169. Cars at SEMA, New Projects and New Technology, Preparing for Pikes Peak w/ Patience Metal Fab

And you're learning how a suspension works on a car that has, you know, 15 inches of suspension travel on it, or 10 inches of suspension travel. So everything's amplified. Your fabrication, your understanding of structure, chassis and suspension geometry. Yeah, there's a lot of guys that came out of the early 2000s mini truck movement that are now very successful, big name builders.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host, Harris AK. Minnoxide, and I'm not here with my Ford-loving co-host. This episode is in memoriam. He moved to California to be a communist, just like my old co-host. No, I'm kidding. But we today are here with Patience Metal Fab for round two. It's been a little, it's probably been close to a year and a half.

It's been about a year, yeah.

Yeah, something like that. So Brian Hawk, Gary Rude, you guys have done some really cool stuff in the last year and a half. So just give us a little bit, some updates, and we'll just go from there. SEMA, probably.

Yeah, SEMA, I guess the Camaro. I think we touched a lot on the Camaro the last time you were here.

Oh, yeah, it was in the video last time.

Yeah, kind of Nick's kickoff to starting this. Obviously, he's he's continued. We've continued to build the car. Him and I went out to Pikes Peak last year to go kind of get a feel for if that was something he wanted to do and that's on his list to do this year. So, yeah, kind of the continued development of a car like that, which is just something that is never really done.

Yeah, you know, this is this car has come a long way since the last time we had you guys on the show. I think he's even done really well in the series he was in.

I mean, there's been some goods and there's been some bads. I mean, that's just racing.

I tuned in to that live stream.

You know, unfortunately, one of the things that we've continued to battle on in the car is still the OEM electronics in it. And they continue to haunt us. And everything that we run into issues with is always something to do with leaving OEM can bus in this car, which...

Is that a regulation thing?

Nope, that's going away this winter.

Gotcha, because that was one of the things I was talking with one of your other customers, Aaron. Yeah, because he has to stay, I think, OEM ECU or something like that. Can't go stand alone.

Yeah, so he races in a series that's a lot more stringent in real books. The series that Nick was racing in really is just a balance of power. So it's how much horsepower you make versus how much you weigh. And then there's a few stipulations. But as we saw in a drug out protest this year at the Nationals, they can pretty much run anything in it.

Sure. Okay, so what did Pikes Peak scouting look like then? So how are you guys going to approach that? Like, are you guys still going to go for that whole Pikes Peak time attack sort of deal?

Yeah, I mean, this year, if we go out there, it's really just going to be a go from the starting line to the finish line and get that flag and just, you know, not trying to go out and set any records this year. I mean, you basically what we saw, we went out for one practice day last year. You're on the mountain at 3.30 in the morning. You have to be off the mountain for practices by 8 a.m. because the highway opens back up to tourism. So it was a lot of cold, early, set up is nasty, you're up there. If you're practicing the second tier or the third tier, because they basically break the track down into three sections and there's three days of practice. So you get to practice one section each day.

Okay.

And you got a nice parking lot on the low section, mid section is a decent parking lot, the top section, there's like a little bit of a gravel runoff that everybody's got their trailers like stuck off to the side of. So he needs to get a smaller trailer. You know, at least we got in there and we got to kind of observe and see. So we're not going in totally strange. It is invite only deal, but you apply to be invited. Correct. And what they look for is you to basically be able to name drop people that currently are racing. And so one of the big things we went out there for last year was to kind of make connections and meet some people. And we did that. And Nick in true Nick form silver tongued his way in. And now he knows a handful of people. And I think it's very promising that he'll be able to get an invite this year after he applies.

I don't know how he does it. He's really good at it. I need to learn some skills from that guy.

Yeah, he'll listen to this podcast, so we won't go any deeper than that.

Sure, sure.

No, he is not. Nick's a good dude. He's just very... He's gotten to where he has in life because he's personable and he's outgoing. And I think just generally speaking, he kind of attracts a certain attention that, you know, in racing works real well for you.

So when you guys are going for that Pikes Peak thing, is there any like rule book or is just like go for it?

Yeah, no, there is. There's a few different classes. I was just thumbing through that to kind of figure out what class we're going to run this in. Funny enough, the Lexan Windshield on this car is probably going to put this in one of the unlimited classes. Of all the other things done to this car, the Lexan Windshield is the thing that's going to make it so that he can't run in one of the lesser classes. But again, I mean, your first time out there, everybody says the same thing. Go from the start line to the finish line. I think the first year, if you're a rookie and you get to the finish line, you actually get to keep that flag. So it's like, that's your only chance to do it. Just do it and always go back later and try to go set records and stuff. I mean, if you've ever driven up that highway, even at 20 miles an hour in a Kia or something, it's intense.

It bogs you down. Like we, I went there for two of my rallies in the past and the cars that I was in, they just turned it to dogs halfway up the hill.

It was funny because Brian had been out there for vacation a little bit earlier and he told me to buy the oxygen.

Okay.

And I didn't.

You can buy the little oxygen in a can where you can just huff it.

Okay.

It's basically hair in a can, but yeah, that elevation will get you.

You got to the top of the mountain. I couldn't feel my cheeks. My fingers were tingling. I was like, yeah, that's what he was talking about.

Were you just walking? Are you trying to go on a hike or what?

No, no, we drove up, but it was just, I think it was just early lack of sleep, lack of food and being in this, you know, being in this car. Yeah.

What the top of Pikes Peak is 14,000.

Yeah.

Yeah. 14,000. I think 100 or something like that. It was cool. I miss being skinny. I was just running around on the top of that hill. I couldn't do that today. I had to pass out.

Well, all the drivers have to wear oxygen. It's required. So all the drivers are plugged into oxygen.

I never thought of that, actually.

Which, I mean, for safety factor.

Right. Not if you get dizzy halfway up the hill.

Right. So, no, it was pretty intense. We got some cool stuff in the works this year. MoTec, bigger power. We're working with Cortex to develop an SLA for the Camaro to replace the MacPherson. And ideally, that'll all be in come Pikes Peak this year. Sure. Good to play with it a little bit.

Do you know, I think I talked with Nick at SEMA about this. Are you guys going with the MoTec M150, or what are you guys going with? Any idea?

I don't know which system it is, because he's buying it from another customer of ours that bought it and didn't wind up using it.

Okay.

I do think, who would have to look? Yeah, I don't remember.

I think it's the 150.

Yeah, because I think that's typically like the plug and play, whatever sort of system.

It's the one, the plug and play systems are built around. And it's, I mean, it's one of the only ECUs on the market that will run direct injection. That's really where we're running into the issue.

Oh, that's right. I always forget these are DI.

Yeah, I mean, we work with, you know, you got Haltech shirt on. We work with Shawn all the time, you know, I mean, regardless of how we feel of him as a person, you know, just kidding. Shawn, you know, he's over here quite a bit. Most of the stuff we build has Haltechs in it, because of, you know, the ease of working with him. He's right here. He's, you know, good support. But yeah, in this case, Haltech can't do anything for us. So we had to go MoTek. Plus we got a couple other things we want to do on this that the MoTek ecosystem will make it a little bit easier to do it.

That just seems to be really strong in motorsports. It's like MoTek and Bosch for whatever reason.

That's exactly it. That's just because I think traditionally MoTek was kind of the first to the market with that high-end group of electronics. And while everybody else came out with ECUs, they weren't really, they didn't have their ecosystem around them. PDM's ability to work with ABS, these things whereas MoTek from day one was meant to work with that stuff. But now, I mean, they all work due to CAN communication. And they all generally can work together or be programmed to work together.

I warned you. I practically begged you to put your pennies in that piggy bank of yours. And the moment is finally here. Head on over to your garage. The kitchen sink, perhaps. I don't know where you keep your hammer, but you're going to smack that piggy wide on open and run to tunebyshawn.com to take advantage of the Haltech Black Friday sale. But wait, don't you dare skip this ad because you could save an additional, additional 5% off using comb and oxide at checkout. And you think I'm done. This guy thinks I'm done. Listen, you can get a free merch item that's less than $99 on sales, totaling $999 or more. Yeah, that's what's up. Tunebyshawn, shawn.com. Let's get back to the show. What kind of advice are you getting at Pikes Peak? Any particular things that you're like, oh, we should address that or what are those conversations look like with veterans?

We kind of avoided going in and asking a bunch of questions. It was more just kind of be there, observe, meet some people. Brandon from Airpower out in Utah, I think, was a guy that Nick had worked with on some poor stuff, and he kind of let us come out. They had rented a house for you hanging out there. Afterwards, kind of just, you just learn a lot by kind of being a fly on the wall sometimes. Just kind of observing, looking at people's setups. What did they bring? You know, small trailer is key because you have to drive down the mountain with it.

Yeah. I don't really thought about that. I never heard of that before.

So I think it's not better.

No, not in that case.

So is that just a matter of just getting like one of those like little the drop trailers, like the small, tiny ones or?

I don't know. I think we'll probably do. Nick was looking 26 foot box is the maximum size it can be. So I still try to find somebody that's got like a 24 foot feather light that we can rent or use for getting out there because his 36 foot in tech is not going to cut it.

OK.

Yeah.

Not coming down the mountain in that thing.

No. What about updates on you? Any updates on the all wheel drive, Sylvia?

That all wheel drive thing over there is about in the same spot as it was when we did our podcast.

OK.

I've taken a little bit of a step back to take two steps forward. Just within the skill set we have in the shop now.

OK.

And Derek on with all the 3D scanning and design capabilities. We've reconfigured the tube front on that.

OK.

I'm still doing a cool V-mount, functional V-mount setup, but it's really just encompassing the 3D scanning and design capabilities we have now. So not a lot of progress visually, just all digitally.

There you go. I was going to say, I mean, I think we've we've made good progress. Yeah, it's just not anything you can see.

Just a lot of digital progress. So we have the whole front end designed in CAD, everything functional the way it needs to be. Now I just got to hit print and bend it all out.

Yeah.

Yeah. I don't remember seeing all those markers on it the last time I was here. So is that something you guys are branching out into more and more? Or I guess, OK, he said his name was Derek.

Yeah. Yeah. We hired Derek, Derek Peterson.

OK.

Who's been a huge asset to us in the 3D scanning and design capabilities. Slight machining is kind of pushing that envelope.

Yeah.

If you've ever heard of this small company, MA. Performance, Derek was Derek worked for MAP for about 10 years. He kind of he came on as a machinist by trade out of school, but, you know, quickly kind of became an asset in the design side of things for them as well. Him and Kyle were directly together on a lot of product development. So, I mean, he came in here to help us get a machine running and kind of said, you know, I'll figure out whatever you guys need me to figure out. We've just kept throwing things at him and we haven't found anything he can't do yet. So, yeah, we've got him scanning, doing a lot of design work. You know, we're still utilizing Next Rev Motorsports when we get into the real heavy lifting on engineering, the K5 stuff that we've been doing, where it really requires, you know, simulation and stress analysis and, you know, heavy chassis design. But Derek's able to kind of take a lot off, a lot of the light duty quick stuff on his shoulders and quicker turnaround that way, it stays in house a little bit easier.

