylinder walls, right? If they had a real cylinder wall in the Coyote, I think you would have seen a lot more people trying to like cheap these things together, you know, but since it's kind of not an option, you have to like commit a lot more to that engine than you do to build an LS. Right? You know, you get a junkyard 5.3 iron block, you know, with some He-Man thick cylinder wall in it, like it is going to take a lot of horsepower, you know, where that stock Yachty spray welded cylinder wall just isn't going to do it, you know.
Yeah, but if your goal is just like a thousand or whatever, you can basically junkyard either one of them together. Yeah.
You know, you could put a pick your poison, you could put a cam, some head studs, you know, and whatever and turn the boost way up on an LS or, you know, you could throw a Yachty in there.
Just hold the oil pump gears.
Yeah, you know, put some oil pump gears and some head studs in it and, you know, push it till the stock piston is about to die in it, you know, and they'll both do it, you know, so it could be done for cheap. Again, I don't think, I think again, people are just scared of it.
Yeah.
You know, like some hillbilly on the farm that can build a small block Chevy, we'll put an LS in there and slap a carburetor on it and call it a day. He is not messing around with a Coyote.
No.
You know, and four timing chains and trying to figure out VVT and, you know, he thinks that's some import thing, you know?
Like I remember when I was buying up Fox bodies, I would get so many of them that would have carburetors put on, like the 80s ones that would have carburetors on them, even though they came with EFI because they had no, they were just like, it was too much for me to f****** figure out. I took all that s*** off and just put a carburetor on it. I'm like, well, this is like a 92, so it didn't have all that. That's cool. And I got to source all that s***. But thanks anyway. Yeah.
This is what they knew how to work on. Yeah. And that's why, I don't want to say I don't venture out, but do I want to tune Alex's F150 on a stock ECU? No, I shouldn't. But I know that if I do it my way, that it's gonna work. If I put this Link ECU in it and I make it 12 minus one, and I cut the cam down until it's got one tooth, this thing thinks that there's a freaking Honda Civic attached to it now. It understands this cam and crank pattern. It is like the first cam and crank pattern since the beginning of EFI. It's like, this is going to work. If we bang some IGN 1A coils or LS Smart coils or anything on it, because the stock Yachty coil seems like it's CDI, two wire.
Oh, okay.
We'll keep that interference out of the game, and we'll put a Smart coil in it. We'll use a normal hall effect cam and crank sensor, and it's just going to work, you know, as long as we can figure out what the firing order is, this is going to work. You know, we're not doing anything different than we've already done 2,000 times. So like, did I make you buy a couple extra parts to do it my way? Yeah, for sure. You know, could we have gotten the stock stuff to work? Maybe, right? But was it worth it, right? You know, now he's got, turns a profit off some of these parts, but to, you know, make an initial cam and crank sensor or whatever, you know, you got a hundred bucks into some parts or whatever, or we sit here for another 10 hours pulling our hair out, trying to figure out what in the hell is going on with the, you know, stock VR sensor. Right. So, A, at the time, we couldn't even find a proper wiring diagram for it. And then even with this thing on the bench, waving it across the wrench or a fork or whatever, I can't get this thing to work. Well, I flipped the wires and flipped the wires and flipped the wires. Now did I burn the sensor out? Well, probably not, but did I? Right? And I was just like, I'm done with this. We're just messing with it on the table. I'm like, I'm done with this. We're just putting a hall sensor in this thing. It's just gonna work. Yeah.
Keep it simple.
There you go. No, it's gonna work.
Did you want to touch on some of the billet stuff since we are closed? I think we're past three hours now. I think, right?
I have no idea what time it is.
I was gonna ask you, like, is like, I can talk.
Oh dude, it's almost midnight.
Yeah.
Is it really?
Oh s***.
Yeah, so do you want to touch on your stuff?
Holy s***, I have a hundred notifications.
Well, sometimes you could get someone going. I'm like, I like listening to this guy. This is like smooth jazz. I'm just chilling over here.
