155. Sequential Transmissions, 6XD Gearbox, Drifting and Nascar, w/ Clay Stephens

In the drift market, gearboxes from overseas were starting to merge in. And they come over here with these big V8s and V10s with turbos, superchargers, things like that. A lot of these sequentials were just not an option. So we said, hey, our GSRs and our Andrews, our four-speed dog boxes that are basically coming out of NASCAR is what we're using behind all these American cars. Why don't we take that technology and the sequential technology, put it together. That was the birth of the 6XD, basically.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide Podcast. I'm your host, Harris AK., Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations, and I'm here with my Ford-loving co-host, Dan.

That's me.

Mr. Gunnigrash. We are back in North Carolina by some miracle, we have a number of fun things going on this weekend, and we are here today at 6XD with Clay Stephens. First of all, thanks for having us.

Yeah, I'm excited to have you guys here for sure.

I implore anybody to actually watch the episode because we have a lot of jewelry behind us, just a lot of bling. But go ahead and tell us a little bit about what 6XD is, what it is you guys do here, and we'll just go from there.

So yeah, the 6XD Gearbox is basically an American-made six-speed sequential gearbox made, I just call it for high-performance cars. It's in tons of racing, but it's actually getting quite a bit into the streets and things like that. Like I said, it's all made here in America, and it's all like straight-cut gears. It's all sequential. And so yeah, obviously there's a bunch of different configurations for different cars. We have some new product as well about to hit the market, and we love it. This is our passion. This is what we do. And we love machining. We love engineering. We love going fast in race cars. We love going faster with shifting, cutting our times down by shifting fast, things like that.

So how did this all originate? Because you had some things in your career, and obviously Rick was out here with us currently. How did you guys all meet, and how did this all begin?

So 6XD started around 2017, 2018. And it basically formed somewhat out of a necessity, or a hole in the market, so to speak. Me and Rick, Rick is the owner of RTS. I'm the owner of SS Manufacturing. So we already did a lot of manufacturing in the automotive racing world, where there'd be suspension, valve covers, engine components, things like that. And he did a lot of gearbox stuff, quick change rear ends and things like that. And in the drift market, some of these sequential gearboxes from overseas were starting to merge in. And in the European world, they're used to smaller displacement engines with higher RPMs, lower torque, but still good horsepower. They get a ton of horsepower out of these cars, but a lot of them are just lower torque cars and stuff like that. And they come over here with these big V8s and V10s with turbos, superchargers, things like that. And a lot of these sequentials were just not an option. So we said, hey, our GSRs and our Andrews, our four-speed dog boxes that are basically coming out of Nascar is what we're using behind all these American cars. And so why don't we take that technology and the sequential technology, put it together. And that was the birth of the 6XD, basically. So we put our two heads together. He's got so much experience with drive train, rebuilding gearboxes. Actually, he used to be a part of another Nascar dog box company 15 years ago, or maybe even longer. And so he went through that whole development process. So a lot of his information just from experience and a lot of my knowledge from engineering and all the CAD and design work just basically threw all that together in a mix. And that was the birth of 6XD.

How long before that? When was the birth of S&S Manufacturing? How much further back was that one started?

That was like 2014.

Okay. You were always doing like automotive, race car parts, things like that is kind of how it started then?

Yes. Okay. Yeah. Love machining. So I formed that with Schuyler. Schuyler Schipper, he's actually the other part of SS Manufacture, and he does a lot of the machining or all the machining, 90% of the machining on the gearboxes right now. I'm more of the racer and the designer, and he's all about machining. I love machining too. Anyway, so we got together and formed a company. We had a handful of customers in the racing world, Nascar and then drifting as well.

So is that kind of like the main origin, then Nascar and then drifting? Is that mostly what it comes from? Because I know you do-

That's how I got into it, and that's how I actually met Rick. So, when I first moved up here to North Carolina, I worked for Robbie Gordon in Nascar, back when he was running Nascar, now he's just doing off-road stuff. For the, that was the Jim Beam car, the Monster car, like we had, you know, it was a pretty fun, cool time. But then, I met a guy there that started ASD, his name's Ian, that started ASD, and I didn't know anything about drifting. And ASD was a drift company that was sponsored by Falcon. And so, finally, I went and took a look at what they were doing, and I was like, these cars are pretty cool, because I got to the point, in NASCAR, you know, you build the same car, almost the same car, over and over and over. That was the era when we were going from the fun car, which I would call it the real car, to the COT. So we had, you know, a little bit of change of platform there, but after you build a handful of those, it turns into a factory. It turns into just a factory. So the idea of the drift cars was really cool. You got an actual OEM car that you cut apart. I mean, it's a, you know, a unibody car that now you put a cage in, and now you got tons of horsepower in it. And we had more horsepower than the, you know, NASCAR has. I mean, I'm not trying to dog NASCAR either, but you start looking at some of this stuff, it's like, hey, let's get rid of some of these rules in this rule book and let's start having some fun. And that's what got me into drifting. And Rick actually worked with us at the same place, doing all the gearboxes, all the rear ends, and mechanically running a couple of those cars. So that's where I met him.

Okay.

So you have a car, you do some racing then and driving?

I don't right now.

Okay.

No, I don't. I used to race a long time ago, I used to race circle track race, Legends cars. Okay. But no, I don't now. I try to stay focused on business here. And then also I have three kids at home that are all young right now playing softball, baseball and things like that. So it's not a lot of time for dad to go off racing for the weekend. Yeah.

So do you see yourself getting into like drifting or anything in the future? Get a clapped out 236.

I'm not building a car for one of your kids to go drive?

I'm probably a terrible person to ask that because I don't, I've seen a lot and you can keep this in the show or not, you choose that. But I've seen a lot of people in racing, circle track racing, road racing and drifting. It's not, you know, and if they didn't have to work for it, to me, they don't appreciate it too much. And I'll take it back to some degree because there are those kids out there where they do have to work for it. Even though mom and dad have the money to support it, they still do have to work for it and that's good. But I've always told myself if my kids wanna race, I will be there to help them, but I'm definitely not, I'm not gonna just throw them in something and then they just think this is life because it's actually a big privilege to be able to burn tires and waste that much resources, you know?

Oh yeah, racing weekends of any kind are not cheap, so yeah, I think, yeah.

So I'm kind of a weird person in that aspect to ask that. Most people are like, heck yeah, let's go. But I try to, when it comes to raising kids, everything, you know, everybody views that a little different.

Sure. What does iterations look like, right? Do you guys burst onto the scene and everything's perfect or is there iterations along the way and improvements? Because obviously, you're developing new product here. I guess, was there growing pains along the way?

The growing pains would be not product related at all. It's more supply, I guess not supply demand, but just growing to the demand, trying to scale a company to the demand. Is the demand going up? Is it going down? Where's the bell curve? You know, you can get excited because if things are going fast, all right, let's invest, invest, invest. Throw all the, you know, everything I got into the same basket and you know, so you gotta be careful of that. So scaling a company is, probably everybody that's growing a company would agree that that's probably the hardest thing. But as far as iterations of the physical Gearbox, we were a crazy big success right out of the gate. It's the very first one, we were even blown away. We were like, we didn't have a problem. We took it to, we had Alex Hilbrim running. And actually my mind is drawn to blank. What's the super old road racetrack in California?

Oh, is it the one that just shut down?

There's somebody just bought it.

Okay.

I forget. I never known, now and then my mom.

My California people are so mad right now. Just screaming at the windshield right now.

What is it? It's Willow Springs. Okay. So we took it to Willow Springs and ran around a couple of times and just tried to break it. Basically said, okay, cool. Like we didn't try to break it right off the bat. We just like, hey, let's make sure it shifts good. Let's make sure everything is like we like it. And then we were like, okay, that's good. No problems. All right, let's see if it can handle shifting crazy. So we had him and his drift car just pull, hold it to the floor and just yank the shifter handle to grab the next gear. Okay. And he's like, it's hard to pull, which it should be, because you got dog rings that are back cut, it's designed to hold itself in gear. So you're trying to rip it out of gear. Once it comes out of gear, it goes into the next gear. So this was not with a shift cut or anything like that. It was just to the floor. And it worked. And it blew his mind. And nothing broke. Everything was good. And so, no, there hasn't been any kind of large failures apart from when we entered the Viper world, which we knew we were going to eventually have a failure because at that point in time, we never had like a catastrophic type failure where you're breaking a gear, you're breaking a shaft or some bearings or things like that. We would have the typical where the gears are just getting worn out. You know, basically the consumable items, dog rings or gears that are finally, you know, showing some signs of wear and you know, we MagnaFlex everything here so we get to find things faster than the average person will.

What's MagnaFlexing?

MagnaFlexing is basically crack checking. Okay. And the correct terminology would be NDE testing, non-destructive testing. And so, you're basically magnetizing the part and that's after you put fluid on it with particles in it. And so, any kind of cracks will get attracted to those cracks. I mean, all the particles will get attracted to any cracks that are in the gears. And it's under a black light and you know, so it's in the dark. So when you shine a light on it, you see the crack. Otherwise, you wouldn't have seen it. Sure. So, that's another one is a dipenetrate test. People can do that. Crankshafts will do it. Any kind of engine component, people will do it. Obviously, drivetrain components, stuff like that.

Did this have to start from scratch or did you, so you had to design this gearbox kind of from, did you have something you were working off of or, is there a way to make, get like a manual transmission and set it up linkage-wise to do a sequential or?

There's some people that have done the retrofit type, I think it's S1 sequential or something like that, where they make a shifter for say T56s. Okay. And I don't know much about it. I've never installed one, but from what it looks like on their website, you just take the H pattern shifter off and you put this one on there. I don't know how well it works, but that didn't turn it into a dog box to actually shift fast. You still got sink rings and things like that. But this started, basically the constraints that we had were we, there's a lot of people racing with four-speed, I call them just Nascar four-speed dog boxes because you had a handful of companies making those from Jericho, Andrews, GSR, Mid Valley, all these different companies. And they're all the same length. They're the same Muncie bolt pattern up front. They're the same drive shaft. So that was constraint number one. We wanted somebody to be able to take this out of their car and put in a 6XD, same drive shaft. You're going to have to make a new mount for sure. But that's it, same bell housing, same everything. So that was constraint number one. The other constraint was we worked with, anytime you do something, you're going to want to have as many off the shelf parts as possible. You don't want to start from scratch, like you're saying. Right. So I didn't want to make gears. So I designed the box to use the standard GSR gears from G-Force. So Rick at RTS has a long term relationship with all the guys there at G-Force. Great guys, they worked with us very well on this project, and we've been working with them for years on it. So they saw the potential in it, and they wanted to be involved. And so yeah, they're very highly involved. And so basically, all the gears are... The rest of the gearbox is designed around using as many off-the-shelf parts as we could from that. And those gears have been being used in Nascar for decades.

Well, it gives you more flexibility to change ratios and stuff too then, right? Because you're not like, okay, now we need to make this just to do this gear ratio, or we need to do this.

Yeah, we got a huge ratio chart just because of that. They've made additional ones for us. But yeah, right off the bat, we have a huge ratio chart that automatically beats all the other ones, all the other sequentials out there. Like if you go look in their catalogs, you got like four stacks to choose from. Ours you can do, you're like, not unlimited stacks, but you can do 20 different stacks, 30 different stacks, because it's just so many different ratios. And the way I've designed it is modular. The cluster gear, cluster shaft, however you want to call it, is actually a long spline shaft, the gears just slide on. So I mean, there's a lot of sequentials that do it this way, but not all. And therefore, you want to change the gear right here, you slide the gear off, you slide the gear on. So it makes it simple.

