79. Custom Builds and Careers In Fabrication, w/ Matt Corniea and Jose Ascencio

Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host, Harris aka Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations, and I am here with my co-host, Dan, Mr. Gunnigaraj.

Yep, how's it going?

It's going good. We'll see if we keep the intro, man. But this might be the last episode we do the intro like this, so we might just enjoy it.

Just make sure you send any pre-recorded stuff to me for approval.

Yeah, yeah, sure, okay boss. But nonetheless, so this is the show where we go beyond the meat. We like to meet people within our local community, or anybody that's involved in the car scene, whether it is local or national, whatever. So 79 episodes deep, it's about time that we got some fab guys on. I've been saying this for what, 40 episodes before you were even co-host, I think. Just because we love having people of different aspects of the car. There's so much stuff on a car, dude. And you guys touch a lot of it. So I guess kind of give an introduction to each of you. So we have Jose and Matt, right? Yeah, I've talked to you a handful of times. So we've got both of you guys, you guys worked together at MAP before, right? Sweet. So just kind of give us a bit of an introduction about what each are you doing. So we'll start with you.

Well, my name is Jose Ascencio. I currently just kind of hop on with doing whatever kind of fabrication, kind of entrepreneur. I have my own little thing going on. I call it Elegant Garage. It's just a little shop that I have that I put together to just do any fabrication for anyone who does like, who needs charge piping, downpipes, even turbo kits. You need anything, honestly. I'm not afraid to do it. Just trying to help the average person, local human being, that wants fab work done that doesn't want to bring it to a shop that's 200 plus dollars an hour. So I work out. I work good projects on good average amounts of cost of what to build for someone and pretty much take them in. Yeah, that's pretty much what I do now. I work with JWP here and there to do a couple of things here and there.

Is that one of the main guys that you're working with right now?

Right now, yeah. Just helping them because I know they're having other fabricators there, and then they've just kind of wanted somebody else to fill in the void, so hop in and hopefully stay in that spot.

Sweet. And then you're over at DRSC. How does that work?

So I'm the one and only fab guy, really. Dave was doing all the fab work for a while, you know, last year. I think they've only been open for a year and three, four months or something like that. So Dave's, you know, the big boss, he's the top dog there, if you want to call him that.

We call him other things, but we don't have to say that on here.

Yeah, he was giving me s*** for calling him David in a text message the other day. I was like, whatever.

He doesn't scream David to me when I see Dave. I'm pretty sure if I called him David, he'd punch me.

Yeah, that's actually my middle name, and that's actually my dad's name as well.

Oh, really?

So, yeah, I'm the one fab guy there. Dave was doing it all originally, but, you know, he has to run the business and stuff. He's too busy to do it. So when I got the news that MAP was closing down, you know, I was going to do side work over there on a Saturday here and there and stuff like that. And I kind of got lucky. Just turned into a full time gig.

Over at DRSC. You mean?

DRSC. Yeah.

So for those listening, so Dave has been on this podcast two or three times now. I know episode 64 and I think, actually, no, yeah, he was on like episode nine. Like he's one of the OGs on here. So yeah, no, we just did some really cool stuff with him and tuned by Sean. That was a fun project that did you do some fab work for that Camaro or no?

No, I know the muffler, I think, got hit on the dyno when it was.

Yeah. So later problem.

So yeah, my problem. No. But no, PMF did a lot of the fab work on it. It's a custom chassis. I'm not sure what company did it Schwartz.

Yeah.

Yep. That's a beautiful car. Yeah, I think it's dude.

I the more I kept looking at it, the more awesome it got. And then, you know, we were at JWP on doing the dyno work. What was that? Like a Saturday, I think, like three days ago, whatever. And dude, that thing just destroyed my microphone. Like it was just, it's a really cool car. Apparently, that dude's got a cool collection too. So after talking with Dave, so.

Yep. But he pulled up to the shop the other day and some Porsche, not sure the model or the year or whatever. And then he has some Jeep with the Hellcat swap getting built in Chicago, I think.

So yeah, I actually, I need to reach out to those guys when we go to. So there's a number of people in Chicago I want to have on, like we're going to have a guy that does like Nitro Cross and Rally Cross, whatever, that's going to be freaking sick. It's going to be like the first person younger than me on the podcast, which is kind of wild, but apparently he like does it professionally. But that's a different set of Cajones those guys need. But you know, that's a really, really cool car. So yeah, I kind of like was over your shoulder while you were doing some fat work, I think for one video. But so I guess after you guys kind of left MAP, so you kind of went on your own, you found another shop. But when you guys were back at MAP, what did that kind of look like? Well, did you guys do a lot of cool projects back then or?

I wouldn't say we did anything like on anybody's like cars through the shop. Like business-wise, we didn't really do much because I don't map turn their way of doing any customer work after like, what, a year before we started working there, maybe two.

Yeah, I'd say there's probably two or three customer cars in the shop right when we started that we're getting finished up in.

And that was kind of like the end of that because there's money exchange was kind of a problem. But the only thing we really built there was kind of our own cars. That's the one thing that we loved about map is they gave us the opportunity to work on our own stuff. And it taught us a lot of kind of things that we would never learn on the field. And it kind of taught us, I guess, to become who we are a little bit different than the average production fabricator.

How many fab guys were over there?

At the beginning, it was us five, I think this is what, eight years ago. It was, yeah, five of us eight years ago. And then when, unfortunately, everything turned downhill, it was two shifts. We had about 18 to 20 people, I think, and then, yeah, we had a whole second shift. We had 10 people for first shift, and we had eight people for second shift, I think. And then Something like that.

Yeah, it's right when COVID happened, you know, everybody got extremely busy. Yeah. We got extremely busy. So yeah, a whole other second shift, and it was weird, you know, everything was roped off and stuff. It was a weird time. Yeah.

Yeah, they had us only being able to use the restroom at one part of the building, and then other stuff like that, you know, the whole.

Were you guys building like the kits that went out to get sold then? Is that what it was? It was like a production line type situation?

So we originally went from, I think, like regular orders where it would be like a couple people would order some downpipes, and then they would do small orders of like a batch of five. That's how we used to do things, maybe a batch of 10. Especially to the last couple of years, they started trying to do more of a production line where we could get two or three people to work on the same thing and then do a batch of 40 and see how fast we could get them done. We were killing it, but unfortunately the economy wasn't doing as good as we were.