So is that a matter of you guys just designing stuff in house? Are you trying to go more like the parts direction or what's, I guess, what's the plan of having him as an asset?

Some both.

OK.

Right. So, you know, we are as our builds elevate, you know, it does require more digital layout, digital planning to kind of get to that that next level out at SEMA. One thing that really stood out that Ring Brothers, Aston Martin.

Yeah, that thing was.

I mean, you know, look what two million bucks will do, right? But like, honestly, that car is gorgeous. Every piece on it. And as we kind of stood there and looked at it, you know, the conversation around, you know, what we're doing in the next rev, some of the composite stuff, the 3D printing now. I mean, there's nothing on there that the skill set to do that is here, right?

Right.

But you've got to have, you know, that next level of design capability and kind of, you can have as much foresight and draw on a piece of paper as you want. But, you know, obviously the digital and the CAD stuff does take it to the next level. So Brian's car is a perfect example of it, you know, to digitize that whole thing, get it in there and then be able to change a bunch of stuff up. I mean, Max went in and actually cut up the manifold that he had made because in playing with that, it made sense to move the turbo to a different place.

You know, that's an RB30 in that one, right? That's the plan?

It's an RB30 block, 26 head.

Yeah, so I was going to ask about that because like I think the other street alpha guy, he has an RB30, RB26 combo or whatever. What goes into that? That was kind of like at the back of my head all day today when I was listening to our old episode. Is it just the head?

I mean, it's the RB30 block, which has got a taller deck, you make a provision in the block just for another timing chain roller, tensioner per se. Some guys use a tensioner, some guys just use it as a roller. Okay. Then the 26 head, and that's kind of dubbed as like the 2J killer. You get the twin cam. Both heads are twin cam, but at least for the 26, that's kind of the recipe.

I don't know if you're paying attention. Well, GTR Festival just finished yesterday, I think, or didn't it?

Yeah, they were doing that down in Texas.

Yeah, yep. One of the Australian guys, I met through Tukes from Street Alpha. He just came over here and took the horsepower record or something over here. 2,100 horsepower R34, which is just insane.

I believe it.

Power is so crazy now. I mean, I remember when 600 horsepower on the street was like unheard of.

Yeah. Well, since the last time we were on the show, we got way more into traveling to country, right? And it's like you talk to people and it's like, man, 400 horsepower. You were a bad m*********** back then.

Now it's like Sienna minivans make that, you know?

Yeah, for real. Well, it's like the Grand Wagoneer, right? It has the new hurricane engine and it's making, I think, around the hype. Ohio puts like 500 horsepower, which is insane.

And off the showroom floor. I mean, guys, you can buy four digit cars now.

Yeah.

I mean, honestly, there's almost something wrong with that. I mean, look at the amount of these things that wind up scrapped, right?

Well, I look at Copart frequently.

Yeah, exactly. It's like, should almost require like a driving certification that goes along with the...

It's usually the Chrysler products. You know what I mean?

As a Chrysler guy, I know what you're talking about. It's usually the Chrysler stuff. 15 pages of stolen Hellcats, by the way. Like they were like down to like, just bare chassis and everything. 15 pages last time I looked.

On Copart?

Yeah.

I think it's down now, but for a while, I think I had it on one of my Facebook pages. It's a lot.

Dude, it's so nuts.

Yeah.

Seems to be something going on in that Chrysler community. Yeah. What are the challengers, the Hellcats? They're kind of doing these takeovers and really stealing the thunder from, you know, the classic Mustang, drive it into a crowd.

I just say, throw a Patience sticker on one of them, man. It's some good marketing.

The street takeover stuff is just, I mean, you know, it's not that, you go back to like the days when racing were real good, you know, up at Deer Killer and you know, the old, you know, down Midway, all sorts of areas down there. It's just, we've always had, there's always the generation and how they got in trouble, but it just seems like the street takeovers are a lot more public facing now than those days where you're trying to hide from everything. Yeah.

So help me wrap my head around this, right? Cause like you guys are in the same space as like the Ring Brothers and all these other big awesome shops, right?

Cool, I'll take that as an extreme compliment. Well, you know, Ring Brothers is like, you know, top echelon.

Right, but like you guys probably have an idea of like, so how do we even get to a $2 million build? I mean, is it just a matter of, I think they said it was like 20,000 hours or whatever it was. What goes into a car to be of that caliber?

A lot of attention to detail. I mean, everything's really one off in a build like that. You know, it comes down to a great body guy. Sure. I'm sure the paint jobs on those cars are, you know, north of $75,000 and then the interior alone. Not to take away from the fabrication involved, but you know, whether you're using exotic interior materials, high-end paints and, you know, paint supplies, materials. $2 million. I mean, I guess I can't fathom that. Sure. The stuff we build is definitely becoming more high-end. Sure. But I think in any build, that Magne II is the last 10%, that is the most expensive and the most time consuming. So it's easy to get a build up to fruition, but then that last 10% is usually what drains a lot of people financially and motivation wise. It's just the fit and finish, right?

Sure.

Well, and that's, I mean, the last, yeah, literally the last 10% of a build can be 50% of the budget. Because of the fact that, you know, that's when all the detailed work goes in, right? That's when, you know, why does it take you three days to, you know, I don't know, put a door handle in, or you know what I mean? It's something, like pick it, and you look at the detail on those cars, right? You look at, you know, everything is one off. So, you know, to use something as an example, like this Volkswagen right here, right? A lot of the parts are one off in that car, right? The rear cradle is one off in order to make it all wheel drive. The chassis work that supports putting that rear cradle in, right? The firewall and that Volkswagen emblem that he wanted to put in there out of the tailgate. All the hot side, cold side piping, but motor mounts, that was a kit, right? Interior, factory seats just reupholstered. Door panels, factory door panels kind of worked. You know, the enclosure for the stereo in the back, what Josh Rittenauer over at Venom did for that thing, awesome, but dash, factory dash, right? So we've got as many things that are OEM parts in that car just reworked as you do one off, right? When you look at a car like that, every single piece on that car is one off. So every piece has the attention to detail that the pieces that are one off in this car got, right? So, I mean, you take a car that's, you know, let's call it a $200,000 build and 70% of the stuff on that car is OEM, 30% is one off. I'll change that to 100% is one off. You know, it's pretty easy to get to some huge numbers at that point, right? Especially when you start to talk about composites, right? Like the lower valence on the front and the rear of that car were carbon. We're starting to play in composites with Next Rev. In fact, we've got our dash is just about done. We did a custom Kevlar dash for the Renault rally car. Oh, OK. And what we're really beginning to understand, and you know this, but when you work through the process, you get a different understanding of it. So we, for instance, let's just take a dashboard, for instance, right? We take down our plasma machine. We put a gantry mill on it so that we can cut a piece of epoxy board the size of a plasma table. Standard mills won't do that. Like a CNC cabinet usually won't do that because it's not big enough. So you take the machine down, you run that thing for, I don't know what Derek had into that, 35, 40 hours to cut the pieces. Now that piece goes over to the body shop, gets sanded till it's perfectly smooth, right? Sprayed, wet sanded to a 1500, three times to get the release on it. That's just the plug you now need to make the mold from, right? So then you make the mold pulled off of that. Then you finally get to make your part at the end of all this, right? So that's one piece. Look at these builds, look at these cars, tons of carbon on a lot of these cars now, right? Door panels, dash, valances, side skirts, every single one of those things is 15 to $20,000 to get to a finished part, right? You just count the parts in that car. I mean, there's probably two or $300,000 just in composites in that car alone. So again, right? How do you get to 2 million bucks? When there's an option to make something out of sheet metal and it's going to cost $5,000 or you can make it out of carbon, but it costs $20,000 and you make that decision every time. There you go.

Plus you can include f*** ups along the way either.

I mean, it's nuts. It's nuts. The more and more we get into this composite stuff, the more I see like to make it to that first part, you know, 20 grand for the first part, two grand for the second part, 200 for the next 10 parts, right? Because all the work has already been done.

Are you guys familiar with, I think it's Nelson Racing Design as well then? Yeah, you just see that he just kicked out that crazy full carbon fiber Viper.

I didn't, but it doesn't surprise me. I mean, it's look at SpeedCore and that challenger they had, you know, the Mustang. Like there was somebody somewhat recently that had an R34 that was full carbon body.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah. You know, I mean, even what's the guy that's running around breaking all the track records everywhere in the C6? Ferris?

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, his new car is a full carbon body.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you're you're at least at least 60, if not $100,000 to go from nothing to a full carbon body on a car. You know, and I mean, yeah, it's crazy. You just talk about these numbers. You're throwing stuff around that. Guess what? That $2 million mark comes real quick when you're doing stuff like that, you know.

So you're doing some Kevlar. So actually, what's the updates on the Renaults? I don't see the other one in here. Or is it in here still? Because there's a street car version and a rally car version, right?

Yeah, the street car version. That was just Brian's other car. He just had that in here for a short period. But sure. Engine, what's his name?

Mitchell Mitchell Wilson, engineered performance in Texas is who we are working with to pretty much do the bespoke machining and everything for Brian's Renault.

OK, yeah, he's doing engine and tranny. He's doing engine and tranny, everything. So it's going to be all. Yeah, I mean, he made the crank, made the, you know, the value in that car and that motor is in that 821 Vin, which would have been Renault made 200 cars so they could homologate cars for racing. If you were a private to your team and you wanted to go racing, you had to make sure you got an 821 because that was the car that had the same internals in the engine as the group B car. It was just like a forged crank and I think rods or something. But like they're unobtainable, you know, you can't, you can't find them, you can't get them. And so Mitchell said, well, why don't you bag that crank up and put it on a shelf or, you know, a rainy day and we'll just make a crank for the car. And then that led to, I think, rods, pistons. I mean, he's doing tranny stuff.

So these all sound super cheap to do, by the way.

There you go. How do you get to two million dollars? Here we go. We're having this conversation, you know, when these options present themselves. But I think, how did we find him? Didn't you have him do your diff?

I had been kind of a follower of his on social media for a number of years just because he really specializes in kind of that bespoke engine, mainly the L series for Nissan. He does a lot of VR stuff, a lot of RB stuff. He does some Jay-Z stuff and probably a lot more than what I'm mentioning. But I basically sent my all-wheel drive pan to him and had him put in the gear set for it for my car, just as like a feeler. And then the relationship we kind of developed together seemed to be real interested in wanting to do that Renault because we couldn't find anyone that would touch that.

Right.

You know, the customers rely on us to help him facilitate finding a machinist and there's just no one in town that would touch that, or even the tri-state area. So it's really right in his wheelhouse.

Yeah, odd enough to say he had some crazy, like flathead V12 Packard motor that he was doing where he was converting it to they made cylinder heads for it, twin cam heads for it, converting it to a four cam motor with a big supercharger on it or something. And I know when Brian, the customer that owns that, heard about that, he was like, all right, I think this guy can handle my 1.4 liter Renault motor over here.

Those guys are so hard to find. What's the hardest skillset for you guys to find, especially whether you're hiring or outsourcing?

All of it?

