139. Subarus, Company23, Product Development Corporate vs Small Business w/ Mark Menzenski

The place that we had parked the F-150, it's gone. And I'm like, what happened to my truck? Designed it up, 3D printed it, like made it, made it work. I'm like, this is cool. Email company 23, hey man, you guys want to buy some designs? Like, I made a tool.

Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host Harris, AKA Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations. And I'm here with my Broken Ford co-host.

Broken Ford, it just had a little hiccup.

A little hiccup, cool.

I have a fuel pump issue, I'm pretty sure.

Mr. Gunnick Garage, we're not the mister. And today we are back for the third time recording. Yeah, I'm gonna cut that part probably, not really. We're back for the first time ever recording with Mark Menzenski at Company 23, Subaru extraordinaire. Tell us a little bit about what it is that you do here at Company 23, and we'll go from there.

That was excellent. We can pack it up and head home now. So my name is Mark Menzenski. I work for Company 23. We are a Subaru aftermarket brand located in central Wisconsin. I'm a design engineer, and I run our marketing department, I guess. I run our social media, really, so I just post Instagram once a day. So I do everything from product ideation to development, to design, to sourcing, to purchasing, to manufacturing, pretty much all of the above, all the way down to, you know, I'm a Subaru enthusiast, so we're sitting here in my shop in front of one of my 2004 WRX STI's, because like Dan, when stuff breaks, you can't have just one.

Oh, absolutely.

So yeah, I do basically all aspects of the business, you know, from the engineering and marketing side. So we're an extremely small company. I think right now there's one, two, three, four, five of us. So I do a lot of the actual boots on the ground engineering, the social media marketing, influencer outreach, which is, you know, a very fancy way to say, I just message dudes on Instagram who are big influencers and send them free stuff.

That's why we're here. Yeah, it's the free stuff, though.

So my boss, Chad, he works out of his home office in Minneapolis. So he's one of the company founders and my boss, lead engineer. So he keeps me in check and, you know, tells me when to spend money sometimes or not. His co-owner is Ryan, who's at our... Back the bus up a little bit. Our headquarters is actually in Wausau, Wisconsin, which is about two and a half hours east of here. So Ryan is our kind of business director, oversees all the finances from a high level. His wife, Amanda, is our business operations manager, kind of on a day-to-day level. So she does order inventories, things like that, actually receives stuff, packages it, ships it, day-to-day financials, things like that. And then we have Damon. Damon is one of our shop techs who does a lot of welding and building and all these kinds of stuff. So yeah, most people kind of get confused because I'm located out of my shop here in Hudson, Wisconsin, where we're sitting. I'm a fully remote employee, so I kind of get the freedom to kind of pick where I work out of. So was working out of my house about five minutes down the road from here. And then my two-year-old son figured out doorknobs, and he would just come into my office constantly and say hi. So that was, I moved my office over here, and yeah, so here's where we sit. So we're doing this. I'm glad to see you guys again that we can do this again after the debacle that we won't talk about last time.

It's like the second we get here, what's going on next door, dude?

So I somehow it's louder than last time. So for people listening, Mark's like, yeah dude, I swear to God, it's quiet here all the time. Yeah, the entire construction zone next door.

Yeah, I feel like I lied to you.

Yeah, right?

Yeah.

It's like an Avengers movie next door. Thor just came back for the third time.

So maybe he's drinking here during the day, he doesn't realize it.

Yeah, I'm actually just up there napping on the pallet rack. Don't tell anyone.

But anyways, so to break it down for people listening, so you guys create a lot of unique tools, it's probably a good way of putting it together. It's okay, it's hilarious. But anyways, you guys, like for example, before we got started with the podcast, you're showing us some of the stuff that you were designing. That's been the labor of love for the last however many weeks. So is it predominantly like Subaru based stuff that you guys do, or is it kind of branch out to other things as well?

Yeah. So to go back to the beginning of where the company came from, and a little bit of background in history for everybody that's listening to the construction in the background. Just ignore it, pretend it's not there. Company 23 was founded in 2012 when the two owners, Chad and Ryan, they were working, I'm pretty sure it was on Chad's EJ207, swapped Bug Eye, white WRX. Subaru people listening will understand what that means. Dan looks very confused.

I know Bug Eye.

Bug Eye. So Bug Eye wagon with the Japanese STI engine in it, which is a two-liter, which you probably don't care about because it's not a V8. Yeah.

Not enough leaders, but yeah.

And the pistons go the wrong way. So when they were working on this thing, a Subaru and their Infinite Wisdom, there's a lot of things that need to be held that rotate with a bolt in the middle, and there are very weird shapes with no real way to hold them. So cam gears, crank pulley, things like that. There are kind of shade tree ways to hold on to them and loosen the bolt in the middle, but over time, so we'll use the famous example, which is the Subaru cam gears, the bolt in the center of them, over time with heat cycling or rotation, things like that, it gets super tight, super, super, super tight. So the factory torque spec is like 70 something foot pounds. When you go to loosen it, also in their infinite wisdom, Subaru use a 10 millimeter Allen for that bolt, which have never stripped out ever. So now you have a super, super tight 10 millimeter Allen when the bolt is not made probably out of the best steel. So a certain percentage of them like to strip. But if it doesn't, you need something to hold on to that cam gear. That's where all these kind of funky shaped wrenches come in to hold certain geometry on the cam gear so that you can get the bolt out. So Chad and Ryan had purchased one of those tools to work on his car. They got it. As we all know, OEM tools, the price is not low. They're pretty expensive for what they are. They got the tool, took a look at it, thought they could do better. Went back, did all the work, launched the company in 2012 with a pretty good portfolio of tools, actually. And the rest is history. Here we are, what, 13 years later, and now we have quite the product portfolio of many different things. I want to preface this, too, and say we don't just copy OEM tools. That's not us. So we're engineers, we like to do things differently, and you know, in all our wisdom, too, like we like to think we can do it better than anybody else, which most of the time is true, to toot my own horn.

Well, you're not going to see OEMs making Cromalli tools.

Right, right, right. Well, knock on wood, it's a secret. Don't tell anybody. That was top secret, dude.

Okay, we'll cut that. We'll just throw it out there.

I didn't say what it was, so I don't care. You can put it out there. But yeah, so I mean, that is one thing that we do. We leverage manufacturing partners that we have good relationships with to get different materials, get different surface finishes, get different geometry manufactured that maybe someone who's doing it a different way won't do. So at the beginning, we are engineers. We like to make something that, it's maybe not the cheapest thing in the world, but if someone buys it, it has a lifetime warranty from us on it. And that we hand it to you and we go, we feel good about this. We're never gonna have you come back and say, hey, I broke it. You're gonna call us up and say, what else you got?

Well, you're probably right at or still under what OEM tool costs.

We're well under.

Yeah, and they probably aren't guaranteed for life either, I bet.

I don't know if they are or not, but I have some friends who work in the Subaru dealership network here in the Twin Cities, and they'll send me like TSBs when Subaru brings them out or tech service bulletin for those who are listening. Like Subaru just launched a crank pulley tool for the FA-FB engines, which are the newer ones. And it's like $1,200.

Holy s***.

Yeah. And it's like, I don't know if it's going to be that gold or what it is, but like we offer something that does the same thing. Like it's a slightly different design and it's more modular, but ours, if you buy everything, all kit and caboodle to your door is like $70.

Oh wow. Okay.

Yeah. So it's, it's not like a little bit more expensive. It's like ungodly expensive. And then they ship it like, I don't know how the purchasing works, but I think they just ship them to dealers and dealers get stuck with the bill. Oh yeah. So depending on your dealership size, things like that, I don't know exactly how all that works, but he sent it to me and was like, do you have this? I'm like, no, we got something better. So I mean, to jump back, so yeah, we manufacture tools to make Subaru people's lives easier, and we don't just copy and paste anything, we do everything ourselves. So everything you see is engineered by us, myself and Chad and Ryan, and we line up manufacturing for it. We have many manufacturing partners that do a great job. We do welding in-house, we do assembly in-house, we're looking to the future of bringing manufacturing operations in-house. We just bought a new, well, it's not new, we bought a building that's new to us in Wausau. Side note, it has a five-ton crane in it, and we got to play with it when we close on the building.

Dude, it's sick.

It's so big. It's got a wireless remote, and we're driving around. It was so cool, dude. I'm such a nerd.

I think you guys were just getting ready to close or something last time we talked, so you hadn't got to play with it yet.

No, I think last time we talked, it was either that weekend or the weekend after. And yeah, we went out and we forgot to buy the champagne at the booth store. We bought everything else. We were going to break champagne on it and stuff, but we got to do it. It's so cool. We just joystick this 100-foot boom crane. I'm way too excited by it.

So you guys would keep the crane?

Yeah, the crane is staying. Dude, I don't know how you would get that thing out. Someone probably bought it for 300 grand at some point. It's on big steel I-beams and it has 100-foot travel on it. It's crazy. It's crazy, but I don't know how you get it out if you wanted to get it out. But we are very... What's the word I'm looking for? Resourceful, I guess you could say. It's not that we're cheap, but we look for the best way to do things because again, engineers, so we overthink everything, try to figure out the best way to do it. So we bought a building that's like way too big for what our needs are right now. And it has like an office space, kind of a central space, and it has a giant warehouse space in the back where that crane is. So we're looking at renting a couple of portions of that. Well, we're not big enough to justify, I forget how many square feet it is, maybe like 15,000, like it's huge. So we're gonna rent out certain sections of that to help offset the cost of it. And do things kind of like make a little, sell a little kind of thing, which seems to work really well for us. So we don't over leverage ourself and, you know, just go out and buy a brand new Haas CNC or something and hope that we have stuff to keep it busy. We'll wait, we'll, you know, use outsource manufacturing partners and build up our business until we can look at the numbers and say, okay, if we save X amount of dollars on this many parts in a year, we can, we would make more money if we bought our own CNC kind of thing.

So there's one on Facebook Marketplace a few weeks ago. I don't know if you saw it. It was like a Haas CNC machine.

So they're everywhere everywhere. And like, it's crazy what you can get for your money now. But at the same time, like, again, we like analyze everything. We love to analyze.

Yeah.

We love Excel. If you love Excel, like we could be friends. Dan's like, I hate Excel. I love Excel, dude.

It's just digital graph paper, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

You can make it, you can just do like this plus this equals this without having to click on all three.

Oh.

The most used feature ever.

Yeah.

But I'm a super numbers guy. I love, call me nerd, whatever. I love data and Excel. And like I had a professor in college, like you'd go to him and be like, hey man, I feel like this is stronger than this. And he'd be like, he'd just look at it and go, in God we trust, all others bring data. So like in your previous podcast, we were talking like Greg Banish and Sam, and they're like spewing data and numbers and facts. I'm like, oh yeah, dude. I'm like, oh yeah, sign me up, dude. This is awesome.

Side note, we're going to try to go out to Detroit next month to get both those guys back on.

Dude, get them on the same morning, just let them talk.

Oh, jeez.

I don't know if my brain can handle it.

I can watch.

Dude, I have somebody, actually, Kyle, he keeps asking me like, hey, can I co-host for Andre Simon? Nelson?

Larkin, Larkin. Not Nelson, he's Map guy.

He's like, can I please co-host for Andre Simon?

Kyle's such a nerd. When you see him, ask him to clean the foot powder off those parts over there, he left on them. I had him do some 3D scanning, and the scanner really doesn't like shiny surfaces, so you spray like foot powder on it. He left it on there and clean it off. I'm like, come on, what'd I pay you for?

Yeah, that's very unfair.

Oh, a little inside baseball, not really. I should probably do that tour next time we're there, but at SEMA Garage, where they do like the ADAS system testing, so like your brake assist and all that stuff, they have to do like super dim lighting, and then also like non-reflective like paint or whatever. It's just because you can't have any of those like laser thingies.

Yeah.

That's the medical term for it. Reflecting off of anything. So it's just it's crazy like what goes into that. But okay, let's backtrack because I feel like we...

We talk about the crane.

The crane, yeah. Okay, so you obviously have an engineering mindset. Where does that all come from? As in like, what's your background from like career wise? Because I know you were at Polaris for a while, but you kind of were a little bit all over the place. Where does this like love for automotive like tool design come from?

Yeah, it comes back to me being really cheap.

Okay.

Like straight up, dude, I hate paying people to do stuff. So when I was four, three, four, I was small. My first love has always been motocross and dirt bikes, as you can see behind me. That's just part of my collection. It's like my version of Dan's Fords. They all work though.

Oh, come on.

So when I was like three or four, I'm pretty sure I have like undiagnosed ADHD. That's why I like hyper-focus on doing cab design and stuff. And like everyone will just leave me alone. Like let me work, give me coffee until I'm twitchy. But my dad, like I was super like energetic kid. So my dad did two things and I have two brothers also. So he put us in hockey when we were very young. And one summer's day, like my mom needed him to get my brothers and I out of the house. So he took us to a track called Brubem Tioga that was right down the road, like 30, 40 minutes from my parents' house. I went to the Pro Motocross National Weekend when, you know, he saw the ad in like the paper when the paper was still a thing. And he took us down there. I was like four years old and I'm like, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. And I don't remember it, but there's like a famous picture of my brothers and I a couple of years later where like we have our little backpacks on and we're standing by the fence and like Doug Henry's going by on the CR 125 and like, so cool. But like from that moment on, like dirt bikes were my thing. Like I loved them. My parents wouldn't let me get one because I thought I was going to die. So it took like years and years and years of just beating them down, like, can I get a dirt bike? Can I get a dirt bike? Can I get a dirt bike? Which now in hindsight, my own son does to me about like sitting in my car. So mom, I understand the frustration, I guess. So yeah, send me that clip, I'll send it to her, she'll love it. But so I love dirt bikes. And then finally I was like 12. And I'm like just beating up my dad on like a Saturday morning. I'm like, let me get a bike. Let me get a bike. Let me get a bike. And he was like, did kind of did the thing, like the dad thing was like, shut up. But he said, yeah, you saved like a thousand dollars and you can get dirt bike. And I'm like, consider it done, dude. And I mean, this is 2004. So like a thousand dollars is probably like 50 grand today.

What was the bike tariff?

So I did absolutely anything like a kid who was 12, 13 years old could do for money that had my skills at the time. So like I was refereeing hockey, like multiple games a day. I was getting paid like 20 bucks a game. I thought I was rich. I was umpiring baseball. I was like digging a pond in my parents backyard for five bucks an hour. I was like working. I'm like, I'm doing this. So worked for like, I think from start to finish, it ended up being like nine months. And I had like almost a thousand bucks in my checking account. And I'm like, you said, you know, what kind of deal? And he was like, s***, I did. So, I mean, kudos to my parents. Like they held up their end of the bargain and like, I'll never forget it. I was like downstairs in the morning before going to school on like a Friday and there was a 1995 YZ 80 in like Cape Cod. So I'm originally from Ithaca, New York. So Western New York. Cape Cod is like seven, eight hours away. Mind you, we don't have a pickup truck at the time. We have like a 2000 Dodge Grand Caravan that a gold one my mom loved. And I'm like, I ran upstairs like my mom, we got a bid on this thing. Like it looks sweet. She's like, all right, fine. She goes downstairs and she bids and like, it wasn't enough. And she's like, well, guess you're not getting that one. And I'm like, hold on, I'm bid like one more dollar. She bid like $950. Like just one more dollar. She's like, fine, one more dollar. We won it. My mom did the like, oh s*** thing. And she's like, how are we going to get home? My dad's like, how are we going to get home? I'm like, take the seats out of the back of the Grand Caravan.

I was gonna say, a YZ80 probably fits in a f****** minivan.

It does, it does. We know this now. So my dad, we knew nothing about motorcycles. My family had no motorcycles at the time, no nothing. My parents knew nothing. My dad takes all the seats out of the back of minivan, lays down plastic, and brings some rope. Goes to Cape Cod over the course of a weekend, the rope doesn't work, so he goes and gets tie downs and brings it home. And I get on it wearing a bicycle helmet, rev it up, dump the clutch on asphalt, bike goes like 30 feet, I don't move. And I'm like, I'm gonna die. I take it back, I don't want this thing. I got my money back. And over the course of time, I got a dirt bike helmet the next day, and I thought I was hot s***. But of course, said bike had a bunch of mechanical issues. So I needed chance brackets, I needed tires, like all the normal dirt bike stuff. And we take it to a dealer, and the dealer would put chance brackets on it, for example, and it was like a hundred bucks in parts, and 400 bucks in labor. And I'm like, well, that's stupid. Like it was a bunch of bolts. You just took out, put back in, you charge 400 bucks. So my cheap a** self was like, you can do it, I can do it. So that year for Christmas, like my dad got me a toolbox and a torque wrench. And like the service manual for the bike, because, you know, whatever. And the fun thing is like that white bike sitting over there. That's the one. That's from Cape Cod. And like that toolbox up there is the one my dad got me. Like I just never get rid of anything, I guess.

I know how that goes.

Yeah. That bike, like I'm, if you guys have any tips, I'm still working on my wife to like, have it be the centerpiece in our home. It's not going well. I don't really understand why.

They just released, at Hay Days, they had a shirt that had that bike on it.

No way.

Yeah, dude, that's like iconic in the Yamaha dirt bike.

I'm kind of kicking myself, because when I was younger, like it had the purple frame, it had the purple seat, like it had the purple graphics, and I hated it. And now in hindsight, I'm like, I should have kept them.

Yeah.

Like, oh dude, retro, retro is back, 90s are back. Yeah. So anyway, that leads me to the, if you can do it, I can do it kind of thing.

Yeah.

And like I would sit down at home and I would just read the service manual. Like some kids read like Harry Potter. I would just like, all right, torque this. Okay. I'm like, yeah, that's good.

That's my son right now.

He loves my guy. So and then that turned into, you know, I worked on them. Like I, you know, I got bigger, I got older, I got different bikes. Like I would offset schoolwork for dirt bikes. Like I did just good enough or just well enough in school to keep riding dirt bikes. Like I was not, I was not like a book nerd. Like I was like, this is boring. I don't want to do this. I just want to like fix my dirt bike. Like it's fine. And then it came time to like try to figure out college. And I remember like, I liked doing the thing with my hands, like don't sit there and like tell me what to do. But like I would put together a cylinder head on my 400 CC four stroke because you know, that made sense. Oh, this just goes here and tighten this, loosen that, whatever. And I had contemplated going to like MMI, Motorcycle Mechanics Institute and just be a mechanic working on dirt bikes all day. I thought that sounded good and started thinking about it. And I'm like, you know, like that's cool. But like, I don't really want to do this all day, every day for 40 years, but like designing the thing would be cool.