Right, right.

Well, it's like luxury things kind of go away. People start doing less and less mods. That's why I haven't gone E85 on my car. It's like, not in this economy. You know how much chicken costs, dude? It gets ridiculous.

I mean, I love E85. It's obviously the best for your engine, but no. When I was daily driving my 240, it was like, every two days, it was like 50 bucks in gas or 45 bucks in gas, because it gets like 10 miles to the gallon.

Yeah, people think, oh, it's cheaper.

No, it's definitely cheaper when you're paying for it, not when it's consuming it.

Yeah. Well, it's like for me, like I'm really close to a really good Minoco. So like, you know, always top tier content, but it's like, they had to go out of the way. But then again, I'd go to the shell up the street, get 93. So yeah, we got lucky.

We had a high V right up the street from us.

What do you guys got there?

Yeah, in a holiday, that was really good.

93?

No, or 85. We had a BP and then it shut down and became a holiday of like, of course we were, because we were doing what E30 blends and stuff there. And then BP went away and I'm like, because we lost those and I was just like, finding a BP now is what a dime, like it used to be a dime a dozen. Now it's like one every few months.

Yeah, there's one a mile and a half from my house that has 93. So yeah, I'm really lucky. Like I, there's a quick trip next door and I do work for them. So I'm like, I love quick trip. And then when I drive by to go get 93, though, I just gotta put my hand up like this.

And just drive past quick trip. Yeah, no, I always stop at that BP by here. Cause like, you know, he's over in Hudson. So it's like an hour drive. So I have to fill up by the time I get to over there. Cause you know, just ridiculous.

But I guess I kind of need them to stay in business. So, so I can get 93.

Yeah, that's probably a good thing.

Maybe I shouldn't steer people away from there.

Yeah. It's okay. I get them enough.

All right.

My 11 gallon tank. So yeah, like, so how does somebody even get into doing like fab? Like what made you guys kind of realize like you, that was like, because there's a lot of different aspects of working on a car that you can kind of get into. What made you go the route of fab work? Because I'm guessing you guys have done other types of work on cars too, right?

Right. Right. So when I turned 18, I started working out a good year. I just did oil changes, suspension, alignments, and some basic stuff like that. And then one day my boss came up to me. He's like, you're not going to work here for the rest of your life, are you? Like he's kind of being a dick, I guess, but kind of like pushing me to like be better. Not that my parents didn't do that. I was like, I don't know. You know, maybe I'll try out welding and stuff. And then I went to school at DCTC for the welding technology program. My cousin Jake got a job at MAP when they were in the Plymouth location. I was like, dude, that's so cool. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, working at a performance shop. This was 10 years ago. And so I went to DCTC, got my certificate and everything like that. And then I applied at MAP. And I was like, well, I know a bunch of people there already. And I'll fit right in. And then I started actually a week after Jose did. So we're basically there at the same time.

I'll just pull yours a little bit closer there, by the way, just because you're good. Got these microphones. Got to love them. But no, that's the one thing I realized is like, fab guys, you guys don't have to disclose it. But I've always heard you guys make a little bit of bank. It's a decent field. I don't know. Am I off on that?

It depends.

It depends.

It depends. You know, a top dog, welders.

Like patients.

Well, I'm saying just welders in general. That's on the oil rigs, pipe fitter stuff. They're making $60, $70 an hour after their five-year apprentice or whatever.

Those videos are crazy, too.

Yeah.

But it's dangerous.

They do some cool stuff.

That's the thing. It's dangerous.

It's not in an air-conditioned building standing on a nice mat.

The easy way to say it is you could lose your life. And if one of those pipes snaps and hits you, you're not getting hit by a five-pound pipe. You're getting hit by 100-plus pounds of force. And I haven't seen things, but I've heard enough of this.

It'll take you out.

Yeah. So I've wanted to do that. But at the same time, if it's that easy to go out, I'm not going out that easily. I'm not trying to say. If you want to do that by yourself, and you make that money, yeah, there's money out there. That's a different type of field.

You'd be either out in the middle of summer on a hot day, or in the middle of winter in a puddle of ice, and mud, and water, and stuff like that. But you're getting paid for it.

Dude, I remember after seeing there's this video of this guy working on some sort of oil rig, or somewhere in South Dakota, Texas, whatever. And he's completely just brown, with just liquids, and just whatever. And I was sitting in the air-conditioned office. I'm like, you know what? It could be worse.

Right. Right.

I've seen videos of pipe with, I don't know, what kind of gases are out of it. But they're welding, and it's literally fumes. Flames are coming out of the pipe, and they're closing it shut.

Yeah, it's like a natural gas.

And you can't stop it, because the pipeline is running through the whole city. So they're just welding over it. And in the corner of the well that's still open, it's like flame coming out, because they're filling it. That's the type of day. Yeah, you're probably getting paid $100, $200 an hour. But if something goes wrong, you know. Yeah.

Especially natural gas. Yeah.

Yup.

Like I said, there's some things, like I've seen other, like, I had almost got into underground underwater welding. That's probably the highest paying, but that's the worst.

That's crazy. I don't even know how that works. That's just nuts to me.

Full body suit, literally. It's like you're going scuba diving, Steve. Like, you know, like, literally, it's what you're doing. And then it's just like, yeah, but the thing is, it's bad for your body. Anything under like 30, 40 feet, your body starts feeling the weight. Oh, yeah. It's like going, like, I guess the moon is losing gravity. Right. It's getting heavier and heavier and heavier, where eventually it could take a toll on your body. And that's what a lot of people tell me that are, I don't know, in their 50s, 60s, they've done it. Their bones click, clack, and cardiac everywhere. It's just, you know.

Plus, I mean, you guys are car guys, too, right? So like being in the fab part of it, like that's just kind of a, it's two birds with one stone, right? It's something that you like and a job at the same time.

Yeah, exactly. And I know people say don't, or if you have a hobby, don't turn it into your job, but like.

I hate that phrase so much.