Yeah, that's fair.

I mean, really, I'm...

Machining is really the tough thing right now.

Okay.

And we don't do that obviously here, but a lot of customers ask us if we got any input for machining, and we really don't.

Okay.

There's talented people in town. They're more geared towards V8s.

Okay.

Not a lot of people in town that'll do something weird one-off like that.

Sure.

Is that ever something that you would consider even trying to get in house, or is that just a matter of it's just so expensive?

It's expensive, and I just don't want that liability.

That's true.

It requires a knowledge base. It's like, yeah, you can buy the equipment, but unless you have somebody to run it.

Right.

You know.

Well, it was passing the buck again too, right? Like I remember on our last episode, that was kind of like the regular term you kept bringing up, especially in motorsports. Like what do you pass the buck on?

Yeah.

So.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's interesting to watch the industry go through these changes where it really is hard to find people that I think there's a certain level of like there's an acceptable quality level that's kind of changed in maybe the last five or six years where it's like pretty much if you've got a heartbeat, you're acceptable to do a job. You know, and when it comes to skilled trades, I mean, we've just run into problems finding people that are that are good, even good reputable companies that we've worked with in the past now seem to just be dropping the ball or the quality sucks or whatever it is, whether they got bought out or lost half their staff. You know, it really is a challenge. I mean, that's why we wind up doing stuff in house. You know, so we ran into with wiring. It's why we wound up dealing with wiring in houses.

What is the wiring for you in here, by the way? Is it more you guys or?

No, it's kind of collective. I'll do a lot of the design. We're starting to lean more and more on Shawn when we can. Andrew's good with constructing wiring harnesses. He'd be hard pressed to sit down with three or four pinouts and be able to lay out a whole car. But we've got a software now we use where we can create the diagrams and create the pinouts and kind of make it easy. He kind of goes home and sits on YouTube and he geeks out over Rob Dom and these wiring guys that make these beautiful harnesses. He's got real good knowledge on how to build the harness correctly.

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It's just like the application and design side of it where he kind of lacks, but that's all right because that's the type of thing. I can do it in advance on the computer and then give him what he needs to do it. But I mean, if we found a really good wiring source that would come in and just do it, that'd be the ticket.

That's hard to find as well.

It is. There's a few guys out there. We were just talking about Andrew Carlson earlier. He uses a guy that flies out from California. He's got his little strings. He sets it all up, writes some stuff down, goes home, builds a harness and ships it out to him. $20,000, $25,000, he's looking for a harness, but it's going to work. But then you reach out to that guy and he's, yeah, I can get you in in 2027. How's that? You know what I mean? These guys are just backlogged like crazy or they just don't respond because they just have too much work.

Well, for context, this is going to be episode 169, I think. We've had one wiring guy on for context, so.

I think a lot of it has to do with how expensive it is. Like people, it's kind of, it's the same thing that we did. You have to give it away for enough years to be able to then charge for it.

Yeah, true.

You know, we just gave it away at a young age when we could afford to do it alongside day jobs.

Right.

Because, you know, once you get to the point you have to make money, it really becomes a challenge.

Right.

You know, if you've got to make money to keep lights on, but you don't have the reputation behind you to charge what you need to charge, you're never going to make it. I mean, we were 20, 25, 24, 25. We started it in 2010, 20. I should be able to do that math.

Oh, his brain's going at this age.

Now, we started in 2010 and then moonlighted that for five years, and then 2015 went full time.

I think I was 30 when we went full time, and I had just had my first kid.

It's actually 10 years officially PMF in business with us being full time.

Sure.

15 total.

Geez.

But yeah, the first five years is the hardest.

Yeah.

I don't think I could do that again. You know, working two jobs like that, it definitely took a lot of me. It takes a lot out of anyone doing that, but it's setting that groundwork.

Well, building a name too is difficult, right? Are you guys mostly get referral work now, or where do most people find you?

Social media is powerful, but it really is word of mouth.

Okay.

You know, it's kind of this underground scene here. I mean, there's a lot of vehicles in Minnesota, especially in private collections. But there's a bigger car scene here than most people know. And it's just it's word of mouth. That's word of mouth. And starting to get stuff from out of state. And that's where the social media aspect comes in.

Have you have you had any international builds yet?

We got two Mustangs in Germany.

Yeah. Years ago, we worked with a gal. This was probably 2016, 2017. We built two Fox body Mustangs.

Oh, cool.

Which they're now living in Munich. I haven't talked to her in a few years, but she would travel stateside and compete over here. It's road racing and drifting.

Is that what the cars were built for? OK.

She came over, found how many miles around that saline? 60,000 or something, 62,000 miles. She found like a mint, clean, legit barn find, 62,000 mile saline fox body. Number 351, I can still remember it on the bumper of it. And brought it to us to cut it up and turn it into a race car. It's like, you know, I remember putting videos and pictures up of it, and there was the amount of hate and the amount of like backlash from people on, you know, why would you do this to a correct car, you know? But it just didn't matter to her. Like she liked the body kit on it, the saline kit on it and the wheels. And she was that's the one she wanted to cut up.

What car have you gotten the most hate for?

The EV Porsche.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah, the Tesla Swap Porsche we built during COVID. That one got a lot of hate.

Was there any updates on that since the last time? Cause that's what we filmed with in the background last time.

That will be back here in December.

Okay.

To, Andrew's real excited to get that one back in.

Okay, okay.

I'm kidding. He had to take that battery box apart like eight or 10 or 15 times.

That sounds awful.

That's what he gets to do again cause again, it's got a couple cells that won't charge completely. And so it's got to be taken apart and the batteries have to be sent back to EGT and new cells.

And yeah, that car was built and delivered and he was enjoying it out in Washington DC. It just, it was so early on in that EV game where now if we were to do it again, we do things a lot differently. So I think he's just struggling a little bit with some prototype stuff.

Sure.

Well, being an early doctor on the electronic side in that in that car. So I think he's kind of reached his capacity.

Okay.

He'll he'll transport it back to us and we'll work through some of the electrical problems he's having with that battery system.

Well, and there were some updates to like coolant flow through those motors. There's a seal inside those motors that goes bad and leaks coolant onto the windings. And so he bought a manifold that allows you to eliminate that. And then that had to change kind of the coolant configuration we had in it. So that's one of the things that now he's having trouble getting it to bleed. And, you know, just, you know, these, the thing, the thing that's interesting about that EV world is it brings a different element of customer, right? It brings, you know, people that have never really been into cars, but are very into technology, right? Are interested in the EV swap stuff. And so you get a different type of customer that is very intelligent, generally. You know, whether it's like an engineering background or something, and they're able to figure this stuff out. But, I mean, it's still a car at the end of the day, right? Taking it apart and putting it together and taking it apart and putting it together and trying to figure this stuff out eventually. You know, and what Ted's running to is he's just he's limited in his facility. You know, he's got this farmhouse in Virginia that's built in, you know, 1860 something, right? And it's got this little dirt floor garage, you know, that he's trying to work on this thing. And he's just, you know, kudos to him for doing as much as he has on his own. But yeah, I mean, at one point, sure, you know, you need a you need a proper shop setting the resources and everything that you've spent years acquiring. Absolutely.

Yeah. If you were to rebuild, let's say, I don't know, pick a car. Let's say this Camaro, let's say we want EV swap it, right? What would you do differently? Is that a matter of just going to like, I think it was called the hypercraft or whatever?

Like, yeah, battery systems, the motors that are out there now. I mean, the packaging, I think Tremec bought Electric GT. I think they've got like a T56 housing or something that's got an actual electric motor in it. So it's like, you put all the batteries under the hood and then the transmission has the motor in it. Like just for physical packaging in a car, that stuff's starting to come a long way. I don't, you know, it would be a case by case basis, but the batteries is the biggest thing. I mean, you find the company that has the most advanced battery system right now, and the most kind of all-encompassing battery system where you're just pinning out a connector, plugging into it. Maybe it's got some fire safety stuff in it, and that's it. You're not taking it apart. You're not dealing with individual batteries. You're not dealing with these 24 gauge, you know, cell taps that you have very low amperage, but super high voltage. You know, it's like, it's just, it's a recipe for disaster if you're not really fully set up for it.

Who was it that was working on the batteries? Was it you or somebody else here?

It was Andrew. The one that like tried to blow himself up. I think we shared that story with you. Yeah. I mean, you just, you know, two little pins you cross or, you know, you touch the wrong spot on those. I mean, think about it. You're, you're high voltage in your house is 220. That thing's 400.

Sure.

And it's DC.

Yep.

You know, you got these tiny little cell taps, these 24 gauge wires that doesn't take much amperage. They all melt down and you run into a scenario where you've got voltage going through, amperage going through things that aren't supposed to go through it. So, no, I mean, we would do another one. But, and I'm sure we will. I mean, the future is going that way a little bit, right? Like it's going to be put more and more part of motorsports, but, you know, we'll stick with internal combustion as long as we can.

Well, I don't know if those around when you were doing it, because that was a COVID build, right? The Porsche. Did you ever see the Fox Body Mustang that FuelTech did?

No. Yes.

They managed to make a manual EV or whatever, and then they used their own, you know, FuelTech, whatever stuff to basically control everything.

Yeah.

That's super cool. I think they did a video on it.

But there's another guy, there's a guy that's got a little AE86 that I've seen videos popping up on. He's got a manual in it.

Okay.

You know, in that case, you can use a lot lower power.

Yeah. Yep.

Motor. He's even got it piped into the speakers to sound like a little turbo, you know, 2 DC motor or whatever. So when you run through it, the car sounds like it should sound. But yeah, creative. Just, you know, at the end of the day, it's a little underwhelming still.

Yeah. It depends. I like that we went to go test drive on those new hurricane, or not hurricane, the new Daytona chargers or whatever. And it's cool. It drives amazing. It is pretty quick. But yeah, you open the window and it's just, I don't know.

I get it.

It's faster. I get it. There's a lot of pros to it. But maybe I'm just part of that previous generation.

And, you know, change is hard to accept sometimes. And it's especially when you associate the senses that you do with an experience. Sound is just part of it for all of us that grow up with it.

Yeah, change is hard, right, Dan? Oh, he's not here.

Yeah, right, Dan?

Oh, that's one of the things I wanted to ask earlier. Okay, so who do you guys go to for paint?

Kind of depends on the build.

Sure, because this thing is, does this thing get rotisserie or what's the story with this car?

The story with the Volkswagen, that did go on rotisserie, did get taken down to bare metal, blasted and stripped all the way through. Who do we use for paint? Paint kind of depends on the direction of the build. We work with a few talented outfits in town. The Volkswagen in particular, it's Bobby Mayer at Bobby's Chop Shop up in Pease, Minnesota, is who Nick kind of selected to do the build. And I think he did a great job for what Nick wanted. Now, something like Gramps, we've talked about in the previous episode, or the S10 that we have out, I mean, that's like true show car paint job. And not to take anything away from Bobby, but Nick didn't want that level of a paint job. He still wants to go out and thrash the car. So, it's kind of interviewing the customer and determining what they're ultimately going to do with it, and then plugging them in to who we work with. And right now, we work with about three different paint or body shop facilities kind of based on the direction the customer wants to go.