I could have warned you about that.
No, it's good. I mean, people, a lot of times, they go into this going, I don't know what I'm gonna talk about for 45 minutes. Yeah. Three hours later.
I'm so f*****, dude.
What, your girl?
No. Like, I gotta wake up in f****** six hours.
Yeah.
Oh yeah. I was talking about like tuning classes, right? Like my first tuning class, I like wrote all down how I was gonna do this. And I had a whole bunch of notes. And then I walked up and like stood in front of everybody. And I'm like, oh s***, I can't even talk. I'm like, I was about to start crying. I'm not even joking. I was about to cry in front of like a bunch of grown men, you know, and I'm like, and I finally literally just like put my head down and like looked at my laptop and was like, okay, so here's how you would go and start to unlock an ECU and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's lunchtime. Yep. You know, and then, all right. I like stand back up after lunch and I'm like, oh s***, I'm kind of nervous again, you know, start talking. Boom, it's time to leave. You know, I'm like looking at everybody, they're like packing up their laptops. And I'm like, did I really make it through like eight hours of this crap? And I look and I'm like, oh s***, we ran a half hour over already. You know? All right.
Well, I'll leave it up to you then. Do you want to touch on some of that stuff or do you want to wrap it up?
From all of these stories and all of this s***, the building coyotes and having to tear s*** back down to nothing and build it back up, you've kind of learned to have to make some of your own parts. So you've kind of started to turn a little bit of a business out of this.
Yeah, so basically when we did the Gen 3, the DI deletes. Yeah, the DI deletes. So basically when we were putting this thing on a standalone, the Gen 3 was the first yote to have DI and port injections. So not many if maybe now, but then there was no standalone that would control both port and DI. So I was like, well, it's basically the same as a Gen 2, just somehow get rid of the DI and run it just port only. So I drew up, took a bunch of CAD classes in high school, drew up some plugs based off of the DI measurements and source of seals and just made some block off plugs. And then when I made them for my truck, I ended up having like an extra 10 or 15 sets made and they sat on my desk for quite some time because I was scared to sell them. I was scared to post them for sale or say I had them and then just get like backlash from people saying, why are you doing this or why is that? So I ended up just having a few extra sets and told a few people about it. And some other fast guys reached out to me, bought them, a big tuner bought them from me in random. And then a lot of people wanted them. So then I just started mass producing some of the parts. Basically, if I need the parts for my truck, instead of making one for my truck, I'll make like 10 or 15 and put them on the website. So I've just been starting to make a bunch of like CNC billet parts from coil brackets, cam crank sensors, fuel rails. That's a Hemi air to water intake. Pull the blower off, put air to water if you want to turbo it. Bunch of other stuff that will be coming out hopefully shortly in the next two or three months.
Okay.
Mainly Coyote and Hemi stuff.
Yeah.
No room for making money in the LS world.
Yeah.
It might sell, but you have to sell it for less than what you make it for.
Yeah, make a nickel on each one. Yeah.
If that, yeah, lose a nickel on each one.
Lose a nickel.
Yeah.
It has to be so cheap that China outsources it to India.
Oh, yeah.
That happens too.
I forgot about that.
Yeah.
Like they say, s*** flows downhill.
Yeah.
When there's no money left in China, they outsource it.
But you say then you've also turned that into an actual business as well now, right?
Yep. Yeah. So it's used. I started off as Budget Billet, and then I'm transferring it to Alloy Works because the Budget Billet is when I was just doing the, I think when I first started that, I just had the DI plugs on there, and then maybe the cam sensors, maybe the cam sensors. But I'm starting to build some and design some really nice, like high quality pieces. And I don't want the Budget Billet name hurting me in the long run. You know?
Right.
So have a lot of really nice, basically just super nice parts coming out. You know, if you've seen the intake, the machine work on that, the fuel rails, the iPlugs, if you have them, the machine quality is awesome. And I don't want that name hurting me.
Yeah. There's nothing budget about it.
No, it's not.
Not anymore.