Well, that's what I did, and I still love it. You know, I still love working on my own car, you know, doing turbo cuts and stuff on that, or doing side jobs, you know, like after work, I still have enough brain power, I guess. After a long day, I could still, you know, cut some pipe and weld it together for somebody. And so, yeah, doesn't really get boring at all, honestly, especially after you see a finished product from just random pieces of pipe, and you build something cool with it, and you're like, yeah, that turned out great. And then, you know, customer likes it, and that makes you feel even better.

Right, yeah.

Is there something that, like, is there something that you've done that you're just like, you killed it? Does anything come to mind, like your best project you've ever done? I know it's a hard question, bud.

Yeah.

It puts you on the spot, bud.

Yeah, I've done a couple of cool things. I don't know, do you guys know who Ian Donegan is?

Maybe.

He has a 90, 91 single cab, short bed truck. It's a Silverado with the LS in it.

Work truck.

And then, yeah. Work truck is what he calls it. That's what he calls it, the work truck. And I did the turbo kit on that, and it turned out pretty sweet. He goes up to a cash, a Brainerd. It's a drag truck, so.

I'm sure I might have seen it. It's easy on social media, I'm guessing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, this is one of those awkward moments. I'm gonna go up, oh yeah, 500,000 followers. Or something crazy.

I can guarantee you, Chevy trucks and Silverado's don't come across my feed, so I probably haven't seen it.

Goddamn Ford guys.

Yeah, fix your algorithm, man.

Yeah, what are you? Are you like a Chevy guy, then? Or where do you stand? Do you have a preference?

So I had a DSM for a long time.

Oh, okay.

That's what probably most people know me as. A DSM guy, whatever you want to call it. And then my cousin Jake had a GTO. He had an LS2 and a T56. Made 700 wheel on some turbo. And that thing was together for like five or six years.

And just took it.

And yeah, he beat the snot out of it and brought it down to Texas. And he was racing everybody around here and stuff like that. And it just wouldn't break. I was like, this DSM kind of sucks.

Before, a thousand horsepower was the average. Yeah. It was like 700, 750. That was fast.

And I was like, well, I want to drive something. And I don't really want to worry about it breaking. So yeah, I got a 1980 Fairmont. It's a four-door. It's kind of like a Grammar car, I guess you could say.

You're talking my realm now. I know what a Fairmont is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's basically Fox Body.

Yep.

It has Fox Body and SN95 suspension, brakes, K-member, just rear end, stuff like that. So it's a six liter out of 2012 Silverado 2500 HD.

Now you lost me. LS.

It has a VS Racing S475 on it that had a Turbo 400 in it. I actually just ripped that out this past weekend, and I got a brand new T56 Magnum that's going in it. So yeah, it's been a very long time since I drove a car, and I actually enjoyed it. The last time that was when my DSM made like 400 horsepower. It just was so much fun. It was reliable. And then I got bit by the bug, and I started turning it up, started breaking stuff, and then I just... The car wasn't fun after I got done with it.

It's fast, though. I don't know, do you know Alex Talon by any chance? He has a Talon whenever I was making like 500 wheel. Took me for a ride. Yeah, his plate is achoo. It's a fantastic plate. No, that's sneeze. Yeah, and then he got Evo, and his plate was achoo too. But perfect. But no, that car was ridiculously quick. I think because it weighs like 2,900 pounds.

Yeah, they're pretty light for an all-wheel-drive car.

You know what I found out recently? I went down this rabbit hole of watching old Formula One stuff. Apparently, during the turbo era, in the 70s or the 80s, whenever it was, they were in these 500, 600-kilogram cars, which I think that in bald eagles, I think that's 1,000 pounds. But either way, it's like-

Math adds up.

Maybe a little bit more. But either like 1,500 pounds, 1,200 pounds, whatever, and they're making 1,500-wheel horse, or not wheel. Well, we're probably rounding air back then. But like over 1,000 horse in a car that weighs nothing. And then, you know, things tapered off after a while. But it's crazy. That is, yeah.

People had less brain cells probably back in the day.

Well, it's like, you know-

I think I get begged to go the other way with everything.

I guess in this generation. I wouldn't doubt it.

That's when men were men, man. Just strap me to this f****** chair with a jet engine on it.

We'll figure it out.

Dude, they used to use rocket fuel. Like legit, like damn near rocket fuel in Formula One. And they were like, oh yeah, this causes cancer. It's probably not.

Yeah, I heard you guys talking about ventilation down there earlier as like they probably didn't even use that s*** back then.

Oh, no.

I mean, we're used to ventilation stuff because of like the old dyno at MAP. Like you had to use that. Otherwise, you pass out walking in there. Literally like-

Because it's like a box.

Yeah, it was literally a box. And if you didn't turn those fans on, you got out of the car, you probably pass out like 20 seconds of just breathing and stuff. It was bad.

I'm surprised they didn't do- So their stuff was basically hand-built. Did they have stuff that they sent like CAD drawings out and had like China put it together or anything like that? They didn't send anything out for like big production?

We eventually started doing- So we were building- Me and Matt became like the main manifold fabricators. So we built all the collectors and everything, but eventually that stuff just took way too long. Like the collectors would take us two to three hours a piece to do it the way we wanted it. Smooth flow so it wouldn't crack everything. Eventually they ended up just 3D printing or scanning one of the ones that I did. I can't remember which one of us finished it, but the 3D scanned it, sent it to China, and had like a casted version of it made. It took forever, like two years, so we were still making them forever. And then eventually they showed up, and then from there we tried polishing them and doing other things. But yeah, they eventually started making one with casted elbows for certain things. I think we did WRX downpipes, like the flanges, a couple other things like that. And there's a few things that we, I guess we went towards the China route, but the quality definitely dropped on, like the flanges we were getting that were offset. Things weren't perfect to when we were getting them done in house, but that also shot us in the foot for having things not done as fast when all the fab stuff got seed and seed in house, and then other miscellaneous things got seed and seed in house, it would slow down production for other things. So we just ended up going to outsourcing it because it was a lot faster turnaround, cheaper, et cetera, but it kind of also caused problems, so it was like a 50-50 thing.

Yeah, there's a cost to it.

Yeah, it was a 50-50 thing.