Sure. So, okay, because like I'm looking at the wheels on this thing, and those don't exactly look like thrashing wheels. Is he going to have a different set for thrashing or?

Well, just like anything, the car was originally built to be more, a race car and do track stuff. And just kind of organically spiraled into, I would consider that kind of a show car now. Nick's got his nice wheels on. I'm not a wheel guy, but I know what he's got on there is kind of rare and high end. Yeah. He'll probably have a different set of wheels if he really wants to go track it. But I feel his direction, he's going with that car now is more enjoy it on the street and he's going to hit the 2026 show circuit with that and really, really let the world see it.

No, because this thing is, I mean, the interiors also, was that a Knish or whatever too or?

No, no. Josh at Phenom. Josh Ritenour at Phenom.

Gotcha.

Josh and Josh Ritenour at Phenom and Shawn Henderson at Top Stitch, just to highlight them.

Gotcha.

I mean, they came together and whipped that interior together in probably three or four weeks. You know, Nick really hit a wall with where the car was at, and they pulled through and saved the day.

Okay.

And did a phenomenal job. So to dive into that, on who we use for paint, we work with a few upholstery guys in town. Those are the two people we work with, Shawn and Josh. So if a customer comes in and they want the full package, paint, body, interior, that's generally the direction we'll encourage customers to go. As with Josh or Shawn.

And a lot of that has to do with when you are in the fabrication process, if you can involve the guys that are going to be doing the finishing work, the painters, the interior guys, there's things that you can do while you design the bulk of the car to make sure it's easier for them on the back end. We really saw it with Gramps. We brought Shawn in when we were doing the cage in Gramps. And today we got this concept. We want to do the upholstery mounted to the bars. How do you want us to do this? We talked about it. He wanted some flanges. So we were able to actually weld all the flanges to the cage during the fabrication process. Instead of having this finished painted car get dropped off to him. And now he's got to figure out how to do it. So similarly with this, where you're talking to these guys through the process, what do you want us to do for Sheet Metal? What do you want to do for Sheet Metal? What do you want us to finish? To what degree do you want it finished? Where are you going to be hands on? And then it lets you kind of spend the customer's money a little bit more strategically as well. So he's not paying two shops to do the same thing. When he's like, all right, we'll leave this, you take care of that.

So were you guys a part of the design process for this car then, early on, or did he come with an idea and here's what I want?

He kind of had an idea of doing the all wheel drive Haldex swap from the beginning when he initially approached us. That was kind of his pitch, is he did want to do a SEMA build, no pun intended, but it was always kind of an all wheel drive Mark II that he wanted to go and road race, it's really where it started.

And it's a VR6 in there?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So then who did all the, I guess the performance side of that then, is that you guys as well or working with someone?

So the motor that's in that car right now is a Schimmel Performance built engine. So 3.2 liter VR6 motor, turbocharged. Schimmel Performance did the full build out on that particular motor.

What are they based out of?

You know, I'm not sure where Bill Schimmel's out of.

Pennsylvania or something?

We've never worked with them before, it was something Nick sought out.

Okay, gotcha.

Nick, the owner of the car, sought out Schimmel Performance.

Is that some sort of like big VR6 guy or something?

Yeah, that's what he's known for. But you know, that is, that's kind of the same thing as talking to your upholstery guy when you're doing the fab inside. When you're talking to the, you know, all right, what performance do we want? What level of power do you want this thing to make? Talk to the engine builder. What do you recommend? You know, what what size turbo should we put on this? You know, we're we will never, we will never spec out a turbo for somebody. We'll rely on the people kind of in our circle for that type of thing. You know, it's stick to what you're good at, right? Talk to the tuner, talk to the engine builder, and then we'll do everything we need to do to physically make it fit, mount, you know, do the work to it. But those are types of things you're just you're better off. Know what you're good at, stay in your lane, use the people that are sure good at the other stuff for that.

Well, to answer your question just a little bit more in-depth. So yeah, he sent us a crate built motor and we'll certainly install it. We'll do all the piping, we'll do all the plumbing, downpipe, intercooler piping. That's kind of where we come in. So a lot of the time a customer will bring us a built motor and they'll say, hey, mount it in this car and then we can sew it together, do all the plumbing, piping. And that's kind of where we fit in on that like performance building side. It really is having a builder mentality to see the car through and through like Gary said, we're going to build this car, all right, let's get upholstery over here right away. What groundwork can we lay for him? I think that's just the value that we offer that maybe some people don't is having that builder mentality to see it through to the end and know who to bring along the way and when so you don't get to a point and it's like, well, we didn't think about upholstery guys, so how is he going to mount all this stuff? So to reiterate, really laying that groundwork throughout the build.

Is that why so many people, especially in this space, struggle to see any success is just constantly going back cutting stuff or like just redoing stuff all the time?

Yeah, it's a little tunnel vision. You kind of get that tunnel vision or that gray mentality where you're only, I only have to mount this down pipe. What about everything around it?

Right.

That you can incorporate with it.

How do you guys do this? I don't know. I haven't thought about this before. How do you guys do that before you even have parts? Because the seats come in at a different time. You get the crate engine early on. How do you even approach that?

There's kind of a flow to it. Okay. But Brian made a comment that I just want to highlight. A builder mentality. We talked about skill sets. We hire guys in that are good at welding, good at fabricating, good mechanically, good whatever their specialty is. They come in the door with it, but then you have to learn the other aspects here, right? Because take like Max, for instance, phenomenal welder. So you only tell them to say that Max comes in here, you know, brings that skill set in mechanically, never been a mechanic by trade, never been a tech, never been a wrench, taking his truck apart and put it back together countless times just because it's a 2J. But yeah, right. He, you know, training them up on the mechanical side. But then when you come into exactly what you're talking about, you spend the first year getting these guys trained up on the skill sets, maybe they need to hone in. And then it's teaching them to look at everything as a bigger picture. That's what takes guys years to figure out.

Okay, how long has Max been here now? Just over a year or two, right?

Two years.

Two years coming up, yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it takes years to get that mentality because it's so easy to look at a task, accomplish a task, and then move on to the next task. Right, so you've got your software. You jump in in the morning, you look at your tasks for the day. What do you have to do on this car? All right, you know, I gotta build a downpipe, let's say. You jump in, you build this awesome downpipe, and then, you know, you're running fuel lines two days later, and you realize that you backed yourself into a corner because you did something with the downpipe that now you can't run fuel lines where you need to. Right, so the ability to look at a project from a whole, I mean, it's 15 years we've been doing it. Those mistakes still happen once in a while. But I mean, that was the biggest learning curve to all this. You build something and then you got to cut it back up or you got to change it, you know, what do you do with those hours? You can't build a customer for them. You wind up eating them. And guess what? The lights don't stay on when you got to eat that stuff. So that really is probably the single biggest challenge of this type of industry and why it is that guys, like you're talking about, you take somebody who's really, really talented at what they do, why can't they succeed in this space? And it's because what do you do when you make those mistakes? You know, we fortunately we're doing it alongside day jobs, so we could afford to eat it because we weren't relying on that money. All that money had to do is pay rent on the shop. You know, I wasn't putting food on our tables. But yeah, after that, after going full time, I mean, you really do learn this is this is the single biggest time suck is when you have to do double work. You got to go back in and do something a second time. So let's not do that anymore. And training the guys on that man, it's tough. It's tough. Got to have a scope of the whole build at all times.

Just to highlight the guys we have, you know, this industry is tough to find, good talent. And we, I feel for the first time, we have a great team here, but I feel like for the first time now, we really do got a dream team. Everyone here is very good at what they do. And it does take time. Like Gary said, they come in with one aspect, one good skill set, and then you kind of mold them into being this builder, right? And I think all our guys really take that seriously. They take the customer we work with seriously and dedicating those hours. So just to really highlight our team, man, it's tough to find good help and the guys we have working here are top-notch. And it's a really good feeling. Yeah.

I'm sure that also comes with its own lessons, right? I'm sure in the past, has there been employees that are just like the one that got away sort of deal as well? Or not really?

I mean, just like any business, you're going to have some turnover. Sure. You know, we've really had minimal turnover over the years. And it's usually just scheduling conflicts. But as far as the one that got away, I mean, we had a guy in the very beginning that helped us out tremendously get our feet off the ground. And, you know, I wouldn't say he got away. He just he wanted to do something different.

Sure.

You know, so I wouldn't say there's been one that's gotten away.

Sure.

You know, we've had some good turnover guys kind of realize in this. They can't operate at the degree that this shop needs. You know, this isn't just a build one car a year. I mean, you got to constantly be at the top 100% of the time. And when you finish a project, you got to jump right in the next one. So it's really fast paced, high energy. You know, it's we're sick people. You know, this is this industry is, you know, it sucks the life right out of you.

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.

And anybody here could go make more money sitting at a table doing production welding on aerospace parts or something, right? They're here because they have a passion for this. You know, one of the big things that we learned, like Brian said, we had a guy early on that came in really, really sharp guy, really creative, very, very good. But he wasn't really like a diehard car guy. And that's ultimately what got to him. Because I mean, picture this for your job. At least three out of five days a week, you come into your job. This is the plan for the day, 25 minutes into your job. That plan isn't going to work. Now you have to figure out what you're going to do to solve this problem, right? And while problem solving is fun and something a lot of people like to do, constantly getting beaten down by, well, that's not quite going to work the way you want it to, or that's not going to quite work. I mean, it's literally an engineering practice every day in here, you know, and you're testing things and everything we do is one off. So it's just, you have to operate at that level. I mean, we recently had a guy that was with us for a little bit. He also was very, very good. But when he decided to leave, he went back to machining where he had come from. And he said, man, I just need to be able to go unplug. I need to just be able to go kind of run a machine, you know, and I just to operate at this level all the time for me is exhausting. I'm struggling with it, you know? And so to say they got away, I mean, you can't say they got away. They just realized that they weren't going to be able to continue to do what they needed to do, so.

Yeah, you're not going to keep them from what they want to do, right? Something for anyone.

It wouldn't work. Like you can't be in this environment, produce what we produce. I mean, and not be passionate about it, you know?

One of the things you touched on earlier was software. I'm just curious, what do you guys do to kind of keep everything organized here?

Ha ha.

Or attempt to organize?

Oh, that's that's a big shout out to Kendrick. OK, so we've we've looked at ERP software as we've looked at shop management software is, you know, things like shop monkey.

What is it?

Tech metric. The problem with all of those is they're all intended to. They're intended to work for somebody who's got a car in the stall for repair, a list of tasks, getting through the tasks, general automotive shop drives on that kind of software, but it doesn't work for us because the way our tasks are broken down on these cars and these projects are so long, we require more of like a true project management software. And so we'd kind of been we'd been using Jira, which was a open source free program, and we'd kind of been using it to an extent that it seemed to be doing the job for us. And then we hired Kendrick Kendrick's background as a software engineer. In that industry, they use Jira for project managing their software design. And when he came in here, he got all excited that we were using Jira. And then I showed him how we were using it. And it was like, you could just tell right away the wheel, the gears just started turning. The first, I don't know, five, six weeks, he was here. He basically program, you know, did a lot of the things you can do with Jira if you know how to code on the back end to get it to do what you need it to do. And to him, I'm sure he's going to watch this and just laugh because it's like the most simple fundamental stuff.