Not anymore, no. Yeah.
So you basically said, you said you took some CAD classes in high school and that's what you're using for all this?
Yeah. So in high school, we had a really good like engineering program, you could say.
Okay.
I took like three years of AutoCAD classes and learned in Inventor, and downloaded again and brushed my skills up. But my teacher I had in high school was really good.
Okay.
He was awesome.
So are you still like, well, actually it's still a question, but what does this kind of like continuing your education look like? Because I'm sure you're learning stuff every day as you're trying to grow an actual business out of it now too.
So a lot of YouTube videos.
It's a school of hard knocks now. Yeah. You know what I mean?
YouTube videos, design stuff. I mean, the software, the software, I don't think you'll ever learn every aspect.
Right.
I use Invener. I don't think you'll ever learn every aspect of it. So like I'll learn little tricks and like shortcuts on designing things, like almost every day, but like some things that I can't figure out how to draw or come to life. There's a couple of guys on YouTube that I follow.
Anyone in particular?
I don't even know how you'd spell their names. Because they're from overseas. I don't even think you have like somehow I found the video.
You don't have the button for it.
I don't think you have the button for it. I don't know how you would find them, but a lot of it's just playing with the software, hundreds of hours in designing stuff. I think, I mean, crap, that intake probably, I don't know, three months of working on it, four hours a day.
Holy s***.
On and off and yeah.
Yeah.
You know, so.
Not the same design the whole time, right? Like stuff, it was one design, then scrap the whole thing, then restart. Like it's not start with one and just progressively gets better. You'll get like almost done with your done with it. And then you're like, s***, well, that's not going to work. Looks like I'm going to have to restart now.
Yeah. Yeah.
No, it looks really cool, but it sticks two inches above the hood. That's not going to f****** work.
Yeah.
Well, shoot, then, I mean, do you want to pop the usual three?
Yeah.
Because this boy's got to get on a peasant air tomorrow, right?
Yeah.
Yeah. Got to go to Utah tomorrow.
So what's the usual three?
All right. So at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests to pick three cars. You have to give me a show car, a daily driver, and a track car. You have an unlimited budget. You can cut whatever you want up and weld it together, swap whatever you want.
You said a daily driver, a show car, and a race car.
You didn't mess it up this time.
I didn't.
When you say track car, I think we're road racing.
You can do whatever you want, track, drag, strip, dirt, wherever the f*** you want to take it. Yeah.
All right. So, show car. I mean, I guess I'm going to have to pick some like big dog, twin turbo Lambo, just so that we could show it off and get some gold diggers.
Yeah.
And then, for a...
Who would you go to for a twin-turbo Lambo?
I would have to do it myself, so I didn't catch on fire. And then, if I was doing a track car, as much as I want a drag race, I want an LMP3 car that I could like drive on the street. So, I think I might have to take that. And a daily, right? A daily?
Yup.
Yeah.
Ooh. Honestly, probably just like a Slam Denali Dually HD on some semi-wheels again.
Yeah.
Sold.
Just that way, it's a big dog ride, it's huge, and then we can pull the other two with them too.
Yeah.
So, we didn't throw the tow vehicle in there, so we're going to make that be the tow vehicle.
That's, I did mine a tow vehicle too, just because you got to.
So, would you choose?
My first time was a, because I've been asked a couple of times, my first time was a Raptor R, and when I was a guest on the show, and then since then, I've upgraded it to the Shelby Super Baja, the F250 6.7 Power Stroke, Shelby, it's such a bad a** truck. Because I got in the diesel game, and I was no looking back on that either.
Yeah, yup.
I'm gonna start backwards. I'm gonna start with the daily driver.
All right.
Dually 450 limited, for sure. Okay. What was next, track car?
Yup.
Oh, that's tough. That's tough.
All wheel drive F150.
Something all wheel drive? Yeah, probably all wheel drive F150. It's just, it's, it's just fun.
Dude, they're smoking, like they're just f****** the whole world up right now.
Is that American GTR?
Yeah.