I feel like the flange, so like the downpipes and manifolds and stuff, besides the collectors, we made them all. There was a bunch of, we had three different, two benders there. We had two CNC ones and then one smaller one. And yeah, everything would get bent up. We would get everything in like a literal shopping cart, and then you'd have a jig set on your table, clean the pipe out, cut it, tack it, and weld it together, and then do that 15, 20 times in a row, depending on what you were building. So it's kind of mindless work. I'm much happier where I am right now.

Yeah, I was gonna ask, like, what are you kind of working on now? Like, I'm guessing you get a little more free rein with Dave. Before we get too far into the show, I wanted to take a moment to talk about Razorhood. If your daily driver is having issues, aka your beater you got off Craigslist, Razorhood's telemechanics and AI tools can help you diagnose and solve the issues you may be dealing with for a fraction of the cost. All you have to do is add your car to the Razorhood garage to get started. You can provide the AI tool, also known as Gus, with the specifics of the issues you're having, and it will help you narrow down what the culprit is. It's a great way to bounce ideas off of to figure out what actually might be the problem. You can then select from a variety of solutions to explore the cost and difficulty of doing the repair yourself versus taking it to a shop. If your car doesn't have detailed solutions yet, that's totally fine. Just go ahead and add your car to the garage for free, and that will let the Raise a Hood team know what to focus on as they continue to develop and grow. If you want to try out Gus or chat with a telemechanic, go to raiseahood.com and add your car to the garage to get started. Use code MINNOXIDEFREE for a one month free subscription or MINNOXIDE20 to save 20% on a 30 minute call with a telemechanic. Let's get back to the show.

Yeah, yeah, so obviously Matt basically turned me into the fabricator I am now.

Right, that helps you hone your skills doing that stuff too, right? Like, I'm going to weld 400 of these today. I'm going to get damn good at it, you know?

Repetitiveness.

Yeah, absolutely.

People ask us, I know on daily on our welds, like, how do you get, like, dude, it's like, I compare welding, like, to drifting or driving. Like, the more seat time you have, the better you're going to be at it. No matter what videos you watch, whatever tips and tricks, welds, whatever you may have, it's not, that's not going to help you. Believe me, it may help you just pick up the welder, but continuously doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it, you'll find the rhythm. Like, that's what you want to do.

So then it gets you to this level now where you can go and do that stuff, the fun stuff, right?

Right. Exactly. Exactly. And yeah, Matt, I basically honed in my skills. Max Ottergard, I actually want to give a shout out to him. He was my, he was my mentor, you know, he taught me a lot of stuff and I probably wouldn't be as good as I am today if it wasn't for him. He's actually at Patience now, Patience Metal Fab. So he is striving.

Didn't he fab like his own, like, Sim Rig too, or maybe someone else? Yeah.

Well, also his truck.

Yeah, his truck. So his truck is an ECUZI hardbody that he literally cut, like, the box, like the, like the, where you sit in it, the cab, off of it. And then he made a, like a square frame on the floor, put it on there and slowly started building like a tube chassis off of it. And then did S13 rear subframe, S13 front, like subframe, lower subframe, you know, for the engine. And then everything else is all roll bars and, and he did it all, what, six years, five, six, it took a while, but he did it all by hand. Everything TIG welded, no, not a single MIG weld on that truck either. Like he hates MIG welds at all and like everything. He wide bodied it, it's 1J swapped, rear radiator mounted. Like you gotta have Max on here. You want to have a, that dude's fabrication, like me and Matt, me and Matt are really good fabricators and I try to meet cocky or anything, but that dude blows us out of like the world. And he's one of our best friends either.

Yeah. He also built that full truck on a bender and the bend, the tube would start to coil up a little bit. So he had to like figure out a way to make everything work together when the tubes weren't perfectly flat. You know, if you've been a 90, laid on the floor, it would have like a little wobble to it. So somehow that truck just turned out great with not too great of a bender. So, yeah, and at Dave's, it's basically when I first started, I did a couple of E36s that came with turbo manifolds already. Turbo was already mounted, so I did, you know, downpipe, intercooler, just custom stuff I wasn't really able to do at MAP. So shout out to Dave for hiring me and giving me a chance.

How long have you been there now, by the way?

I started on February 5th.

Okay, so like two months now to yeah, and already starting some fun projects.

Yeah, yeah, it's it's been great. I love it so far that everybody there is super cool and not everybody at MAP was cool as well.

Right. But it's kind of like that next step within your life.

Yeah.

Speaking of BMWs, don't you have one?

Yeah, I have an M3. E36.

E36?

Yeah.

Okay, because I got the other day, I saw a black one go past me on 169. I was like that thing. It was black with like red guts. I was like, that looks really good. That is.

Have you been in Gus's car?

I haven't, no.

That thing is insane.

That's two J's. Swapped, right?

Or no?

No.

What's in that?

He can kill you if he said that. He's a big BMW guy. I always say Jay-Z on a BMW, and he always gets a little irritation. We're good friends and everything. I think this is a built M50. I was talking to him about it today, and I think it made over 11 at MVP.

And that was when it was slipping.

Yeah, and he says now his clutches are slipping and other stuff, but yeah, he was making...

Oh, no, not slipping. Spinning, sorry.

Yeah, and then it's got the DCT trains. I forget what it's called, but yeah, that thing, he was on a ride for it. That thing's a f****** great train.

Yeah, right before Texas, I believe, a couple of nights before they left for Texas, him and Sean were tuning it, and I was in the back seat. We did a hit on the road, and I was thinking to myself, I was like, I don't like going this fast. Like, holy s***.

It was very, very fast. 170, somewhere around there, right?

Allegedly.

Dude, he was beating up. There's one video he got in Texas, just absolutely destroying someone, I think.

I mean, he race ratified.

Did he run it at the track, too?

No.

No, he's just a street guy, I think.

He ran one of the Silver RS3s here, the Grey RS3s. I didn't say he walked it, but he...

It was significant.

That thing is ridiculous. I give him respect for that car. That car is fast as f***, for sure.

That's pretty good, because I know that RS3 is fast as f***, too.

When I was watching, I was like, all right, I think it's going to do some damage. And then when I saw it race the RS3, I was like, all right, so we got definitely something to worry about here.