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Okay.

What's your most common type of customer then? So is it still mostly like, cause like again, we were kind of alluding to like street cars and drag cars a little bit earlier. Is it still mostly like that, the drift scene then? Or?

Actually, no, not the most, definitely not. We do have quite a bit of a form of drift. We started counting that the other day. I think it's a third of the field has a 6XD, which is, and there's no other gearbox, you know, as much as a third, you know. So we've got most of them, we've got more than any other gearbox manufacturer, NFD, but no, Road Racing is a large one from Time Attack People. Oh, true. Trans Am, we've got a version for Trans Am that we've made for them, where we lay it over on its side in a super low ground clearance. Those guys will run like a 5.5 inch clutch or 7.5 inch clutch, and their oil pans are dragging the ground. So we had to make the transmission clear also. A lot of those guys, they love it. They're finishing races. Some of the gearboxes in that series have a lot of DNS. So ours fixed a lot of that.

Oh, really? So how do you guys stack up against the competition? Do you have any DNS? I mean, at racing, obviously, but...

In that world, I don't... I honestly can't think of one.

That's such a cool series, too. I got to experience that last year.

Yeah. Yeah. I would like to even get more in it, to be totally transparent, honest. The only downfall to our gearbox in that series is that that series is full of a lot of smart engineers. Obviously, I'm an engineer as well, so I can have a tendency to overcomplicate things. And so, I know where they're coming from, but I'm also a racer. And I know I've worked on the cars, and I know the big budgets of run race teams, things like that. So, the conflict in that series is the weight of the gearbox. It's 20 to 30 pounds heavier than the competition.

Gotcha.

To me, it's not a big deal from an engineering standpoint, because you're at the bottom of the race, you're at the bottom and you're at the center, things like that. So, I'm not too concerned about it on my end, but I know that that is a number that's pretty high to them when they're trying to cut everything out.

Right.

A lot of them already have to add weight anyway.

Okay.

So, it's kind of like when we worked in Nascar, we used to put holes in everything. It was ridiculous the amount of effort we go to to save weight. And the funny thing is the car still weighs the same, because all you're doing is adding more lead. Yeah. You have to put lead in the frame rails to get... Because your car is too light. So, if you cut five pounds out of it, you're just putting more five pounds of lead in it. But what you've done was you've moved it from, say, you know, the rear glass area to now it's in the frame rail. So, but that was enough effort that was worth it in Nascar.

Right.

And Trans Am is along the same lines. Those cars are pretty close, so they're trying to look for every single thing they can. But some of those gearboxes are super lightweight. And this one finishes all the races. They rebuild it. The money difference is large for a lot of teams because when you rebuild one of these, it's normally a lot less than other ones. A lot of things are built modular, so you're not having to replace like a whole shifter barrel or a whole clustered gear. You can just replace pieces that are hurt.

Is that something they have to send here for you to do? Or is that something they can order parts in? Is it something that they can repair themselves or...?

We have both. We have some customers and we support them. I don't have like a huge manual on how to rebuild it, but we have sent videos to a couple of customers to help them do it themselves. We have a team that they'll tear it apart at the racetrack just to change ratios for– they'll change second gear, third gear, whatever, just to dig out of a corner better. So they know exactly what they're doing. They're doing really good. They'll send gears back to us just to Magnaflux. They'll send it back to them and we'll send them parts. So we have a handful that rebuild it themselves, but most of them obviously are– most of them just want to send it here and have us Magnaflux everything, crack check it, put it back on spin rate, make sure all the linkages are adjusted properly and that way they're just plugging it in and going.

Okay, so one of the things we touched on is, you know, it's just a handful of you guys working here. You have a pretty big operation considering how many people you have here. What does support look like then? Who are you all just on the phones all the time or just send it out and it's good to go? What does that look like?

So I think as we get larger, this will become more of a problem. As you have more product out there, obviously you're going to have more maintenance failures or whatever, but we've been able to stay on top of it so far. Rick handles most of the customer relations. I try to stay in the computer designing new product and things of that nature, but every now and then I'll be involved as far as helping diagnose something. Either Rick will hit me with something and I'm like, he's already talked to several people in the day, his mind might be mush and he'll ask me, he's like, everything you're talking about points towards the clutch to me. Let's have them look at the pilot bearing, look at the clutch, you know, and sure enough, normally it's something along those lines. The good news is that normally when even if it seems like a big problem, once you get down to it, normally it's not that big of a problem and we can get it fixed.

What's your, what's the most entry level? So I saw on the board over there, there was 500 or 1000 horsepower written on your whiteboard back here. What's your entry level to get into a sequential? Like, what is your, what is your bottom dollar customer look like?

What did you say on the board?

500 to 1000.

Oh, okay.

Right here, 6XD standard 500 to 1000 horsepower.

Oh, okay. That was probably that board, that actual writing was probably in 2018, to be honest with you. Oh, really?

It is behind several other whiteboards.

It is.

So yeah, it might be an old one.

That needs to be put into a spreadsheet by now and, you know, be in the cloud by now. But yeah, that was before we were trying to figure out, you know, that was the target. It was like, hey, as long as we can consistently hold a thousand horsepower. No, so where we're at now is our standard one up to 1,800 foot pounds, 2,200 horsepower.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

After that, we push everything towards the XDX.

Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. And personally, if I was, you know, there's a gray area there too. What is it going to be used for? What size vehicle, what size tires, things like that. So, we'll factor that in too. If I had 1,500 horsepower and I had a heavy vehicle and I had the money to spend all that, anyway, to get to that point, I would probably start opting up to the XDX anyway. And at that point, XDX hasn't fallen, hasn't failed at all yet.

Could you differentiate, but just kind of explain to the audience real quick. So, what are the various tiers that you have? So, as standard, XDX, is it just those two or?

As far as terms of strength, it's those two. So, the standard gearbox is what we just talked about. It's right up to like 1,800 foot-pounds. And then it's got a lot of variations as far as packages, I guess you could say, to, you know, like you said, it goes into a Camaro. So, we've got like a plug and play Camaro kit, a Mustang, Vipers, 5th Gen Vipers, Corvettes, the C5, C6, C7 Corvettes. We have a handful of adapter plates for a bunch of different engines. We don't have like say plug and play kits for like a power stroke for the truck or whatever, but we do have an adapter plate for the power stroke engine. I think we even did a Cummins engine with Scott Birdsall. So we have a lot of adaptions to get the standard gearbox into it. And actually the XDX gearbox for that matter, because the front and rear of the XDX, like the bolt pattern wise is all the same. So if you have like any type of adapter, it could also work for XDX. So as far as strength though, once you step up in power, then yeah, we steer people towards the XDX, which in all honesty, it's well engineered as well. There's nothing special about it other than the fact that it handles a crap ton of horsepower. The way we get it to handle that power is just larger gears, larger bearings, and more bearings, and it has proven to be amazing, especially in the Vipers. It's been great.

What do you compromise when you go up to the next level? Because obviously, we always have this discussion of street car versus race car, and then the lines are blurred. Is there a compromise when you get into something like this and go through the levels?

How so?

For example, like drivability or whatever, what have you.

Would there be a major difference between the standard and the XDX as far as drivability?

No. Actually like Aaron and Enthmoto and things like that, they love the XDX. Even though it's heavier, it can handle more power. We've got a couple more bearings in there. And I think when it's under load, everything is happier because the bearings are holding it better. So in all reality, the drivability is just as good, if not better. Okay. They're all dog boxes. None of this stuff is sequential. So based on that, I'd be full transparent in that, like that leaves it up to the tuner and the driver on how rough it is or how smooth it is. So like, if you have a, if you got a sink ring type of like OEM style gearbox, you know, the sink rings are going to slow down the gear for you. It's going to slowly go in. It's going to be smooth. You can still make it rough by popping the clutch or being rough on the clutch. Yeah. A dog box, it's going in. It's going to bang in. If your RPMs aren't right or not, it's going in. So if the driver knows what he's doing, then it still can be super smooth. We've actually tuned some cars here with flat shifting or no lift shift, whatever you want to call it. Basically, it's electronics that cut the timing for you when it sees you're upshifting. And you can upshift full throttle or you can upshift part throttle. If you're part throttle, it's just as smooth as like an automatic transmission. You almost don't even feel the next gear. So.

Are you seeing this adapted in the drag racing community? We haven't really, I haven't heard that one come up yet. Is that a thing that's happening? I'm noticing that a lot of times now in the rules, they're specifying H pattern. Is this a thing that's up and coming in the drag community?

No, we have a lot of drag customers, a lot of street strip type customers that are going to want to, hey, I want to have fun with my car, you know, drive it all the time on the street. Now, I want to take it to the drag strip. So we have a lot of those guys. You're right. We have a lot of guys, I think, that would be sequential and more specific, 6XD sequential. I've heard it like, I've heard it a ton of times. I would love to run your gearbox, but we have to run H pattern. So those guys are obviously getting like a TR6060 type built up pretty heavily and things like that, which actually we make a T56 case too. Did one, it's a project that we also do with Enth Moto to help develop their H pattern program, which I think sounds like they're doing real well with that. They got their gear set. Tick Performance also builds a lot of these types of gear boxes, granis, things like that. But yeah, the H pattern guys, they're building awesome gear sets and stuff like that, but you finally get to a point where the case is going to break. And basically, the bearings pop out in the back. Actually, I've seen cases totally split, but it's very common to pop the bearings out of the back. And so, yeah, we have a case that it's all, it's fully billet, just like all the stuff that we do, and it's got a steel insert that holds those bearings in, and nobody's, they're not going to break one of those. Nobody has, and I would bet that it never will.

So, how, I'm trying to think how to ask this. How, if you were to look at your customer base, how much of it is, like, I guess, quote unquote, off the shelf versus completely custom? Because I'm sure you have some customers ask for, they have a problem, you can come up with a custom solution.

That's a good question. Percentage-wise, 50-50.

Really?

Okay. No, as far as how many, like, the gearbox is going out the door, yeah, large, more than half are off-the-shelf packages we already have. Because we, at first, obviously, maybe not. You know, when we first started the gearbox, because as soon as we have it, we say, hey, you got something for, come here, you got something for a Viper. So everything was like, no, I don't, but let me get the files, let me start designing, we'll get you something as fast as we can. And then, okay, now we have a Viper package. Now we have a Camaro package. At this point, we don't have many that we have to do that's super custom.

Okay. Is it, is it sometimes like, for example, somebody will come to you with a problem, you come up with a solution, and then that becomes available to a wider market rather than one customer sometimes?

That's normally always the target, in my opinion, for a business standpoint, that makes more sense. And then just a humanity, if you will, standpoint of like how to, you know, I'm putting time into something, I would like for more people to enjoy it, not just one person. So, you know, it's very beneficial if you can spend whatever time it takes to design a package, but then many people get to enjoy it. So, yeah, that's always the target. But we do have a couple of one-offs, even the land speed. We're working on a land speed thing with a customer right now. They're going to have some one-off stuff. There's not a lot of land speed guys going 400, so that's not a large market. So some of their stuff's one-off.

Okay. Because of the way this shifts, you can adapt it to paddle shift as well, then, for something like this?