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So, like I said, I'm from Michigan, New York. So I'm like kind of West Central Finger Lakes-ish region, like right in the middle. And I had watched my older brother like try to pick what college he wanted to go to, and he like toured all these colleges all over the country, and he's like super selective and super picky. I went and toured the Rochester Institute of Technology, or RIT, Rochester, New York. And like as soon as I went to tour it, they took me straight to the machine shop, and they were like, here's where you'll be day one, and you're gonna learn how to machine stuff. And I'm like, enough said, dude, sold. Applied early decision, the only school I applied to, got in, it's like, this is easy, I'm gonna go there for mechanical engineering. That was super easy. So my time there was interesting. So we talked about this last time, but like again, I was not the best student. If it didn't interest me, I was like, I'm out, dude. Like you sit down and like teach me like book physics, like A, like you have variables, not numbers that relate to somebody like falling out of the sky. I'm like, I don't care about this, dude. Like I end up, I end this problem and I just have a formula or a bunch of variables. I want to know how fast Johnny hit the ground. Like I want to like apply this. So I don't want to say I coasted my way through the first couple of years, but I coasted my way through the first couple of years. And like I was extremely blessed because I don't shut up and like people like to hear what I have to say once in a while. So I go to career fair and just nerd out over s*** that people would show me. And they'd be like, oh, this dude's like into this. And I'm like, I'm only into this because it's cool. Yeah, like the book stuff, whatever, man, like I don't care. Not that I didn't care, but like I couldn't grasp it. So like I go to career fairs and stuff. And this one guy, I was talking to the representatives from Mattel or Fisher Price. Mattel is a parent company. He like showed me this little like, you know, the little horse from Toy Story? Yeah, they had a little flashlight that was the horse from Toy Story, like pulled the trigger and the horse was like opened his mouth and it had a little light in there. He's like, check this out, dude. He'd like hold the horse's mouth shut and pull a trigger. And when he did that, the mechanism would disengage and like it wouldn't break the toy was the whole spiel, right? And I'm like, dude, that's so cool. And he's like, right, you want a job? I'm like, yeah. So, you know, me being me and the power sports junkie that I was at the time, like I ended up working on power wheels as a development engineer, which like he was like, yeah, do we have like a power wheels dino? I'm like, no, you don't. He's like, without photos. And I'm like, yes, you do. That's so cool. So I'm talking to like Boeing and Mattel and a couple other big companies. And I'm like, dude, they have a power wheels dino. Like I'd go to Boeing. I'm like, dude, they have a dino for power wheels. I was jazzed. So I ended up getting the job at Fisher Price. I was a co-op there for nine months and I loved it. I was like, I had all these, I was maybe potentially modifying power wheels. And like we had indoor test track and I was ripping them on the test track. And like I had all these different battery configurations that I built off the clock, of course. Yeah. But I would do like low is 12 volts, high is 24 volts. And I'd have like the turbo button and turbo button was 30 volts. And if you hit the turbo button, you had like 90 seconds before the contactors and the motor melted. But it was fun. So I learned a lot, learned kind of a lot about like the professional environment and being an engineer. And so I was, I turned 21 at this co-op. So it's kind of one of those things where like, RIT, let me back the bus up again, I'm getting ahead of myself with the dyno stuff. The RIT program that I went to was super unique because I had to do co-ops to get my degree.

So most of the co-op for us that didn't go to college.

It's a fancy name for internship.

Okay.

So I went to college and didn't get an internship because of COVID.

So I don't know what this means.

Okay.

Yeah, so basically what it was, was most mechanical engineering programs are four years. When you show up day one, you go over four years, you're done, good luck getting the job. Like you have no experience, blah, blah, blah. So RIT, it's four years of academics, but then in there or plus that you have 15 months of co-op. And again, this was 10 years ago, so it's changed since then. But at the time I went, I had to do 15 months worth of co-op at a company to get my bachelor's. So in a co-op at RIT or internship, they're the same thing really at the end of the day. Like I left school, so I wasn't doing like nights and weekends. I would leave school, I would go work for a company full time. They'd pay me, Fisher-Price gave me a house to live in. Like it was pretty swanky. So they're like, here's the, we have like, they have like five houses.

Was it a real house or like a toy house? House house, yeah.

I mean, in hindsight, it was pretty small, but yeah. But it was sweet. So like they'd have all these co-ops at the same time. We were buddies, we'd hang out, drink beer, things like that. After I was 21, of course. But.

Did you mess around with like Hot Wheels, Wild King, S******* at all or not really?

I mean, yeah.

Not Hot Wheels, the Power Wheels.

I told you about it, I got pulled over on one, right?

No, God knows it off-camera one last time. If you want to tell it again.

I mean, I don't care. The Statue of Limitations is expired, right? We'll get there in a second. But internship, so I would leave school, I'd work as a full-time engineer. So like some people are like, I don't know what it's like when I graduate. I knew exactly what it was gonna be like when I graduated. So I did nine months at Fisher Price as a full-time development engineer. Like I got to see what nine to five was like, and then I went back to school for six or eight months, and then I worked at BorgWarner, who was at the time, tier one supplier to Ford. So timing change, we'll get to that one. But anyway, so the drunk power wheel story. So we had vehicles and power wheels that like we needed to get rid of, and one of them was a black F-150. And the F-150 was sweet, so I modified it. So it ran on two batteries, so it ran 12 volts low and 24 volts high. It got up and went pretty well for having plastic tires. But it was sweet, because you could fit an 18 rack of beer in the bed, and it would fit like perfectly. So Fisher Price was like an hour and a half from where I went to school. And at the time, I had a E-150 Econoline, it was my moto van that I'd bring those bikes around in. And we had to get rid of this F-150. So I took, what else am I gonna do? I took it back to my buddies who lived at school. And we thought it was great. So we're whipping it around campus, and whipping it around the parking lot, I had extra batteries for it, it was great. And I may have had a beer or two, and I'm driving down the road, I'm like, whatever, I'm going to party. I don't know where the party is at, I can make it. And campus police officer, I looked in my plastic sticker rear view mirror, and I see the, and he pulls me over, and he comes up, and he kind of looks at me in disbelief. I'm sitting there, you know, like this, like hello. He's like, is this a registered vehicle? I'm like, no. Like, it's about two feet off the ground, it's a sticker, it says fun to drive, it's a license plate, but no, it's not. And he's like, kind of looks at me, he kind of does a face palm, and like, I have beer in the bed, like I'm bringing the party. And he's like, you gotta go park this, I don't want to see it the rest of the night. I'm like, fair. So me, up the sidewalk I went, back to my old apartment. So, you know, have a good time, my buddies or whatever, get up the next morning, and like the place that we had parked the F-150, it's gone. And I'm like, what happened to my truck?

You call the cops and they stole my truck.

Well, it gets better. So like, we're like, we don't know. Then we start calling all our other buddies, like, I've seen the truck. We didn't want it to like show up somewhere, and we get like, up the flag pole or somewhere in trouble.

Right.

And then my one buddy calls me and says, yeah, dude, like, it was like three in the morning. And this is Rochester, New York, and it's like February. Like it's cold. It's not cold like here, but it's cold and it's snowing. My buddy's like, yeah, dude, I asked everyone at like 3 a.m., like, should I try to drive it back to my apartment? And his apartment's like 10 miles away. And all my buddies in their infinite wisdom are like, that's a great idea, dude, you got this. And he's like, I made it in about a mile. And then it died. So I threw it in the woods. Okay, let's go get it. Go get it. There's footprints. There's no truck.

Oh my God.

So we thought about like posting like stolen truck flyers all over campus and decided against it in our infinite wisdom. But yeah, still don't really know what happened to it or where it went.

Hopefully some dad whipped over, got it, some kid enjoyed it for a little while anyway.

Yes, my buddy told me I stashed it in the woods.

Post this to highlight somewhere. Some people will be like, I got that truck still.

I'm like, that's so awesome. I hope they do. But come to find out like three years later, my other buddy came up to me and said, you know what John lied to you about that truck? And I'm like, no. What do you mean? He goes, he was driving it home, got cold, waved some car down, and tried to barter it for a ride back to his apartment, and then it wouldn't fit in the car. So then they threw it in the woods. Like, dude.

So he was planning on giving it away and taking a ride home.

Yeah, he was gonna trade it. I'm like, well, I don't care. I never saw it again. Never heard from it again. I miss it. It was a good truck.

Those things are like 300 bucks. Yeah, yeah.

You can buy it from the store.

Yeah, they are.

So what did you do at Fisher Price? Like, I know you were doing engineer, but is there any parts you designed or worked on or any particular vehicles that, because they're always switching them through there.

Yeah, yeah. So it's always fun for me to talk to people because people will bad mouth. Like, let's use power wheels, for example. People bad mouth power wheels all the time. Ah, it's junk, it breaks, whatever, da-da-da. I'm like, if you knew how much work went into that thing to make it not break, you would stop screaming and b******* because you didn't plug the battery in for six months and now it's dead. Like, A, you don't want to pay $1,000 for that thing. You want to pay 200 bucks for it, 300 bucks for the thing or whatever. And B, if you don't charge a battery, I don't care what battery it is, over time, it's going to die. So, you let it sit dead battery in your cold garage all winter, it's your fault. It's not bad mouthing them. It's not a car. You're not driving it every day. So, my responsibilities at Fisher Price, I was basically like electrical, mechanical systems, product development, testing quality, things like that. So, I would set up and run the tests on like the gearboxes, for example, like those gears in the gearboxes are plastic, but the main one on the motor is metal. So, when people are like, oh, I stripped the gearbox. I'm like, no, you didn't. Like, you only stripped it, like if you made way more power with this thing than you were supposed to. We literally had test rigs. We'd load like 20 or 30 of these gearboxes on and simulate little Johnny going forward, backward, forward, backward, forward, backward for like days and days and days, just to simulate the shock loading on those gears and see if we could break them. So, in a perfect world, they don't break, mostly because those plastic tires work as a clutch. But even if you take those off and put like rubber tires on it, those gearboxes will last a lot longer than you think they will. So basically anything that little Johnny could do, or we had a grandma test too that we would call it, little Johnny or grandma could do to this thing, if they were treating it like halfway decent, they last forever. So we would test the motors for life. We would do battery testing. If we had like a different batch of batteries come in, we'd load the batteries up, run charge, discharge cycles through them. We'd beat the crap out of that stuff. And basically came back to keep the battery charged. It's gonna last forever.

I used to work on them and fix them up. Yeah, so I have never ran across one. I still have an old Gravedigger, like the old original one. I have two of them actually. I guarantee you if I put batteries in them, they'd run. So yeah, people don't understand that they're old NiCad batteries. They're like two or three cycles and are not nearly anything that they used to be. Yep. So yeah, I'd always just break all that plastic s*** off of your great engineering. Because you need that plug, right? Yep. And then there's that little heat f****** fuse in there.

Yeah, you pull it out and just put a piece of wire across it. Yeah.

Well, I don't know. I don't mind using the heat fuse. It keeps them from dying.

Yeah. Yeah, like there's so much testing. And like we talked about last time, like it's directed at a kid. So anything Mattel does, which is almost everything that is like directed at a kid, and especially something where the kid is running or driving it or whatever, the safety that goes behind it and like the safety check is mind blowing. Like they won't do anything unless it's like vetted by like 20 different kids trying to test it. And like you think of one way to do something, well, they thought of 50 other ways that you're not supposed to do it and tried to figure out if anybody was going to do it that way.

Is there anybody's job that is to pull parts off and put them in their mouth just to make sure that they can't do that?

Yeah, there's standards behind that.

Are they just taking the kids off of like the scared straight TV show? Like, oh, go f*** it up, you know?

Dude, it's so funny because like, I probably can't speak about a lot of the super secret stuff that happened there. Because there was a lot, like there's a ton of cool stuff that they made and tested and like I would drive around that never saw light of day. Because back to the safety thing, they built a couple of prototypes where they're like, what would happen if this and we made this? I'll tell you off camera. But they built it and the kid was like, oh, sick and started like driving like up hills like this and they're like, like the lawyers would step in and be like, no, you're, no, uh-uh. Nope, this is not like a real dune buggy here, man. Like, you got to back it down a little bit.

Well, and then Razor came along and they started doing s***. So if they had kind of gone off on that, because they were ahead of them, they could have done some cool s***.

There's a few things that in hindsight, like we worked on, that never saw the light of day, because it costs or testing for whatever reason. But like, fast forward to now, they would have been smash hits and multi-million dollars. Like at the time, like I was there 2010, 2011. Like if you had showed a couple of things to people back then, I don't know, I don't want, that never worked. To now, and it's like, oh yeah, totally. My kid's got three of those. Yeah, yeah. And they're like, oh, well, a lot of this stuff there was kind of ahead of its time. But yeah, the amount of testing and safety stuff that goes into things for children is mind-blowing. Like my boss at the time, he had gotten a new job in the quality department while I was there. And like they started, like this is 2011. So like smartphones were barely becoming a thing, which makes me feel really old to say. But like iPhone had just become a thing, also feels extremely old. But they started making like cases for phones that were targeted at kids. And then it became a thing of like, well, if we make this case on a phone and give it to a kid, and kid does XYZ, what happens to the phone? So they were like driving nails through the screen protector, through the screen of the phone, to see what this phone would off gas, even though it wasn't their product, just because they were so hyper focused on kid safety, because people are, their kids are important, I guess.

Oh yeah.

It's ridiculous. I don't know if you saw the thing that happened last month. There was a trend, you know those little jelly things that you would shake and they go inside out or whatever? There was a trend of kids putting those in microwaves, and then they would explode, and then it'd be like, okay, what did you think was gonna happen? And it's just like, you never know what they're gonna do, is what I'm getting at.

Yeah, they did a really good job of trying to think about all that stuff.

How there's toy companies in existence still in this sue happy country of ours, I have no idea.

Oh my God, dude.

Well, there's thousands of recalls and losses.

You would know about that, wouldn't you?

Why?

Well, cause Ford just like 5X Chevy's recalls the other day.

Yeah, well, Chevy's recall is the engine comes apart from the inside.

So, you know, what's give or take here?

Well, you say that and that's exactly right though, because like, I don't mean to make this into a Power Wheels podcast, even though we can.

Yeah.

We literally had pallet racks of vehicles that someone had done something went, oh, they did this, we're going to sue them. And they sent the vehicle back and like, we had to analyze it in our lab and stuff. And then, you know, it was part of a court battle. So we would save the vehicle. We had pallet racks of these things. And you'd walk back there and look at them, and they'd be like, oh, the report says this one burst into flames. And you'd be like, dude, there's literally charcoal and like a grill rack in the back. Like somebody tried to use it as a barbecue. And they're like, we're in a court battle over it. Yeah. Like, okay. So like, I mean-

Is that a real example?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that, I don't know if I'm supposed to say that or not. I mean, it's been 10 years, but like, yeah, you'd look at this thing and be like, seriously?

Well, have you met the human race? Are you really that shocked? Yeah.

Dude, it's a common theme, though, because like, I worked at, I will get to the Polaris stuff, but I worked at Polaris. We would get reports back where it was like, control arm broke, caused me to hit tree, and they'd send the photos of like the vehicle. There's like, it's just full of beer cans in the front rack. And you're like, which one happened first? Yeah. But like, the stuff that people are capable of is amazing. So I don't know if it's just people trying to get a free hand out of like, I'm gonna sue you for all this money, or they just are that stupid, or a combination of both. But customers as a whole, dude.

Well, if you're gonna be that dumb, I just bought some tools from Tecten.

Yeah, yeah.

And not to promote other tool companies.

No, I got some.

But anyway, they were like, yeah, it's guaranteed for life. As long as, you know, when you send in the warranty picture, you don't show it like on a half inch drive with like an eight foot pipe, and you're trying to pull on it. I was like, well, first of all, if I sent you that picture, then I'm the idiot who is doing it. I was like, I'm going to move it onto a quarter inch drive and then go, look, I barely pushed on it and it snapped it off.

Yeah.

And then get a new one.

I mean, like we deal with that at Company 23 also, like we in Big Red Letters on our website, example for some of our sockets or specialty sockets, it says in Big Red Letters, do not use on impact. Because we know like the second you put on impact, it's probably going to break. Like it might live a little bit, but it's not going to. It's not zero out of 10. And the people will send us pictures, and it's like still on the impact. And we're like, dude, did you use on impact? And like half the time, the customers are like, oh, yep. And we're like, you're cool about it. We'll re-warranty it anyway. Like don't do it again, kind of thing. And then we get customers that are like dicks. Like, oh, never. I'm like, it's in the picture. Nope, definitely not. I'm like, all right, well, you're not being cool about this. So no, we're not gonna send you the wrong one. It's part of the fun about working for a small brand, and I'm super tight with my boss, and we kind of make decisions. We're like, all right, this dude's been super cool. He's not a pain in the a**. He's definitely a repeat customer. It's worth it.

What is that, too, right? Are they gonna be a repeat? Because they're not just gonna get one tool, typically. Does that make sense?

Well, adults are as bad as kids, by the way. They're worse. Yeah, right?

They're worse.

It fits on an impact, who cares? And if you haven't put a chrome socket on an impact, then you're lying anyway.

Have you seen the one where they spray paint it black? This guy's like, oh, I didn't buy the impact. He's got like a half inch deep wall. Perfect. But yeah, back to my career. So I spent nine months at Fisher Price, went back to school, then I went to Borg Warner, and I worked there for six months. So like I said, I'm from Ithaca, New York, and literally like a quarter of a mile from where I grew up, my parents' house is Borg Warner Morse Tech, or it was there at the time. I'm not sure if it still is. But they designed and manufactured timing chains, variable cam timing components, so they made phasers, tensioners, and they had like a development lab there that was pretty cool, Skunk Works kind of stuff. So I worked as a quality engineer in the engine timing component building. So we did machining, assembly, manufacturing of cam phasers for mostly Coyote.

Yeah, holy grail.

The big one there at the time. We did a couple like Jeep things, three, was it 3.6 and 4.6 were Jeep engines?

3.6 was the Pentastar.