I think the RS3 makes, what, a thousand plus or something?

Give or take, yeah. Did you see the one that just went up for sale? It's a ratified build.

Yeah, don't worry, I'm doing this camper thing, right?

I was about to send it to you, too.

I was like, maybe I need to call my bank and switch the bins.

Because we're a little keen to go up to Power Cruise to do some podcasts up there. So Dan's doing a little shopping. We'll write it off.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that's how it works.

Like a mobile casting couch?

Yeah, pretty much. No, I want to get an RV, because I've been going to the track more and doing stuff, and I'm getting tired of, like, I either got a trailer up or I got to drive my car, then you got to find a freaking hotel or something, and then you go get a hotel with all the fun s*** that's going on at the track, because when the lights go on, people think it's racing all day, but when it gets dark, then the whole party starts. Yeah, exactly.

That's the one thing I miss about Proving Grounds. We won't be at it anymore, but it is what it is.

Carmageddon now or something?

It's getting rebranded again, I think.

Really?

That's what I heard. I can't remember who told me, but somebody told me then.

Probably.

It sucked, because we were able to go there all the time, enjoy friends, have little fun parties, catch up with people that you hadn't seen since last year or whatever. Yeah, good time.

I mean, I have kids, too, so I will do some real camping with it, but don't tell the family that the real reason is just so I can go to the track.

I won't tell anybody.

Yeah, all right, sounds good.

So, oh, damn, I'm on the spot now. Yeah, no, I was listening to your RV story. I didn't even have anything to think about. So, okay, so you got the BMW, and then you had the, what was it, S14, right?

Yeah, so I own four cars. I have my 97 M3, which I'm JC swapping. Still haven't finished that, but working on it. I have a 90 240 hatch that I'm also JC swapping. And then I have a 98 Toyota Chaser, the TRD, that came from Canada. I just got it last summer, but I bought it in 2020 before the prices skyrocketed. And I also have my 97 240. It's 1.5 JC swaps. I've done all the fabrication work on that and won a couple of awards. I've had it pretty much for the last eight, nine years of my life.

You want to put a 2JZ in a Bronco too? Yeah, let's do it.

That's kind of my thing. Is it?

Really? Because I've been thinking, because I was going to put just like a Mustang 302 in it, and I'm looking at it, and I was like, man, I think it, because it's kind of tight. I'm like, I think something smaller but fast as f*** would be really cool.

My buddy just finished the 2JZ Colorado.

Did he really?

That's sweet.

Yeah, it looks nice. Turbo fits, fat 400 series turbo fits on it and everything. I was like, all right.

That's so different, dude.

It's like I said, it's the bang for buck engine if you can get the right engine. There's a way you had to tell me. He even was telling me a couple of years ago, he's like, if I could find something, I'd JZ swap it.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, 100%.

I mean, I don't have anything against any motors. JZs are just my thing because I've just grew up around them. It's putting myself into it. But some people think that I'm against LSs. I like LSs. I just like to stick to JZs.

It's still a good, to be fair, though, get 1,000 horsepower out of an LS, that takes a little bit. It's not too difficult on a JZ, right?

Well, depending on what you have, I wouldn't push a stock one over 7.8 without expecting the mains to crack, because a buddy of mine was doing that, and he cracked 5 out of 7 mains. So it gets scary. After that, he started doing billet mains and other miscellaneous things. But if you build a block with the right cams, right turbo on it, right fuel, everything, yeah, you'll make power easily. There's people nowadays, if you do the 3.4 liter, 1,000 horsepower is a joke to that motor.

Really?

Yeah, there's some of the Granis racing making 3,000 out of their engine. Yeah, so it's pretty cool.

I mean, everyone's got their holy grail, right? I mean, the Coyote is freaking the endless opportunities, the LS stuff, the Jay-Z. I mean, there's, you know, just pick your flavor.

Yeah, no, that's all it is. It's all what you want to, I guess, find is your niche. That's why I just found Jay-Z's, because I know that I can find everything at a certain parts store. Like I said, everyone thinks that I hate RVs. I don't hate RVs either. I know when I need an oil pump, I can go to Toyota and get it. If I need a coil pack, I can go to, you know, wherever and get it, where RVs, you can't find anything local and somebody else that has RV stuff has it. But even then, if you're at a track, break down, I can just go to a parts store and get stuff. Because nowadays, I've transferred things to like LS coil packs and other miscellaneous things for the motor. So like I don't have to just get Jay-Z specific things. Well, you can do aftermarket harnesses and stuff that adapt to certain coil packs, GTR coil packs, YZZ coil packs from Yaris and other miscellaneous things like that.

So I've always wondered that on a guy who gets like something totally custom, like what you're saying here, right? Do you basically have to give them a list afterwards? And be like, listen, if you need brakes, you have to give them for like a 98 Malibu.

Going to AutoZone is the funniest trip every time. I bet it is. Because they're like, what do you have? I'm like, 97 240. OK, I need brakes. What are those? Well, it's a 9300ZX. OK, what about the transmission? 90 Mark III Supra. And then what about motor? It's a 98 Toyota Supra. And they're like, I'm sorry. Same with him. And they're like, what the f*** is that?

What year is that?

And they're like, just move. I push them out of the way to the computer and just start typing. Yeah, they do.

They're very set, too. Like, what is it?

They're just scared.

Sometimes they want to know the trim level. Like, that's even going to f****** matter in the grand scheme of things. Is it all-wheel drive?

Two-wheel drive or four-wheel drive?

Like, bro, I just need the rear view mirror. It shouldn't matter if it's two-wheel or four-wheel drive.

I just started yesterday, man. Leave me alone.

Oh, it is bad. If anybody over the age of 14 is working at O'Reilly's, I'd be shocked. It's nuts.

Oh, yeah, that's the one thing I like about the O'Reilly's that we were at over by map is all the dudes knew who we were, and they come over and easily help us all the time. We're just working on today. And they're like, no, we're just working on this. And they're like, oh, s***, cool, can we come over? Yeah, like that. So that's the thing that I loved about being a fabricator, becoming more known for working on cars, is that you get a lot of people that look up to you or ask you things. And just anything that you do, they just either want to copy or just make sure that they're doing it the right way, which is always a really good reassurance.