Yep. So leading into your question, I'll start from ground zero, technology-wise, it's a manual gearbox. So you got a clutch, but it's a dog box. You can shift it manually if you want to. Once you take off, once you use the clutch to take off, say you're in neutral, push your clutch in, put it in first gear. Once you take off, you can actually just hesitate on the throttle a little bit, just lift up on the throttle and shift to your next gear. You don't need to actually use the clutch. Sometimes it's smart to use clutch, say, if you're drifting, because you got wheel spin, you got a difference in ratio between the way the wheels, the tires are de-selling and your crankshaft is de-selling. So because of that, it's always smart to just use the clutch. You can take the next step up in technology, which would be, I mentioned it earlier, which is flat shifting, or some people call it no lift shift, which is basically you have electronics and you got a sensor on the gearbox called a low tail that can tell if you're up shifting or down shifting. And so the human, the person is still actually physically moving the handle, up shifting, down shifting, but the electronics is sensing what he's doing. And then if he's trying to up shift, his job is just to hold it to the floor, no clutch, no lifting of the throttle, nothing, just hold it to the floor. And if he's up shifting, it will induce a spark cut to the engine. So, for a split second, you'll have no torque going through the motor, and it will allow you to get in to the next gear. People can normally shift faster that way, obviously, because you can get electronics. If you're lower gears between first and second, you're like 150 milliseconds maybe. But when you start getting in to your higher gears, some of the better times we've ever seen is like 30 milliseconds, like between fifth and sixth. I think even we keep bringing up Aaron Itzmodo, but he's really switched on with his tuning. He's very smart. But yeah, he was able to get these into the 30s. I don't know if it's all the cars that he's doing or just the one that he told me about.

Okay, so this is actually a topic we've had, especially with some higher level tuners on the show. How important is tuning when you're talking about transmissions, right? Because people always think that one's working, like is it the engine, is it the trans? And it's like, what's the issue? That's a horrible way of asking that question. I guess, how important is tuning when it comes to transmissions?

It depends on what you're doing. I guess I need to go back, you asked about paddle shifting. So it's kind of the same question, or it leads into the same question. The next step up from flat shifting or no lift shifting is paddle shifting. And when it comes to a tuner, they love that. We love it too. As long as the tuner is good. And we'll get into that in a minute. So paddle shifting, basically the driver base is just flipping a switch and says, hey, I want to upshift. Hey, I want to downshift. After that, the electronics can go through its pre-programmed series of events. It can decide when to lift the throttle or it can decide when to stab the throttle for blip shifting for a downshift or when to spark cut and when to shift. All that timing can be programmed and then it's repetitive. It don't matter if the driver is lazy or if the driver is excited and got too much adrenaline going. When you're no lift shifting, you can program the no lift shift or flat shifting on the safe side and then it will work for if the driver wants to shift slow or if he wants to shift fast, but if you want to fine tune it and get every single bit out of it, then yeah, paddle shifting allows you to do that more. And normally you can get it done faster and then obviously the drivers get to keep their hands on the wheel more. But as far as tuning all that, you are correct. We have a kit for, we have like a stand-alone kit that we worked with X and Earing. X and Earing is a company in Florida. It's owned by Max. And Max is an amazing, amazing human. He's very smart, very helpful. He's very good with customer relations and diagnosing problems and stuff like that. But anyway, with him, we've developed a kit for the no lift shift and the software is super easy to tune. And so it allows people to tune that on their own. When you get into the paddle shift stuff, a lot of that stuff gets a little bit more complicated. Most of those people are like say MoTec or whatever. It's important to have a good tuner. Yes, you are. You hit the nail on the head on asking that question because we actually do have a, one of our race teams, the guys that own the race team, they get it. They even say, hey, if we're tuning in new electronics, you might as well plan on that gearbox going back in for a rebuild after before you finally get all the kinks worked out of the electronics because a lot of times they'll hurt it.

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They'll, the dog rings will be rounded off. They've never heard it as far as gears or cracked dog rings. Normally, they just round the dog rings off, and it just needs to be rebuilt, and they're like, all right, now all electronics are good, let's go.

Okay. Yeah. How quick is, let's say somebody needs something rebuilt, right? Whether just swapping out a few little pieces here and there, is it just a matter of just sending it to you and it's here for a few weeks and comes back? How crazy of a turnaround time is it when you're servicing something like that?

Obviously, we don't paint ourselves into a corner and say like a one-day turn around all the time. But we can at times. We are racers like Rick's at a racetrack right now. Okay. What kind of racetrack? Where did he go? I think he went up to New Jersey.

Okay.

So the Drift track.

Okay.

English town where they're running, I think it's the Gambler this weekend. So yeah. And he's been racing for ever, working at Indy, is it PPI? Yeah. The Tide Car, 32 Tide Car, back in Nascar a long time ago. All kinds of different racing in Nascar. And like I said, Indy and stuff like that. So we know racing, and it's a, you know, we've been in the situation where we need stuff Saturday morning from a Friday night failure or whatever. And so we do that things for those types of things for customers, we ship them stuff if we need to. It's normally more clutch oriented or things like that. But if they need to send it in here for a rebuild, if it needs to be turned around quick, we can do it. Okay.

Do you have a clutch that you recommend to people, or do you put just like a standard, like you put a McLeod in, or is that up to the customer as to what they want to use, and would that be vehicle specific, or is it your transmission specific?

All of the above. We do leave that up to the customer. We have suggestions, we sell clutches here. RTS, which is Rick, is actually the one with the relationships with most of the clutch companies. And he's got the experience of like, hey, this goes with that, that goes with this. If it's a weird package, then normally you kind of paint yourself into a corner of what clutch has already, somebody's already figured out the right flywheel and adapter plates and stuff like that. The bellhousing with it, things like that. But if it's a LS platform, you've got so many options of clutches and bell housings and things like that. So we'll steer them in the right direction because we have the knowledge and the experience on what it is. Here, most of the brands that are going out this door is either ACT or Tilton. The new ACT twin disc that they have, I don't know if they measure it in millimeters, I call it a nine and a half inch twin, and this seems to be a good all-around high performance clutch. It does real well, and it's priced real well as well.

Well speaking of pricing, what is the standard? Let's say I've got a Corvette and I want to put that in there, what's that going to cost me?

Corvettes, more expensive package. So our standard gearbox, which as I was saying, you got a front engine, rear wheel drive, and the transmission is right behind the bell housing, and it's just straight standard. I think the current pricing is like $21,800. The Corvettes, which include the torque tube, the axles, the quick change rear end, the drive shaft, basically everything from the back of your bell housing to get to your hubs includes all of that. I don't know the exact pricing right now. This should be around right around $36,000 to $37,000.

Oh wow.

Okay.

Okay.

How important is when you switch to something like this, is the rest of the drivetrain down the line? Because as you're kind of explaining to me, it seems like these shifts can be kind of violent. Depending on when you do it. Is it sending more shock back down the line there? Are we breaking more axles doing stuff like that as you move into something like this?

That's a possibility. And that's true with all dog boxes, whether that's an H pattern or anything. If you take a T56 and you put dog rings all in it, then you're in the same boat. You can get it into the next gear pretty abruptly. So now that's up to the driver. Yeah, so you gotta be smart with your drivetrain. Normally, we don't see a lot of problems with that because the price of our gearbox automatically puts us into a category of customer that's gonna upgrade everything.

Right.

So, yeah, we don't normally see those types of problems where they're breaking other stuff that goes along with it.

Can you, this may sound really dumb, but I don't live in this world, and actually the term dog box is only something I've learned over while I started doing this, like a year or so ago. Can you explain to me what a dog box is and how that works?

Yes, okay, so you got to basically what you have is you got either a synchro transmission or a dog box transmission. So a synchro, the way a gear engage, so a gear itself is always meshed. You're not sliding gears inside of each other, I mean here to show. But you engage them by a slider will actually engage the teeth that are on the front of the gear. A synchro or a synchring type gear box actually slows the gear down for that to go in. Yep, here you go. I don't have any synchrings here, there's no synchrings in this building.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a little.

I kind of understand synchros, that's the world I live in, so I get that, yeah, yeah.

So yeah, it slows the gear down to go in. It takes time to do that, it takes time to slow the gear down. And then you got all, you know, I don't even know the amount of teeth that are on a synchro, but it's like, it's a lot more than a dog box. On a dog box, this is what you have. So this would be what you call a faceplate, and it's riding, it's attached to the gear itself. This is the slider that is basically, the center of this is attached to the output shaft. So once this, once these lock together, now the gear right here is attached to the output shaft. So it's basically the engagement. You can see how they engage. There's nothing to slow the gear down. There's a lot less teeth than a synchro transmission. There's only six here. A lot of the sequentials actually have five. A lot of the H pattern dog boxes, like a Nascar, there are normally eight lugs. Lugs is just like the number of teeth there. So that's it. They're just, they're out of one gear and in the next gear.

Yeah, that's like right now.

So if you're like, this would work. So an example of how clunky they could be. So like when you're, when you got a sequential engagement here, there's, you don't have this slop. So when you're on throttle, it's going to go against here. As soon as your off throttle goes clunk, on throttle goes clunk. So you have that constant little bit of like, slop in the transmission. But that slop is what allows it to shift really fast. Sure.

Is that the most common wear item in a gearbox like this?

I would say so. Okay. Especially in H patterns. When people are shifting H patterns, maybe it's a more complicated shift, especially when you're going across a gate. But we see a lot more worn out dog rings in H pattern gearboxes than we do the 6XD. The 6XD, I think it's just because the way the detents are made, like once you pull hard enough to get past the detents, you're shifting clean. You're out of the gear, you're in the next gear cleaner than say H pattern.

Do you guys build any H pattern stuff here then too? Or are you strictly just sequential with the stuff you do?

6XD Gearbox is sequential. Okay. Rick still does a lot of the H pattern stuff with, he does all that through his RTS company. But yeah, we still rebuild them. He'll sell new ones, sell used ones when they're available. They're becoming harder to, they're becoming less available in the used world right now, just because Nascar's switched to their transaxle that they're running. So, there's a lot less in the used world.

Are you seeing, do, again we spent a lot of time with drag racers, right? So, there's a constant like automatic manual, like there's a barking, you're slower, you're faster, but you know, I'm a man because I shift with a clutch, all this kind of stuff. Does a sequential fall in there anywhere? Are both these guys looking down on you? Like where, do you know where that kind of lands in?

There's all sorts, you know, there's all sorts of people.

People find a way to b**** no matter what.

Yeah, and so, we run in the same thing just like with our gearbox in general. We do, we have some people that are like, I want H pattern and that's fine. We've had people ask us to turn our gearbox into an H pattern and I'm like, there's T56s out there, like there's, that's technically already solved for you. It may not look as fancy as ours, but I don't know. There are those gearbox and things. But no, we just, just our product alone runs in that same type of mentality because you do have a manual shifting platform. You have the flat shifting platform, and then you have the paddle shifting platform. So some people are like, I don't want paddle shift. I want to shift the gearbox. Well, that person is still having a electronics cut as ignition form. And then you'll have another like old school, old school road racers like, no, I don't want any of that flash shift. And I know how to, you know, I know how to left foot or two foot my pedals. And I can do all the down shifting and that, you know, I can blip the throttle. I want to do it all manually. So yeah, every tier has a different, what I'd say is they have a different level of what they consider is worthy of like a driver aid that is worthy of having. So they're all just driver aids. Yeah, they're speeding things up. They're making it easier for the driver. So at what point is it too much and is it too automated? And that's different for everybody, obviously.

Yeah. So you basically have a solution for anybody and everybody.

We do in our world, but if they hate the sequential and they're like, I got to have H pattern, then no, those H pattern guys need to go get their H pattern. And if they're automatic lovers, normally people don't love automatics. This is just obviously my opinion. But they may get automatics out of necessity for the shifting. They just, they rob a lot of horsepower, but if you have a lot of horsepower, they can also take a lot of horsepower. So, and I don't want to be speaking too much out of turn because we don't do automatics here. This is just kind of my interpretation of, you know, what I've learned through the years. They do handle, like, air and ith motor, he can get those TH400s to handle a crap ton of power. We also know they rob a lot of power, too.