Pentastar. Yeah. There was a Pentastar and they had like a sister engine. I'm not familiar with the FCA stuff or whoever owned them at the time. We did some of that stuff, a little bit of Subaru stuff, but the majority of the stuff rolling out of that building was Coyote. And that was super cool because it was very different from Fisher Price. So Fisher Price was basically low cost, really high barrier to entry to like a new model because the injection mold tooling was like millions of dollars to like, the Escalade body, for example, was one piece of plastic. So the tool, they call them tools, injection mold that comes out of is half the size of the shop, and it was millions of dollars. So like, they had to be real sure they were gonna sell some if they were gonna tool up for it. But BorgWarner, on the other hand, was like ultra precise, ultra precise machining, like down to microns and many decimal points of accuracy. So I got to be a quality engineer for that. And what that meant was like my data, lots and lots and lots of data. So we talked about last time, but like I spent a lot of my time sitting at a CMM. And if you don't know what a CMM is, a CMM is a coordinate measuring machine. So you know what a surface plate is, right? Like a giant piece of granite.

Yeah.

Okay, surface plate, giant piece of granite on a table. It's calibrated to use, you know, Greg Banish's. I listened to his podcast again the other day, dude. I'm super...

Did you really?

Oh yeah, yeah. I was on the way home from OTL. I popped it up. I was like, oh yeah, another nugget.

Genuinely curious, what's your favorite part of that episode?

Favorite part of the episode?

Um...

My favorite part of the episode, I think is when he talks about speed density and the math behind it. So when he talks about like tuners, like, oh, I made this much, or the like calibrating versus tuning versus the tuning. But yeah, when he talks about speed density, and he's like, like these dudes are like, oh yeah, I put in 27 and I make this. And he's like, well, we're just doing math. We're doing PVs, NRT, and we're solving for N, and that's all we're doing. Like, you can't, you're not gonna make more. Like, I know the math, or I know how pit loops work. And I'm like, oh, I got him. You literally can't argue that. Yeah, it's funny, cause like, I'm reading his book again, too.

Okay.

And I caught a nugget out of that book the other day that I'm like, oh.

That guy does some really cool stuff. I was on the phone with him last week, a week and a half ago, whatever. And like, I mentioned that like, we're gonna have a monster truck guest on. He's like, dude, I was just doing some stuff. I'm like, I'm not sure if I should say this on camera, but I'll tell you what.

Clip it.

Yeah.

You know, you've made it once other people start clipping for you. When does that start happening? Like Rogan, he doesn't do his own clips. But anyways, now I just had figured I'd ask, because like there was just so many little gold nuggets in that episode.

Yeah, I just thought of another one and I forgot what it was already. Oh, the hurricane one that he paused himself on. I was like, I can't talk about that. Yeah. I'm like, oh, good. Oh, s***, what was the other one? Oh, the locked ECU stuff. Fascinating. I'm like, that's so cool. Because he's like, well, people are going to figure out ways to go fast. I'm like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Like the new hotness for Subarus is to just drop a standalone ECU in them.

Yeah.

And they're everywhere. Link, Haltech, like depending on the model and manufacturer, Cyvax, Motek, how much do you want to spend?

That raises a really good question. Do you have a lot of customers in Australia? Cause I'm sure they have a ton of Subaru over there.

Decent amount, yeah. They get all the fun JDM stuff that we didn't get until 2002.

Really?

So we have a really good dealer over there, Pro Speed Racing. We do a lot of business with them. So they ship a lot of stuff.

10% of our audience is Australian. I cannot wait to go there.

You want them to ship a bear over?

A bear?

Yeah, a bearer.

Oh, a bearer.

Throw it in the crate.

They can ship me a 97 type RASTI. Really? Yeah, everybody from Australia is Subaru person is like, oh yeah, dude, now we're keeping those. Side note, my holy grail car, Vin Atra has on YouTube, the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution 5 left hand drive. Yellow, ooh, ooh, yeah, ooh, that one. Left hand drive. I'm not about this right hand drive nonsense. I'll put it up if I have to, but it's funny, because I talked to Kyle Ark and he's like, yeah, right hand drive. I'm like, no way.

Yeah, that doesn't intrigue me either. I'm like, I like the cars, it's cool, but let's move everything over the other side.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, side note, another side note, all of those ECUs that you mentioned, we recommend Haltech, and if you need one, you should definitely hit up our guy, Shawn.

Two by Shawn.

Two by Shawn.

S-H-A-W-N.

Yeah.

Your commercial.

S-H-A-W-N.

Well, it doesn't help that there's like 400 ways to spell Shawn.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dude, it's ridiculous. Like we had, my previous co-host, Shawn, was S-E-A-N. So it would be like Seen.

We know one of all three ways.

Yeah. I am not a tuner yet. Shout out HPA. I'm doing their stuff for tuning still. I'm not done with you.

We're really just hitting all the sponsors.

We're hitting all the sponsors. You can drop that in there. But I'm curious.

So okay, because you do want to do something on your own tuning, are you looking at like stock EC stuff? Haltech, MoTech, not MoTech?

That's yes, yes and no. So I allegedly have found old copies off the record of things from a certain four letter Subaru tuning company that you're not supposed to be able to find anymore to tune the stock ECU through that little stamp, that little handheld thing up in there that rhymes with shmobs. If people look hard enough online, they can find old copies of software from, but you know, old, old ones.

That would work in theory.

But they don't have a lot of new features and stuff like that. But I am a fan of stock ECU for many of the reasons that Greg Banish talked about, right? Like with the HP tuners and the 250 available tables versus $16,000 and all that stuff, right? So in my opinion, and this is a position of ignorance, right? Like I haven't done any start to finish tuning on my own, but I can speak to it as far as like, I'm a potential customer, right? Like I would love to blow up my own car and by that, I mean try to tune it. My first option, preferable option, would be a Cobb access port through the factory ECU, just because I know what I'm gonna get. Like if you have the software, you can plug into it, you know it's gonna work, like all the gauges are gonna work, like it mounts where it needs to, like it's just, it's factory, right? Like there was a time in history where, in my opinion, you never really needed to upgrade the factory ECU to a stand alone on a Subaru, because unless you were full blown racing the car, or you had a 1400 horsepower drag race car, that you needed to do certain things with, like spark cut launch control, instead of fuel cut, which sounds more race car-y, because it goes pop, pop, pop, bang, bang, bang. There was no reason to upgrade ECU, and a lot of people didn't. So people were making 1000, 1200 horsepower factory ECU with an access port, because up until April 28th, 2022, you could just plug in to this thing with the access port, do flex fuel, you could swap the parameters and the rear O2 sensor, plug a wire band in. You could just modulate whatever DTC trouble codes you wanted to turn on and off. Like you had full control over stock ECU, and even this thing, like this from the factory runs a MAF base setup, so Mass Air Flow Sensor. You could click a couple of buttons in the cot and switch it over to speed density and throw an intake temp sensor adapter from your MAF plug into your new intake air temp sensor and Bob's your uncle, you can do whatever you want. Like there was no reason. But then three letter agency shows up and all of a sudden you can't turn off diagnostic trouble codes, which at the end of the day is not the end of the world, but at the same time, like you can't delete your TGVs anymore or your little idle emissions flapper valves above your head in this thing. Well, if you can't do that, those plugs are now populated. Well, they have something in it. And that's where I used to plug my flex fuel sensor, and then it would communicate to the ECU and Cobb did some bee boops in there to know that all that stuff, right? So that's my extremely long answer to say, if I could wave a magic wand, go back to March of 2022, Cobb, easy, right? I think it's the cheapest, back to the cheapness. Today's day and age, Cobb, I mean, is still good, it's still good depending on your build setup that you have and kind of what you're going for, but there's Link, there's Haltech, I think that's basically it for like this car, but other stuff, there's Cyvex, there's MoTech, there's, what else am I forgetting? What other standalones are popular these days? Those are kind of the big ones.

Those are the main names that come to mind.

But so for like this one, there's a chance, or my other, my other this one, because the other one's silver in my garage, there's a chance it'll either see a Link or a Haltech. And if I had to pick, I haven't tuned either one of these, so comment section goes easy on me.

It's a preference thing for a lot of people too, I've heard.

I think it is. Haltech has gotten really popular these days. Really, really popular. People love those things. Tune by Shawn, S-J-J-W-N.

At least somebody loves it.

Is that the one where you're like, how much does your wife love you? Or is that the pipe one?

A factory ECU can get you really far, but if you're trying to get the most out of your car, you have to take your tuning to the next level. Whether you are doing a highly original LS swap or are a glutton for punishment and want to keep your rotary, a Haltech can help you extract top level performance while keeping your car tolerable to drive. If you go to tunebyshawn.com, you can schedule a free consultation to see what is right for you and your build, but you can also go there, save 5% on all Haltech goodies using code Minnoxide and do it all yourself. That's tunebyshawn.com. Let's get you back to the show.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Haltech is good. Like there's nothing against Haltech. Again, I haven't purchased these. I haven't installed them myself, but I would probably go Link.

Okay.

And the reason for that is because the Link ECU, you just take the factory ECU out of this thing. You actually open the case, take the circuit board out, put the Link circuit board in, put the screws back in, and it goes right back in. So there's no jumper harness, and mounts exactly the same. Like it's, if you look at the two, you're like, that's just a circuit board, and that one looks like a nice pretty ECU. But this one, there's no jumper harness. It just bolts in the factory spot. And like, it's kind of one of those things where it's like Ford, Chevy, in my opinion. They, at the end of the day, they're both very powerful. They both do many different things.

But anyway, yeah, we've had Link people on. We've had Haltech people on. So it's like, yeah, it really does come down to like, you know, most guys typically stick to one thing anyway. We've had a lot of MoTeC people on too.

I love telling stories, I guess, because I have a lot of long stories. I have one that links Link, pardon the pun, myself, HPA and Link ECUs back from college. It's kind of funny.

What do you mean?

So when I worked at BorgWarner, my office mate at the time, he went to Clarkson University, which is, you know, the New York version of where we are. It's up by Canada. And he had started and was running the Clean Snowmobile team at Clarkson. So for those who aren't familiar, Clean Snowmobile is a collegiate design competition. So if you're familiar, like with Formula SAE or Baa SAE, those are the two big ones. Clean Snowmobile is the baby brother because there's only so many schools that can compete because it's got to be cold. And, you know, there's just only so much snow and now there's no snow. So if you own a snowmobile.

Yeah, or like 12.

It's just burning money. So anyway, I got the chatting with him and he was telling me about like the Clarkson Snowmobile was a Skadoo Ace 600 and they were running like a piggyback ECU tuner and catalytic converter. And basically what you did was you would take an existing snowmobile, figure out a way to re-engineer some of the systems and see if you can make run cleaner and get better gas mileage and whatever. And I'm like, that's cool. So again, my ADHD is like, dude, hyper-focused. I was like, that's cool. Like, how do you get into that? He's like, oh, do you want to get into it? And I'm like, yeah, sure. He's like, all right, I'll call my buddy at Polaris. We'll ship you a snowmobile. And I'm like, buddy at Polaris. Well, turned out he had been an intern at Polaris like a year or two before I met him at an internship at Board Warner. So I get back to school a couple of months after that and boom, a snowmobile gets delivered and we didn't tell anybody it was coming. And all the professors were like, what the hell was that? We were like, snowmobile, dude, we're starting this snowmobile team thing. And they're like, you got money? We're like, no. You got space? No. You got a club? No. So anyway, just jumped into it, started working on it and no one would give us money until I wrote this Hail Mary email to the president of the college. And I was like, hey man, here's what we're trying to do. He gave us five grand and we're like, oh s***. So long story short, we way, way, way overdid it year one. Like we got this, remember like the FST some wheels at Polaris did. This is probably even too niche for you. But there were a few some wheels like the IQ days that Polaris had a turbocharged twin cylinder four stroke in 750 Weber was the engine. And it was this really kind of complicated thing. And we're like, let's put that in a mountain sled. That's a great idea. So we like, we're fabbing up engine mounts or doing all this stuff. And this is like our senior year. So like we had to do all our senior projects and everything. And we would literally go to the machine shop at like 10 o'clock at night and start working on this thing. And we would usually like call it a night when the sun came up and we're like drinking coffee till 4 a.m. So you hear all these like SAE student design competition, horror stories like at the time, do it so fun. It was awesome. So we'd like wheel a snow wheel in the machine shop every night, work on it, try to make stuff, wheel it back out in the hallway, just sit there all day and spin.

What was the purpose of the competition? It just had to run clean or?

Yeah. So you were like evaluated on many different things. So you would get evaluated on handling, in use emissions and dyno emissions, power. You had to write like a presentation that's like, here's our snowmobile. Here's what we did. Here's why we did it. Here's what it cost. You know, here's our cost justification for doing it. So it was like, basically you'd simulate that you're the manufacturer and you're going to your boss and you're like, Hey, I want to like mass produce this. So you'd have to like give an oral presentation. You would have to do many things. Right. So, of course, my buddies and I, same buddy that got rid of my Power Wheels F150. He too, I think, has very much undiagnosed ADHD. Smartest kid I ever met. Also the dumbest kid I ever met. Great friend of mine to this day. Shout out, John. But he was the kid that wouldn't show up to class, and then would just show up to the final and ace it. And all the professors would be like, you cheated, and you'd be like, I'll do it again. Get the test out. And he would ace it again. Like, that actually happened.

Holy s***.

And just awesome kid. But, now he's a guy, he's 35, he's old as s*** like me. Yeah, he was like, I was like, hey man, do you want to be a part of this? He's like, no, no, no. I'm like, where are you gonna turbo charge it? He's like, I'm in. We're like, okay. So, first year of doing this, we have never done this before. We have no idea what's involved. We have very little experience like building something of this caliber. So what did we decide to do? We took a latest gen chassis with a twin cylinder four stroke. We thought the stock turbo was stupid. So we did the math behind the exhaust gas temperature and figured out that because we were gonna run ethanol that year, we could keep the exhaust temps low enough that we could run a variable geometry turbocharger off of a baby Volkswagen Jetta diesel. So we had a GT15V turbocharger about that big and all the veins in it. So it would change. So we could change, actually like, we had a little stepper motor we built that would change the actual angle on the veins inside of the turbo. It was wicked. It was sweet. So it was little turbo response, bigger turbo flow at high RPM. The turbo, dude, was like this big. It was tiny. It was tiny, tiny. But it was super cool. Super expensive, like shout out to Garrett. They sent us two of them because we ended up drilling the compressor housing in the wrong spot for the shaft speed sensor. But anyway, so back to my original point of the story. At the time, there was a tuning shop in Buffalo, New York called Innovative Tuning. And the guy who ran that, his name was Mike McGinnis. Well, fast forward to today, Mike actually closed up his shop, moved down to Cobb Tuning to be the head tuner there. That's why I asked you if you talked to him when you went down there. Head tuner there for many years, doesn't work there anymore now. He consults. He also is one of the dudes at HPA now. So if you go on HPA, who are we? And scroll down, Mike McGinnis. Yeah. So he's done some of the classes and seminars and he's talked to people on there. Yeah, it's a small world, dude. So anyway, the story goes, the whole reason I'm going back to this and the link ECU thing. So we did like, we were like, oh, we're going to control all this stuff. Like we had an EGR, I had like a Honda Civic that we were going to run. It was all great idea, right? And we needed to stand alone for it. We're like, let's get one of these Vipec things. So we call that Mike, he was a Vipec dealer. We got the Vipec ECU, we wired it all in. We like had it working and then one day it stopped working. So he warrantied it for us and was kind of like, did you guys screw this up kind of thing? And we're like, well, we don't think so. But anyway, Vipec was one of the offshoots of Link, who now they bought it back or brought it back in. So that was like a very early on Link ECU that I got from the dude that now works for HPA myself, which just is like full circle, dude. The car industry is so small. Oh yeah.

Even on a national or global level, it's freaking nuts.

Yeah, so you're like, oh, I went to Cobb. Did you talk to Mike? I still see Mike here. Like I saw him at PRI a couple of years ago. I'm like, what's up, dude? He's like, what are you doing here? Like, get out of my life. Yeah, 10 out of 10, like you should talk to him on the podcast, dude. He's a super smart guy.

I actually, I think I'm gonna bring that up with my next like get together or meeting, whatever, with HPI. I'd like to talk to some of their other folks as well. Like their teachers, professors, I don't know what they're called.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wisdom people.

So is he over there now? Under there? Across there?

No, he's still out of the US, but he does like just consulting stuff for who he feels like, when he feels like, I think. So he still does like some emissions testing for Cobb and takes cars to Santa Cina Garage or whatever, but he does like some consulting for them. He does some stuff for HPA. He'll like, if you have like a big dollar race car, like what's the one out of like the mountains life racing? Oh, YFE. Okay. He does some tuning for them, I think. Like he basically like, he's like the guy. Okay. But yeah, super cool guy. I see him once in a while. It's always fun to catch up with him, but yeah.

That's what in snowmobile stuff's crazy too. Like Enth Moto has like a crazy like methanol one day recently like did. They posted on their-

I used to do a drag race at Hay Day's, right? Oh yeah. It's just stupid. Like look at this redneck stuff. Like, oh, we're gonna rip my snowmobile 100 miles an hour. 200 miles an hour. Yeah, on grass.

Yeah. And that's in a thousand feet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's so stupid, dude.

Yeah. That stuff's next level to me.

That's awesome.

No, my daughter did that this year on ice. Got second place in her class. And then I was in second place on my sled. I put her on it. She bumped me to third and got second on my sled too.

How fast did she go?

On mine, 107 and a thousand feet. Damn. That's a bone stock SRX.

That was in feet.

Yeah.

That's fast, dude. That's fast. So yeah. So back to my story though. So like we did this whole thing, and we had like the night before we're supposed to leave for the competition, like Mike actually came out to our campus and was like trying to help us get this thing running. We had an unfortunate thermal incident with a little too much starting fluid, which turns out is very explosive. Live and learn. But yeah, things got a little charred, and then we ended up not competing that year, but we still loaded that thing up. Drove up to Houghton, Michigan, so Michigan Tech and just displayed it. And we're like, here's what we built. And it's kind of funny because the whole competition, it's less about the results and more about the networking and meeting kids from other schools with similar work experiences and not sleeping. And it's basically like you kind of just build something cool. And then everyone's like, damn. So we showed up with some of that didn't run. And everyone was like, whoa, you guys built this? And we're like, kind of. It doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't work. Yeah, it's basically a SEMA like monster truck. You show up and it's like, oh, cool. It doesn't work. But yeah, if it did, just use your imagination, dude. Which is literally what happened. But then like through networking and like Polaris sends like a team, like all the manufacturers send like their younger engineers to like network. We got a bunch of business cards, like people contributing like emissions testing equipment. And like it was a big deal. So I graduated that.

For them, they get the...

Oh yeah.

Yeah, there's a whole bunch of people might develop some s***. They'd be like, hey, we're going to use that.