You seem like a guy that would stir s*** in a Facebook group, am I right, or no?

Yeah, I can. I will.

Just flaming someone like, dude, you don't do it that way.

No, I mean, it's just like, sometimes you have to tell people like that. I got to argue with somebody like Jay-Z for a little bit, that his NAG can make more power. Like, yes, it can if you build it, but he was talking about stock to stock. I'm like, no, your stock GE will blow up. Like, they made a VVTI, which is an IS300, it's GS300, it's 98 plus. It's the weakest, Jay-Z. You put 400 horsepower at it, boom, throw in a rod, everything. But if you get the 96 GS300, it's an NA, but it's a non-VVTI, that can hold 800 all day. Like, I've seen people put a 1J head on it with a 2J block like that, 800 plus horsepower all day. But if you use the other block, boom, shoots a rod. And then all these people are like, no, I swear, this is a better flowing head, this is a better, like, yes, after you build it, not from stock to stock, you can't compare that. It just doesn't work.

Some people are wrong, and they just really dig into it, don't they?

That's what I call it, that, because I had someone that I grew up with that was like that, like, no matter what you said to them, it was their way or the highway. And I'm like, all right, it's okay to be wrong. No. I mean, I guess going off of his for learning from Fab, I mean, I grew up always around cars, when I was younger, and the low riders and stuff. I'm from Houston, Texas, so around there, I usually grew up around slabs and low riders and a couple of months of cars here and there. And then growing up, I moved over here to Minnesota probably when I was like nine or ten years old, transitioning back and forth. Parents moved up here and stuff like that, and got into the Fast and the Furious, but at the same time was already dabbling into cars. And then I just always wanted to be into cars. I had an Integra when I was younger, Honda, it was a B18, C5, I think it was a GSR swap. Or yeah, C1 or C5, I can't remember. I haven't been into Hondas in a very long time. And then out of that, just slowly started dipping into 240s and other cars because I had Need for Speed underground. Saw all those games and stuff like that. I wanted to slowly dibble and dabble in other cars. But the older that I was getting, the more I was realizing that it was expensive to do anything that we did. So I always wanted to boost cars, change things. Then I was kind of getting into the drift cars where all those cars are like tube front ends and all this stuff. And I was like, if I ever got to that point, I wanted to learn it. And didn't do anything about it for a while. Then I was working at this appliance company, delivering appliances, destroying my bag for $17 an hour.

Yeah, making fridges.

Literally, removing refrigerators like that song. And I just kind of snapped out of it one year. Just didn't want to do it anymore. And just decided to go towards the automotive industry, but not technician-wise, because I knew, like we talked about earlier, don't do what you want to do because it will kill your drive. I know if I worked on cars, I probably wouldn't want to work on cars after that. So I decided to get into fabrication to learn any exhaust work, piping, and everything like that. So I went to school for Dunwoody for one semester. Didn't finish because no one will tell you, but Dunwoody is expensive, very expensive, like $2,000 a semester. And I couldn't afford to go to the second one, so I didn't even graduate. So all I did was pretty much go back to my old job and just try to figure out what I could do to find something else to do for fabrication, and I got let go from that job because just kind of lost drive being there, you know? Mm-hmm. Matt somehow had openings at the same time. Like Matt said, they had a couple openings for entrepreneurship, or not entrepreneur, I guess, apprentices, I guess is what they call this, you know, training, or they wanted to show us what to do, and I just went to a friend's house, did some training on TIG welding, just trying it for a day or two before I had an interview and got in. Jim gave us a little test, and it was good enough to pass, and ever since then, it's kind of been, you know?

Not even sure how we passed this test.

We looked at our welds, and we're like, yep, looks good to us.

You're hired.

House way. Literally, we're just like, I don't know, whatever, unless we had a bad day or a good day or something, because I don't even know.

Well, your s*** welds are probably good welds to other people. I mean, I have a Hobart that's the highest one you can get and still be on 110. And yeah, I think I'm a good welder, but it's no way in hell.

As long as it sticks together, it doesn't break.

Well, I'm still using flux core, too. I'm not even running gas or anything. I know that'll be a game changer, and I need to do that.

The one thing I tell people is if you're willing to get into it and you want to learn more, don't be afraid to contact us. Give me some time. I'll come over for an hour or two, pay me for my gas, because stuff's expensive now. But I'm not afraid to show anybody the weld, because I know at the end of the day, when I was younger, I always wanted somebody to teach me, and I'm not afraid to teach anybody. That's kind of what my thing was when I was a fabrication manager so I was trainer. I slowly dabbled in that, into training a lot of people for a few years, and then I passed it on to Matt, and I became the fab manager for MAP, and that was a really cool thing to do, is be able to put your touch in other people, to show them how you do things. And now I have a few friends that, my buddy Chase is no-coast fab, he does his own thing, moved to Tennessee, he's doing fabrication for other people. I have a couple other friends that do stuff, titanium and everything, and they all came from, technically us, I'm not going to say my children, but they learn the stuff off of us, and I'm glad that they could learn things from us, and now their careers are, you know, raising and going beyond places that we never thought that we would even be ourselves.

So, how old are you each of you guys?

I'm 33.

Okay.

29.

Okay, yeah, you guys are up there.

Holy s***.

You guys got fat.

At least after 25, it's downhill.

Yeah, well, that's three months for me, bro.

I don't mind teaching young people, I'm thinking like, I'm 40, can you teach me how to weld?

Yeah.

But no, it's like, that's cool that you're kind of passing on that to other people. There's something to be said about educating others. I don't know, I feel like that's how you prove to people that you know what you're doing.

Matt knows, I'm not going to name the person, but I had butted heads with people like Matt before, and there was one person that we're really good friends with now, but there was one time that we got really, really big, had arguments about things, and one day when I needed help, kind of shunned me on it, just made fun of me, and I just snapped, and I literally told him, if you're not going to teach me, then don't belittle me. You either teach me, or you belittle me.

That's fair.

You either do what you can't do, or the other, because at the end of the day, I'm trying to learn what you know, and if you're not going to teach me, then just stay the f*** out of my way, respectfully. I'm trying to be at your level, or more than that, and when people gatekeep that stuff, it's just kind of like, you get what I'm saying.