Yeah.

So, and you don't have many gears. You have, it's basically a three-speed with a converter lockup, so you don't have the ratios that you do in, let's say, a six-speed.

Would you say this kind of bridges the gap between H-pattern and automatic, then? Because it's, from the times that you were telling me that this thing can shift, those are pretty good.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I told you probably the best times, a typical like real quick one, yeah, still 40, 50 second, milliseconds, but no, especially when you start talking, say paddles. Yeah. And honestly, you can even take it to the next stream above that and turn it into what you would call an automatic, where the computer sees the load, sees where your throttle is, sees the RPM and it can decide what gear it needs to be in. And it could do that as well. We've never had a customer take it to that extreme. But it could operate that way, for sure.

Right.

So yeah, for all that purposes, it's really acting just like an automatic.

Okay.

I want to know more about you, though. You keep mentioning your history in racing and all this. So where does this all begin, right? I guess what kind of got you, one, into working on cars but more so on a professional level as well?

Well, I grew up working on cars. My dad had a foreign car repair shop and we worked on German cars, Japanese cars. I grew up doing that. I was trying to think back what age it was because I have a 12-year-old son right now. He's coming to work and learning the machine shop stuff. I feel bad that sometimes he's like, you're not going to learn how to do all the head gaskets that I did when I was, how old was I? I don't really remember my ages. But yeah, so I basically grew up in the shop, work doing those types of things. Transmissions, it started off doing oil changes and then it turned into, hey, we got a Suzy Trooper with Cracked Head or a head gasket, don't know, take it off, let's find out. And then, you know, just doing all that type of stuff. And then I worked on cars enough to know that I didn't want to work on cars when I grew up, at least not OEM cars. Yeah. And so I was actually pretty smart with math and you know, I actually love math and things. So anyway, I decided to do an engineering school. So I went and got a mechanical engineering degree. In the same process of doing that, I was more excited about racing. Growing up, we were fans of different racing, whether it be NASCAR, NHRA. So we went, anything local, we went and saw that and did that.

Were you always local to North Carolina then?

No, I'm from Georgia.

Georgia, okay.

Yep. I'm from Georgia. So we would go to Atlanta Motor Speedway or go to Commerce, Georgia, where they had the NHRA track. I think they tore that down recently, which is kind of sad. But, so that kind of planted the seed of like, of racing. My dad was not a racer. He's actually more of a lake boat guy. And I grew up on the lake too. So I'm also by nature addicted to the lake. But let's see, so fast forward through all that. When I'm in college, I was actually traveling around with the ARCA team. What? ARCA team, ARCA. Which is like a step under trucks, like NASCAR trucks.

Oh, okay.

It's not NASCAR, it's a whole other series. But they basically take the cars that have trickled down through there. And they built a series of that. It's not new, they've been around for obviously many, many years. So I was traveling with the ARCA team, part of the pit crew, part of them, you know, doing the mechanic work and stuff like that. But I was learning a lot about the setup. And I was in an engineering school at the same time. So suspension setup, whether it be circle track or road racing, became my thing that I was just learning as much as I could. At that point in time, I was like, hey, I'm not a driver, I've never driven. I'm sitting here setting up cars. Hey, it's tight, it's loose. You know, I hear this stuff from the driver. I've never felt that firsthand and been able to make the changes myself and see what that's like. So that's when I started getting into Legends racing. And for the sole purpose, yeah, it's a lot of fun. And maybe that's purpose enough. Maybe I just needed to justify it elsewhere. But anyway, I got into that. And yeah, I played around with the suspension, moving pivot points and seeing what that did and things like that. So they're not as adjustable as, say, a stock car with, you know, sway bars in the front and rear, things like that. But so I spent, I don't know how many years racing Legends cars and playing with that. And that's a lot of fun. I really love driving race cars. And I should do it more. And so after that, I see. So that was engineering school. Graduated Southern Polytech with a mechanical engineering degree, I almost went to Orlando. University of Central Florida has a program down there for, it's a master's program. It's called High Performance Engine Optimization. So you spend two years taking an internal combustion engine and playing with piston design, head design, and with all their resources. They only accept five students a year. And I was adamant about, you know, I did all my due diligence, writing letters, calling the dude that does that program. I got accepted to the program. And the funniest thing is, this is what sounds like a short story long, but this is what brought me to North Carolina. That program started about a year. I had about a year to waste, nothing to do. And I had a friend that graduated with me earlier, not with me, graduated the same program as me about a year earlier, they're already working up here at Roush Racing in North Carolina. So I moved up here for the year. I guess I didn't move up here yet. I came up here to hand out resumes, to just get some racing experience. I'm about to go to this master's program. It'd be smart just to get some racing experience, whatever. So I did that, handed out a bunch of resumes, nothing really hit. So I was like, oh well, I'll go ahead and go down to Orlando and get settled in there, find some race teams around there to work for. So when I'm literally sitting down to sign the lease of apartment, like going through the actual stuff, and then you got to realize that at this point in time, I hadn't worked in a professional level of racing at all. And one of the largest teams I had handed out a resume to was Robbie Gordon Motorsports, and he himself actually called me. I'm like, hello. And he's, hey, this is Robbie Gordon with Robbie Gordon Motorsports. I'm like, hang on. Let me take a breath for a second, you know, that type of thing. And then he's like, hey, I just want to talk to you. Let's look at your resume. I saw your, I did like a welding test for fabrication and stuff like that. And he's like, it's rare that you find somebody that's an engineer that can also weld really well. So I told a dude at the apartment place like, all right, I got a rain check on getting this apartment. I'm driving to North Carolina. So I drove to North Carolina, took the job. And I've been up here ever since, working in racing and then started our own company in manufacturing and then obviously the 6XD side of things.

Okay, so you take that job. What time period was that roughly?

2005.

2005.

2005, 2006, yep.

So then you're there for nine years then, or do you have some side projects at that point? What does that look like?

So, I was there for probably three years.

Okay.

I think I was there for three years. And actually, workload's heavy there. It's a lot of hours. There's a lot of turnaround. So, by the time I left, I was actually one of the, there's only like two people that had seniority above me. Okay. So, but that was an awesome job. Actually, Robbie himself is really cool to work for in that we did some really cool projects that, you know, he's got the resources and he's got the dreams. And you're the one that makes those dreams happen, whether it be through fabrication or machining or whatever. And it's really cool to do that. So, we, it sounds crazy. I know we do some pretty cool, awesome stuff here. And it's probably just cause I'm more accustomed to it now, but looking back, I really enjoyed a couple of those projects we had, which weren't even car-related. I built some pit boxes for him to go in the in the hauler, very specifically designed pit boxes, all fabricated. You can buy these things. There are several hundred thousand dollars if you buy them. But normally, they're too big to fit in the rig.

Are you talking about like the pit walls, like where engineers sit at and all that?

Yeah. They have all the TVs in them. We built one, I don't know how many, seven or eight different TVs in it, and they even had a PlayStation in it for them to play racing games when they were bored. The whole backup, it flips up. I designed these huge hinges. They're just basically like hyper-extended hinges that you would use on a stock car, but they're just so massive and they're huge. That was a fun project. The reason for that project is, Robbie wanted to haul his own pit cart around. I don't know if you know this, but all those teams, I don't know if it still is this way, I bet it is, but they buy a pit box and it is very, very expensive. And then they don't fit in the rigs. They actually have a separate third-party company that takes everybody's pit cart from racetrack to racetrack. So when the teams get there, their pit cart is there. So they have to service it, put new nitrogen, all the consumables back in there. But yeah, it's a third-party company. And Robbie is like, no, I want to have it in my rig. And so we made one. It's got all the same bells and whistles as all those boxes have, but it fit in his rig. So it's a pretty impressive project. And then so I spent a lot of time doing special projects there. Also did a lot of chassis fab there. Front clips, rear clips, that's when we were converting over to the COT. So you were allowed to do a lot of front clip stuff on the COT. The main cage was standard. You didn't touch that once it was done.

And COT is what again?

Car of Tomorrow. OK. That came around, I don't even know what year, I guess that was around the 2007 mark. So, did a lot of chassis work. He actually had a machine shop there too. He used Haas. He had a Haas mill, Haas lathe and some manual stuff too. So I got involved with that as far as the software they're using. I was just, I really wanted to do that, which is why we do it now. But it made cool parts that were very accurate and things like that. So I actually got to a point where I was working in the machine shop a lot. And then I also worked a lot on the setup plate. We had a lot of times, the cars are, you know, midnight getting loaded in the hauler or later, three o'clock in the morning a lot of times.

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I ended up working on the chassis plate to help them out on some, because it was just... You learn a lot. I mean, there's a... And honestly, in the racing world, in my experience, the... I don't know what the regular opinion is of Nascar, but the setups on those cars are way more complicated than any drift car, of course, or road race car.

Yeah, it's kind of like Nascar and Indy car. It also comes to mind. It's like, I actually read Adrian Newey's book last year, and I did not realize...

What was that book called again?

How to Build a Car. Straight up.

I just haven't heard it in a while.

Yeah, it's been a few episodes, but like, I did not realize how intricate it is. Like, it's a lot more complex than people think to go in a circle even.

Well, the circle is the problem, or that's what makes it complicated, is because you're fine-tuning one direction. You're fine-tuning a left-hand turn. So your front axle and your rear axle, of course, are going to have different setups, but it's asymmetric front to rear, it's asymmetric left to right. So every corner is a different spring, right? Every corner is a different camber. Every corner is different caster. Like you got, you know, caster split up front. Like everything is so, especially when you start talking about roll centers for Nascar, we went through a handful of crew chiefs working at Robbie's. So, you know, one week we have a crew chief that loves that left front upper control arm. He wants the left front upper control arm high and as long as possible. Next thing you know, the next guy comes in and that upper control arm needs to be short and down low. Well, as far as where it's mounted. So we were cutting, you know, you got like perches that you that they mount to. So I was, you know, cutting perches off left and right, moving stuff to where the crew chiefs want. Same racetracks, you know. They're not the same exact ones, but like they're intermediate, a mile and a half intermediate racetracks, which would all typically have a similar setup. Okay. It's just the difference of what they think works.

Interesting. Does that affect, and that obviously affects like the whole package as well, right? Like if you mess with one corner, it affects everything else too then?

It does. It all depends on what degree, what it is. Biggest thing from an engineering standpoint that I see in that particular change is you're moving the roll center and the camber curve. So, it probably isn't gonna instantly change the handling of the car, because you can make like a track bar adjustment on the rear to get it fine tuned again, or change the wedge, which is basically the pressure on each tire that's going through the springs. You get it back right, but what it is gonna change is when you're trying to make 50 laps on the tire, at lap 40, how good are you then? And that's what these crew chiefs are shooting for. And in their defense, it's very abstract. Nothing's cut straightforward. And all they know to do is what they know to do. But I guess to sum it up, the reason we went even down that is the circle track racing is very complicated. And I respect the people that set the cars up, number one, but also decide what those setups need to be. It's way easier to do a road race car.

OK, so you did that for three years then. I'm curious, what do the hours look like? What are your responsibilities over those three years? Is it just everything?