Sure.

But I mean, it took the management of our projects to another level. As far as tracking parts, parts that needed to be ordered, tasks that needed to be researched when one of these guys gets hung up, being able to ping us and say, hey, you know, we have what we kind of like to call brainstorm sessions around here. If a guy gets stuck, generally, I'll come down. We'll talk through it. We'll try to figure out a solution. And if the two of us can't, I mean, we'll stop everything we're doing in the shop and have everybody stand around and stare at the problem for 10 minutes and throw stuff at the wall till something sticks, you know. And it allowed us to kind of manage those things when they had to happen. It also gave us the ability to track time on this stuff, which is huge. That was one of the reasons we originally landed with it, was we needed to be able to track time in a way that none of the general repair shop software was able to do. So, I mean, you got to have it, but, yeah, big asset when Kendrick came in and was able to kind of play with it a little more.

Well, it's really easy to just spiral, especially like with this, like you were talking about earlier, it's just like redo it this way. You could always make something better, too. That's the other thing. It's like at some point, you just got to call it.

Yeah. And there's a mentality here because you're so able to make everything. There's this sweet spot that we have to find. And it's another thing these guys struggle with because all these guys come from building their own toys. Right. Sure. And when you're in your garage and you can either buy that thirty dollar fitting or you can spend an hour welding this thing up, it's still cheaper you to to weld this thing up. Right. So the mentality is I'm not going to buy it. I'm going to make it. But that's not the same when it's one hundred and sixty nine dollars an hour. Sure. And so having these guys learn, like, don't just make things. Let's you know, some things are better off to be purchased because it's better for the customer that way. You know, so just to touch on again, you know, these these guys and the training and learning how to do this.

Setting up the efficiencies with that software and then, you know, having the guys have the mentality of if there's something out there available for purchase, that'll get the job done. It's going to be cheaper than something custom one off. So we get our efficiencies in line. It makes us quicker, you know, and really keeping that customer budget in mind. You know, Gary and I really beat ourselves up a lot on looking at a build and determining, you know, hours, hours into it versus hours build, you know.

Right.

And having a good system like Jira really helps with that. As a guy who does a lot of the purchasing, parts ordering, shipping and receiving, you know, we wear, both of us wear many hats, but that's the biggest efficiency is guys can now go in that system, tell me what they want to order, and then I'll order it from them. So you basically create multiple different jobs. So it's, they can log in in the morning and see essentially what they got to do for the day or the week. Huge game changer, for sure.

That's why I asked that question, right? Because these are the things that people don't think about on the back. Like, what's the back end look like, the organizational side of things?

So I mean, to give you an idea, you know, there's multiple builds I can look at in this shop right now that have over a thousand hours of labor into them. Well, that number sounds like a lot, and it is a lot, but that's what it takes to build this stuff. But to be able to keep track of that and communicate that to a customer in a way that they don't just feel like, I'm getting an invoice every week, what is this money going to? You know, being able to communicate with them exactly what happened, what's been done that week, you know, I mean, that's, that's huge to have something that allows you to track that time and track what they're doing and take their stories they're telling us every day and put that straight into an invoice so the customer can see it word for word from the text mouth, slightly edited from time to time, you know, but to really understand like, OK, yeah, it doesn't just, you know, whatever, mounted seats and there's 32 hours, right? Why did they take that? You know, so communicating that to them. Most of our customers are generally, it's actually a handful of them that are very engineering minded and they actually really enjoy understanding the challenges that we run into. And then not necessarily partaking in coming up with a solution, but just being able to interact and experience that process.

You know, are you guys doing like, like, let's say, put six hours into this car here today. Are you guys in like photo and video every day, every week, anything like that?

Or most of the photo and video comes from Kendrick or media guys. Generally, it'll just be text description to the customer. OK, at least that accompanies the invoice. Now, when we run into things like this Land Rover Defender over here that came in and you know, he wanted a couple of little rust spots taken care of and you start digging and poking. And before you know it, there's no floors left in it. That's when pictures come in. You know, check it out. This is what your little hole turned into, you know. And then they understand that. But we will use them. But I mean, you know, Kendrick's fully covering that. It's like they'll be, they'll literally be a YouTube episode that shows us on covering it.

I guess we never thought about it from that perspective. Yeah.

No, and we've actually had a lot of customers talk to us about the fact that the YouTube stuff is a value add to them.

Sure. You know, they show their friends when the build is done.

Exactly.

That's a big thing.

Or if they ever want to sell the car.

Right.

You know, it used to be if you had your car built by a professional shop, you'd get kind of a build album, right? To prove that, hey, this car was built by a professional shop. Now that's YouTube. I mean, you look at that Volvo, you know, or that Beetle over there, you know, they got full 15, 20, 25 episode series on them. And if somebody's interested in buying that car one day, they just say, hey, check this link out. Spiral into a couple of hours of watching the video and you know everything that was done to that car.

That's so unreal.

It's kind of cool. It's huge.

Well, it's like a local guy, Blake Crony has got that orange ACR, right? And he has the entire like build process of that, like, you know, when they painted it and all that stuff, and he has a website for it, you know, that nobody will ever find, but he sends it to people.

But it adds value. Cause you don't know if you're looking at a car, you don't know what's under it. I mean, I've got countless horror stories of customers buying cars sight unseen, bring them to us for something that appears to be little. And when you dig into it, you wind up doing major work on it. I mean, most notably the Corvette, C7 Corvette, we did, or C6 Corvette, we did a few years back. We did a 25.5 cage on. Guy bought it from a reputable shop down south, brought it up to us. Turned out like 22 of the joints in the cage weren't welded all the way. We wound up cutting the entire cage out of the car. So not only did he have to pay us to put a 25.5 in a C6 06 aluminum chassis car, he also had to pay us to cut the other one out.

Damn, dude.

Right. So, you know, things like that, you know, paint, bodywork, these things. You know, Nick, there's video, art went up and caught video of Bobby doing the bodywork and painting this thing. So if anybody, you know, is ever looking at this as a potential purchase one day, they know it's not, you know, buried in, you know, mud under all the quarters or something, right? Like these horror stories you hear, it just it validates that the car is quality built and adds value to the customer for sure.

Slide back in. No, like I was like, because like before we started this episode, you're like, oh, man, this is not hurt by that. I am. I'm in. This is better in my seat at home.

I'm enjoying this. It's comfy.

I don't know. Maybe if I lost another 30 pounds, be less comfy.

But, you know, they make them and they've got the rest of world size and then they got the American size. So the wide and tall are the American size. And the rest of the world size is like the narrow or smaller ones.

Well, I'm Bosnian, right? So it's like I'm oversized compared to the rest of the world typically. So I got that Euro in me. But I have an American diet.

So American diet.

OK, I'm surprised I never dug down this rabbit hole much in the past. Can you break down, like, you know, like the 25.5 and all those types of cages? Like, what are the various levels? Like, I guess, what are the numbers and stuff? I guess, suppose it's time, right?

So it's 25, one, 25, two, 25, three, four or five. Now I think they got six for like the diesel trucks. It's based on how fast the car goes and what the weight of it is.

OK.

And really, it just comes down to tubing size, how much there is, where there needs to be tubing, what of the original structure of the car can count as structural, you know, whether you can remove firewalls or floorboards. And if you remove a floorboard, you have to add these three bars because you now remove this.

Sure.

The 25.5 are really common when you hear that came out when unibody cars started going fast and they needed something to sort of adapt kind of a stock floor, stock firewall, you know, 750 somebody's breaking out from 850, but doesn't need to go to a 650 cage. So it allows you to do some of the tubes that are in like the 25, two and three, the 650 cars aren't there because they've sort of have the understanding that unibody cars are built with this construction. So we can rely on this portion of the car, maybe a firewall or like a brace under the rear seats, you know, like these are strong enough. We don't necessarily need to have a bar there, but you just need to tie into it. And then as you go down the line, they get faster and lighter. And like I said, I think it was a 25, six or something they came out with when the trucks, the diesel trucks, they needed something for anything over 4,000 pounds, bigger tubing, you know. It's just a class of roll cage. And SFI does all that. It's not NHRA. NHRA only certifies down to 850, and then they kind of free their hands of liability. So all the 25 stuff you hear, that's all SFI, which is the same like certification that you'll find on a window net or a harness or any of those things.

Okay. And then so there's, is there a little bit of crossover between like, let's say, drag racing and like road course or not really?

Nothing.

Yeah, because like nothing typically look very different.

Yep.

Okay.

Kind of what we've been talking about was more drag racing.

Right.

Yeah.

Yep.

Just to highlight that. Sure. Where we start getting into the, you know, the 25, two, three, four.

Okay.

Cages.

So then just to make sure I'm tracking this correctly then, so like let's say there's a car that's running 750s. Does it have, is it always going to be like, let's say, I don't know, 25, four or whatever, or can it like vary between like 25, five and whatever?

I guess it's going to have a single certification on it.

Okay.

But obviously if you're certified to run 650, sure, you can run 750, right? It's down to correct speed. And it's not just time. Time is generally what it is, but it also includes, there's a top speed rating on it. Yeah, you know. But the nice thing about SFI and the way they do it is it's really precise. So, you know, exactly, you know, these cages, when you're doing cages like that, you're pretty much cutting the floor of the cars out and you're doing a full tube chassis and dropping the body back over it. And the chassis is the chassis. It's pretty cut and dry, you know, across the board for all cars. But you get into road racing and you're building like GT class cars, which is something that's built on a production car. You're working within the constraints of the floor and the pillars and all these other pieces that you just kind of cut out of your way when you're building 25 chassis. So it's more challenging even though there's not as many bars.

Sure.

If fitting them in the car, getting them to, you know, talk tight, headroom, all that kind of stuff, you know, is definitely more of a challenge. I think road race cages are I think generally speaking, they're a little more challenging than drag race cages.

That's an art in itself. My first time seeing like a nice tucked cage was like the Mth Moto cars. And just to how incredible, like you had to look for the cage. It's just, yeah, that's an art in itself.

Yeah, I forget they were having, I think Aaron was having, it was a guy like in Wisconsin or something that was building these cages for him.

I don't know what the cage, they're on a state.

I know that, I don't, I never did, I don't know if I ever knew who it was that was building them, but they were nice. The way they was running them down through like dash vents and stuff, you know, because there's the art to that too, right? When you're doing full interior cars, it's different than, you know, doing a stripped car because now all of a sudden you want the aesthetics to be there. And so you're adding one more piece to this. Your main hoops a little lower, your A-pillars are a little closer to your head, you know, all that stuff. So it's it's a challenge. I mean, we did. What was that that car we did for ratified TTRS?

The Chase Warfield Chase TTRS. Yeah, I mean, that was a ratified customer. But yeah, we did that specifically for Chase. But that was a full interior car, 850 cage.