Yeah, yeah, that too. I'm sure. But they do a lot of the hiring out of that too. So they're like, oh, young engineer, they'll still like work for nothing for fun. Like, we'll just hire them. So that's what I was. So I had applied online and I was obviously from Western New York. And like, I got a job offer to go work at Polaris as an ATV manufacturing engineer. And all my buddies were like, dude, have you looked at like this? So that was in Rozo, Minnesota. For those who aren't familiar, Rozo is like literally 10 miles from the Canadian border, which is 350 miles north of Minneapolis.

Yeah. And it's still, I don't know how it works, but I think there's like a hole or a portal that like goes to Antarctica because it still is like in Canada or even other places. It's got to be the coldest place on earth.

So the year I moved there, I moved there in 2013, which was the year of the polar vortex.

Yeah.

So when everyone's like, oh, it's cold. I'm like, it's not cold where you are. It's like five below. It's 40 below air temp here.

Yeah.

Like I'm dying. So like that was the year my parents were still in Western York and they're like sending me all these like, my dad's like, he loves to like send me news articles.

Yeah.

And he sent me, I'm going to be like, it's colder in Northern Minnesota than on the surface of Mars or some s***. It's like the summer in Mars and it's winter in Minnesota. I'm like, I can't like open it, dude. I'm freezing. But yeah, so I mean, the first year I was up there, it was kind of like the novelty of it all. Like, oh, it's so cold. Like I'm going to go throw this boiling water in the air. Oh, that's cool. The second year I was up there, I was like, this sucks. So, I mean, it was fun. Like I moved up there and I poured basically everything I had into that job. And like it was, I was young, no more, I was 23, no mortgage, no kids, single, like whatever. I'd worked 12, 13 hours a day. But yeah, so to jump back to it, like to jump back to, welcome back to the episode.

I'm so glad you're keeping yourself on track because I can't anymore. I'm just along for the ride, bro.

The cool thing though about working in Rozo was there were like some old salty dogs up there that were like, had been at Polaris since like the quote good old days. So I kind of just lashed onto them and I was like, I just want to like listen to you talk. So I had the opportunity to like listen to these dudes that would talk about designing the Sportsoon 500 and everything that they went through to do it, or like the very first IQR race sled and how a gentleman named Rick Bates like had a string board in his garage and he would like move the strings to figure out the motion ratios of the rear track, which then a lot of other companies took inspiration from moving forward and like all these crazy stories that I just nerd out on. I'm like, that's so cool, dude. All this stuff that people think is like space age technology is just one amazing brain doing something to figure out how it works. So like there was a guy named Jeff Bennett, who is not around anymore, you know, rest in peace or whatever you're supposed to say, but he refused to learn how to do CAD. He thought it was stupid. The kid was for the kids. Like he'd make kids do it, whatever, but he would use PowerPoint and he would like overlay pictures of vehicles and like pick up the suspension and hard points on PowerPoint and then hide things. And like, it was funny because it taught me that like, it doesn't matter what you're good at or what you're good at using. It's just another hammer, like Greg said. It's just another tool. So like my 3D printer that I use over there was like 200 bucks, but I figured out a way to make it work and do what I need to do. And I know what it prints slightly big, slightly small. So I can use that hammer to do stuff that it absolutely should not be able to do, but it does it and it works. So at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. It's when all these kids come out of school and they're like, I know Ancest. I know all these like super fancy programs that make pretty pictures that can show you flow and can show you FEA or element analysis of where something's loaded and bending. I'm like, so what dude?

Then you get someone like Adrian Newey that also uses a f****** whiteboard still.

That guy, that's something. Like, yeah. Like we talked about it last time, like reading his book.

Literally the daddy of aerodynamics.

And how he like figured out all the ground effect stuff on the dyno that one time and how the airflow on the dyno wasn't relating to the real world and how he changed it. I'm like, that's cool.

Yeah. Does he have cat? I think he barely, that's like the junior engineers f*** around or something.

I'm like, that is fricking cool.

Yeah.

Yeah. The amount of stuff that like, you hear all the stories behind or like how stuff came to be. I'm like, that is so cool. So when you do the podcast with like Sam and Greg, for example, I'm like, that's so cool, dude. Like they're talking about how they did all this testing and flow and how they learned this. And I'm like, oh, that's how that works. I think we talked about that last time, too. Like I was a horrible book student. Like if you just put numbers and letters in front of me, like we talked about, the one I always think of is thermodynamics. Horrible at thermo. Like heat transfer, the way things like a pipe radiates heat. There's all this math behind it. You can figure it out. I didn't give a s*** about it. I'm like, that's stupid. I don't like whatever. I'll do just enough to make it through this class, so like I can go do something else. The class I was taking was 10 weeks long. And then like week eight, my professor got to engines. Cause engines are completely thermodynamic based and the way the heat transfer works and the energy. And he got to that and I was like, holy s***, dude. Why don't you just start with this? I'm like, this is awesome. Like the math behind it, the differential equations, like I got a big old D for done when I took differential equations. Still couldn't explain it to anybody these days, but I passed, barely. But then they got the differential equation based thermo and like how it relates to an engine. And I'm like, oh, I get it now. I got an A in the class. I should not have, but I did. But I've always been the guy where it's like, if I can relate it to something. So like tuning, for example, I can go through my data logs and be like, okay, this line's going that way, this line's going that way. I know why it's to an XYZ. Like I understand this. That's why I'm like, how hard could it be? I can be a tuner, just punch in a bunch of numbers until it goes boom. Well, it's like that for a short too. Punch in a bunch of numbers. Oh, sorry.

Well, it's funny how many of the tuners that we've had on that have started that way. Like let's keep adding more until it went pop.

More boost.

Well, the transmission guy we had on after slash before you. Yeah, I texted him like, oh, by the way, your episode moved up a week, by the way. But like he was talking about is like, just start working on transmissions. Like all you have to do is it, you know, fluid goes from here to here, here to here and that's it. And then he's like, well, it's actually not that easy, but it is that easy.

Automatically, I haven't listened to the episode yet. Automatic transmissions?

Yeah.

That's black magic in there, dude.

Yeah, I agree.

I don't know. You'll like that one because he's, again, kind of like this episode and then any of the other episodes like Banish or Sam.

Yeah.

I just let that dude run wild.

Yeah.

He's like, I know that the people who will benefit the most from that knowledge, they're tuned in, they're listening. Whereas for me, it's like, all right, this is rocket science and press that button, put quarter in, you know?

The automatic transmissions or something.

Yeah. You look at the main part of it, right? I even kind of understand how a torque converter works and the clutches and things in there aren't much different than a manual transmission and then you show me the valve body. And I go, no, f******, I'm out. That's it.

You're like, dude, I can't do this maze, man.

Yeah, I know.

I don't know, dude.

My favorite part from that episode was you saying, yeah, I won't even open it up. I'll just go buy a junk transmission, just swap it in.

I've done that several times before I blew a transmission out. I called the junker, hey, have one ready. I'm on my way.

Autos are nuts, dude.

Yeah.

But yeah, so like, to go back to your point about like the OE stuff though, like, oh, we're talking about tuning. Yeah, change it, right? I absolutely like, I probably rewound it 10 times when Greg was talking about like the OE level of tuning, which is that is rocket science, do like the million dollar dino cells and being able to pump different air temps in to map the whole thing. And like actually model everything that's going on and know what's going on every cell. And then to do it for 600,000 F-150s a year. That s*** is wild, because that has a warranty on it. Bob Jones down tuning the road on HP tuners, he don't give a s*** if it blows up. Whatever, I'm not liable.

Well, that's also one of the reasons why sometimes there's a little bit left on the table, right? Like you could go tune your EcoBoost out there and grab another 100, 150 out of it, very easy. And it's probably still live along, right? But that's not, you can't do that across all the masses, you know?

And one thing that has resonated with me recently is there's always a reason to the rhyme. So like, I've been reading some articles about how like, say I have, you know, this car in Wisconsin and I go into Colorado, like the factory ECU is actually going to pull back boost from this thing. Like it's going to either keep it the same level or decrease it. And everyone's like, what, Subaru doesn't know anything because when you go up in altitude, you're supposed to go up in boost to maintain your power. And Subaru's a bunch of idiots. They don't know anything about anything. But then you start studying turbos and learning why things are the way they are. And then you learn that, oh, like if I am making 16 pounds at sea level, my turbo shaft speed is X. If I go up the mountain, my turbo shaft speed is going to go up to try to maintain that. Now, if I try to make more boost to make more power, my shaft speed is going to go through the roof. Well, if my shaft speed goes through the roof, my turbo might explode. I mean, hopefully not, but it can go fast enough to where it just annihilates itself. And you don't want that to happen. You're walking. Like, turbo shaft speed is, that's some nerdy s***. Like, 100,000 RPMs out of a little doohickey that's blowing air. That's wicked.

That's amazing that they don't blow up every day. Yeah, right?

Yeah, like that's cool. But yeah, so the OE level of stuff is wild. So we talked about this last time too, but like one of my favorite tests to watch at board.

This is our first time ever talking about it.

Yeah, it's the first time. So one story I've like to tell is at board Warner, like the OE level of we're going to try that to see what it does, just so we know what it does. So like if somebody does it, we know it's okay. So the dino cells like Greg was talking about, they had a thermo, a thermo? I don't know how to say it. They could control the temperature in it, right?

Yeah, it's a condyle.

Yeah, they could control the.

Infinite variables of temperatures, yeah.

Everything. Yeah, like you said. So they would freeze an engine down to 40 below overnight. So you talk to Greg about like the assisted start and freezing aid and all that stuff, right? Well, they would do that to an engine on an engine dino in a room and then let it sit overnight at 40 degrees below zero, come in in the morning, fire it up, put the throttle to the rugs. Like cold, full load, full throttle, full everything. And their goal was to see if the engine timing components would make any NVH or noise, vibration, harshness. So in a nutshell, it couldn't go clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. Like my EcoBoost probably will in 10 or 15,000 more miles. Yeah. Yeah. So like all this stuff that people are like, you should never do that. Well, they always have done it and they know what it does. And they know they've done it for a reason. They know that like if some redneck just buys their truck in Northern Minnesota and mats it every morning, like it's, it's going to make it through the warranty.

Or my brother.

So what does your brother do?

Dude. So he'll be in third gear by the end of our very short driveway, dude. Like he just would turn it on, just pin it. He's like, I got a warranty. I don't care.

Dude, let her eat, man.

That's why he has a perpetual check engine.

No way.

Yeah. Dude, that's such a, that's such an internet argument. Like, do I let my truck warm up or not? Or da da da. What do I do? You don't need to let it warm up. You gotta let it warm up for an hour. I'm like, it's, it's fun comments to read. Like that Dave's Auto Center place out in Idaho has always started a bunch of Instagram fights over it. I'm of the opinion that like, it's always somewhere in the middle. Like, I'm not gonna start it up and drive it. Like, I don't know if you've ever tried to pour oil at 20 below, it's five weight. Dude, it's not going anywhere.

Temperature is a big thing too. Okay, so, okay. Let's say it's a day like today, like your car's been staying for like, let's say, let's call it overnight.

Yeah.

You wake up at 60, 70 degrees. Do you just let it do a couple revolutions? Like what's your, where do you stand on it?

I'll jump in and start it, and I'll probably let it run 15, 20 seconds. You know, I adjust my seat or whatever, put my coffee in the cup holder, and then I'll take it easy.

Or in my case, I take it easy out the gate.

I don't necessarily sit there and wait, but I'll...

I'm not sitting there and waiting. I will remote start it when it's 20 below zero. Hey, so I don't freeze to death.

Oh, it must be nice to have remote start.

You should get a brand new car. Oh, wait.

It is, dude. Yeah. Or my wife has the ultimate life hack. She parks in our heated garage.

Ooh, I will say that's nice to have now.

My wife used to do that.

I don't because my other Subaru is in there, which doesn't work.

Is that when her remote started? Yeah. My wife did do that, and then she got an excursion, and then we stopped parking in the garage because it didn't fit. And now she's just been permanently kicked out of there.

Nice, nice. Yeah, so in the winter, I'll start it up partly so the oil warms up a little bit, partly so I don't freeze. But on a day like today, I'll start it up, give it 15, 20 seconds, but I'm not gonna mat it going down the road in half a mile. Like I'm not gonna, I'll drive it appropriately, I guess you could say.

Right. Like I think that's a fair assessment.

I love, I love data, right? There's all these myths and urban legends and b******* that people are like, you gotta break your engine in hard. You gotta break your engine in over 10,000 miles. This water pump's better than that water pump. I only run 1540, I only run 530. I let it warm up, I love that stuff.

Yeah.

Because no one's proven any of it.

Right.

If anybody out there watching this, I'm looking at you, has data, data behind engine break-in, I'm all for it. Don't be like, my brother's cousin's ex's sister drove his, I don't know, give me a car. F-150 hard the first 100 miles, it doesn't burn a drop of oil. I don't care. That's one, that's one. Did he change it every 6,500 miles? Did he change it every 1,000 miles? And there's some dude that's like, I broke my Subaru in easy for 5,000 miles. Like, dude, 5,000 miles? Or like, let's back the bus up, an actual break-in use case. A lot of aftermarket engines that go into Subaru say to break them in for 1,000 miles. 1,000 miles.

That's wild.

Some people don't keep their cars that long.

It's wild, because you start doing the math, you're like, okay, like, let's, what's your average speed driving a car, like over the course of your car? 50 miles an hour?

Let's pretend it's 55, yeah, 50, sure.

That's 20 hours of driving at 50 miles an hour. Check my math. Yeah, 510, yeah.

Mark broke his in on our rally. You remember that? He got a brand new GT 500, took it on a cross-country rally with us.

Yeah.

He was done by breaking miles by the end of South Dakota. Yeah.

But like, say you drive 50 miles an hour average, some is 80, some is 30, some is 10, whatever. That's 20 hours of runtime. What's changing in the 19th hour that didn't change in the first 30 minutes?

Oh, I see what you're saying.

Like, that's where the data comes in. So someone would have to break it in different intervals, take it apart, do a surface profilometry, or measure the surface finish of it, measure the dimensions of pistons or whatever.

We could think of a guy that doesn't know how to use one. That's a call back. I'll tell you off camera.

But like dirt bikes, for example, you put a forged piston in a dirt bike, you're going to break it in for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour. That is a way harsher life, right? Like, obviously, the engine, like everything's different. But like, this engine, the factory engine in this when 160,000 miles for Broker Ringland, you know, typical Subaru. But what geometrically changed or surface finish changed, or like parts made it up in the first 100 miles that didn't change again for 159,000 miles?

So are you basically just saying like, just make it like a hundred mile break-in?

Well, they say you have to see the rings, right?

Do they?

Well, that's why I've always heard. Right.

But so, yes, cylinder pressure seats rings, because it forces the rings out, right? Is what people tell you.

Yeah, but does that really take a thousand miles to do?

Never seen data. So like the other one is Subaru's people are like, you got to downshift and like put under a lot of vacuum, because that pulls the rings out.

That's why I heard of a vacuum.

We're all pulling the rings out here. Like, what's wearing in a thousand miles that's not wearing for 99,000 more? Like, it's already running on a film of oil. Like, what are we actually doing in engine braking? No, I've never seen data. I've looked for it. Someone find me data. Someone prove me wrong.

You're still doing brake in oil though and removing that after so many miles or whatever?

Yeah. So I mean, yes, that's not my argument. Like I think you should change the oil just because, you know, it's probably a good idea.

Well, I like to do that first one real early just so I can be like, does it look like glitter or not?

Did I tighten everything?

Yeah.

Well, when I put the new short block on this thing, got the heads rebuilt, did all that stuff like, I don't care what it is, how will you clean it? There's some remnant of machining in there probably. So that between that and the like, there's a ton of silicone that you use to seal up oil pans and cam cap, blah, blah, blah.

Sounds like Ford. He has like a whole cocking gun.

So like there's always remnant of that that break off or whatever. And like, yes, you change the oil, get all that stuff out, like the contaminants or whatever. But okay. I put like the s******** 530 I could get in this, like conventional O'Reilly's. Started it up, idled it, made sure there were no leaks. It ran for like 15 minutes idling, drain it, put a zero one in it, ran that for like 200 miles, drain it, put a zero one in it. That's, yeah, I don't know, it's got like 7, 800 miles on the new engine now, and runs like a top.

That's how Dan Shonek had me break in an engine too. He said get the cheapest oil you can, the conventional s***, and then I put like so many ounces of Marvel mystery oil.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I had that in there too.

Yeah, like I'm for that. I mean, I don't, do I have any proof that it does anything? No way, dude. It's just, it sounds good in my head. Yeah. If anybody has any proof to anything I'm saying, please send it, I'll give you my email. Send it over, dude.

Source, trust me, bro.

Dude, that's okay. So back to my venting, that's a big thing in the Subaru industry, probably as a whole. Like just trust me, bro, it's fine. Like I know. So like water pumps, for example, you can clip this clip. It's probably gonna get billions of views because it's like a big like, no, screw you, screw you. Water pump, for example. Subaru up to like 2002, the water pump had a cast impeller on the back. So like the actual little, it's an impeller, but it looks like a little propeller, like on the back of like a wheel boat thing, like in still water. This is my impression. It goes down the road. They changed from a cast one to a stamped steel formed one. Ask any Subi bro. Like the cast one cavitates less. Okay. Do you know what cavitate means? It's fine. I read it on blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I've never had like, they're like, you have to run the cast one. I'm like, why? Like it just, it's better. It's a better design. I'm like, is it? So why did Subaru change? Oh, it's cheaper. Probably. Probably. But they're not going to change it unless they went through all this testing. We just talked about power wheels testing. What do you think the OE does for a water pump? If that's not right, that's a big dollars. That's about to get jacked up because it was across all their product lines at the time. You think they just changed it and didn't do any testing or that it was good or whatever? Don't get me wrong. If you're spinning your engine at 12,000 RPM, maybe. I don't have data behind that either. But you're not because from the factory, it's only revs 6750. So, well, just trust me, bro. Trust me. It's better.

It's better.

You take your car to Target every day, dude. I don't give a s*** about what water pump you use. I've run the stamped one in many different... I've never had a problem, never noticed a difference. Like real see the pants, dyno, butt dyno, whatever.

Well, what I don't like about cast stuff is it usually is more brittle.

Yeah.

So I don't know if it comes apart more often or not or...

Got me.

I don't know about that OE testing sometimes, man. I'm just saying there's been a lot of different dealers that I've talked to that have a lot of blown hurricane motors.