So, yeah, different seasons. You know, I was in the chassis plate for a while. Sometimes it was. It was a lot of late nights because I ended up on a setup plate, like I said, and setup plate was always last minute. It's the last thing that happens before the car gets loaded in the hauler. So, every department that took a little bit longer than they were supposed to all gets crunched into the last guy. So those hours were tough. You couldn't, it'd be tough to have a family, it'd be tough to keep outside of work good, but I was good at that stage of my life. I was fine doing that because I didn't have a family. I was, that was, that's what I did. So, that was fine. So, after Robbie's is when I had met Ian that started ASD at Robbie Gordon's, and that's when I left and went and worked for him.

Okay. And ASD is what again?

It's a drift shop. It's right now, I think it is, right now it is primarily e-brakes. I think they might have a couple other products. But what came from that turned into RTR Motorsports that it is now with Vaughn Gittin Jr. Vaughn Gittin Jr. was a driver for ASD and for Falcon Tire at that time.

Gotcha.

And then emerging through the years, he became, you know, working with Mustang, working with Ford, continues to get larger and larger, working on his platform. And he's obviously done an amazing job getting to where he's at now with his relationship with Ford. The company that he has built, he's got Fun Havre, also a whole other branding of in the automotive world. So he's done great through that. And so, yeah, I worked there at the Drift Shop for I don't know how many years we did. We won some championships, we won some, a lot of races. We had a four car team.

Okay.

And that's, I did a lot more. That's where I was learning the setup of drifting. And then there's not really a, there's no books on drifting.

Not yet, at least. To be the first.

To be the right one. There are a lot of people out there by now, like there's so many people out there that know a lot about the setups now. There's a lot of people that don't. There's a lot of people in the professional level that, honestly, it's amazing. It's cool in drifting that you can get that far without having to be experts as far as the suspension is concerned. You can just buy a kit and put it where they say to put it. And as long as you're a good driver, obviously, you can make it a long ways. And that's pretty cool.

So, you were there for a number of years. What does your role kind of consist of there?

I was a fabricator. And then we got some CNC machines. So, I was the designer and programmer of a lot of parts and machining stuff in the CNC machine. And then at the racetracks, I was a spotter. And then also like a setup guy and chassis guy. So, I guess you would call it a race engineer. So, in drifting, it's a little bit different. And different teams run it differently. But the way we always ran it and the way I've always done it is the spotter is also what you would call a race engineer or like the setup guy. So, he's making the chassis changes, the decisions of the chassis changes.

Because you're watching how it performs out there.

Yep.

Okay.

Instead of the driver saying, hey, I need this. Well, sometimes the driver don't see everything. So, a lot of times you can say, hey, you're not going out here or whatever. Your car needs to do this. Can you do that? Or do you need me to do something with the car to make it do that? But if it's the other way around, it works the other way around. There's other teams where the setup guys more in the pits. And you got the spotter saying, hey, you're missing this, you're missing that. And they have a conversation. Well, I can't get out there. So, then the chassis guy will get involved and be like, okay, well, we can make a change. We can help you there.

And you were doing that for all four cars then?

Well, I did that for two cars. And then Ian did the other two.

Got you.

For quite a while, yep.

So what kind of... I'll let you talk eventually, Denny.

No, I'm fine. I'm good.

I'm on a stride all of a sudden. So what are these changes and setups look like then? What are you looking for as a spotter for a drifter?

They've changed through the years quite a bit. The performance level of the cars obviously have changed through the years. Back then, we would change, you have your car set up. Normally, the spring rates that you're going to run are going to stay the spring rates, hopefully all weekend. You might change them between sessions, but as far as like in the heat of the moment, you're changing rear bar links like that would change how stiff the rear bar is. You would change shock settings, making the compression or the rebounds stiffer or softer on the front or the rear. What else will we adjust? Gearing, if the gearing's not right, we'd adjust the rear, we had quick change gear sets in all those cars. What else will we change? Tire pressures. Sure. That's pretty much the quick go-to between them as far as like in the... Because when you're in the heat of the moment, you're trying to get as many laps as you can, you can't spend forever making a large change. So you got to do shock changes and tire pressures and stuff like that. And so... And that's all based on like where they're going. I don't know if you... How informed you guys are with drifting. But it is a judged sport, but at the same time, the performance factor of it is absolutely insane. Like, and that's what drives me. I do hate the... I think I won that one, but I lost, because it's a judged sport. It's not a green flag or a checkered flag, I should say. But the performance factor of it is absolutely insane. And you would make these changes based on like where the car is at or how fast you're going. It's still a race, even though they don't judge the speed, it's still a race, because if you can do all the things that you have to do, fill in all the zones with the angle and commitment, and if you can do that faster than the other guy and the other guy can't hang with you, you're gonna win. So it's a race.

So you do that for however many years. What's next?

What's next? I worked for, I took a break from racing for a while, getting into the machine world, machine shop world.

Okay.

And that's actually, that was a pretty cool place I worked for during that period of time because I did a lot of manual machining as well as CNC machining. And it was very intricate work. It was a nuclear, it was a shop that produced parts for nuclear power plants. So, the level of precision was pretty cool. And I think that that's what's helped us a lot with the way we manufacture parts here now, and the way that we design them so that they can be manufactured accurately and things like that. So, I think it's helped me a lot through that. But that was a good, a fun time to learn all of that. So, I went from racing, like a lot of time, a lot of effort into racing, and then back to just machining. So, you can see where the balance is. Now that I'm looking back at it, you can see even where the balance is of the mixture of what forms, say, 6XD. And I did that until I started SS manufacturing. And that was with Tyler McQuarrie, not with him, but he was a deciding factor for me to stop an employee W2 type job and go out on my own, take a step of faith out on my own as an entrepreneur. And I was going to manage his race team. He had a Camaro, a drift Camaro with LS7 in it. And I had worked with him when I worked at ASD. He was one of our drivers. So he bought a Camaro and wanted to go drifting again. And so we managed that program for him mechanically, even somewhat monetarily as far as helping the whole program. And so that was the step into manufacturing here. We ran a race team, but we also had some CNC machines where we started doing job shop stuff. We did job shop stuff for nuclear people, race people, a lot of suspension design stuff. So that filled those years until we get to about 2017, 2018, which is when 6XD was born.

But what does that transition look like? Like it doesn't matter, like here's my two weeks and you just go buy a bunch of machine and stuff? Like what exactly does that transition look like?

I need to write it down, don't I? I don't remember. Yeah, the two weeks, hey, I'm going to start my own company with, and at that point in time, I don't know if I had already bought a machine. It started off, I guess this is an interesting fact, but yeah, I had a shop behind my house. This is in Nascar area, tons of racers around here. So it's very common, you'll see a 1200 square foot house with a 4,000 square foot shop in the back, you know?

This is how everything should be designed as far as I'm concerned.

Exactly, that's what it is. Every car guy would agree. And you got a lot of those around here. So I had a similar setup. I didn't have 4,000 square feet, but the shop in my backyard was as big as my house. And I got a, I was just in a neighborhood, you know, regular neighborhood. And I bought my first CNC machine and had it shipped to the house. Okay. And I had to put, I didn't have three phase there, so I had to put a three phase converter in and things like that. But that got me into my own, I'm making my own parts at my own facility. And so then I could make my parts, but I could also make parts for other people. So that was the birth of it.

What kind of parts were you making at this point?

They were more race, race car parts.

Sure.

So for the program that we had, valve covers, we actually, we had this amazing motor with this amazing rocker gear in it, and there was not a single valve cover on the market that you could bolt in. Like I think Brodix was the one that made the heads. I think the rocker gear was from Crower and Jessel also. But these people made all these parts, but there was no valve covers to cover it, to fit. So anyway, so I have to design them and we machined them there. So we did that. We've actually, we still sell those valve covers now. So that was one thing. Anything that needed for the car, we got transmission mounts on that car that were billet, you know, instead of fabricating it, basically I draw it up and cut it in the CNC. So for me, that's more fun.

Do you have, do you stock stuff on the shelf here? If somebody orders gearbox from you, or is it made to order?

It's made to order, yes. So we rarely have gearboxes like already made. And mainly it's just because of ratios. If we had a standardized ratio set, then yeah, we could already have them pre-built. But no, everything's made to order, but everything is in stock. So like the lead times are, compared to other gearbox companies, the lead times are way good. Because we don't order other gearboxes obviously, so I don't hear it firsthand, but I hear it from their customers that like, you know, the worst ones we hear are from overseas and they're over a year to get stuff built, you know? Yeah. But even some stuff here in the States, people will tell them that, you know, we'll get that stuff to you in like two months, three months. It's like, we can do way better than that. But actually, I mean, we can do next day stuff for stuff, for people that are like absolute gotta have it right now, go into the racetrack, then we can bang out some stuff pretty fast. Obviously, we don't ask people to call us to do that, because we do have a build schedule that we're trying to stick to.

Well, I'm sure that comes at a cost as well.

It could. I don't even think, you know, yeah, you're right. We're probably not gonna help you out quite as much on money if we have to bend over backwards immediately, but it's not like, we don't have an expedite charge type thing, so.

There's a point where, I mean, who hasn't seen somebody scrambling at a racetrack, right? Like it's a thing. You're trying to get parts, or somebody's coming up to your trailer going, hey, do you have this?

Yeah.

I need this AN line. Like I need this adapter or whatever.

So you know all about that, don't you?

Yeah, I do. Um, when it comes to ratios, then because you have kind of an endless option, almost, if somebody calls in here and says, hey, let's say I'm a drifter. I know enough about my car, but I'm not really sure where I want to be at. I'm going from a T56 to something like this. Right. Is that something where you can offer support on, hey, this is where I think you should be at ratio-wise?

Yeah, we offer a ton of support with that, just about. I wouldn't say all of our customers, because we have a handful that are like, they've been raising, they know what they want. But no, we offer, we have a gear calculator chart, where, you know, it shows your splits and your, you know, it shows everything you need to know. And so we'll normally bounce that back and forth with the customer to get them decided on what they want. A lot of people come in, you're asking earlier about like drag racing, street cars, things like that. It's funny because, you know, we get our customers to fill out a configuration sheet and it's like, what's the purpose of the vehicle? And normally it, not normally, but a lot of times it is everything.

Yeah.

Got it.

Everybody wants that Swiss army knife race car, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So I was like, that's fine. I'm fine with that. I think, I'm not sure. I think Rick might get a little, he wants to get things like, you know, defined exactly. But honestly, that opens it up to me, realize, you know, you can't get perfectly defined for any given, you know, quarter mile, eighth mile or anything. So it's basically just a generic split at that point in time. At that point in time, you're just looking like, okay, well, wherever, like, what's your cruising RPM you want to be at on the interstate at 80 mile an hour? Okay. What's your top speed at your racetrack? And then after that, you almost just build it backwards from those parameters.

Oh, okay. That makes sense.

That's what I have you.

That's what, so I had a 2015 Mustang that had an MT82 in it and 331 rear gear. And I went to a TR6060 out of a GT500, but I had to then switch out my rear gear because at six gear was useless unless I was going 150 miles an hour.

Yeah, that's probably like a 0.5 ratio. So like, yeah, your drive shaft's turning twice the speed of your crank. And we don't actually go that high of a ratio. I think our highest is like a 0.7, maybe 0.65.

Okay.

So, yeah, yeah, you're right. Fifth gear is, or sixth gear in the standard T56 dependent. I don't know if they're all built with those same ratios, but yeah.

There was like two options in the GT500, one that there was like a tall and a short one. I don't remember which one, but whatever one I got was not what I needed for what I was. Right.

But as long as you can pull it, your RPM is a stable. You get a little bit of gas mileage.

Yeah. Well, it was, yeah. Well, it's race car stuff. I don't care about gas mileage. Right.

Exactly.

Yeah. It was a simple change out the rear differential and I was off, so not a big deal.