Whoever said that?
No, it's the Mexican GTR.
Mexican GTR.
That's right. Or the Texas GTR.
Yeah. The Texas GTR. No, I can't do something I already had.
Sure you can.
You can. People do it all the time.
Yeah. I mean, I guess F150, to be honest.
Yeah, dude, some people have the same breakfast.
I just have, I just have more money into it. It'd be full chassis.
Okay.
Yeah. Full chassis. I'm halfway there. And then show vehicle. Man, that's tough too.
That's why I'm going to show off the Lambo. Show off the Lambo.
For the gold diggers.
Dude, it'd have to be something ridiculous. I always do stuff that's ridiculous.
I always say we're not in the sports around here. We're in the girls in fast cars.
Yeah. That's really what everybody's doing it for, but you're the first one to just really admit it on camera.
Oh, yeah. We're doing it for the horror, it's not the gram. Well, yeah.
Just letting you know, my audience is 99.9% dudes.
Yeah, I get it.
So I don't know if we're winning at that.
We've also heard that too.
So you guys understand.
Yeah, somebody's been like, I thought I was gonna get chicks with this car and I just keep getting dudes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No kids, no wife, happy life, right?
Something like that.
All right, where are we at now?
We bought you some time.
Show car, dude, I can't even think about it.
Sure you can.
I've never really like showed off a car before.
Is there something out there, muscle car or something, anything that really just...
I like like 69 C10s. Yeah, there you go. Like Zach and Mackenzie's dads.
Dude, I think I could see you in that homies new Impala.
Oh, that would be sick.
With the f****** blower out the hood.
That's a sexy red, that red Impala.
Okay, that it?
That would be sick.
You guys probably got a good donk scene out here, right?
Not really.
No, there is a donk scene. It's not good.
Fair enough.
There is a few nice cars. And I don't go to where they would be, for the most part. So like, we did a car show two winters ago down at Kobo, and there was some, a lot nicer donks than I ever would have expected. You know, like, there's like a couple big block twin turbo cars that are not pieces of crap, all right? Locally in Pontiac, there is a great number of donks, but I'm talking about like, you know, a two out of ten on the paint scale, and a one out of ten on the build, you know, like, just some rusted out Monte Carlo, some clapped out 305 in it, or, you know, at best, like, the world's worst 5.3 swap in it, you know, that's like already caught on fire three times, yeah. Just not nice cars.
Well, sweet. On that note, where can everybody find you guys? Do you want to be found?
You can find him all over the internet. I kind of exist, but I'm a...
You're a referrals-only kind of guy.
No, I mean, I have a page that I don't really do much on, and, you know, I got a couple of buddies trying to push me to do some YouTube stuff, but again, I just, I work, so...
Dude, this shop is exactly like...
Need for Speed?
No, I guess that one scene, yeah, I suppose.
I've never even seen this movie.
Yeah.
Well, no, it's like after, like, before Fast and Furious went to hell, sort of deal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you know what I mean? Well, then, what's your handles, then?
Basically, Instagram, TikTok is just, well, not TikTok anymore. You got six days. I got a week left. Facebook and Instagram is just Alex Chud, and then TikTok is my F150, the license plate's work truck, W-R-K-T-R-O-K.
Okay.
So that's TikTok, and then everything else is just Alex Chud.
Okay. And for you, people find you at A-Star Fab?
No. I mean, basically, if you want to see me actually post something, it's just under my personal name, Andy McPherson.
Okay.
So I think I'm like Andy McPherson925 or something like that on Instagram.
Fair enough.
Andy McPherson on Facebook.
Andy was fighting the GoPro earlier. He's not good with the camera.
Oh, no. It was a DJI something or other. I was about to smash, but we finally got it working. So, you know, I'm lucky for some of you. You might actually have to see me again online somewhere.
Did I cut you off there?
No.
To make sure.
All right, cool.
Well, on that note, Andy, Chud, thank you very much for coming on the show. Super fun. Dan, thanks for existing and we'll see you all next time.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.