So the one thing that is interesting about that's a good point is so, for example, like the Ford one-liter EcoBoost oil pump belt, everybody s**** on that belt. Like that's a great idea. Like, what do you mean? I'm like, there is always s*** at the OE level that doesn't work because of corporate, if that makes sense. So I'm sure when someone designed that belt, and I know a couple of people that work at Ford, but this isn't from them or anything, but when they designed that belt, they probably designed it for an oil change interval of 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 miles, right? So they design it, they test it, everything's hunky-dory because there are rubbers and polymers and all kinds of stuff that will live in oil happily all day long. But if you look at YouTube comments, like what kind of idiot engineer put rubber into oil?

Well, you always see those oil jugs at O'Reilly's, right? They start to deteriorate and they leak all over the place, right? The plastic bottles.

What do you think oil seals are made out of?

Yeah.

Come on, man. Really, oh god, an idiot. I'm like, okay, here's the problem. They design it one way for a certain oil change interval. They sign off on it, everything's hunky-dory. Well, they pass the buck, right? They go to the next person. The next person says, hey, like, to keep the EPA happy, we got to keep our oil change interval 10,000 miles in the manual. Because that is what the manual, I think, says for my EcoBoost. 10,000 mile oil change.

That's a Minos too, by the way.

That's a really bad idea in EcoBoost.

It's wild, right? And then you get the customer that doesn't read the manual, because no customer reads the manual, like I read the manual, but no other customer reads the manual besides me. They go by the oil change indicator light on their dash, which in my truck, if you follow that, is like plus or minus a few hundred miles from 10,000 miles.

Really?

That was my charger too, I actually don't know what I think about.

Yep. So you get a bunch of customers that are like, this is great. I don't have to change my oil till 10,000 miles. And maybe that works just fine until the end of the warranty period, because that's really what they care about. Because I've been told that the emissions from the vehicle is looked at from a global perspective. So like oil change interval gets factored into the vehicle's emissions, right? Because you got waste oil, you got to pour down your drain, at least, allegedly. Yeah. But the engineers go and like, man, like that's not cool. They think, well, we got to do it. Too late, launched. Now you got oil pump belts that like to stay there and go poof. And then no oil pump, no oil, no oil, no run. So, I mean, that happens in corporate, dude. Like it happens. Because I'm sure some engineer is sitting in his cubicle right now feeling extremely validated that I'm telling this side of the story.

But like, he's like, I knew it.

But that s*** happens.

Well, same, like even like when I went to go, it's like a two-free oil changes with this, right? I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna take them up on that. They're like, yeah, you can do your second one, but it can't be any sooner than 10,000 miles. So I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

I'm sure.

Well, it's amazing how much, from even just talking to some of the engineers we know from the OEs, how much some departments, like they've never f****** see each other. They never talk to each other. There's never an email exchange. Like they just, like you have, you're the guy who works on the air conditioning units. That's all you do day in and day out. You don't even know what the rest of the car is made of. It's crazy how they keep so much of that kind of segregated.

And they might work in a different part of the country, different part of the world, different building. You've never talked to them. You email them, like whatever. There's some times where a project's done and you're like, all right, I'm done as an engineer. Away it goes and then it might not launch for 12, 18 months. And after that, the marketing has gotten changed behind it. They changed operating parameters because if somebody did XYZ and punched himself in the arm with it, it would kill him or whatever. And you're like, well, yeah. Corporate is wild. It's crazy.

Did you come across that a lot in your internships or not really?

Not really, but I really wasn't that important as an intern. So being an intern was kind of like, here's your job, go do it. They would kind of handhold you a little bit of like, like you didn't, sounds bad. You didn't really get to think. It was task driven. So you were basically like helping out a full-time engineer, kind of take you under their wing and be like, hey, do XYZ and you'd be like, okay, cool. We kind of follow them along. You didn't really get to like lead a project or make a big decision or whatever. And honestly, like even being at a company for nine months, it sounds like a decent chunk of time, but it's not that long in the grand scheme of projects. So and I can speak to the corporate thing because like, I worked at Polaris for a couple of years, got sick, a small town, Minnesota, ended up working at 3M in the auto body collision, repair division for almost 10 years. So you're talking about big corporation, woof, that's a big one. Yeah, it is. When I was there, this was before the whole medical thing split off and drug delivery systems got split off. It was like 80 to 90,000 people globally. And like they did this thing where they want to do global structure and global everything. So like for a couple of years, my boss was in England, lived in England. So like the time change to do like my monthly like, hey man, I was a go on meeting was really tough. But yeah, so I mean, it was cool though, because like you talk, we talk about like the OE level of things, like everything 3M does to their kudos to them is from an extremely science based level. So the way I like to talk about it is like Polaris is a very much marketing driven company. So if they marketing came to you and said, hey man, like not me, I was in powertrain, but like they go to powertrain and be like, hey, in two years, we need Razor 1000 to make over 105 horsepower. You got your task for the next two years, make it happen. Or like, we need to put turbo on Razor, because that happened when I was there. And here's your budget, and here's your constraints, and here's all your stuff. So for an engineer, it's like very like, all right, here's what we got to do. 3M was the complete opposite. So 3M was very science based, very like technologically driven, where they were like, oh, you're a development engineer, like here's a budget, go invent something that we can sell. So like command strips, for example, is the one everybody kind of thinks of, like.

I think Post-it notes.

Post-it notes.

Yeah.

I got to meet and hang out with the dude that invented them.

No way. Art Fry. Really?

My dude, he's so cool. Like cool, I have so many stories off camera. Dude was 90 something years old when I talked to him. So Art Fry was one of the coolest dudes I ever talked to because he got like, back to the corporate management structure, right? So this was a long time ago. He like, I think it was an accident. A lot of things at 3M are accidents that they just figure out a way to apply to things. He like came up with the adhesive, didn't know what to do with it. Like the adhesive that can peel off and leaves no remnants. And like, he came up with the idea for it, pitched his boss, boss said this is stupid, no one will ever want it. Now mind you, this is now like a billion dollar part of your business, right? No one's gonna want it, it's just stupid. And Art like brought it back to him like multiple times. And dude was like, if you tell me this one more time, like I'm gonna fire you. And Art was like, whatever dude. Went home, built a machine in his basement to manufacture Post-it notes, like in Oakdale. And like built the machine in his basement, started manufacturing them, and like showing them to people at 3M. This is why this boss is permission. People love them. They're like, this is great. Like blah, blah, blah. Of course, this boss probably tried to take all the credit for it. But people loved it. And then fun fact, the machine was so big, they wanted to move it to 3M center. They couldn't get out of his basement. So they like bust his basement out to like get it out.

Oh really? So they took his actual, he even built another one.

No, they took his actual machine. And like the cool thing I posted notes that I nerd out on all the time is like the formulation to make that adhesive is not patented.

Oh really?

There's a difference between patents and trade secrets. So a patent, you get, call it, I mean, the average patent, you get 20 years of protection on, right? So if I make this car and I'm like, I don't want anyone else to be able to sell this car, I can patent it. And, you know, there's two different kinds of patents, design and utility. Patent it one way or the other. No, I will get 20 years of protection and, you know, exclusivity of selling this in the US in exchange for teaching everyone else how to do it. That's the patent transfer, right? So if, like, for example, you can look up a utility patent that might teach you how to do something, it will, in great detail, tell you exactly how to do it. The person who did that gets 20 years of protection, but at the end of that, everyone can do it.

Oh, or in this case, Viagra and Bluetooth 20 years later. That's why you have all these different, like, straight to your door companies now.

Yeah, yeah.

The new age is here, boys.

So they just figure nobody else is going to figure this out. Who gives a s***? We're not going to patent it because we don't want to get the secret out.

Yep. It's still to this day doesn't have a patent on it. It's the trade secret. No one is there. There are companies that have tried and they're, you go buy them, put them back to back. You're like, this is not as good. No, but I remember when I worked there, there was like five or six people, I think I was told that like knew what it was. And they're like sworn to secrecy and blood, like will come after you if you say anything, like very select few. I'm like, that's so cool.

It's just vinegar and water.

It's like something really dumb.

Like that kind of stuff, dude, I get so excited about hearing all the stories. I'm like, that's so cool.

Yeah, that group is sticky. They stick together.

They work. They work nice. They don't leave residue. Like, and then, yeah, it's crazy. He is a super cool dude. But he was very much like engineering, innovation, technical leadership kind of guy, like make the thing, make it cool, and it'll sell. It was basically in a nutshell what he told everybody in my department. But super cool moment to like be able to...

Was he still working there at that time? Or you're just coming in to be like, hey, or...

No, he's wild though. I think he was 92. So it was probably two years ago. It's probably 93, 94 now. And like, he just has this engineering mind that can't rest. So he would, like, he started up like two more companies after he retired, and like, he just, he retired and then just kept working because he just loves what he does. So he just wants the mental challenge of trying to figure out and solve a problem and just keeps doing it. So he contracts for a couple of companies. He comes and speaks at 3M once in a while.

And that's the last thing you were doing before you split off to Company 23, right?

Yeah, so to get home, we went on a tangent and a half, but to get back to it. So corporate America, to me, in my opinion, not for me. So I could speak to it extremely harshly, but I won't clip that part. It just wasn't for me because the fact of the matter was like as an engineer there, like you've talked to other people who worked for big OEs, right? Like Greg, I'm just going to keep him fricking. I might send him my book, I haven't signed it. But like you graduate school and you get a job at corporation or whatever and you end up working on a mirror cover or like one tiny little thing for months and months and months. And you might spend months on a certain design aspect of, so I was working on automotive repair equipment, spray guns, paint cups, things like that. So when I say, in God we trust, all others bring data. I would literally spend months putting together presentations of graphs and charts and X versus Y and this one's better because all these parameters or whatever. And some senior level engineer would tell me I'm wrong. Like I'm not the one telling you this, man. Like this isn't the Subaru water pump. Number, number, number higher than number, number better than number. Caveman got it. We got this. And he just said, no, you can't do that. Like, what? Well, this person may or may not have actually ever like gone through the testing or used the product or painted a car or whatever and just tells you you're wrong because he just feels like it on that day. I was so over that pretty quickly. So like the corporate hurdles were really challenging for me. Don't get me wrong, like corporate has its ups and downs. Like some of the ups, like the budgets there are ridiculous. Like the equipment you get to play with and the toys and the customers. And like I got to go to SEMA. I got to do lots of fun things working at 3M. I'm like, don't get me wrong. It's not all bad. But the like you talked about, like someone you may have never met is making a decision about a project that you're working on. I'm like, well, has blah, blah, blah ever like been in a body shop? No, but they know best.

Do they though?

Because like I just had five painters ask me for this. And now that person is saying, no, like, can I just bring them to the body shop and they can tell them instead? No, no, because you can't do this because they're full of meetings all day. I'm like, this is the more important. But anyway, I digress. But yeah, I had a lot of really good experiences. I met a lot of good friends and like how overall 3M was fine. The big corporate aspect of it got old though. And so, long story short, I had started and I had Subras at the time. I had this car at the time back in like early 2021. And I was working on it one day. I was putting my oil pump on. I went to put my oil pump on and I knocked the spring out of the front main seal. So I had to drive all the way back South St. Paul, get a new front main seal, come back. I was like, this is stupid. Why isn't there a tool where I can put the oil pump on and then put the seal in? That'd be cool if someone would do that. So Company 23 was around at that time. I had purchased a bunch of their stuff. I was already a customer. I shot them an email on the contact form on the website. I had designed it up. I had my own computer, own software, everything. Designed it up, 3D printed it, made it work. I'm like, this is cool. I wonder if I could sell this. Email Company 23, hey man, you guys want to buy some designs? I made a tool. And they're like, do you want to just consult for us? Nights and weekends, and we'll cut your royalty check on the stuff that you do. And it was a great deal. I'm like, yep. So I started doing that. And at the time, no mortgage, no kid. Wasn't married at the time. So every night, dude, I would just hop on my computer after I got home, and I would make s***. I'd make a lot of s***. So we did a lot of stuff that first couple years between a lot of tools to sell really well, seal installers, timing kits, engine stand. That was my outlet, and it was great. So I was a very valuable employee to both companies at the time, because I would work my day job at 3M, and I did my job. There was a couple of years where I did the thing where I was like, I'm going to be CEO. I'm going to crush this. I'm going to be the best engineer at 3M ever.

We were there for 10 years.

We were there for 10 years. So it was 2017. And we had this, it's a long story, this injection molding project. And they needed somebody to work on it. And there was a contractual obligation to another company. And I jumped in and saved the day, learned how to do things, built a bunch of stuff that was way out of my wheelhouse. But same thing, just learned it as I went. And was like, I'm going to destroy myself for this. I was working seven days a week, 14-hour days. I'm like, this is great. I'm going to be rich. I'm going to get a raise. I'm going to get promoted. All those things happened. I got a raise, got promoted, did everything. And at the end of it, I was like, that was really worth it, dude. Kind of like a couple extra hundred bucks a month. I thought I was going to be driving an Lamborghini. I thought I was going to be Ryan Wheeler.

No, I'm just kidding.

But yeah, and I was like, this is dumb, dude. I'm going to destroy myself and make not that much more money. It's not going to change my life. I'm not rolling into Porsche. I'm like, input versus output. Not worth it. So then I started working for Company 23 and my whole engineering education and career. I had been pretty, what's that called, when you're used to the jail and then you get out, and then institutionalized to nine to five. You will get nine to five and then you will die nine to five, and you will save your 401k every month, and then you retire, and then you don't have anything to do. So I started working for Company 23 and I was like, it was such a small company. I was working with my same boss now, Chad, and I'd send him a design. That looks good. Make it. I'm like, whoa, who else we got to get approval from? I said, make it, dude. I mean, are you sure? But no one's checked this. I haven't checked it. I'm like, I checked it. I know it works, but what about, should we get 10 of these prototypes and make sure they work? He's like, are they gonna be different? No. I'm like, wow, just order them. I'm like, oh, okay. So I had small company experience of let's do the thing, and then I had big company experience of make sure you're covering all your bases, and I was merging the two at the time. And yeah, it turned in like, design the thing, make the thing work, make the thing, sell the thing, and I will never forget my first royalty check showed up. I'm like, oh, I got extra money. It was $24. I'm like, this is sick, because we had like launched a product like a few days before the end of February in 2022, sold a few of them. I got 24 bucks, and I'm like, oh, you're gonna like pay me for what I do. I'm like, that's sick, dude. So like, 3M.

This is a good way of putting it.

At the end of the day, it's kind of what you do, right? More podcasts, more viewers, more listens, more money, right? It's kind of that simple. So like, there's a lot of people in corporate America, and I'm painting with a very broad brush, which I was told not to, but it works. They don't do s***. They just show up to work every day, sit in a couple meetings, they would call them leeches, and they would just leech off everybody else's work, and then they'd collect their six-figure paycheck and go home. They wouldn't do s***. People knew they didn't do s***. So you'd be sitting in a meeting where two or three of us had done all the work, and there's like 15 people in this meeting, and you're like, who are you people? But they would show up, and they'd hitch their wagon to the cart, so to speak. But that turned into my nights and weekends gig of working for Company 23 of like, oh, I make this thing, we make the thing, we sell the thing, I get more money. This is great. It's like, I loved it. Right away, I'm like, this is engineering. Because like, I started doing the social media, I started interacting with people, you know, nights and weekends, I'd answer messages of people who had questions about stuff. I'm like, I know this stuff, I love Subaru. I would be doing this anyway. Like, this is fun. This is what I like to do. So over the course of the years, like, it ended up being, what, two and a half years of working nights and weekends for them before we decided to make the jump to full time. And like, the business built up, and the business grew, and like, it kind of got time, where it was like, let's just do this. Like, let's go all in.

Did they approach you, or you guys kind of already talked about it?

I had wanted to do this since day one, dude.

Okay.

I was like, full time? Full time? Full time. It was kind of the thing where they were like, yeah, I mean, we'd love to if it made sense. Like, yeah, dude, totally.

At what point did it make sense for them to bring you on full time?

The business had grown to a point where like, financially, it was viable. So, I mean-

Through some of the products that you designed as well?

Yeah, that was part of it. I mean, engineers aren't really cheap. I mean, I don't make a billion dollars a year, but like for a small business, like it's a tough pill, right? So again, with the analytical or the analysis backing of it, it was like, okay, like, here's the product roadmap. We do a budget every year. It's like, okay, here's what we think we can make. Here's the profit on it. Here's when we launch it. Here's the percentage of the year we think we can- Like, it's minutia. So then it comes back to me, like, I gotta hit these timelines. I gotta hit this. So, like, it made business sense, and it wasn't, like, a huge reach. So, but anyway, I've put a ton of pressure on myself, and I'm like, I gotta-

We gotta make it worth it for them, dude. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, so when I was leaving 3M, everyone's like, where are you going? I'm like, Company 23. And they're like, what? Like, we make Subaru tools. They're like, really? I'm like, yup, it's way better than here because I make a thing, we sell the thing. Like, I get sort of back to the bus up again, just do a comparison thing. At 3M, I had done three official roles. I had done product engineering, I had done product development engineering, and I had done application engineering, all for collision repair stuff. So product engineering is like a thing that we made, analyzing the quality of it, analyzing the performance of it, making sure that the stuff we're selling is what it's doing, what it's supposed to do. Product development is like skunk works. We're gonna make this new cool thing because we think it'll work, we think it'll sell. Straight up, you could do nothing for a couple years to make money for 3M, but it's necessary to create the command strips, the post-it notes, the PPS cups, all that stuff. The application engineering is like the tech support guy. I'd be in body shops going, hey man, we've got this new thing, here's how you use it, here's all the stuff. So between all that, the manufacturing engineering experience I had at Polaris, the quality engineering experience I had at Board Warner, the experience I had from Fisher Price, I have this big gamut of experience now, and that all comes together for Company 23 of analyzing what customer's gonna do what, what they care about, how they're gonna use it, how much they're willing to pay for it. And then launch, I do the social media of like, we launched this thing, here's the verbiage of how we launch it, here's the pricing, here's the communication of it. And then like, you know, I filmed a, I mean, it's pretty bad, I think, but I filmed a social media YouTube video of like, we launched this tool, da da da da da. There'll be more of that coming soon. But yeah, so like to see all the aspects of the business and then small business, I get to see it all. Like, idea, make the thing, test the thing, sell the thing, look at the numbers of how many we sell. That's cool. Like, that's super cool to me. So, it's super fun, it's super stressful, because it's super stressful because it's self-imposed on me, by me, where I'm like, I need to get this done. I gotta like prove to them that I was the right choice. I gotta like perform, yada yada yada. So I'm my own worst enemy in that aspect. But especially now, because I got a wife, a kid, a mortgage, a fence, no dog.

Yeah, remember all that stuff you were talking about earlier? I didn't do this or this.