Yeah, I got you. Very cool.

Okay. So what does your day-to-day nowadays look like then? You mentioned a lot of design work, machining. Is it different every day at this point?

It's different in seasons. So I'll try to crunch as much design work into a season of like, okay, we're going to work on this project. Obviously, until you finish something, you don't really reap the reward of it. So the whole goal is to finish something once you start it. So yeah, I'll spend seasons, and during like a designing season, which just went through a heavy one, designing the new transaxle, that's what I try to spend about every hour doing that of my workday. But what it actually happens is, couple interruptions here and there, do have to do the business side of things as far as paying bills, getting purchase orders out, all those types of things so that everything keeps moving. So, I definitely have to segment the day. All right, this is two hours of this, this is two hours of that. That's, I attempt to do that. It works, it's definitely an improvement whenever any individual tries to do things like that. It doesn't always hold true to actually happening. Right now, my day to day is actually in the manufacturing side. We have a new machine, so getting that installed and getting it online producing parts is what I'm focusing on. And so my day to day changes, but as in general, it's all season based.

Okay. Well, speaking of your new transaxle here, what does R&D look like? Is this something that you guys are, you're watching what's going on out there and trying to think of the next thing, or is it kind of like customer demand, they're calling you, you notice, hey, I just got four calls for this. Is this something we want to look down, or what does that look like? What does R&D look like for you guys?

It's mostly, yeah, customer demand. So we have a wide range of people that call in. They'll call in with a, hey, I got a such and such motor. I don't even know what the motor is. I have to look it up. Then I realized this is the only person that wanted it in five years. Can we do it for this one person? And not be crazy expensive? Cool, we'll do it. If it's a big thing, then no, we're going to have to just turn them down because sometimes you got to say no to some people just so you can say yes to other people. And so this one was a thing where we're getting a lot of calls from Porsche guys as well as GT40 guys, like the transaxle guys in general. So that's when we started diving down transaxle applications. And I've got my mindset on three applications, and we just picked one right off the bat to go for first. And it's basically the GT40 mid-engine kit car type setup. And that's what we have here. This was designed basically with the front plate that will initially make for it will fit a GT40 bellhousing. The length of it was constrained to stay inside the GT40. The limits there, the axle locations, it's GT40. So that was the predominant focus on this one. But it's also going to overlap into many others. We have the factory 5 GTM here, which is this car right here is owned by Brian Gluck. And he is, he's an amazing dude. He's letting us use this car for the R&D for this gearbox to test out the first article. This is going to actually be behind an LS. And it's about 650 horsepower, I think. So that's the first transaxle that we're offering to customers. The next one is going to probably be more rear engine Porsche design that a lot of people are using. Mainly, yes, somewhat satisfy the Porsche market, but the larger market that I believe at this point sounds to be the Sanreal guys. Oh, okay. We just can't call for them all the time. As soon as that picture went up on Instagram, hey, Sanreal, Sanreal, Sanreal, maybe soon, soon, soon. So that's the target for sure. And I love those, I love Sanreal buggies and dunes and all the dune vehicles. I mean, those guys are insane, the stuff that they build.

Once you have the kind of like basic blueprint though, is it hard to transition over to Sanreal? Like now you're just kind of changing the case around mounting points, things like that, or is that still pretty extensive?

It's obviously a very project sensitive for that particular design and what we're doing. I'm not totally sure yet. This is being transparent on all my thoughts and what direction we're going. But it's essentially, internally, it's actually about the same design.

Okay.

The problem is you got to turn it around backwards, and after you turn it around backwards, you got to flip it upside down. And once you flip it upside down, all the oiling design is out the window. So, the target is to redesign cases, redesign whatever is needed to where the oiling is still good. And I don't want to do it the way... So, right now, people are taking Porsche, like OEM type Porsche gearboxes, they're using them in mid-engine cars, they're using them in a bunch of different stuff, but they are always having to retrofit some type of oiling system. You know, we want to package, we want something that, every time we try to solve a problem, we try to solve it like it is fully solved. So, offer that to the customer, like the best of your ability. So, that's the target, is to redesign the cases for that application, but it'd be plug and play. No retrofit, no, you know, it'd be perfect.

You don't want to do like GM and just put in thicker oil and change the sticker in your owner's manual? Sorry, I took a little jab there.

Oh, I mean, it's okay. They just beat you just last weekend, so it's fine.

Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Yeah, yeah.

I got to get my hits in where I can.

Okay, so design time. How much time went into designing this? Is it strictly you that did the design on this?

Yeah, technically. Yeah, I mean, me and Rick, well, as I'm designing, it's not fully my brain. I'm doing all the CAD work for sure. But we'll consult back and forth on thoughts and ideas and what about this and things like that. Because I'll have a problem. I'll be like, I don't want to do it this way. I don't want to do it that way. But then I'll talk with Rick, or if it has to do with the manufacturing side, I'll talk with Skyler on the manufacturing. And a lot of times after talking to him, as you know, two brains bounce some ideas around him. And then you didn't come up with A or B, you came up with C. And it was, hey, why didn't I see that? Okay. So yeah, we'll bounce ideas together and around. And he'll come up with concerns that I didn't see. And yeah, so that's why I'm very confident in the success, the performance of even the first article. Like, I don't expect to have any problems. Which is, sounds kind of arrogant. Yeah. But our first one was really good too. And I just know the work and the design that went, like, it wasn't like, ah, this will probably work, let's go with it. If we ran into a situation where this probably will work, we know, let's make it where it's gonna work. And that's just the way we approach stuff here. That's why I approach stuff.

You know what breaks my heart? No, it's not the 2% female demographic. It's the fact that 80% of you guys are not subscribed and following the show. So go ahead, hit subscribe or follow. And of course, if you're on YouTube, hit that bell so you are notified when we drop a new episode. Let's get back to the show. When do you... You seem like somebody that's on the creative side and the engineering side. When do you stop designing? When is it time to get the first article out? Because you could iterate forever, right? When do you stop iterating at least to get the thing out?

Those are very good questions. When it's complete.

It's never complete though.

I feel like this one is. I feel like it is. Yeah, there's different applications I can do as far as... Okay, now we need to go to a Chevrolet motor. Now somebody is going to want it against a Coyote. But as far as the internals itself, I guess the next step you could possibly do is start doing like finite element analysis on every single part and trying to make it as light as absolutely possible. And the amount of time that goes into that on, you know... First off, with finite element analysis, you... It's amazing software. It's great. It tells you wonderful stuff, but it only knows what you put in it. And what you put in it is the constraints. So can you tell me how much load is going through, you know, any given section? Because you're going to have to do it separately. So any given section you count, you know, you can do the torque, but you don't know how it's mounted on a car if it's put in addition... Like the chassis is twisting or something like that. So you could always go like, obviously, worst case scenario. Okay, cool. If I go worst case scenario on my loads and the analysis says that I'm like way, way good, then we can go lighter. Let's go thinner. So you could, you could definitely take something to that degree of, I would guess you would call that like the more the F1 type level of just like, yeah, money is no object. Just keep, keep, keep going.

Well, you got to be realistic at a certain point too. Like, you know, you can't have the $200,000 Gearbox, you know.

Right. And we can't go out of business or else we help nobody.

Right. And there's that too, right?

Yeah. So yeah, the target is to, what's good for us is good for everybody else because we're in, the business of helping, helping racers and helping car enthusiasts with their drive train, with the transmissions. And, and, and then also the art or the fun aspect of that, of keeping everything exciting because that's for us, the sequential market is what's exciting.

Do you do any like 3D scanning or any stuff like that as well?

We do. We actually outsource that because we don't do it all the time. So I got a local company here that comes and shoots anything that we need. Normally it's like a, say a bellhousing, like you were talking about, a customer calls, hey, I got something. I want to, you know, I want to adapt to this and stuff. There's no OEM CAD for it or anything like that, that you can get, then you just scan it and make an adapter.

You have to track down a bellhousing though, if it's a customer from far away.

They'll ship it to us usually or, or we could, yeah, we'll find on eBay or find whatever. Okay. Yeah.

Because I'm seeing a pile of bell housings over there. I think I see a small block forward one over there.

Yeah, there's a lot of adapter plates. We have a lot of Japanese motors. We just did a S2000 for a customer. We got RB, the two JZs, all kinds of different applications.

Is that big? So the adapter plate is probably pretty easy to make, but now do you have to worry about input shaft and all that stuff now too, for length and all that?

So that's basically the two factors. You gotta make the adapter, and then the input shaft's gotta be the right length for... So then you got the pilot bearing and the clutch splines. They just gotta be in the right place with however thick you make your adapter. So that's all. So we have packages. So once it's designed, I'll make a drawing, and hey, this adapter uses this bellhousing and this input shaft. And if it's a custom, then we'll keep 10 in stock, things like that. So everything is in stock. Okay.

So obviously you're messing with this right now. What's on the horizon? Is there anything on the... I guess what's your next big challenge you're looking to overcome, or is it just kind of stay the course, or what's that look like?

The next one is the transaxles. We've got our one out now. Then I was going to work on the rear engine one, and then see where we're at then, because a lot of Porsche guys are still calling us for the mid-engine.

Okay.

The mid-engine Porsche guys. And that fits perfect except for the axles are above the input shaft. So basically I need to have another transaxle design where the output shafts are on the bottom side.

Okay.

So right now, you got the input shaft right there. And every transaxle that you're going to find out there is they're one or the other because the input shaft goes through and it feeds the first shaft in there. And then the perpendicular to that is where you got your differential and your ring gear. So it's either above the input shaft or below the input shaft. So this one is above it. That's what fits the GT40. All the mid-engine cars or kit cars are going to have that type of setup.

Okay.

Just flip it upside down.

And then you go in, then you can go 150 in reverse.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah. It does sound simple.

Yeah, I know. I was just going back to your whole, it causes a whole other reign of problems there.

It doesn't. The pinion gear actually goes to the total opposite side of the ring gear. And yeah, it's a whole other package. It's a whole different design. So yeah.

What's the common problem or misconception that you come across when it comes to the sequential world that people come to you with?

There are a handful. Number one is that it's only for racing. You can go in forums and see people battling back about that. Like the dog boxes are only for racing. You cannot have them on the street. They won't. Some people say they won't last. Some people say they're just too rough. I could get the rough comment if you don't know what you're doing or if you're just a rough driver.

Is that basically what it is? Just be a better driver?

Just be smoother. Just match RPM before you let your clutch out. Or figure out how to shift smoothly. It is possible. What else with the sequential? It's not really a misconception, but they are very expensive. It's a whole different tier when it comes to the competition. There's no company out there that's making thousands of these at a time, because they don't move that much. So that's about the biggest ones that I remember, is seeing people. We don't have a lot of people. By the time they call us and talk to us as far as our customers and stuff like that, they're on board with sequential and they want one. So, they've already, we don't have too many misconceptions in that area.

Are you the only, do you have dealers out there that sell your stuff through them, or is it the only way to get one through you?

You can go through other people or through us. We sell direct to customer. We have, what we do is we, it's pretty simple. We actually, we don't have a huge dealer network. The product is tough to have dealers in that, if they're going to operate the way we do, then they're going to have to inventory a lot of parts.

That makes sense.

They're going to have to, because everything's built to order as far as ratios and stuff. So you're going to have to have a, you know, pretty decent cabinet full of ratios. So, but what we do is offer builder discounts. So if you're the, if you're the shop that's building the car for somebody else, then yeah, you, just like everything else, when you own a shop, you make money off the parts that you sell. So we set that up basically with anybody.