Yeah, I think we ran that down through vents and had all his upholstery and like it's all doable. It's just, you know, now all of a sudden you're moving things around a little differently. You know, you need to stick pipes through a dashboard before you put everything in place. And then you still got to plan on how you're going to drop the cage and access things. And yeah, it definitely adds to it for sure.

Yeah. Serviceability to all that in mind. Yeah.

A lot of that goes away. People don't realize if your cage goes through your dash vents, you're never fixing that heater box. If your heater core leaks, you're going to live with it or you will cut your dash at that point because you can't get it out. Yeah.

OK.

So there's some downsides to the fancy trick. I mean, it's a full interior cage, for sure.

I guess I never thought about that either. You guys don't do a ton of drag cars in here, do you?

Not really, no.

Every once in a while sort of deal?

The drag scene is kind of a bunch of good old boys. And in a good way, a lot of them are self builders. Oh, true. I'd say we probably do a couple 850 cages a year, but anything beyond that, it's definitely kind of a good old boy, if you tighten its scene.

Sure.

A lot of talent out of state. You know, guys are having their cars built up, but our specialty is, it really is road race.

Sure.

Yeah, there's still a lot of guys, too, that are good fabricators that are building cages for drag racing in their garages.

Right.

That's a better way to put it.

And you're not going to compete with that.

Sure.

Right. They don't have the insurance overhead we do. They don't have the overhead overhead that we do. So, they're going to be able to build them for cheaper. And there's a lot less of that in kind of the road race world. There's also, the customers are a little bit different as well. You know, generally speaking, and this is a huge generalization. I know we're going to get beat up over this, but generally speaking, a lot more of your drag racers or your road racers are kind of your white collar, you know, business oriented, you know, go to any Apex, you know, event up at Brainerd and look at the guys that are out there, right? They're generally not as interested in bringing their car to somebody's garage. You know, they're more the ones that are asking, you know, hey, are you insured? What's going to happen if something happens? You know, and these are just differences in the industry, not better or worse, but just generally speaking. Yeah, that's that's what we that's what we kind of see. And you can tell I'm kind of picking my words, picking and choosing my words here.

I know exactly what you're trying to say, because like when you get to even different classes, even within drag racing, it's a very different type of client, because that's mostly what our show has been about, mostly street car and drag cars and all that. Even when you get to certain classes, the clientele changes or shifts, not always an exact science, but you could definitely tell.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think there's also something to the fact that as you get fast in drag racing, it really does become a team effort to operate that car. I mean, real fast cars in drag racing are a completely different animal than real fast cars in road racing. You know what I mean? Like look at this car. This is a very fast road race car. Generally speaking, the motor is pretty much stock, other than Carl put a bigger pulley on it. The fuel system is still stock. There's not the elements to this that there are in, let's say, a 750 door slammer, or some of these cars you just saw it, the World Championships recently here. It takes a team of people to make those cars work, so you kind of have more of a team mentality, and most likely there's going to be somebody in that team that's the fabricator.

Sure.

You know what I mean? So somebody in there is going to be the guy that's going to handle a lot of that load, so you're going to see those cars less in shops and more in kind of a home-built shop, you know what I mean? At least that's kind of my traditional take. I mean, we've got a bunch of buddies that early on, I mean, a lot of the cars we did early on were drag cars because that's kind of we got done building our trucks and a couple guys said, hey, can you try to build some 850 cages? And we had the tools and the skills and did them. And so in the early days, I mean, that's a lot of what we did. And then we kind of just went in the direction of what came in the door and kind of followed where the most likely area was to be able to make it into a career.

Sure, so actually, this is one of the questions I had when I was listening back to our episode. So you had the Ranger, if I remember correctly, right?

Yep.

And then you had the Toyota?

Took all the way up.

Yeah, yep. So what exactly were you guys fabbing when you were working on those trucks? We never got into the details of them, I don't think.

I mean, an air ride mini truck like that, whether they're bagged or they're body dropped, body dropped meaning frame and chassis lay flat on the ground together, it really does come in a lot of frame modifications. You know, thinking of a solid axle that needs to go up and a body that needs to come down, we'll do like a C notch over the rear axle to allow that rear axle travel to come up. Same thing with the front suspension, usually we do what they call a Z, where we'll chop the front nose and then let that come up as the rest of the frame drops down and then we'll play connect the dots. Modified longer upper control arms help that bigger tire tuck up, but really it's frame modifications and then mounting things like airbags and an air tank. It really kind of helped us groom our suspension geometry knowledge in four links and making a mini truck work. I mean, they still drive down the road straight, but you're putting a bag on a bar to get more lift out of it. You still have to have like a four link suspension mentality to set these cars up. So it kind of really groomed us for a lot of stuff we're doing today and you know, mini trucks will always have a place in my heart. Oh yeah, absolutely.

There are a lot of phenomenal builders that are out there now building hot rods and other cars that came out of the early 2000s building mini trucks.

Really?

Absolutely. Because I mean, how many times do we build your frame on your Ranger? Like four times. I mean, it's you do it, you drive it. It kind of works. You do it again. It works a little better. You do. I mean, custom suspensions. I mean, you're building everything. You're building all your mounting points. You're learning about how a suspension works. And you're learning how a suspension works on a car that has, you know, 15 inches of suspension travel on it or 10 inches of suspension travel. So everything's amplified, you know? And I mean, your fabrication, your understanding of structure, chassis and suspension geometry. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of guys that came out of the early 2000s mini truck movement that are now very successful, big name builders, you know? It's kind of cool.

What was the hardest part? I guess, because like you, Volvo, BMW, right? That's where you guys came from.

Yep.

Where did you guys kind of start picking up the skills of getting into the fabrication side of things? Was that just a side thing or?

I mean, it was definitely a side thing. You know, a lot of it stemmed from living on the West Coast, but even prior to that, before moving to Arizona, I mean, the custom car scene up here in the late 90s, early 2000s was all about shaving door handles and body lines and painting cars. So that's where the interest came from. In some experience, and maybe I'll speak with me a little personally, was really when we lived in Arizona in the early 2000s, that West Coast custom scene was so huge that it just really opened the doors up. Really for the mini truck scene and then what guys were doing.

Sure.

Was that your favorite TV show, West Coast Customs? What was your favorite show back then?

Exhibit, Pimp My Ride. I don't know what the name of that show was. I think it was Pimp My Ride, right?

Yeah.

Just in the cheesy way, right? I don't watch any of those shows now just because I don't have a lot of time and there's so many out there. But if you can think back early on, you know, it was probably like Orange County Choppers, right?

Yeah. Monster Garage. I forgot about that one. That was mine.

But, you know, Pimp My Ride, I mean, it's just a cliche, but it's like that's, you know, they were they were cutting and buffing cars and shipping them down the road.

But it's as iconic as, you know, Fast and Furious. I mean, there's a generation that can, you know, relate to that. Yeah. We just put up we put a water fountain in your glove box or whatever. You know what I mean? Like that was, you know, it was just a funny group. And now it's, we've kind of gotten to know a few guys that were involved in the media side in those years. And it's funny to listen to the stories of like what was going on in the backdrop and that stuff. It was just people that had, you know, I mean, no idea what they were doing, just slapping TV shows together and the networks were just buying them. And it was, you know, trying to figure out how to how to kind of afford to do all these these builds and all these cars and, you know, keep the shows moving forward. Some icons came out of there, that's for sure.

What's the wacky? Is there anything that's been wacky that you've put in a car before? Like a goldfish tank or anything or?

No, nothing like that. I mean, we've always been like driver, motorsport focused.

Right.

So not to fall in that cliche of like a builder or like a custom builder, which we're kind of getting into a little bit just with some of these. You know, our core is always motorsport related, roll cages, chassis fab, but we get tasked with a lot of turnkey builds now or they want us to see it through. I can't say I've put a fish tank or anything in a vehicle before, but you know, it doesn't.

You're open to the idea.

We put a roll bar in a solar race car for a college. That was kind of goofy until what race we went like a solar race car. You know, those colleges do you like the solar race cars?

Yeah.

We had a what we built a roll bar for one. I mean that the bar itself wasn't quirky, but the car was.

Sure.

That's kind of kind of cool. I don't know. Yeah. Most everything else has been pretty straightforward.

Sure. That makes sense.

Yeah.

So going back to kind of like the mini trucks sort of thing, because this is again, was YouTube out at this point? Because YouTube was 2006, I think when it came live. So you guys, where were you learning these skills? I guess it's just did you have mentors along the way or friends in the forums? Forums. Forums.

Forums, man.

Like, yeah, there was some forums and stuff. A lot of it self taught, self interested. You just go to shows, particularly in Arizona.

Sure.

Live down there. You'd go to the shows and just see it. And, you know, usually one guy in a club had a garage and everyone would just kind of hang out. And you just more is more trial and error.

Sure.

Yeah. There's more trial and error for a lot of that stuff.

Yeah. The forums were good. And I mean, I kind of miss them because it was, you know, the photos, the in-depth, you know, the guys would put up all the pictures, the guys. The big thing in the mini truck world was chassis building, right? Like everybody had to have the cooler looking chassis. And so, you know, all these pictures. And then, of course, like the pages and pages of debates of people telling them why it wasn't going to work and, you know, but yeah, I mean, the knowledge is definitely a lot more readily available out there now. That's for sure. You know, YouTube University, man, you can pretty much anything.

Oh, well, the almost 100 episodes since you guys have been on, like my like the amount of learn is just because I research after every single episode before every episode. It's insane how much is out there.

Yeah, it's cool.

And you just keep finding more YouTubers, more TV shows. It's you can't keep up with it all. Like you said, you have no time. People like, have you seen this niche YouTuber? I'm like, no, I haven't.

Well, and that was the thing. Like it's been good and bad. Like the knowledge out there is good, but man, the influencer side of it has definitely detracted from the industry a little bit. You know what I mean? It's like SEMA, it was a perfect example this year. You know, it's just like, it's so heavily influencer oriented now. Yeah, it's pretty heavy. It's less about the builds and more kind of about, you know, who's going to be at this booth signing this and who's going to be, you know what I mean? Like it's kind of just, and I get it like that, that whole side of the industry keeps wheels turning and keeps, you know, money coming into the industry. Cool. But it's just not, you know, as a builder, it just isn't the most, I don't know, attractive part of the industry to me, you know, and just seeing it and how far it's gone. I mean, SEMA definitely, we haven't been to, I haven't been to SEMA since 2018. Brian went once since then, the last few years, but yeah, it's definitely changed a lot. Yeah.

The one that stuck out to me this year, I can't remember who had him at his booth, but I don't know if you guys ever watched the UFC fight. I think, I think it was seven years ago, maybe longer. Derek Lewis, the guy that was like, my balls was hot or whatever when he took off his shorts. That guy was signing autographs at some booth today. I'm like, that's such a weird, I don't know how that crossover happened. Somebody out there knows what I'm talking about.

And you know, what does that say about what SEMA is, right? SEMA is supposed to be like a shop like us are supposed to be the customers at SEMA, right? We're supposed to go out there to make connections with new businesses and new products and leave with networking, right? Who has these people in their booth and why? Like what shop owner is like, hey, I want to go get this guy's autograph?