It's wild. So like to go from the, it doesn't matter what I do every day. Like I will have a corporate paycheck that's just gonna show up for the most part until they lay everyone off, to the I have to perform. And like part of my employment is performance based in terms of compensation. And at the time, like formula was expensive, dude. Like that stuff's really expensive. And diapers, and like he was growing. And like, like, oh, s***. Like he's two, almost two and a half. I mean, he's being college sued.

When you were at 3M doing the product development stuff, sorry, I was been we're trying to get back on this. Is there any products that you were part of development on that? Anything worth note?

Yeah. So the performance spray gun that launched a couple of years ago. So when I had started, 3M had purchased this company called AccuSpray, and re-branded some of their products, and made some stuff. And they had a, it's plastic. We weren't supposed to say the P word, but plastic spray gun that was really good for primer. Like it was only ever designed to be primer. Marketing got involved, business got involved. They made other tips of other sizes. So like one, two, one, three, one, four, it was good for primer, sealer, and then nasty stuff like rock guard. But like it would spray base coat and clear coat, but like it had inherent problems. Like it was designed to be primer gun. So spray gun or PPS, so what is it now? Performance spray gun. That was like clean sheet. Clean sheet, like let's make an awesome one. And they did. So I was part of that for many years. I think I started on that in like 2017. So that launched like 2020, oh man, 2022? And that one is awesome. So it's still like, it's still at the end of the day, it's a polymer or plastic, but like it launched and painters started using it and they were like, oh, it's plastic. And then they started actually using it. And they're like, whoa. So like it's cost effective. It's cheaper than the competitors. It punches above its weight in terms of performance. Like it's solid. And I think a lot of that comes back to the fact that like they took their time with it. Like it was in development for a long time. But we got it. I said, we say we, I was part of the team. But it was right. They got it right.

So when they were you doing stuff like that, like they bought another company. But did you do they ever like go out and buy three or four of the competitors ones? You guys take them all apart and look at them.

Yeah, all time. That's true at every company.

I figured.

Yeah. So Power Wheels would buy Peg Prego benchmarking. So in college, it's called cheating.

Yeah.

In industry, it's called benchmarking.

Oh, okay.

A professor told me that in school and we're like, yeah, whatever. And now I'm like, oh.

So yeah, because you talked about how Power Wheels, people thought they're junk or whatever, but they are, they're top notch. Peg Prego is the creme de la creme, but if you want a gator or a tractor, cool. But one thing Power Wheels had for them is all that, I'm assuming that licensing they did with all the employees.

Oh yeah. But yeah, I mean, it does come down to price point too. Like pegs are expensive.

Yeah.

They're like double the cost. So, and I mean, like you talk to people and they're like, well, did you know that they could make a car that lasts forever? Like, yeah, you don't want to pay for it though.

Yeah.

Like if you want something like completely stainless and everything, like, yeah, any OE, any company could make the best thing in the world. You don't want to pay for it.

Yeah.

So you're the problem. But yeah, like every company I've ever worked at will benchmark everything. So I think every company does that, honestly. So at the end of the day, it comes down to whatever decision you're making as far as cost or performance or whatever is important to that company.

That's why your GT500 exists. We talked about that on a previous podcast.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of companies will buy something and then one up each other. I mean, look at the horsepower wars in trucks right now. Yeah. It's so important for Dodge to be 1,006 foot pounds. Yeah.

Best in class.

Yeah. That's a big one. Best in class.

How about the Hornet, which again, I come from a Mopar family, but it's like, oh, it's the best in class by like a lot of, it makes like almost 400 horse or something like that in a Hornet. They're not selling. Like it doesn't matter.

People shopping in that class are not.

They're not power hungry. That was the first thing that I said. I'm like, dude, nobody in the power class cares about horsepower. The new Compass is sick though. If you haven't watched the reveal on that, it's actually kind of cool. It's way better than the outgoing generation.

What's the new charger?

So my pops demoed one for a few days here this week, and I've gotten to go for a test driving one. Listen, that car would sell very well if it was just 15 gram less.

How much is it?

It's like 59 or 69 MSRP. But dude, on it, like, first of all, dude, the EV.

We're talking about the electric one.

The electric one. So let me go on my rant here, trust me. First of all, it sounds, I know the exhaust sounds a little goofy, and I probably would drive with it off most of the time. It is loud, bro. It is louder than a Hellcat.

Really?

It is because it's like the fake exhaust, the frat Sonic or whatever. The interior, I really like.

Really?

Like if you were to daily drive it, like compared to a Tesla, I like it more than a Tesla, because that's more benchmarking, right? Looks-wise, style-wise, I do like it, and I think once they have the hurricane in there, dude, I think that's going to be a b***** car, and I was against it for the longest time, but now I've been in two of them, and I'm like the interior design team definitely crushed it. And that's probably coming because I hate the f****** interior design of my Volkswagen. That's why they get a redesign on it, which by the way, additional rant, a Golf R is up for sale for 59 grand right now. Has a titanium exhaust. Who needs a titanium exhaust in a Golf, dude?

I do.

No, no.

I don't agree with this rant.

No, yeah, for 59,000, f*** you, you buy one.

Dude, I love tie. Titanium is awesome.

Yeah.

Hey, fun fact about titanium. If it's colored, it's welded incorrectly.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

Titanium in a perfect world is welded in a completely inert environment inside and outside. So people are like, I back purged it. That's cool. All that bluing is oxidation on the outside from exposure to chemicals or exposure to the atmosphere, which is not the proper way to weld it.

But it looks cool.

Exactly.

Race car stuff, dude.

It's blue. Was it Sam?

Sam hates titanium.

Really?

Because it sounds like s***. That's why he hates it.

I want everyone to know I'm coming.

This is an off-camera discussion. It was actually the first day we met him. It was literally we went to dinner. Before we even walked in, he's like, I f****** hate it.

Yeah.

Apparently because I get sounds differently and it's awful.

It's more like tinny.

Tinny.

The exact term you used.

I have a titanium exhaust on my 450 at my house though. Looks so good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dirt bikes are sick, dude. It's so light. It'll crack eventually, but it looks so light. You pick it up and you're like, oh dude. Yeah. I love tie.

Whatever, dude.

It's blue and purple and stuff. It's welded incorrectly. I don't care. It looks awesome.

So when it's welded incorrectly, it just fails or what? Because if it's an exhaust, how much stress is it going through?

It's really a pointless, it's like my variable wealth of useless information fact of the day. Because on a car, it doesn't matter. But if it was a welded joint going on an airplane or something, which welded joints are not common on airplanes in my experience because of failure points. It would be welded in an inert environment inside and outside so that when you weld it, it would look the same color because that bluing or whatever is oxidation, which is technically weakening the joint.

So let's say it was in an airplane, which it wouldn't be, but let's say it was, it'd be more prone to failure.

Yeah. So if you were going to endurance test something and bend it a little bit, eventually it would crack right at the heat affected zone of the weld.

That was one of the side tangent of a tangent of a tangent of a tangent of a tangent of a tangent. How many, dude, that's the 16th wall. Like I was like just briefly like going through like putting together a new ad for High Performance Academy. And I'm like looking at this, I'm like, oh, so that's how you test welds and all this. I'm like, I all knew this to me. So yeah, which is probably what you got a college education in.

Testing is super cool. I love testing again, data, data is cool. Yeah. So we did a big lab about this in college actually, which was, it resonates with me forever, but we got this little round bar samples and it was supposed to be like 1018 steel. We had to go through this whole long process of figuring out the failure properties of it, why it was different and justify it to our professor, which I learned more in that one class probably than the rest of my collegiate career. But you get this little bar of 1018 steel and you put it on a fatigue tester, which is like you bolt it at one end, you put a little force on it at the end of it and you spin it. So when it spins, the top of its intention, the bottom of it is in compression, right? So you're bending something, the bottom of it's trying to push, the top is stretching. Eventually, after a number of spins, it breaks and you can plot that out on the graph. Well, it didn't match what it's supposed to be for that material. So we went through this big process of like trying to decide what it was. We do like spark testing on it to figure out, you know, what the carbon content was, blah, blah, blah. Basically, what you end up finding is that when they make a round bar, they don't roll it, they pull it, they draw it through a mandrel. And doing that work hardens the surface of the material. So any round bar, 10, 18 steel you buy, is way stronger than it's supposed to be. So like, but to test that and know that like, there's a limit on it. So in theory, the cool thing with steel, I'm probably putting you guys to sleep. I'm a nerd now. I'm not reliving this right now. But like, with steel, there's an endurance limit on it. So if you push a little bit, and it doesn't meet that, or it doesn't go past that endurance limit, and you spin it and bend it and tension it, it will never break, ever. But if you go past that endurance limit, there's a lifespan. That aluminum, for example, if I'm remembering correctly, blow me up comment section, does not have an endurance limit. So if you bend aluminum and load it, eventually it's gonna break regardless of what you do.

Yeah, that's when you do that whole back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until your little piece breaks off.

I never thought about it that way. I knew like the more sciency, whatever way. Cause like, for example, like that's why they rebuild like 4,000 horsepower cars all the time. Cause it's all aluminum and it's like, yeah, it makes sense.

It's fun, right? Like train car axles bend when they put the car on it. Well, it's under the endermost limit. They'll never break. So like, there's all these like engineering case studies where like people died and s***, but like, it's fascinating now. So like, I mean, that sounds bad. Like that would probably be a short, but like, you know, that sounds pretty bad now that I repeat that in my head. But like people die. I mean, this one people didn't, but like there was little puddle jumper airplane that would fly back and forth from like Hawaii to Southern California. And just went back and forth, back and forth. Well, what happened was like the outside of an airplane, I think, well, parts of the outside of an airplane, not the whole thing, are steel. Well, when you go up in the air, what happens? You pressurize the cabin, right? So force coming in from the outside, force coming in the outside, things are flexing, things are moving. Well, it did that so many times, because it was such a short cycle time, going back and forth. Eventually, they found the endurance limit of the fuselage of the airplane, blew the top off the airplane in flight and landed it. Yeah. Cool, huh?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. No one died in that one.

Okay, so nobody died?

I was looking for the death part.

No, no one died in that one.

No, I got off-camera comments. Be up-the-wall story.

That was the kind of engineering case study that we would learn and all learn from. So all these bad things that happen, you can find a reason behind it, which is cool.

That's the tough part of a freaking school, though, is learning. Unless you have something to apply it to, it's just words on a page. So that's true, too.

So I will talk good about my school a lot because I learned a lot, other than the student loans afterwards. That was not fun. But a lot of my professors were very experienced in industry. So they weren't just like PhDs that couldn't get a job and started teaching.

It wasn't those who can't teach situation?

Oh yeah, it was those who can't teach, teach gym. Those who can't do teach, those who can't teach, teach gym.

Oh, okay.

So that'll explain my entire middle school gym teacher.

Holy s***. Yeah, so a lot of my professors had gone out in industry, worked at XYZ company and then either retired or just been like, yeah, I'm gonna go back and teach. They'd come back and they'd bring all these case studies and teach us and we're like, that's cool. So super blessed to have made a really quick decision and gotten away with it about what college I was gonna go to, because it worked out pretty well for me. So super lucky, but I always hear all these horror stories from people that just went to very theoretical based colleges of like, math, cool, numbers, cool. But all my classes were like, math, okay, now do this with it. We're gonna go to a hydraulics lab and make s*** move. That's cool.

Yeah, those are the best professors and teachers for sure.

I've always learned by doing. So back to my Company 23 employment now, which is honestly at the end of the day like my dream job. Because I sit here in my little metal box, and like I just get to mad science s*** all day. So like, I was showing you guys some stuff on the computer, like I'll draw stuff on the computer, like spend a bunch of time making everything work and fit and like look good and get the costing right, working with suppliers and then I'll build it and I'll test it.

What does ideation look like for you guys? Like, are you just perusing through forums or like, obviously you're tearing stuff down every day and being like, how can I do this better? Where do ideas come from? Like, how many Subaru tools can you make?

There's a lot, there's a lot. I mean, not that they break all the time or anything, but a lot of it comes from experience. So like at the end of the day, I'm an enthusiast. Like I go home on the weekends and if I can find some time, I'm in the garage like working on my own because this one makes a bunch of whooshy noises and goes fast and that's cool. So like a lot of it comes from experience and the like my boss and I will sit down or you know, anybody who works for Company 23 and just do the like, my favorite phrase is like, wouldn't it be cool if... Yep, I'm listening. Let's do this. So like one that we just released there, these little, like I can show you on a cylinder head over there, but on the back of the cylinder head, I'll just grab a cylinder head.

Sure.

Oh, I don't have the right cylinder heads. Dang it. Nevermind. Please hold. So on the back of the cylinder heads on a lot of JDM stuff, there's these little like half moon shaped recesses. Let's put it on. Okay. Because when they bore the cam bearing journals or cam journals or whatever, they had to go all the way through the head. So they made this little half moon shape on the backside so that they could get the line bore all the way through, right? Well, the factory has this little plastic half moon shaped plug that you RTV in. You basically glue it in and put the valve cover on. Well, they suck to take out. They're horrible. They're so bad. And every time you take them out, they just break. So, and the heat cycles and all that stuff. So a bunch of other aftermarket companies make these little aluminum ones that go in there. And it's the same problem. Like, they don't break when you take them out. But when you take them out with pliers, they leave all these, it just gouges in, looks like s***. So this was literally how a product came to be. Like, I had wanted to do billet half moons, and I just went to my boss, and we're chatting, we chat every Monday. Like, wouldn't it be cool if there was like a little ledge and you could put punch in there and knock it out? And he was like, that's a good idea. What about this? That's a good idea too.

What about this?

We just played ping pong of ideas until he was like, what if we just put a hex on it? Like, that's a great idea. Drew it up, made them, tested them. They work great. So we have these little half moons, like a thing that, I don't know, like no one ever did, but we were like, that's cool. So we just machined these little billet half moon shaped dealios with an eight millimeter hex machined into it. So when you go to tip, that's funny because my boss was like, dude, isn't it funny? Like we're making a product that's designed so you can take it out the next time your engine blows up. I'm like, well, you put it that way.

You are a Subaru company.

Yeah. So you put a little eight millimeter hex and you turn it and RTV is super strong in tension and really weak in shear. So you just shear it off and it comes right out. And RTV comes off and it looks brand new. No mess, no fuss, no nothing. It works great. So we put a patent on it.

Yeah.

Was it worth it? Maybe.

You sell quite a bit of them?

Yeah, it was a decent amount.

Yeah.

But honestly, like, it's not going to feed our families for 20 years, but like the marketing might. People were like, what? You did what? I'm like, oh, you can take them out. They're like, where were you 20 years ago? I'm like, probably like a baby. Well, I guess I'm not that young anymore, but yeah, so that's one thing that we pride ourselves on is like we're an engineering based company. Like we solve problems. That's what we do. So like not being able to hold a cam phaser. All right. We'll make a tool for that. Not being able to put the oil pump on and then the oil seal, make a tool for that. I can't trust a timing kit because I don't know where the components are coming from. We source them all directly from the manufacturer. We put them in a box and if you ask us where you get this one, I'll tell you it comes from NSK or Koyo or Mitsuboshi or whatever. We'll guarantee them like it's Japanese quality. You don't got to worry about it. So a lot of our stuff comes from personal experience because I guess maybe I am a loser or I'm a Subaru nerd or whatever. But like I come to work, I do Subaru things. I go home, I play with my two-year-old who I love to death. My wife, I love her too, I guess. Just kidding, just kidding, dear. And like I'll vege on Subaru things or I'll read my book about tuning and I'll go like, all right, my Subaru, like I don't know why, I just like them. They're just cool. I love JDM, four door turbo charge, whatever's, they're cool, I don't know. You gave me a check for a billion dollars, probably I'll go like finish the other one.

Yeah.

Foreshadowing. But like, I mean, God, I might be a loser, but like, I was talking to a financial advisor the other day, and he's like, yeah, like, you put this much away over here. When do you want to retire? I'm like, what? When do you want to retire? I'm like, I'm good. He's like, wait, what? I'm like, dude, I could retire right now. I'll probably just keep doing what I'm doing. I'd spend more time with my family. But I don't know. I like making stuff. I like doing stuff. It's cool. Stuff makes whooshies and go fast. Whatever. I'll spend more time trying to crack that stock ECU again. I can turn off my codes. EPA, hi. Don't listen.

Don't come after me.

But yeah, I don't know. I'm like, it's funny because it sounds super tongue-in-cheek. Don't at me comment section. But like, I genuinely love what I do. Like, I don't know. Pay me more money. I'm probably not going to change jobs. I like what I do. Love what I do. Just do it. I don't know. It's fun. My wife hates it. Let me just preface this. She hates it. She's like, God, could you just stop working for a while? I'm like, what? Like, I like it. I don't know. Like, it's fun. I make stuff. I get to make the stuff and work on the stuff that I would buy myself. And it helps pay for spending more on these stupid things that are rusty.

So you probably don't have to buy tools from Company 23 anymore?

It depends what it is.

Yeah.

If it's for like product development, no, I don't. I honestly probably have the whole catalog and then some. But yeah, like if I need parts for something, like I still, it's cost. But yeah. I'm fortunate to be at the position where like, I don't try to like, I severely dislike when random people hit me up online. They're like, yo, let me get it for free. I'm like, yeah, sure, dude. You just want like the shirt off my back and I'll cook you dinner and like, what else do you want? You want me to give you everything?

You just reminded me of the South Park episode.

God, dude. The one thing that I've seen is like, when your buddies are like, let me get a discount and like, there's a full bowl and strangers are like, I'll pay retail. Yeah. Like I hate that. Like if, not that I'm trying to get something from like my friends, but like I have, I've just over the years made friends with people who are influencers in the Subaru community. Shout out Tanner. But like they're friends. I don't know. And they, like we exchange goods and services for goods and services, right? So like he's got a big Subaru platform. I'll hook him up with the new stuff. He markets it for us. We have a way to track it. We know that it's worth both our time. Like it's mutual beneficiaries or whatever. He's a random bro. He's got like a thousand followers. And they're like, let me get that thing for free. I'm like, that thing's $300. What, what, what, why would I do that? Why would I do that? Can I just, can I just have $100? Dude, I don't know. But like, yeah, it just grinds my gears. And then like people you don't know are like paying full retail. So you're like, I'll give you a shirt. I'm like, I'll buy it. Like, let me support you. I don't, I don't, I don't need to get s*** for free. So like, I have no problem paying full retail. So like when I had Kyle Lurkin scan some stuff for me, it like smooth. I had Kyle Lurkin scan some stuff for me. He spent hours on it. Like he did, he did the thing that I do sometimes where he's like, oh, like it's not good enough. Like I'm going to keep working on that. And I'm like, I'm going home then. Because whatever. He spent like hours and hours and hours on this thing. Like what do I owe you? Like you told me it was going to be two hours. What do I actually owe you? Oh, it took a lot longer than I thought it was. Like I'll just pay you an hour. I'm like, no. No, dude, you spent 10 hours on this. He's like, yeah, but I'm like, let me pay you like two, three, four hours.