Sure. Made in America. All right. This is, I've been holding on to this topic for a little bit. How difficult is it to keep this American made?

In my opinion, it's easy because it's just the product itself. It is a more expensive product. So, and it's, it's, it's fancy. So it is definitely fancy.

I'll give you that.

To me, it's almost easier to keep it American made. I don't have a company that's competing with me in this market in America that is getting stuff as cheap as they possibly can. You know, somewhere else in like large batch quantities. So you go to a different market, you know, you go to say clutch companies or, you know, you know, many, many other markets, whatever. It might be a lot harder, but in our market, it's not hard to stay American made. Okay. And we obviously do. That's a priority for us, for quality, to know what we got for lead times, to know, just to be in control of things. We honestly, we don't even want to have many vendors. We, you know, we want to control lead times as best we can. So when you deal with too many vendors, so say we made nothing and everything was, you know, we had to buy everything. There are so many timelines and schedules across so many companies that I'm at the mercy of. So, so yeah, we try to keep, not only American made, we try to keep stuff as much in house as we can. We have a handful of companies that we deal with for the parts that we don't make here. But yeah, all the adaption, all the gearbox stuff, or all the like external stuff that you see, everything is done right here in this building.

What has the longest lead time? Whether it's in house or waiting on somebody else?

As far as parts?

Sure.

Yeah. I'd say shafts.

Okay.

Getting our shafts made is the longest lead time, I think. Rick is actually the one that handles those purchase orders and pushing our vendors to hold to their estimated time. But I think that's one of the worst ones.

Okay.

There's a complicated... Shafts inside of a precision gearbox like this, it's a complicated piece to make. It's very simple, but they get through the heat because they're long and skinny and you go through a heat treat process and they deform. You got to straighten them, you've got to regrind them. So it's a process to make them for sure.

So I'm referring to my list of questions here a little bit as well just because...

Yeah, I saw you cheating over there.

I'm cheating, yeah.

So... Why is that cheating?

That's not.

We're not. Every once in a while, like we just...

Try to see how good you can do. It's like, I'm gonna close my eyes and throw an orange.

Yeah. Well, honestly, most of the time, like I said before we started the show, it's a lot of just, you know, car guys can talk forever, man. Like we can be...

Oh yeah, for sure.

We'll probably be here till sunrise, you know, if we really wanted to. But every once in a while, I like to outsource questions every once in a while. So here's one. The difference between manufacturers making claims about durability versus actually being able to prove durability. Obviously, like for example, earlier this episode, you're talking about, you know, the torque figures and all that, that is able to run through these. Is it just a track record? Is that why you're able to prove these things? How are you able to confidently claim these figures?

Yeah, experience. Okay, so like, hey, this car did it, so it can handle it.

Sure.

So, you don't, you don't, you don't, if it can't handle it, you're never gonna get there. It's gonna fail. Now, can another person take the same gearbox with less horsepower and kill it? Sure.

Okay.

They can take a car with huge tires and downshift and wheel hop it, and you only need 300 horsepower to get going fast enough to start wheel hopping a car when you're de-selling. So I mean, that kills every gearbox. Sure. So, I mean, not immediately, but if they keep doing it, it'll eventually do it. So yeah, you can kill it. But if you have, so we have a handful of customers that they have a good tuner, like you're saying, the driver's good, they know what they're doing, and we see what it has done, then yeah, we know we can do it. Okay. Like our, it's kind of like everything works in series, not parallel. What I mean by that is everybody has to do their part to get to the finish line, to get to the success. So if everybody else does their part, and we're one of those links, and we didn't break, then we know we're good. But if, a lot of times, it might be another link that breaks, whether it be, it could be a clutch, it could be the programming of the shifting, it could be the engine, it could be driveshaft. We've had people that, they throw a driveshaft, or driveshaft brakes, and it destroys the gear. We had, yeah, we've had a customer with a driveshaft problem one time, and then we ended up having a gearbox problem, and we said, oh yeah, this is the one to have the driveshaft problem. And it tied back to that.

Okay.

Yeah, so, I guess a long answer, but yeah.

Speaking of that, I see a lot of driveshaft shop stuff in here. Is that kind of your guys' go-to for driveshaft?

It is, yep.

Okay, solution?

Yep, we've used driveshaft for years, driveshaft shop for years in Nascar, or even in drifting and stuff like that. So that's, and they're just right up the street. Oh really, okay.

Oh, really, they're down here?

Yep.

Oh, I did not know that.

That's about, they're about 30, 45 minutes north of here.

Okay.

Just up the street.

Yeah, that's it.

Close enough. No, anything less than 10 hours for us. Yeah, it's just a hop and a skip away.

That's funny.

Damn, I just had a good one in there.

I lost it.

It's fine.

Damn Elani, it only lasts about an hour and a half.

Oh, I need another one.

Well, we had to get up at 4 AM to catch up this morning.

No, it's back. Stop talking. One of the things you mentioned there, it can also be a people issue then. Like a human error along the way.

Oh, for sure. Yep. Yep. That's why you got to, I mean, in any kind of situation where you're trying to solve a problem, everybody involved really needs to work together and being transparent or being honest on everything that's happened. Because if a customer calls and says, hey, Gearbox is doing this, we got no other problems. It's your Gearbox. Okay. Well, if that's true, that's fine. Let's go. Let's fix it. But sometimes, it's not our Gearbox and it's something else. And it doesn't matter how bad I look at our Gearbox, you're not going to find a solution and that doesn't help anybody. So, a lot of times, it would be something else. So, yeah, a lot of times it could be either the human causing the problem or the way that they want to diagnose problems. And through my years of racing and at the racetrack, that's where you obviously are diagnosing tons of problems. In any form of racing, I wouldn't say it's rare, but not everybody is talented at diagnosing problems. I'm just looking at the facts. Looking at all the facts and narrowing it down to, you know, probability and statistic-wise, let's go with this, you know, things like that.

Do you have an example of like a... Let's just have a hypothetical problem and how you would approach diagnosing it. Like, have you had any calls with like customers and kind of ask the question of, have you approached it this way?

I mean, yeah.

Teaching people to diagnose, I guess.

Yeah, I can't think of... One problem, actually one problem we had and we solved, it was not a gearbox problem, it was a problem with the gearbox, but it was the way they adjusted the shift stops. And I had to have, they had to have, send me data to look at. So, they had data on their shift barrel, their shift position, but basically, they shift really hard on acceleration after a restart in the race, and it went from second gear to fourth gear. So, it skipped third. Okay. And I know the way the box is designed. I'm saying, this is impossible. And if they can hang on weight, if it didn't go all the way to the shift stop, it might could have possibly gone two gears. It would get complicated if I tell you how that could be the case. But I was like, hey, send me all the, send me the data, let me see it. And I could see where it actually did. And then I asked them to adjust the shift stops and see how many turns it took them to get back. So apparently they had adjusted them super tight. And sure enough, that was the problem. So, and without looking at the details, you know, anything like that, but if there's a problem, there is something causing it. There's always something causing it. So...

What an engineer's mind.

You gotta find it. It's not magic. Yeah. Well, it's not just like, I mean, everybody said, you're unlucky or it just happens sometimes. Like, that's the answer when you don't really know.

Right.

So, and sometimes I might even give that answer. I've had problems at the racetrack where I leave the racetrack scratching my head and I don't know the answer, but I have to just accept, like sometimes you just don't find everything.

I'm in the tech side of things, so there's plenty of times where I call in for support and I get the, oh, that's weird. Yeah, I know.

That's why I called you. Yeah.

Well, if they don't give you all the information, like you're saying here, that's like going into your doctor with a nasty cough, but not telling them that you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, right? Like, it's impossible for you to diagnose that if you're not, you know, like you said, there's always usually a root cause to it.

And yeah, of course, I don't want to waste my time, but at the same time, I don't mind doing whatever to help a problem. But at the end of the day, we're not helping each other at all because we're not going to find the solution if we're not looking at all the data that we have. So, yeah.

Is there anything, whether it's in the last five years, ten years, is there anything that you have taught or are teaching customers? I guess, are people becoming more educated in this space and coming to you kind of already understanding your product and what they want as a solution?

We have educated, normally like an older crowd, that don't know what a sequential is. Even, so the Hendrick Motorsports has a program, they changed the name, I think it's Hendrick Performance. But anyway, that division is making track attack cars, which is basically general public access to buying these track attack cars, and they're road course cars. We got into their program initially by they were looking at some of the billet suspension that we had, that we have made in the past. And then, we were like, hey, I think a sequential would go smart in this car. And at first, they were like eh. And then, like two weeks later, hey, so I talked to somebody else about sequential. They said it was a good idea too. So, anyway, long story short, they were like, hey, yeah, let's start putting those in the car. And then, these are Nascar guys. Extremely smart, extremely talented at what they do, but you also know that it is, it's all right here, and it's circle track. It is road racing too, but it was all new to them, long story short. So yeah, we taught them how the flat shifting works, and you know, going down there, tuning with them, going to the racetrack to tune with them. Max from X and Earing would fly up here, drive up here sometimes to go to the racetrack with us. He goes to a lot of tracks to tune stuff, our transmissions and other people's transmissions. So he's an amazing, he puts in a lot of effort, and he's wonderful. So yeah, we teach people as much as we can, educating them. I think it's becoming more, I think obviously sequential is more European in history. So there's a lot more Americans that don't know what it is in the car world. And so, but I think that's obviously through time, they're starting to learn.

So I really, I'm gonna lose this one, I really want to. Okay, let's pretend I have a time attack Corvette, right? When's the time to get a sequential over a stock transmission or whatever, a built normal Corvette transmission?

Whenever you build your car. Okay. I'd say it's probably obviously money permitting. It all depends on the program, some of the other variables. No doubt, if that's what you do, if it's time attack and that's what the car is for, then it's a no brainer, that's the direction to go. Especially with our Corvette package, because it comes with a quick change rear end, so you go to different tracks, you can just adjust the quick change. I mean, five minutes and you can fine tune your top speed. So, that's a no brainer. If money is not an object, then you do it right off the bat. Even if you don't have crazy high horsepower yet.

Every car guy ever.

Well, it's never fast enough, you know?

How does that work for fluid on the quick change rear end? You have to replace the fluid then when you do that? Or how does that?

When it comes out, yes. Technically, yes. I don't know if I'm allowed to say it, but we have done quick gear changes before, slap them back in and go, and the oil will drain through the bearings from the larger section. So basically, the rear is a really small section, and you do lose a little bit of oil. The proper way is, yeah, pop the gears back in and then give it a squirt of oil. We have made a change really quick to get back out there on the track and go, go, go. And everything was okay.

So you don't lose a lot then?

You don't lose a crap ton. And then, like I said, the main case holds a lot more oil and it's going to drain back to the rear gears. In ours, we actually have them flipped up in the Corvette package. They're actually flipped upside down. So you actually have to run an external, like recirculating oil pump. So it actually, which is good for if you're in road racing anyway, you kind of need that just to go to a cooler to keep everything cool. So if you do that, then you'll just run a line to that rear housing and then you're instantly getting oil back there. It's just going to drop the main level a little bit.

Okay.

So you could probably do two gear changes before you're like, all right, I need to put a half a quart back in here.

Okay.

So to kind of go back to that, again, I'm upgrading, I don't have a Corvette, but let's say I'm upgrading my Corvette for my Time Attack Series. What are the immediate benefits that I see by putting a 6XD in the car?