I guess it's kind of the opposite of what you care about. Yeah.

It's kind of, it's continued to attract sort of that, you know, for a long time, SEMA kind of got a bad name because for every shop owner there, you know, he got three or four of his buddies in that weren't actually supposed to be there, right? And they're all there to just try to work a deal on their parts for their own cars, right? And then the vendors get sick of having these conversations because that's not real business for them. And then they kind of check out. And then as a shop owner, you're kind of like, well, I'm not getting anywhere with anybody. Like everybody's just halfway checked out, you know, and that's why when we started going to PRI, I was going to say, yeah, that's a big one. Totally different, right?

Is going this year.

Actually, that Volvo is going to be there in the Cortex booth.

Oh, okay. Oh yeah. That's right.

So yeah, we got two cars that went to SEMA, we got one going to PRI, so kind of a big year.

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But, you know, Racetech, they weren't at SEMA. Cortex, they weren't at SEMA. SXAP, they weren't at SEMA. You know, a lot of these race companies have really stepped away from SEMA. And I think it's, you know, the the the burn yard out front and that stuff, like it's finding its own spot and sure and good for it. You know what I mean? Like SEMA is the pinnacle of the year. But I think there's a lot of shop owners like us that have kind of stepped away from SEMA completely because of PRI, you know, and they're all owned by the same companies and they don't care which one you go to. But PRI is definitely a lot more specialized and you leave there with a lot better business networking than you do from SEMA, for sure.

Is it kind of just a matter of turning more into spectacle than industry then? Yeah. The other one, I don't know if you guys have been keeping tabs on HPX. So I'm going to be having him on the show. I'm actually having a booth at PRI. I don't know. I'm sure you've seen that on Facebook, but I think he was the president of PRI for some time and now he's starting like another one to basically kind of fill that gap that you're talking about. Is it just be more industry focused? So I think they're inaugural heroes this year. So we'll see how that goes.

Well, and PRI is kind of beginning to do the same thing a little bit. You know, you got all these people that are on these TV shows that are signing autographs and booths. And again, that's fine. I understand that it gets people to your booth. But that's, you know, if it's a true industry convention, you know, that stuff's kind of like, why are these guys here?

Yeah, I get it. Well, we talked to Schwartz last year as well, and he was like, yeah, it cost me 100 grand or whatever to go to SEMA. And it's like, I didn't see that money back. So I get that. As we kind of start to wrap up, is there anything that you guys wanted to touch on? I know you kind of wanted to talk about this car when we went back and forth, but is there anything else that I'm kind of missing?

No, man, we got some exciting stuff coming in the pipeline. I would just say, you know, stay tuned. Yeah, that Volvo is going to be wild.

What's the story with that car? It doesn't look very simple.

So if you know anything about Volvos, which most people don't, the two four twos in the early 80s were the car that Volvo came out with to get homologated for Group A racing, which was road racing. It was the touring series in Europe. And, you know, it kind of has that. It's where a lot of those real classic iconic, like the 190E, you know, the real squared off 190Es. And some of these iconic, like 80s looking, you know, race cars, you know, the M3s, the E30s, you know, they all raced in that series. And, you know, for Volvo, it was the two four two. Well, Brian bought that, bought a motor, bought a 2J on deal from a customer that wasn't going to use it anymore and then wanted a car to put it in and kind of want on that car. And, you know, the body lines on it are good. It's a sharp looking car, squared off, kind of has that real classic 80s year old look, except for underneath it is basically a GT3 suspension. So it's a full SLA, so short, long arm front end, because nobody makes anything to support that platform.

Right.

You know, so to put a McPherson in it out of something else just didn't make sense. So it's a short, long arm front and a cambered rear axle, all by Cortex. So that's, they make some of the fastest Mustangs out there from Pirelli World Challenge days, Mustang Challenge. And now Sam Paley going over to Lamar earlier this year, he was supported by Rick Reynolds and Ford Performance, which are all tied into Cortex. So they know how to make cars go around the course fast. And we wanted to put something in that, that wasn't kind of some crappy repop, you know, Chinese front end that most of these hot rod kits are nowadays. So we just went straight to what we know and Cortex Racing, we've worked with them before.

And it seems like a partner you guys are really putting on this year.

Yeah, that's actually whose booth that car is going to be.

Yeah.

So it'll be kind of fun for them, too, because it's totally outside of their wheelhouse. Everybody knows them from Mustangs and OK, they're going to have an 83 Volvo.

Oh, yeah, I suppose. Yeah.

In their booth.

Same era, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Kind of cool. Otherwise, I mean, I don't know what else we got coming on the pipeline, the Beetle.

We got a pretty cool Beetle that we were tasked with. I don't know really, really what to say about it. It's just kind of a bad out of hell. It's just a road race Beetle, full tube chassis. That's taken a different direction for a motor power plant. I wouldn't even really know how to describe the Beetle at this point. It's not going to do any sanctioned racing. It's going to be kind of a jack of all trades. Sure. An advertisement for his business, it can go road race. It'll never competitively road race, but you know, been battling some motor issues with that car as well and pretty much just decided to do a 996 twin turbo motor setup in that with a PDK trans.

Well, that's going to be nasty. Back the bus up here. So power wise, probably like 500, 600 wheel, maybe.

I mean, they've made 445 in that motor stock and that's where we're going to start.

I was going to say, because like that car doesn't need a lot of power.

Yeah.

It's going to wait. It's going to be sub 2000 pounds almost.

Absolutely. I mean, that car, that car over there where it sits right now isn't even 1300 pounds. Yeah. And then you're going to put that driveline in it and you know, yes, it'll, I hope it'll probably be sub. I mean, it'll probably be sub 1800 pounds.

Geez, dude. It's not have a cage and all that stuff in there.

It's got a cage.

It's a full Kermali tube chassis right now.

OK.

Yeah. I mean, it came to us originally to do some suspension stuff on. We installed a kit from was it Cool Ride, Cool Ride Customs out of California, California. Makes a really cool like independent front suspension and kind of a long arm rear coil over conversion. Get rid of the beam in the front, get rid of the old torsion bar in the rear. So we put the suspension kit on it, and then it went over to Bose or over to Veshio's. And the customer wanted they had this vision of this rendering that he found that would have required the car to be lower and it couldn't have been lowered without really screwing up the geometry on the suspension. And we put it in at the height it was supposed to be at. It needed to go lower. So it came back here and we dug into the mini truck days and we basically zed the thing four inches. So we dropped the thing. We cut the front and cut the rear so the suspension mounting points would stay proper in relation to the ground. And then we basically just dropped the whole chassis around it. And the most sense just was to tube chassis the thing. So it's still got like the factory floor pan in it, but the tube chassis is on top. And then, yeah, like Brian said, it was he was waiting on the motor for years. The motor never came through. It was supposed to be a hot little turbo, 2,700 cc air cooled motor. And when he pulled the plug on that, he said, what's the coolest thing I can do?

And it was the coolest thing we came up with. It was that or like an STI motor.

Okay.

And we thought about putting a Subaru drivetrain in there just to keep it simple and get them rolling. But he really wanted to go all out. So we came up with this wild idea to do a 996 twin turbo motor, which it's on its way here.

Okay.

Once it lands, then we got to kind of figure out how to get it in there, but that's kind of the next, you know, in the pipeline, real high end build we're working on. Maybe we bring that to SEMA next year.

So, okay, to make sure that that fits in there and the PDK and all that, I mean, do you... I mean, how do you know it's going to fit, I guess? Are you doing some sort of measurements on both beforehand or what's the thought process there?

I mean, I think the thought process is we'll make it fit. But with what we have in our back pocket now, you know, we'll 3D scan the entire Motor Trans. We've already got a 3D scan of the car. And we'll start to play with it digitally. And there'll certainly be some rework that has to be done, just where the vehicle was going before. Nothing structural, but some tin work that will have to be redone.

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But the car was really set up to receive anything, just with the fuel cell we had in it. It just is going from air-cooled to, you know.

That's going to be awesome.

996 motor.

That's going to be one of the coolest builds you guys have done.

Yeah, that PDK, I mean, he wanted to be able to paddle shift it. So we looked through options of gearboxes. And so just to highlight a few of the companies, because there's no way this thing would be possible without having some partnerships on it. Just this is outside of our wheelhouse with some of this speed density out of Tennessee, specializes in doing PDK swaps in 964s, 993s, 996s, and 967s. So if you got like a Triptronic car and you want to go PDK out of a 991, they've got a Cyvec ECU and everything figured out to actually convert over to the PDK, which is super cool. Stumbled upon them, talked to them a little bit. I don't think Jay took us seriously at first, like we weren't really going to do this. And then once I told him, we just dropped the money we did on the Forge Line Center Locks for the car. Like this customer is committed. He wants this kind of 2RS inspiration in this thing. I started to get some time a day from him and yeah, we moved forward and he kind of custom figured out a way that we could do this, where the Cyvec ECU that's going to run the tranny will also be able to run the engine. So we'll be able to use a single ECU and it's going to be not streamlined by any means, but at least we've got kind of some support in our corner. When it came to figuring out the motor, reached out to Ryan Gates over at 311. Yeah, if you need Porsche input, I mean, he's one of the better ones in town. So he kind of said, yeah, that 996 Mezger that's going to be about one of your best options for something that can swap, but isn't, you know, we stayed away from the 997 because of variable veins on the turbos. And you know what I mean?

Okay.

We just really, again, stay in your own lane, right? And reach out to people that know what they're doing. Like, I don't know anything about those trannies, those motors or anything. So I was kind of collectively bringing some knowledge together, figured out a game plan, pitch it to the customer. And then all you got to do is write the checks.

It's easy as that, right?

Yeah, right.

I love seeing all the polka dots everywhere all over. Like I see under this car.

Scan dots on everything.

That's something you guys are really embracing in the last year, huh?

Last year, year and a half, yeah, is the 3D scanning. I mean, it's a game changer.

OK.

A lot of people are overwhelmed, think it takes more time. But in reality, it's almost quicker. You get a scan and then you can do it digitally, where we would make three, four parts of something before we get the end result, where we do a lot of old school CAD, right?

Yeah.

Cardboard data design. We'd make parts that way. Now it's just a quick scan and then it's digital.

Yeah.

What is your choice of scanner? Who's doing all the scanning for you? Is it just you guys or one of your engineers here?

Artsum is capable of doing some scanning and then Derek also. So we got two guys here that do quite a bit of it. I don't even remember what Artsum scanner is. He brought his own scanner in. Otherwise, we have Creaform Handy Scan, a bit of an older one that we use. Actually had some real good conversation with Creaform this year at SEMA. So that's looking at the PL3D or the Creaform that they've got now. A lot of it is the reverse engineering capabilities on their software has just gotten so good. These older scanners, you battle with processing and dealing with the files. Now a lot of the stuff, surfacing models and that type of stuff is way better now.

Oh, dude, it's like a $10,000 scanner from five years ago. It's like a $1,000 scanner today. It's insane.