No, just pay me one.

I'm like, here's the Venmo for three.

I don't know.

I'm not going to like completely screw you. Let me pay you.

Yeah, that was a really good Kyle impression by the way. Like the tone of voice is almost perfect. Just for a second.

I spent all night on it. I love Kyle. He's the kind of guy where if he doesn't know how to do something, he's going to figure it out and he'll run over anything in his way.

That dude.

I like that.

What's the word I'm looking for? Robust isn't the word. What's the non-quitter word? That dude ain't going to quit. He's going to figure it out. Resilient. No, that's not it either. Welcome to my thesaurus doesn't work.

Yeah, I like that. I ended up paying him a few hours. I want to keep you as a partner business or whatever, and I'm not trying to get anything for free from you. I don't remember how we got on that tangent, but...

That's a good question.

I don't remember, but I like...

Oh, developing product ideation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But yeah, so a lot of it comes from firsthand personal experience, and you're like, well, there can't be that many tools for a Subaru. I'm like, I'll show you the list, dude. We got like new product ideas, like a long ways.

How many products do you guys have on your store right now? Rough estimate.

80.

S***, really?

Yeah.

That's all Subaru related?

Yeah.

I mean, well, if you count the OE stuff that we offer, 200?

Holy s***. Maybe.

I can show you the website. I mean, we got...

I'd love to have a car that needs 200 special tools.

No, it's not 200 special tools. It's like, it's probably 40 tools, and then 20 specially designed by us parts, and then timing kits, water pumps, the engine stand.

Things that make your life easier.

Yeah. And then probably like 150 OEM part numbers that we stock and offer on our website.

Like a genuine OEM.

Yeah. Like the stuff that like, we don't offer everything. We're not trying to be a dealership, but if like somebody comes to us and they're buying s*** and they like need an exhaust gasket, we have an exhaust gasket. Like OE.

That's kind of nice too. Like when you're there and you can just add the s*** to your cart and it all comes from one package. I do like that.

Yeah. Like other things you may like, add.

Yeah, literally. Yeah. Actually, yeah, that's on our website. So like, if you're buying an oil seal tool, we have the oil seal. Like you might want this underneath it. Yeah.

Other customers also bought.

Yeah.

That's just effective, man.

If you need like a rear axle for your 97, like legacy, I don't have that.

We don't have that.

We're not gonna have that. Go to a dealer, go to Napa. We're not stocking. We stock like the popular stuff that a lot of people need for obvious reasons. We're not networked with a dealer. You know, we work directly with companies that manufacture the stuff, which helps with pricing some. But we're not trying to be a dealer. It's mostly courtesy to our customers when the majority of the time, we focus a lot of our time on tools, and then we haven't even touched on the sister company deal.

Well, yeah, what's that all about?

Yeah, so years ago, boss of Company 23, or one of the bosses of Company 23, and his buddy who has an EV charging company. Oh, that's right, I forgot about that. Charging stations for EVs. Also out of the Minneapolis area, they struck a business deal where we do contract manufacturing for them. So through that, we were buying certain components and systems to assemble on to chargers that we designed and built for them. And we thought we could do some stuff better. So we did, and I spent a long time designing a cable retractor that can go on the wall or bolt to the actual tower. So I got big guys. If you go to big guys, you know what big guys is. There's a charging station in the back of the parking lot. Way in the back.

I've seen it back here.

In the field.

I've even seen it back here.

We should go check it out.

I've even seen it and been like, why is that there?

It's just like a random pole. And you're like, go park way over there, Mr. Tesla guy. This is Wisconsin. Barely Wisconsin. Yeah, right. It's a suburb of Twin Cities. That was designed and built by Company 23 for our partner company. And then on top of that, there's those black boxes. So if you go over there and you pull the plug out, like you're gonna plug in a Tesla, it puts a rope that ties to the cable and it'll pull it back in. Well, that one was really expensive and didn't meet our needs as far as quality and performance and life cycle. And we made our own. And then we made a tester that tested it our own. So up there, you probably can't see it. There's a, see that blown up Subaru short block up there?

Yeah, yeah.

To the left of that.

Right behind the other four blown up Subaru short blocks.

Yeah, right.

To the left of that blown up Subaru block is a bunch of wires. That's a microprocessor controlled unit that I built that will pull it in and out forever. So it's, I'll show you it off camera, it's a mess. But yeah, we tested that for, we tested all our stuff. So it's all durability tested of like, we know this will go for 20 years because I love data. But we, now we test our, you talk about like buying all your competitors stuff?

Oh yeah.

Bought it, tested it, know exactly when it fails. So I went to Vegas a couple of weeks ago for the EV charging expo, and literally had the thing in my backpack, and I'll just take it out and be like, check this out, dude.

They'll be like, well, cool.

So trying to sell that more into the EV market and...

So what's the vision for that look like? Like does that end up at EV, EV, EV?

EV.

Every EV charger or what?

There are so many different varieties. So in a perfect world, sure, I'd love to. I could pay for my kid's college, but that's not realistic, I don't think.

But there's like a 16 years you have enough time.

It's coming fast. So not every charger, but like certain markets, I would love to get way more in there. But like the big ones that you might see at a gas station where you like plug your Tesla in, and like DC fast charger where it's charged in like five minutes. It's not for that. That's a completely different market. It's more for like, we call them not to go too far into the weeds, but level two chargers. So someone who wants to put a faster charger in at their house, it doesn't want to just plug it into 110. Those chargers it goes really well with, or like the one at Big Guys, for example.

So what exactly is the problem that you're solving here? I'm still not 100 percent sure of what exactly it is.

Durability, mainly. So durability and aesthetics. So the durability of ours is super awesome. It's tested to like, I mean, I fried a relay on the microprocessor board. I mean, on that unit, it was almost 40,000 cycles. Okay. But yeah, so that's all the way in, all the way out, all the way in, all the way out for a long time. Then I ran it in here so that my wife didn't have to listen to it anymore. But yeah, so-

So did you just leave it running like overnight?

I come check on it twice a day.

Oh, okay. I'm just imagining like they come in here, it's late, nobody's here, they hear that, what the hell is that noise over there?

Oh yeah, you can hear it too. They're probably like, dude's making bombs in there. He's cooking meth. I'm sure they thought that. But yeah, it ran for a couple of weeks. Oh really?

Yeah.

I forget the time, but you can do the math. I think it was like-

Yeah, what's the data?

Yeah, I have it on my phone, but I'm not going to get it out. It was like 47 seconds round trip. So do the math, time was 40,000, and 60 minutes an hour, yeah. It was like 20-something days, I think.

Holy s***.

So the Arduino board, or it was an Arduino microprocessor, but yeah, it fried itself after a while.

How did the one end up at Big Guys? Is that, does somebody know Jethro, or does-

I don't know.

How did that-

I don't know. So we're not the customer-facing entity for it, so we build the thing for the customer, and then they line up the installer and all that stuff. I don't know why there's one at Big Guys. I can't imagine anyone drives a Tesla there.

No.

It's probably all diesel trucks.

Well, in that particular area of the parking lot, it's dirt mostly.

Hold on, there's Teslas around here.

It is Hudson.

Yeah, Roadie has a Cybertruck.

Yeah.

Sure.

Oh yeah, he does. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I saw it on the way here.

I think he's got a unit here, because I've seen his food trailer.

Oh, interesting. Okay.

I think it's down there. Yeah, Cybertruck. What do you think of those?

They're all right.

You remember the last time what happened when we talked about Tesla, right?

Yeah, everything fried.

Everything fried? Half the episode was gone.

All of our s*** just quit.

Elon is watching.

Dude, yeah, Elon's like, I'm going to plug that real quick.

I think Cybertruck's kind of cool.

No, but dude, we are coming up on two and a half hours, man. Holy s***. Yeah, I know time flies when you're having fun, when you're graduating. Actually, one more question.

I'm good for half an hour or more. Yeah.

Question for me is, do you guys do some stuff for like the, what is it? The new BRZ or sorry, the new GR86, it has an F824 in it, right? You guys do stuff for that too?

Yep. Yep. So the nice thing about Subaru is they never really change anything.

Okay.

So like you're talking about old Subarus or whatever, Subaru had the same basic engine architecture in cars from like 1989 until 2021, the STI. So like people will probably get at me in the comments and be like, that's not true. The EJ is totally, no, it's not, dude. So they had the EJ engine come out in 89 or 91 or 93. Someone correct me in the comments. But like if you look at this thing, you take all the accessories off and you look at the block, and then you look at like a block from 2021, you'd be like that image from like the office, we're like those are the same blocks.

That's what I was thinking.

Yeah. Like the HR wants you to find the difference and he'd be like, these are the same block. They just kept adding stuff. So they added like the TGVs for emissions, the tumble generator valves in the intake track. They add like secondary air injection in the exhaust to try to keep the emissions down on cold start. They add variable cam timing. They add dual variable cam time. They just kept like adding stuff to this thing. And that was all the way up until 2021, which I've kind of put together was, well, God, I'm such a Greg Banish fanboy. The Lev 3? Ask him to quote that for me. But there was a change in emissions that they couldn't meet it with the EJ anymore. That's why the EJ is dead. We're gonna rest in peace, EJ. But the FA, so the FA came out in 2013 in certain model cars, I think. Somewhere around there. But then the turbocharged version came out in 2014, the XT, and this is my very long-winded way of answer of saying it, they're only chains a lot. So people will get at me in the comments, but the FA24 shares a bunch of stuff with the FA20. Which now has been around for 12 years? Holy s***. But a lot of the stuff like crank pulley holders and cam gear holders, we have a tool for from the FA20, and it just works on the FA24. I mean, there's certain stuff that we're looking at developing for it, but the best thing, that engine stand has the pattern of the bellhousing on it, that's been the same since dinosaurs roamed the earth. The Subaru has been around. So all the EJs that we know and love are phase two. There was phase one EJ that goes even further back. And those are the same bellhousing, dude. It still works. So when everyone's like, Oh, Subaru, the Subaru, that you can go buy like an old Subaru from like, when did the RS come out in the US., like 97, 2.5 RS? You could literally buy like a 2021 STI and change the length of the driveshaft and axles and stuff like that. You got me comments. But like copy paste the driveline in that RS. And that's the 2.5 RSTI that everyone knows and loves and are super common for people to build. But like the engine will bolt up. The transmission will bolt up. Like everything is just the same. That's why people call them Legos.

Ford's stuff is like that too. Like small block Ford's stuff is all the same. And then all of their mod motor stuff. So the 4.6, the 5.4, the Coyote, all that s***. If you look at a Coyote and a 4.6 four valve, they're not too terribly far apart.

Yeah. That's why a lot of companies love making stuff for EJ because they just launch it for an STI if it's 0.4 to 21. Which you're like, damn, that's a long time.

Yeah, it is.

A really long time.

Dude, if somebody was born in 04, they'd literally have a license.

This car can drink beer. Yeah. It was 2004.

The Fox body platform went from 1979 to 2004.

Damn.

Technically a new edged Mustang. It's bones is a Fox body Mustang.

Yeah, dude. It's crazy. And that's why some of these things are like DOEMs. They literally have to design it for 20, 30 years.

Yeah.

If you think about it.

It's crazy.

No, the reason I asked those is because I recently discovered, I knew the outgoing FRS BRZ platform was pretty cool, but then I started looking into the new one. I'm like, oh, that's cool. And then I watched the video on it. I didn't realize that whole community just did not exist much to me. I just never paid attention to them. We never had the luxury of having a lot of Subaru guests over the last two and a half years, whatever it is.

They're busy working on their s***.

Yeah, they're exhausted. But it's not like I could describe the platform. So then I found out they went from a 2.0 to a 2.4, and I'm like, oh, that's cool. And then I watched some review videos, and I'm like, that's really cool. So we may be talking in the future soon.

So if you go and talk to the boys down at OTL, they have some, I guess it's not really secret sauce, but they, so the first gen BRZ had the FA20. All the like commuter cars had the FB25. So 2.5 liter F series engine, like Outback, the Outback, Legacy, one of the boring ones, Forester. So they took the 2.5 liter FB25 block, put it in the first gen BRZ with the FA20 heads, and they have like a new version of a hybrid setup, which is old school Subaru. But like the 2.5 liter makes a lot more torque, and it's sick for like drifting.

Okay.

So they're big in the drifting down there.

Yeah, I saw your story.

So if you roll out to like Portland, you should be able to find plenty of those blocks.

Dude, no. Yo, block? Oh yeah. Yeah.

FB, yeah.

Yeah, those are reliable though. So those, I mean, reliable. I would just, change your oil.

I've just tried to picture where that market, there's a guy who would zoom in, in Portland area.

Yeah.

And he'd be like, does a street view. He's like, we're going to do this until we don't see a Subaru.

Yeah.

And he did it like eight times. He's like, this is impossible. And he shut the video off.

I saw that video. It was pretty funny. Yeah.

But yeah, so like there's, I don't know, like turbo charged setups or stuff, but if you go talk to OTR boys, they, I mean, I don't want to say they destroy, they rip on BRZs in the parking lot, like at their year-end party. They run all day. Like, you're just waiting for this thing to just send a rod to the moon, and it just rev limiter all day, drifted around the parking lot, they just keep running. Last year, they broke like three rear axles, zero engines. I just, like, just beat the hell out of it. Like, it's not even yours, and it just keeps running. It makes me want one.

So yeah.

Oh, but yeah, I mean, to keep going on this long podcast, I will die on the hill of Subarus are not unreliable. The customer base just doesn't have, A, realistic expectations for what they're doing, or B, they don't understand what they're doing. They do it anyway, and then b****, the thing broke, even though they're making way too much power on components that were never designed for it. So I know we talked about this more last time, I mean, allegedly, but like, what things were designed to do, they're really good at. But once you get outside that window, you're on your own, dude. So to go back to Greg Banish again, this is just a Greg Banish fanboy podcast. He talked about like the locked ECUs and being able to go in there and manipulate the map sensor, if you put a blower on it, whatever, right? Well, that's going outside the window of what the thing was designed to do, right? It's really popular these days because they will live for a little bit. You take a newer STI stock engine, stock everything, and you just throw a big old ETS rotated turbo kit on it with a 6466, makes 650, 700 wheel horsepower on a stock engine. That's very popular. Then people complain about them blowing up. And I'm like, well, let's think about this for a minute. The thing was designed and delivered with a warranty at 305 crank horsepower, not wheel horsepower. You have, let's call it, tripled the factory output and then you b**** about the engine breaking. Like, let's unpack this here. The only reason it lives is because you're doing it at a higher RPM, so it's less load on the rod over time. So your piston speed is a lot higher when you do it at a higher RPM, the rod gets away a little easier. Instead of b******* about it blowing up, let's just be happy that it lived for 5,000 miles. Like, cast piston, stock rod, I mean, stock crank is good for a lot of horsepower, but still factory semi-closed deck block. Like, let's be reasonable here, dude. Like, you can't honestly have expected to get 100,000 miles out of this thing. And you drive it like you're going to the, you're just bad out of hell all the time.

Well, and then what was that number of how many Subaru owners modify their cars?

I think it was like 55% or something like that. That's crazy. Yeah. At one point, yeah.

I'm amazed that there's 45% of people that don't.

Well, it doesn't across all Subaru lines probably too. So like your Foresters and all these things we talked about earlier.

I doubt it. I bet it's just WRX STI. I bet WRX and STI.

Yeah.

Because the majority, like the people that drive the normal ones don't care that for a long time, Subaru didn't have a cool and temperature gauge on the dash.

Yeah.

It just had a cold light. That's true. Yeah. There's like whatever, like it just goes. So Subaru like designed it for like, I don't want to say real dumb consumer, but a real dumb consumer.

People that don't look at the gauges anyways, who gives a s***?

Yeah. So I, when they, I listened to the podcast where they said that, and I'm like, there's 45% of WRX's and STI's in the road that are stock. Like no way, dude. Everyone I see has something done to it. Every single one. Whether it's wheels, mudflap, whatever, it's got something done to it.

Where do they draw the line? Does fuzzy dice count? I mean, like where are we at here?

I don't know. If I had to guess and interpret what they were saying, I would bet that it's tuned on an access port.

Okay.

So that little widget in the window was super common for everyone to do.

I don't think that was a Cobb study or anything though. Really?

Because I don't know if you can count on it as modifying it. Maybe, I don't know. I'm splitting hairs here.

Because think about what SEMA is. 80% of their customer base is in the truck industry.

That's crazy.

Right? That's where most mods go. And it goes back to... Huh?

Wheels, tires, suspension.

Yeah, wheels, tires, suspension.

Yeah.

See, if I had to venture a guess.

If you take the s***** tires off of a Hellcat and throw on some nice whatevers, that's a mod.

I could see that.

Cause man, those stock tires, man.

Yeah.

My only guess would be if Cobb was looking at like sales of access port every year, and then sales of car every year.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a Cobb land study, but who knows a lot.

What I can say though, for certainty, is that this car, if you were to remove the rust, and remove the mods, and take 140,000 miles off of it. So if this is a 2004 Java Black Pearl, if you say a Java Black Pearl to anybody in the Subaru community, they go, ooh, it's a one-year color, super rare color, there's not many of them. There weren't that many of them in 2004, which means there's less now. Put this back to complete OEM, take a bunch of miles off it, make it pristine underneath, it's like a $80,000 car. Holy s***. It's dumb. Go on, bring a trailer. I know the comments are probably gonna blow me up on this. Go on, bring a trailer, look at the previous sales. Like there are some of these that sell for stupid money. But they're clean, they're stock, they're like spotless underneath all OE. People lose their s*** over them.

Well, now I know how to get into a Subaru group. I'm just gonna lean in and go Java Black Pearl.

They're gonna be like, oh, this guy knows his s***.

No, seriously, bro.

They're just gonna hand you the cool lady, brother.

Yeah. Yeah, dude.

Or like, it's crazy now too, because like I grew up in the Fast and Furious era. Like there was a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution 8, like same kind of condition, like 10 out of 10, never left the garage or whatever. I think it got close to six figures. Damn. Yeah. Damn. I wanted that car. I can't afford it. That's wild with some of the old JDM stuff is going for these days.