For the Corvette specific, like I just mentioned, you'll have the quick change, which will allow you to fine tune top speed. But then, that's more sequential specific. Number one, you're going to have six gears, if you don't already. Number two, you can change the ratios of those gears to what you want. Number three, it depends on what level of shifting you want to take it to. You can shift manually. You're still going to probably shift faster because you're never crossing the gate. It's just yanking the gear. Or you want to take it into flat shifting, no lift shifting. Then you can start getting into the electronics, where it's actually, you're holding the thing to the floor. The butterflies are staying wide open and you're just cutting ignition for a split second. So therefore, you reinstate torque. So like even in that situation, you cut ignition instantly. And then like the 50 milliseconds later, you actually reinstall it. You can actually ramp the torque back in. So you're not instantly blasting the tires off. It's not like on off switch. You actually ramp it in. And it's not ramped in slow. It's ramped in fast, but it's not enough to shock the system to where you just kill the tires. So the time that you spend shifting is way less. And that's gonna, I mean, some racetracks have 60 shifts in them. So you get a couple of milliseconds here and there. And now you're a second, you're two seconds, three seconds of lap time.

Well, you were kind of touching on earlier, it's like on the, just how fast it is too. It's almost kind of like Porsche PDK level of speeds, I think.

No, 100%.

Yeah.

What's the learning curve like? If I'm a T56 guy and now I'm moving to a sequential, is there a big difference in how I drive? Or if I'm clutching and doing all this stuff, is it pretty similar? I don't have synchros now, so how is...

Well, the dog box is going to be a little different. It's just going to be easier to shift, to be honest with you. You're not going to have the rejection or you're not going to have to be patient for the synchrings to slow down. It'll just be rougher on you. It'll be a harder shift. I personally think it's pretty seamless as far as going from H-pattern sequential, because it's still manual.

Right.

It's still pretty manual. We have through the years, we've had one or two drivers, they have the problem that they have because it's the same motion going from first to second, because to upshift, you pull back.

Right.

So, from going first to second, it's the same motion, but going from second to third, you go forward. So, if you just, you know, muscle memory, want to go from second to third, you just went back down the first.

That'll ruin your day.

We've had one person say, yeah, I messed that one up, you know, and that was in the drift world. Other than that, I think it's more of a preference. Okay. You know, at least that's what I see. I see just H-pattern guys say, you know, I want to have the H-pattern. One thing in defense of H-patterns that you don't have in a sequential is you can go to neutral anytime you want to. Okay. Yeah. And you can skip shift. So, like, if you want to, you know, you're done with your pull, you're at, you know, a quarter mile pull, and you want to, if you got a parachute, pull your parachute or just put on your brakes, you just normally slap it in the neutral, so you're not wearing out your release bearing and, you know, your slave cylinder. You can just, you know, pop it in neutral, coast, and stuff like that. So, with a sequential, you're going to actually hold the clutch in. Okay. So, it's not a big difference, but it is something there that I've heard in the past. And then the other one was some people like when they're, when they are on the street, they want to either skip shift going up, and you can't do that. So, you're going to have to go. I mean, you could technically, because you could just click. You don't have to. You could click two gears.

Okay.

So, in reality, you could. It doesn't, you know, you are shifting twice. But if you're skip shifting, you're probably not doing it fast anyway.

Right? No.

You're doing your grocery getting. So. Yeah. And then the other one is, it's normally the de-sail. Like if I were to have a sequential in my car that I'm driving every day, then I don't know if I would get tired of it or not, because I would actually probably just love to always be driving the sequential. But when you go to de-sail, all right, I'm coming up to a stoplight. You're going to put your clutch in and coast, or you're going to downshift into every gear. You're not going to downshift. Sometimes if you're got, say, a five-speed, you might downshift into fourth, and then you might downshift into second. But you don't downshift in that. Well, you can. A lot of people don't downshift in every gear. So with a sequential, if you're going to downshift, you're going to... But even that goes back to, you could always downshift twice. And like I said, they shift so good that you can hear them. You need to look at our YouTube channel. I think we have it on there. If not, look up the Hendrick Track Attack Cars. They'll have the shifting on there. You can hear the road racing upshifts and downshifts on how clean and how quick they are. It's fun to listen to. That one, and there's also on Instagram, there's... Cable is the guy's name. His Instagram handle is 9LVIPER.

Oh, yeah, yep.

He's got our standard, I think it's our standard 6-speed in his, and he's time attack. He goes and makes records all over the place with his VIPER.

And then he recently, what happened to his car recently? I remember seeing it like last year. Was it an engine failure? Did he crash or something? I can't remember what it was, but...

He did have something. I can't remember. And I actually, well, I'm not on Instagram too much, but I haven't seen him. I don't want to jump to conclusion that he hasn't done anything lately.

I was following him for a while though.

Yeah, I haven't. I haven't seen much from him recently, but that's not to say he's not putting stuff out there.

It's not Gearbox related, otherwise you would have heard about it.

You may not even hear about that. When I'm here, it's so laser focused here. When I go home, I got, you know, kids, and like I said, ball practices and stuff like that. So it's, that's my day.

Well, sweet, should we pop the usual three?

Sure, like right now?

Sure, like right now, right now.

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

Yeah.

You can swap whatever you want, build whatever you want. Money is no object. What are you picking?

We're gonna take our union break and be back in 15 minutes, you think?

No.

Just kidding. What's the three applications?

Track car, show car, and daily driver.

Daily driver. I've gotten old. For daily drivers, I don't want anything crazy. I think it's because I've had performance cars through the years. And you always have something you gotta do to them to keep them the daily driver. So, daily driver-wise, I have enjoyed just having a half-ton pickup truck and just that's it. Just stock.

Yeah.

Bone stock. So, I'm gonna be boring at this.

Doesn't matter. Are you a JDM Ford GM guy or do you have a way you lean?

I was raised GM.

Okay.

And I probably still am GM. Okay. I'm turning more into a diesel guy though. I'm not a fan of the gas motors that they're putting in the half-ton trucks.

Yeah.

Just because, I don't know, man. Everything's just barely made to enough power. Nothing's like just overkill, you know? The transmission is barely enough. The motor is barely enough.

Well, even the diesels are like that until you tune them up and then they're a whole other animal.

But you have the ability to do that. Correct. So, yeah, a lot of race teams have dealt with Ford. Ford, as a company, you know, if you want to start talking about companies, then you got to start looking. I'm gonna go ahead and forward a little bit, just the way that they are not getting into a whole bunch of stuff like that. But I love how they, like even with RTR, how they have adopted or brought him in, whichever way you want to look at it, lean on him for a lot of stuff. But that relationship there is really awesome to see. Chevrolet will not get involved in drifting. Ford does. Toyota's finally, a couple years ago, is getting more involved. Nissan's getting more involved. So a lot of these manufacturers are starting to see that this drifting market is continuing to grow and is growing with the younger population more than anything. So anyway, that's kind of a side topic. What's the next one? You said show car? Yeah. And you can only have one?

Yep.

That's for this episode.

Okay. I'd probably go with a 69 Camaro.

Okay.

Yep. Not like a genuine, not like a, what do they call it? Just not, I don't care about matching numbers or all that. I would have a, I would definitely have a high performance.

Like a pro touring build of some kind?

Yep.

Yeah.

Anybody in particular you would go with or?

No. I don't keep up with it a whole lot.

Sure.

So, I've just grown, I grew up always wanting a 69 Camaro. My uncle had one. I thought it was the prettiest car. And so, that's what I would, for a show car, go with that. For sure. Okay.

All right.

Track car?

Yeah.

Any track. Any track. Can you build your own from the ground up?

Sure.

Yeah. I would do that. I would do either front engine or mid engine type of, something similar to the Ariel Atom. Oh, okay. Except it would be all in-house built, in-house designed. That would be the cool thing. Okay.

What kind of engine would you throw in it?

I'd probably do LS.

You want to do something like a judder or something like that?

No. I'm too practical on stuff. They're so, you just can't get the power for the money and any other platform. Of course, everybody does it, so it gets a bad rap of like, oh, another LS. So, but I mean, you want to have fun. And, you know, if you were, we do have a customer. He does pools. He does, anyway, he did not like any engine platforms out there. He designed his own engine.

Oh, really?

Yeah. So, that would be next step. I mean, to me, that would be pretty baller. He'd be like, no, I don't like it. I want to take the LS. Okay, but the, you know, the bore spacing is not right. Okay, two valve, four valve, like whatever, and go with it. That would be cool.

Yeah.

I think that would be cool, because in all reality, there's no engines out there that, in my opinion, are perfect either. That's fair. I think that I would like to take an LS, I would like to make it four valve, and figure out the best cam design, figure out the best whatever, of overhead or dual rockers.

So you're still the coyote, is that what you're saying?

They have too many camshafts, too many chains, all that stuff. They're making them, they're doing good with all that. I mean, obviously, they're very performance. They're huge, though.

Yeah.

All that stuff's huge.

Well, you go in four valves, that gets a little...

It gets complicated, but is there a way of doing it, you know?

When I see the block, I've got a couple of blocks laying around at home. I'm like, they make a cute coffee table. Then you pull the head out and you're like, holy s***.

It's bigger than blocks.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, I'm probably talking at my butt, probably never would be possible to do anything like that.

So did you never end up doing that engine program? I was gonna ask you that earlier, and then we moved up here.

No, never did. Moved up here. Stayed up here. Yep. Yep. And I don't really have any regrets of that.

It just would have been easier to build your engine from scratch probably.

That's true.

Yeah.

That's true.

Maybe you can see if your invitation still stands.

You're right.

Yeah.

Yeah, I need to see if they still got that program going on down there. It's a pretty cool program. Yep.

Well, if you'd ended up in Orlando, we might've read about you in the paper somewhere. You may have been, would have never left Florida. We would have got Florida man.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're not wrong there.

Right.

Well, perfect on that note, where can everybody find you?

Do what?

Where can everybody find you?

Whether it be 6XD, you, whatever. Our website is 6xdgearbox.com. And our best way to get in contact with us is through our email. Rick sees it and I see it. And it's 6xdgearbox at gmail.com. Very generic. So we both monitor that. Our Instagram is 6xdgearbox, as well as Facebook. Yeah.

And come say what's up to you guys. Are you going to be a PRI this year?

We'll be a PRI. Cool. I think we'll actually be at HPX next year. I don't know if y'all went there this year.

Yeah, I was thinking about going to that next year. Yeah, it looks pretty good.

It was good. I mean, it was the first year. So the nobody knew what to expect. Obviously, I wish there were more people there. Everybody did. I wish it was a PRI, but PRI has been building that thing for years. So it's going to take some years to get them going. There's still some big names. Hendrick's there. Vintage Racing, a lot of fabrication companies were there. So, I mean, there's some pretty decent names. ARP was there. There's pretty big names in the market are going. So what else? We do SEMA. We normally have a... We partner with ACT, SEMA, to... Well, Rick sells a lot of the clutches. With our 6XD packages, we sell a lot of the ACT clutches. So we're in their booth with... We normally display in their clutch and how it adapts to the front of the gearboxes and things like that with the throwout bearings and stuff. So probably going to be bringing the brand new transaxle there for everybody to see. Yeah.

The thing is, I want to just to sit and look at.

Yeah, no, me too. For sure, I'll... There is, anything you do, you finally do get accustomed to it. You get used to it. So you walk in here every single day and you see stuff like that. That's shiny. So you do get used to it. But at the same time, every now and then, you're like, thing is freaking awesome. Yeah. So, yeah, Dan.

You can find us at Gunna Garage with Two N's or me, MrGunnaGarage on Facebook.

Perfect. Well, on that note, thank you for coming on the show. This is a blast. Dan, thanks for existing and we'll see you all next time. 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.