Or a $85,000 scanner from five years ago is a $10,000 scanner. Yeah. You know, I mean, it's huge for sure.

Well, last thing, we're sitting in some race tech seats. I feel like I'd be doing Adrian a disservice if I didn't ask.

Why?

What got you guys into race tech?

Really, what got us into race tech is our good friend, Frank Munson, Anderson Motorsport, is really who we learned a lot about race tech from. I've been working with him over the years and developing a relationship with race tech. Kind of our sales pitch to it is the integrated seat back support. You know, there's no other seat like it on the market that's got a structural integrated seat back support in the back of the seat, where you can basically bolt your seat to the cage. A lot of sanctioning bodies, I shouldn't say a lot, some require it, some don't. But if you got a fiberglass seat, you know, people are punching holes in their seat and doing a seat back support tying in the cage that way. That's kind of really where race tech differentiates. We've been working with them now for three years and install them in all our in-house builds. We usually have a few in the showroom at any given time, so customers can come in, sit down, try it out before they buy it. And that's something you don't see a lot in town either, is where can I go and sit in a seat? So, you know, we got at any given time, you know, four to six seats in our lobby, but race techs, you know, it's the support too. It's still a smaller company. It's kind of we believe in.

Yeah.

It's my two cents on it.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, the back support is huge. I mean, grab any seat. I don't care how stiff it is or how good it is. It's only mounted down here and you grab it, move back and forth. I mean, we had a customer that crashed 992 earlier this year at Brainerd, lost it in one, backed it into a wall. I mean, absolutely decimated the car, ripped the whole quarter and everything off, knocked over one of the K rails. One thing that was super noticeable, those have Seybelts in them. The seat actually was about an inch and a half from the door bar, but yet the door bar had a dent in it. Because when that car hit the wall, that seat did flex enough to allow that to hit. Now, different theories on whether a little bit of absorption is good or not. I would prefer that my seat not move anywhere, and all the absorption happened in the padding in the seat.

Right.

You know, versus it moving and then dead stopping against a door bar. Ultimately, John did break ribs on that side. So, I mean, you mount these things on the top point to the harness bar. And I mean, they're just they're super rigid. Plus, the more you can feel the car, the more solidly you're planted in a car, the more you can feel it. I think the more input you get as a driver.

Yeah.

You know, we've seen more and more of our off road customers jumping into these because of that back support. Andrew's got, Andrew Carlson's actually bought two of the Kevlar's from us.

Okay.

Which are their super light.

I think that's what's this one here too, as well.

That's what's going in next. Save about seven pounds off a seat by going with that thing. You pay for it, but hey, you know, it's racing. Where don't you, right? But yeah, they're comfortable. They've got inserts in them. You know, you can do the foam inserts. They got different cushions, pads, the covers come off so you can wash them so they don't get all nasty. You know, I mean, just plus like Brian said, the support. You partner with a company you believe in, you get support from. That's enough for us.

They're good people. I talked to Adrian, and then I also talked to their New Zealand marketing guys, whatever, super nice people. So yeah, yeah. And they're comfortable. We're at an hour 40 here.

So and David, the owner, that guy's a trip.

I look forward to meeting him hopefully this year.

We've had the opportunity to be at the Nicky Blaine's.

Yeah, Nicky Blaine's in PRI. Nicky Blaine's in PRI. David's always taken care of us and his hospitality is great. Real fun guy, real funny guy.

Okay.

Yeah, just a great team to work with, man. I don't plan to work with any other company.

Yep.

Well, and they're also in so many series, too. Like I think all Trans Am cars or whatever is trying to get these seats. Like just, yeah, it makes sense. I mean, it does it well.

So I mean, the big thing for us again, you know, like Brian said, where can you go in town and go sit in seats? We heard it over and over and over again from people. Hey, we've had people come in and just ask if they can sit in customers cars just to feel out different seats, right? Because you just there's nowhere that you can. So that's kind of why we built up the race tech lobby that we did. I mean, it's ultimately come out, sit in them, feel them out, you know?

No, I urge anybody that's looking for stuff next season. This is where, again, I didn't start feeling it in my back until about maybe five minutes ago. That's just because I'm a big fat ogre.

Bosnian, is that what you said?

Bosnian, man. That's what you have, man. But I'm a professional lazy guy, so I'm all for it. I always like to plug race tech on the show because after talking to them and actually getting to understand their product, I'm not getting paid by them. And now I actually be able to stand there for a prolonged period. I can see what the hype is about them. Because I got a race clip at home and that's also a comfortable seat. But again, I'd say it's about equal comfort, but you get a little bit more protection out of this one. So I don't know. Nobody really thinks about, we talk about time and time again on the show, is nobody thinks about protection until it's-

Safety is an inconvenience to people.

It's an inconvenience. Yeah, that's what you said last episode too. But nobody thinks about it until you have to think about it, you know?

Your best customer is one that just came off the wall. I hate to say it, but I got to build a new car. I just crashed my old one. These are all the things I learned from it this time. No compromise. I want the best safety equipment. I want the best cage. I want the best protection. Hands down.

Any other partners you want to touch on before we do the usual three?

No, I mean, we work with just a few handful of people. Cortex Racing, Race Tech, these are the kind of two main companies we work with. Sure. Who we like to support in the small community we have here.

Sure. Yeah, we got a couple of cool things coming up with drivers in the future. Some guys are supporting. A little more with off road, some of that stuff. Just, you know, yeah, stay tuned. It's going to be exciting for sure.

You guys are always worried about time on this show. We always, you know, we don't have much to talk about.

It just happens, man. You start going, you know.

Yeah. Well, on that note, I'll kick it off without Dan. How does the question go? Usually it's like if you could pick three cars, you have an unlimited budget, you get to choose a show car, daily driver and track car. What three cars are you choosing?

We did this last time.

Yeah. Now you get to update your answers.

I mean, my show car is still the same, man. 59 Cadillac, all long and slow, you know. Put that on the ground. That's kind of in my mini truck days. I don't think I'll ever build a mini truck again, but definitely air ride is still deep in my roots. Yeah. And that'll be my show car.

Every time I'm on Marketplace and I see a DeVille, I think of you, low, long and slow. And I see it several times a year.

Some 59s. And they're the most sought after, but I don't even take a 60 or 61, but.

Okay. And then track car?

I mean, I have this all wheel drive swap S13 over here that should get done at some point, but a track car, I guess I really don't know. I think in the last episode, it was a GT2RS.

I don't know, actually, I don't remember.

It was kind of my track car and then my daily was just an R34 GT-R.

Bayside Blu-ray.

Because RB is for life.

Yeah.

There's no JZ around here. We got one JZ guy in the shop. He'll learn soon, though.

He'll learn.

Yeah, when Art left, that left Max alone on an island as the JZ guy.

Oh, that's right.

RB guys in there. Man, yeah, you took my R34. I'm going to say the same thing, though.

Sure.

Like that would be, I don't know, Bayside Blue, the set of Golden Ismo wheels on it, man.

That was more about that midnight purple.

But OK, that's where you differentiate.

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah. Some people have taste.

No, I'm telling you, I don't know what it is about that. Again, generational thing, I guess. Show car, it'd probably be something on air, be something big, crew cab dually or a bourbon or something. OK, just something you can pack a bunch of.

What about one of those friends in the escalates?

Yeah, there you go. I'm good with that.

Yeah, that sucker on air.

I'm good with that. Or maybe by like, I actually don't like the new escalates that much. I like that previous, that, what is it? 15 to 20 body style.

Sure, yeah.

I just think they look a little bit sharper. I just thought it'd be cool to do like a black wing edition of one of those.

OK.

You know, gotta be on air, gotta lay out. Has to.

And then daily driver.

Well, I would do the, I'd do the, I'd do the R34 for a daily. I'd do an R34 for a daily. I think for the track car though.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think I'm really kind of falling in love with this Volvo that we're building over here. Really? That'd be a pretty. I mean, it's going to be a full GT3 suspension under that thing. And when I say GT3, I mean, like GT3 race class, not, you know, like homologation GT3 style, not Porsche GT3. But it's going to have way more power. I mean, that, that two J's.

What's that? What's going in there? Is it two J?

Yeah, that's what's going in there. And it's got, what's, what are the turbos on that thing?

I believe they're 58, 58, precisions.

Twins.

Okay.

It's got an S after it. There's two of them. So I mean, I think it's going to be.

Two top moment twins.

Yeah, I think it's going to be capable of real numbers. And with that suspension under it, I mean, that thing would be an absolute riot. Yeah.

You guys couldn't convince him to do an RB? What happened there?

The JZ kind of just fell in his lap. We had a customer that had a JZ that was fully built locally and he was looking to offload it. And when you can't go wrong with a JZ, don't get me wrong.

Sure, sure. Yeah.

There's only one way to build an RB. And it's just the right way.

Yeah.

A lot of guys try to do it, try to backdoor an RB. But with the recipe that that motor was built, I mean, everyone says, you know, a thousand horsepower. Internalized, it's built with those parts. I think the customer will probably respectively run it around six, seven hundred. But we're definitely going to wind it out and see what it'll make.

Hell, yeah.

It's going to be awesome. And that's going to be all set and ready for PRI then next month.

You mean next month? You mean like three weeks, three weeks from now?

The car will be at PRI. The idea is to, you know, try to get it through dyno and break in before then.

Sure.

We'll just see. The car's the car's pretty well along right now. We're just finishing up the whole system.

Yeah. Shawn will be out here next week, Tuesday, hopefully doing first start on it.

Oh, is that Haltech?

Yeah.

Oh, cool.

R3, Haltech.

It's got a custom set of three way MCS is on it because part of Cortex's agreement with having their car in their booth was MCS can get behind whatever car was supposed to be that Mustang. And so last minute, they dropped it on MCS that that's not going to be there. But fortunately, it's their suspension under the car. Sure. You know, we're able to make it work. So I mean, three way MCS is and 7800 horsepower and a GT3 suspension.

Yeah, sold. Yeah.

Perfect track car. I think 35 is all back and I think 285 is in front, 275 is in front.

So I can't wait to see it. That would be a good time. On that note, where can we find you? Patience Metal Fab on all socials?

Yeah, yeah, definitely appreciate the support. You can find us Instagram, YouTube, we do Facebook. Those are really the only three.

Yeah, you guys do a damn well, too. I got to give you props on that. I was complaining about this before the episode, I think, I was saying to Kendrick, I was like, man, it's hard to do highlights for shops that don't do media, and you guys do it very well, so hats off.

And just to highlight Kendrick, certainly, I want to give some kudos to Art, who obviously got our social media following up to where it was. I mean, I used to do that years ago, doing the Instagram and stuff, but it truly is a full-time job, and it's not as easy as it looks.

Yeah, no, he did a great job.

Art came in and he got us a long way. And then everyone that's come with us have always gotten us to the next level, whether it's Fabricate or Media. But now with Kendrick here, it's going to give us that digital presence more on the advertising side, try to build out some of our product.

It's awesome stuff, guys. Well, thank you very much, Brian, Gary, for coming on the show again for round two. And we'll see you all next time.

Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.

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 and see you all next time.