Well, it's really crazy when you think is that what every most of those cars, there was a point where it wasn't worth s***. You could pick one up for five grand or something.

Yeah.

Then they go to then it just all of a sudden becomes a hit again.

So I had a co-worker at 3M. He bought I forget what year it was. It was, I forget if it was post-Uppy-Downy or pre-Uppy-Downy headlight, NSX. He paid like 30 grand for it in 2008. It's like quadrupled in value since then. And he let me drive it. It was sick. Yeah. But unpopular opinion, first gen NSX, I didn't really like. I'm going to get skewered in the comments for that. That'll be a short. But I didn't really like it. Like it was cool. Like it was a cool car. Don't get me wrong. Comments. I don't mean to offend you. I'm sure your dad's brother has an NSX, but like you get into this thing and you're like, you're like laying down, like you're like, oh, this is a car car. That's what my two year old calls them to be like. This is, this is legit. Like I had over a hundred thousand miles on it. Shifter is mechanically notchy. You're like, ooh boy.

Yeah.

And then I like look at the steering wheel. I look at like the turning signals, look at the mirror. I'm like, my dad's 2006 Accord looked just like this. So you're driving down the highway and you're like, this isn't like exciting. It's just like a really good car that I'm laying down in. And I tell other people and they get all offended. And I'm like, I mean, it was cool. It was cool. It was an NSX. The engine was back there, but like it didn't have that pizzazz, you know? And the really funny thing was like, I mean, it's not funny, but it was parked in the parking lot at 3M and some dude walked by and like hit the mirror off by accident. He replaced it with like an O2 Civic mirror, bolted right up.

Well, a lot of those first generations of those kind of things were like a Skunk Works type thing, right? Like there was a group of engineers like yourself, they're like, we want to do this one really cool thing. And the OE went fine, but you can do it like this and you have to do it nights and weekends, and you only get $5 to do it. And so then they're like, okay, how the f*** are we going to do this? And then sometimes they do a lot of things off the table. We've got a friend of ours that does a lot of skunk work stuff that is an engineer at a certain automaker, and I won't call him out right now, but he's constantly hitting us up and be like telling us s*** he's doing, he's not supposed to be doing. It's awesome.

Yeah, dude, like the NSX, you're like, okay, titanium connecting rods in the engine, you're like, oh yeah. And you stomp on it, you're like, come on, man. Let's go, come on. It could have been cool. I mean, it is cool.

It's cool.

But you drive it, and you're like, mm, it's just kind of boring. Like, let me say it this way. Like, the NSX, when you got in it, this quicksand's getting deeper.

Yeah.

There was no doubt in your mind that you were going to make your destination. When you get in this thing, 50-50.

Yeah.

You're like, oh, this is reliable. This is like, am I going to make it? I don't know. We're going to find out. So, part of the pizazz of driving an old s*** box JDM car.

Yeah.

I'm driving an 86 Thunderbird Turbo Coupe out there.

Yeah, because this other thing wasn't working.

I love that car.

You might be walking home.

Nah. Nah.

It's downhill to my house from here.

Oh, if you're about to go with the three car questions, I do have an update on this.

Oh, yeah?

I do.

Do you want to pop the usual?

Yeah, we could do it.

Yeah, we're coming up on that, yeah.

This is a long episode, dude.

I thought you might as well hit banish numbers if you want to go three hours.

Bob, dude, I'll start spewing data.

What do you want to know? I love data.

All right.

Well, I think it's time to wrap this up. So at the end of every episode, we'd like to ask our guests to pick three cars. I need a track car, a daily driver and a show car. You have an unlimited budget, build whatever you want.

Race car is staying the same. Fernando Alonso's was a 2005...

You didn't Google it since last time?

Dude, I forget which one it was. That's not my update. That was the same one. The last was a V8 or a V10. I forget. I think it's a V8.

V10, yeah.

V10?

V10, I think so.

The last Fernando Alonso Renault Formula One car.

I don't know what you mean by last time. This is the first time.

I would only ever say Fernando Alonso's car that he was driving at Abu Dhabi, and Lewis was like, oh my god, like that one. I want that one. Could I ever actually make a lap?

Yeah, V10, because I remembered a Facebook highlight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think that was when Richard Hammond drove and couldn't make the turn, because he wasn't going fast enough to have the downforce to make it around the turn. That whole top gear skip might have been b*******, but anyway. So that one stays the same. My daily, though. Last time I had said a manual, first time, I would say manual transmission Lamborghini Urus. I have an update on this one. So my neighbor, a couple weeks ago, bought a 2020 SQ7, which is, you know, different badges, right? And it came with an APR tune on it. So it makes, you know, 700 at the wheels on pump gas, whatever. He bought it, didn't know it was tuned, took me for a ride and was like, this thing is great, it's too fast. And I'm like, dude, it's a 5,000 pound seat. Like, stop. He like, took me for a ride, and I was like, dear Lord of God. I was like, this is dumb, dude. You can't like drive this in the winter. He's like, I'm going to drive it in the winter.

Oh my God.

So I take that back. There's no way I'd ever want that with a manual transmission. Ever.

Okay.

I would die, dude. I mean, we're going like, allegedly, we're in Mexico on I-94 over here. Maybe Mexico Hudson.

L-94.

You stomp on it. The thing just squats and goes L-94.

I'm sorry.

That's funny.

We're on L-94 over here.

Yeah, yeah. That's good. Jesus Christ.

Okay.

Sorry. Okay.

We lost them.

Yeah.

Straight to El Salvador.

Okay.

Professional, professional.

We're on L-94-O. And like, you put it in sport mode, you stomp on this thing, and you're just like, Dear Lord of God, like, I don't need this.

Stop it.

We got the giggles now.

Oh, man.

L-94 is crazy. But anyways, no...

It's going to be on a shirt.

Yeah.

I went to Mexico, L-94, with the 94 logo on it.

So is it staying the URUS is just going to automatic now, or what is happening here?

Oh, man.

So staying automatic.

Yeah.

You know, what will really like blow your mind is that there's manual 2,600 horsepower Vipers out there.

Which is just that s*** insane. Well, how are you going to shift? How are you going to let go of the wheel?

It's a magic motor.

I'm not let go of the wheel.

Dude, some of these guys can drive.

It's like that old clip of Ayrton Senna going around Monaco.

Just, yeah, dude, that clip's insane.

I'm like, dude, hold on, dude. It's like from like 1986.

Dude, you see that footage, it's nuts. Okay, so you're getting an automatic RSQ8?

Yeah, it's between that or like a, also another hill I will die on. I would rather have the EcoBoost Raptor instead of the Raptor. I want the, let me take the back there. I would take the Raptor R chassis, but I want the Ford GT engine in it. I don't want the V8 pushrod nonsense, whatever it is. No, it's not pushrod.

It's the GT 500 motor.

I still don't want it. I want turbos.

It's called the Predator, man.

I don't care if I want it.

I don't know if you want things called...

I'll take it back.

I don't want the German car because I can't afford it with tariffs, even though I have unlimited budget. But I would take a Raptor R with the Ford GT powertrain in it because I want turbos because Harvest exhaust energy is cool.

Okay.

I don't know.

So, hold on. The current Ford GT engine?

Yeah, the 3.5 EcoBoost.

Yeah.

Basically, the really, really big brother of what's in his truck right now.

Yeah.

The one that's a 3.5 but shares nothing with that one.

Yeah.

But we're going to market it as a 3.5 because every average you'll be like, that's a 3.5.

Cool.

It's the same one.

No, it wins on Sunday, sells on Monday.

It's not true. It's not wrong.

Yeah.

I would take that one, put it in Raptor R chassis. I think that would be a good day. Because as I do car seats and stuff, also the SQ7 is pretty small in it. Like, wow, we're in it.

That's how you get an RSQ8. See them bigger. Way better. Way better.

Yeah. I'll go pick up truck this time. I mean, the first time. And then my show car is going to stay the same. I don't know if I sent you the picture of it, but the engine bay from... There's a dude who built this 04 STI, tucked the wire harness in the engine bay and painted everything and cut off all the mounts and filled all the holes. It's just like a work of art. So that would be a show car, because I way more appreciate stuff like that, where someone's got a lot of sweat equity and craftsmanship in this, than showing up to a show and dude's just like, yeah, she got my, I don't know, McLaren I bought. Like, sweet dude, awesome. This dude painted that, welded that, cut that, tucked that, I don't know how it works, but it works. Like, that's cool. Like, you just got a big wallet. I don't know. Awesome. Snaps for you, dude. McLaren owners are always mean. I don't know. But yeah, that's my three, so.

Well, I'm counting mean McLaren owners in my head.

Too many to count or what?

There's a lot.

Why is that such a thing with supercar people?

It's a range.

Yeah, there's both kinds.

Is that a thing with supercar people?

It isn't. So having been a photographer and a professional podcaster, I don't know, I just lost my a** laughing to L94 a few minutes ago.

That's a good shirt, though.

We'll see how it goes.

Can you do the 94 badge with a sombrero on it?

I'll come up with something.

I only do my top speed runs on L94-O.

But one thing I've realized over the last seven, eight years, I've met a lot of supercar owners, and it's equal ratios. Yeah. For example, not every VQ guy is an a******, but a lot of them aren't. Yeah. It really is. It's ratios, right? Like it's, I think the money is probably no factor. It just elevates their personality.

I think you're right. I would agree with that. Cause I mean-

Oh, I show, oh, one discrepancy. Most people who get their money through lawsuits, that ratio is a little higher.

Yeah, that is true. I don't know if it's a Midwest thing though, but I feel like the majority of people that I've met with like FU money, like the auto motorplex, chain has and stuff are just super cool. So I will come out and say that. Like I forget which dude, I don't know his name, but he had a Countach, the white Countach and like the mystery machine and all that stuff in his condoms. That is the coolest dude. I was like quizzing him on like, do you actually drive this white Countach? Or it's red, white or red?

That one was white.

White? But anyway, he's got a Countach, like it's made condition and like, like do you actually drive? He's like telling me all this stuff. I'm like, what if it breaks?

No, it's red.

Does it matter?

It doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

White or red, whatever it was. Gold jacket, green jacket, who gives a s***?

There's a purple DL on there too.

But yeah, the dude was super cool. He's like an old guy and he's just like, yeah, like third gear broke and I had to like call the factory in Italy. And they found like this dude named Tony, they had one on the shelf and like, spent like an hour explaining to me how he got third gear replaced by some guy in like Cambridge who works on Lamborghinis. I'm like, okay, cool. But I feel like the majority of people I've met in the car community here in the Upper Midwest have been super cool.

Yeah.

You guys are all right too.

We're not super car owners, but yeah, we're all right.

Is there a Volkswagen out there?

Yeah.

It's basically a Bugatti, right?

Yeah, dude.

Yeah, I feel like people here are not to keep this podcast rolling, but... People here are super cool down the earth. I really haven't met anybody that's like...

Oh, I'd set up another douche bag in my head. No, I'm kidding you.

I haven't met anybody that's like super cold shoulder dick. You know what I mean? Maybe that's just my experience, but like the only people I know in the near vicinity that have super car-ish people are that Ryan Wheeler dude and Mr. Agave, and the very little I've chatted with them, they're both super cool.

Yeah.

So, I don't know. And that Agave dude, wasn't it Paul? I haven't had the pleasure of meeting him, but like, or like actually talking to him. But like, I know a bunch of people that like know him pretty well, and like gives away money to classrooms for spelling tests and stuff. I'm like, oh yeah.

No, he's, he's super cool.

That's freaking cool, dude.

That's super cool.

I've known him since-

I saw that one coming. I was waiting for it too.

He was a bartender at the bar that I live a mile and a half from now when I first met him. It used to be called Idaho Chucks. It was in, it's what was eventually Cozy Corner, and it had a fire and burned down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They go way back.

Idaho Chucks.

Idaho Chucks. My dad and I would sit there and have a burger and a beer and chat with the bartender.

Nice.

Did they ever do anything with Cozy Corner? Or is it still just a carcass?

Mark, so the Zappas now have it, they own the building. They now have the laundromat back up and running, and I think they put a new roof on. I think they're fixing up the restaurant, but I don't know what's going on there. There was some real shady s*** going on with how that all went down. That's all I know.

Like who burned it down?

It could be an off-camera situation. Clip that!

Yeah. I think that covers everything. Where can people find you?

You can follow Complay23, Complay23 all spelled out. So if you can't spell it, don't follow us on Instagram.

That's what the client's telling you.

I'm going to get fired for saying that.

This is turning into a no-do necessary really quick.

If you can't spell it, you probably shouldn't be working on Subaru. So let's be real here. Or Mark underscore Complay23, which is not spelled out. Or if you just go on our website and choose a question, an email, fill out the contact form, like that will go to the appropriate person. If it's a tech question, eventually it gets to me and yeah. Sweet, we're happy to help man. We're super, like Greg Banish, super cool guy. He's like, I'm super accessible. I am also super accessible. So like we sponsor Facebook groups, like and we post in there all time and that's all me. So like, if you comment on one of that, I try to get back to everybody pretty good about it. Or you send us a message, Instagram, Facebook. I do my best to get back to everybody and yeah, we're super accessible. So questions, comments, concerns or compliments, send them over.

Dan, so you can find us at Gunna Garage. Wait, hold on.

What are your guys' three cars?

Oh God, this comes up like every three or four months. Somebody asks us this question.

You've done this a lot, like rapid fire, your three, if you don't mind me holding you up for five more minutes.

Yeah, I'll live. Dan, go ahead.

Daily is a Shelby Baja Raptor, or not Raptor, it's their Baja, anyway, the Shelby Super Baja. So it's a six, seven power stroke, all done up for off-road s***.

10,000 pound truck.

Yeah, but it tows 40,000 pounds, so who cares?

What the hell?

It's probably not that much, but it's a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

And I really want something super car, so I don't know, probably if I'm going to keep in the Ford family, Ford GT, I would like to say the current gen, but I think I'm going to go the 0506, gen one Ford GT.

You wouldn't go with the gen one, gen one?

No, not the GT 60s, 70s? No, it's not. I'm not an old, old school guy.

You would take the 5.4, the blown 5.4 over the...

I think so. I've just heard from a lot of people, there's a lot of cool technology in that car, but I've heard that it's not as exciting as the NSX, dude. Yeah.

Just boring.

Sorry. Accurate boys.

I probably would want it though, because it's a million dollar car, but...

Yeah.

You have unlimited money though. Yeah, yeah, that's true. You can crash it.

All right. I'll take one of those then.

And what was the last one? Show car?

Show car? Yeah. I would go something resto mod at that point. I really want a 7071, I think was only two years, Ford Torino. And I'd want the Cobra, Superjet Cobra.

That'd be cool.

Yeah.

Cool.

But probably put like a Predator motor in it, some with the DCT. Yeah.

For me, I've... So this is going to sound really douchey.

McLaren. No, no, no, no.

You've already picked it.

No, I've got to recognize a handful of times, and I really like being low key is what I'm starting to learn, which I don't mind getting recognized. I'll be nice being high. I'm not going to be like, f*** off. But I do kind of like this car, like just looking stock as possible. Like nothing identifies me, right? So kind of one thing is like maybe like a newer Golf R, keep it low key and then do something ridiculous.

Like titanium exhaust?

Yeah, yeah.

Otherwise, dude, I really genuinely like would like a fricking track hawk or something, man.

For a daily?

Yeah, for a daily. If they were getting stolen all the time, right? So it's like that, you know, so.

What if the dude in Hudson's got stolen?

Yeah, great. Yeah, yeah, poor guy, dude. F****** they found it, I think.

Someone like posted a video of it on Snapchat, like some kid like found it, like I saw it, I followed it.

In the city.

Yeah, yeah.

Newport?

Yeah, I think it ended up at a takeover that night.

Oh, poor car.

Some SUV, it has to be an SUV, right? For a daily, like I'm more practical in that sense, and I don't know if a truck is calling my name, a TRX would be kind of cool or a Raptor R, but I think, I think, let's, let's say Trackhawk this time, check back in a few months.

Wait, where does the GTI fit in? So that's your daily?

I was debating. Was that your track car?

Oh, there was a Golf R, was it your track car?

Somebody's not listening. No, it's between a Trackhawk or a Golf R for a day. I think I'm gonna go with Trackhawk today. What was it? Track car? I don't know, man. I'm gonna count those GR86, five, no, I'm kidding. No.

Kidding, not kidding.

Kidding, not kidding.

It would be the slow car, fast mentality though. Fast car, slow, slow car, fast. I do have an appreciation for it, dude. Yeah.

It would be fun. I don't know, man. That Valkyrie is still pretty freaking cool. That whole project comes with a story. It's a track car, track car, right? I feel like if you have unlimited money, you kind of want to go with that. I'm kind of, because now I know about so many freaking things, it's hard. Oh no, I think like a 9-liter Viper build.

Yeah, because you don't specify circuit track or drag track.

Yeah, well yeah, but I'm going to do like a twin-turbo build. I know my limits on it, and I think I would genuinely enjoy road course more over drag racing, as cool as drag racing is, and that's a lot of our fan base. I think let's just call it a 9-liter Viper build. And then, what was it? The Shokar?

Yeah.

I haven't thought about this in a long time, as you can tell. It's been a long time. Got them. And s***'s going ape s*** in my head right now.

Yeah.

God, what did I save the other day?

Shokar.

No, what did I save? Some sort of like... That's the thing, dude. I'm struggling with Japanese, Euro, American. Like, that's the problem. I like literally everything.

It's the wrong answer. It's not like we're gonna like...

It's all wrong answers.

Defriend you on Facebook.

Yeah. See, I'm making my own podcast last forever now.

Yeah.

I'm struggling.

Why is this a four-hour podcast?

You're probably...

You'll never be asked this question again either in the next 10 years.

It's only about two, three more months. We get asked like every sixth or seventh episode. Yeah. And I usually am like, no, no, no, no.

I blow it off.

You got me today. No. I'm going to go with Ralph Gilles, one of the guys from the chief of design or whatever at FCA, whatever, Chrysler right now. Yeah. He was part of Gen 5 Viper Project. He has a really cool full carbon body. I think it's a 60A charger. Let's go with that today. Yeah. That's a pretty cool one. And on that note, you made this far in the episode. Follow us everywhere. Check out our sponsors, blah, blah, blah, blah. Goodbye. Let's get some food. See you. Thanks again for watching the show, guys. Be sure to go into the description down below and check out all of our sponsors. They are what make this show possible. It allows us to travel the country and talk to some really cool guests. So be sure to check them out, support them just like you support us, and see you all next time.