Well, it's like, I was listening to another podcast today, and one of the comments that they had was like, oh, I'm going to start a diet, and somebody kind of laughs at you, like, okay. It's like, all right, how does what you just said help?

Yeah, you're making it worse for me.

Yeah, you're just getting in the way. So yeah, I totally get that. It's like, at the very least, if you're going to, like, don't belittle me. Yeah, teach me.

Don't belittle me. That's literally my thing.

Yeah, that's fair.

I get that. That's the one way to make other people go above and beyond in their life. Like, if somebody doesn't know how to do something, that one little thing that you train them may have changed their career. That may have switched things up for them to do things. Like, literally, there's people that came in and wanted to work fab, but Josh was just like prefab for us. He was cutting stuff, taught them how to weld, and now he's doing a couple fabrication things over at Eurocharge. You know, he does stuff for them. Like, all I did was give them like an hour or two of dibbling and dabbling, and it just interests you enough to want to continuously perfect it and perfect it and perfect it. And that's the one thing I love about TIG welding. It's the pain in the f****** a**. But once you get it down, that satisfaction, I can't even compare it to anything.

Right, when you see those dimes and that gold, silver color and stuff like that, it's like, I want to keep doing this forever.

It looks good to me, and I'm not even a welder. I was like, it's gorgeous. I know.

We'll share old photos, and we're like, oh, those are good.

But then on the other side, you know, you got the sloppy mechanic stuff. They'll mig weld the turbo kit together. It doesn't look good, but it works. And you know, some people are completely OK with that.

It still has little pieces of the wire hanging out at a certain angle.

Yeah, like on the inside of it as well, in the exhaust flow. It's like, yeah, some people don't really care. But just, you know, where we're at is, yeah, the stuff looks really nice. And our bends line up good, and all the pipe is clean, stuff like that. So like, it's definitely a different level than sloppy mechanics, obviously. But there's like two different groups of people, people like sloppy mechanics people and then actual fabricators that care what their stuff looks like for the most part.

So I'm like as noob as it gets to this, right? Because I understand your world at all, right? So like literally like not at all. So what's the difference between TIG and MIG welding then?

So I think that's what you said, right? Yeah, MIG welding has like a, it's a gun with a wire that comes out, and the gas will come out, and then a TIG, you got a foot pedal, a torch, and then a wire in your other hand. And then you manually feed the wire in with your other hand.

A little more delicate care to it.

Yep, yep.

Is one easier than the other?

No, I mean, yes and no. You know, if you've been doing one thing for years, and you try to do something else, you're going to have an issue doing that other thing.

Right.

So, but TIG welding is, you know, there's no sparks, it's clean. MIG welding, it's sparks, you know, you'll have holes in your clothes and stuff like that.

Fine sweatshirts. You'll get burned, you'll have a splatter landing your hair behind your helmet, and then you're flipping your helmet doing this, it's the worst.

And they make protective stuff for all that, but you don't wear that s***, I don't wear it.

I think I would burn right there for MIG welding because I have a jacket, and I have a hole in it, and it went through the hole, and it burned me in my jacket. Because it even burns holes in the jacket, so it's like no matter what you're wearing, you always get f***** up. And MIG is just, I mean...

I've heard of wire feed welding.

But I mean, there's really... I know really good MIG welders as well, where it looks like you would be laying it with TIG, but with just MIG welding, some people have it down. I mean, Matt, I don't know how he has it down. I have it okay down. I'm more of a grinder when it comes to MIG welding, because sometimes I have to do a second pass to make it look better or something, but it's all to depend on the amperage, because there's like 110 amp ones that are a little bit harder to penetrate into certain metal, and then you get the 220 amps, and you can turn it the f*** up, and it'll just burn into whatever and s***. That's the difference with that stuff, too.

Yeah, and MIG has its place in the automotive world. You know, if you do a cage, when you do a cage, you weld a piece of metal to your floor in the car, and then you know that's paint and body filler and stuff, so you usually will MIG weld that, and then weld the cage, TIG weld the cage to that, and then obviously together, so basically, you'll just strengthen the cage. I'm not sure what that plate is called exactly. I've never built a cage before, but I know the concept.

It's the base plate for the cage, but pretty much the MIG will penetrate through anything, even if it's not clean. Obviously, you try to wire wheel all the paint, everything you can off, but if there's anything left in it, it'll ignore it. Whereas TIG, the second a piece of paint, dirt, dust, it just picks it up, and the tip of your sharp tungsten just goes into a ball. So the thing about the tungsten, it's pointed a certain way, and it points right at where you want it. As soon as it gets a ball on it, the line of light, I guess, like a lightning bolt, is pretty much what it is. Instead of striking where you want it, it's going, like, going wherever it wants. If people don't realize, it's dirty, stop. That's where I try to make these fabricated better. As soon as you dip or anything, or you get that tungsten, resharpen it. Why? Because now you're not fighting this light going everywhere. So that's what makes migwelling nice on that stuff. But then you're also dealing with all the sparks. At the same time, if you have any fuel or anything that could catch on fire, that happens a lot. And then you gotta go find an extinguisher and try to not burn the building down. Had to happen a couple of times, but you know.

So then when you're getting into real heavy stuff, then you gotta move up to stick, or what do they call it? Arc? Or can you do that with mig too?

So heavy as in what exactly?

Like thick stuff. We're welding together 3 quarter inch plate steel and s*** like that.

Well, I guess it depends what that's for. For like dumpsters and stuff like that, we use a mig, but it's called spray arc. Not really sure what the difference is too much. I should know because I went to school for it. But yeah, I mean, you can also TIG weld that really thick stuff too. You know, you probably want a water cooler, like a big welder that can actually put out the power, and then a water cooler puts water through the torch and keeps the torch itself cool and the rest of the machine cool and stuff like that. So it doesn't overheat.

You'll melt that f****** handle to the ground. Literally. I was TIG welding some other day. I had like 140 amps, 150 amps, and it's not water-cooled. My hand was like, my glove shrinks. Like, literally, the leather, it gets so hot that it becomes eventually my strong hand glove. Like, literally, it's small as hell. Like, literally, we always make fun of it. Me and Max used to do it all the time. We were like, my strong hand, because we struggled to get it on. But literally, the hotter the torch would get, it would melt the leather. Yeah, smoking and stuff, start on fire and everything.

It's good stuff.

Is TIG equipment cheaper than MIG, or vice versa, or is it all the same?

There's a bang for buck, I guess, for machines nowadays. Me and him both started, I guess, I don't know where he started, but at MAP, we always had Miller, which is kind of expensive stuff. I would say the Gucci of the TIG welders. But then he's moving over to Everlast, over with Dave and them. And I'm kind of debating on getting one for JWP, if they want to give me one over there. Just because for the price, you can literally, it's, what, $1,600 bucks, you can get a 220 with water cooler. Whereas mine is just a air gas dynasty, the 210. That was $3,500 used. And they're $7,000 new. But the technology is beyond. It's got square wave, all this stuff for aluminum, where it changes different frequencies and stuff. So it penetrates different, points arc differently, like the more you get into TIG welding, it's really scientific as well, because a lot of the metal material, it works with the machine, I guess, when you set it up right, because there's a lot of things. Like main TIG steel, you don't really have to change anything. But when it comes to aluminum stuff, you can change the wave, so the heat cycles are different, so it doesn't overheat in certain areas or points. I don't know how to explain it. It's just the more you mess with and dial this stuff, you get it dialed out.

Yeah, and Dave bought a brand new Everlast Typhoon 500. Yeah, that is a freaking sweet machine.

What does that thing?

A lot. It was quite a bit, yeah.

It's still cheaper than a Dynasty.

Yeah, well, he got a quote for Dynasty 280. It's b***** Miller, and it was like 18 grand.

Like I said, it's the Gucci of...

He's like, yeah, you know, while I'm looking at these Everlasts, I was like, I'm completely fine with Everlasts. I do not expect you to spend 18 grand on me for a welder, you know. I was like, you can if you want, but these Everlast machines are sweet. They've had really good reviews, and then he got into contact with one of their sales reps, and then they just released the Typhoon 500 like a week or two prior before you pulled the trigger on it, and nothing showed up. It was f****** buzzing. Yeah, it's a very nice machine, so I'm very lucky.

How big is it? I haven't seen one yet.

Like, as in tall? Is it like... Yeah, it's tall.

Is it on a cart, or did you...

It's as big as Andrew's Esop.

Okay, so it's like that.

So yeah, it's big. Big size, stuff like that. And yeah, that thing will weld anything I ever really needed to weld, so...

Well, that's one thing I love about all the shops, especially during the times that we're kind of in right now where a lot of people are kind of holding onto their money, is a lot of the shops locally are investing. Like Dave's investing, like Ratt's invested, the second shop, this ain't cheap.

Right.

It's really cool to see all these people investing, especially in their employees. Have you guys kind of been seeing the same thing?

Yeah, even as an entrepreneur, I understand what they're doing in the business aspect. I had to spend all the money on myself just to be able to make an income. Like I said, my welder was $3,500 used, and then I had to buy all the leads. I didn't even come with the leads or the pedal or anything, so that was another $1,000 on top of that. And then set up a shop, lift. So I understand these guys, I don't even want to know how much they're spending for a whole shop, because just in the storage that I have that I'm allowed to do whatever I want, I'm probably $7,000, $8,000 into just stuff that I need to make a couple of grand a month.

Well, you got a lift and stuff like that as well.

And then racking, stuff to store stuff, piping, and then everything. It adds up fast, believe me.

So is that what you do? You got a storage unit then that you're working on?

So in Prescott, I have a shop that I'm allowed to do pretty much anything. I was allowed to install a lift and everything in it. The only thing that sucks is I don't really have water.

Prescott, Wisconsin?

Yeah.

Oh, s***, I'm from Hudson.

Yeah, so I'm right there, right off of 29, in the quick trip area over there. Right around that little area. They gave me the okay to do whatever. Pretty much just been trying to figure out if that's...

In Prescott, they don't have much else going on.

No, but the cool thing is that in Prescott, I have my buddy Brian Hayes. He does Hayes Performance. He's a bender. So anything that I need, any pipe bending and stuff, just run up the street, literally two minutes away, bend me whatever I want, and it's made out of stainless. So that's the nice thing about having someone... He used to work for Map with us, and eventually started doing his own thing, just because you learn these things, and you want to invest in yourself and make some money on the side.

You guys are kind of everywhere. Yeah, we're it.

Dude, I run everywhere.

Yup, yup. Yeah, shout out to Hayes Performance. We get some tube from him as well for GRSC.

Yeah, anything you need in hand, just drive to Prescott. He'll have it instead of having to wait for Vibrant or whoever to send you a whole week later because sometimes nobody wants to pay overnight shipping. He has it. As long as you're not afraid to drive in to Prescott, he'll have it for you. He cleans and washes them too and everything. He has straight pipe if you need it as well. He has a Vibrant dealer as well. He also does K&N filters and a lot of stuff too. So if anybody wants to do entrepreneur stuff, don't be afraid.

Well, if you got a fun car, it's not a bad drive. I mean, it's a cool area.

No, I love the drive.

The cops don't really like us, but you know.

The guy who owns like half the restaurants in Hudson, he's all the restaurants in Prescott, he's been buying them up and opening up down there too. Do you live down in that area then?

No, I live in Bloomington, but when I was working at Map, I got that place originally, and it was only like a 10 minute drive after I left work. Because eventually we all started wanting to do our own thing after Map because we knew it was, sorry to say, slowly starting to go away.

You kind of get these vibes when things are kind of going away, yeah?

Well, plus I have four cars, so like the last thing I want to do is have, like I had a couple of cars sitting in the back of a lot of Map, and there was a part time when we were kind of getting yelled at because we would leave our s*** there, and they'd be like, hey man, you got to move your s***, or like a snow pile would come, and they'd need to shove snow into a parking spot, and our cars would be parked there. So eventually we had to like, in the wintertime, they made us now like take cars. So eventually I just started getting my own shop just because it's really nice to have everything in one area instead of having to go to a buddy's house here and another buddy's where my other car is and stuff. And I just started getting my whole, I guess I would say my cluster of s*** together in one area. But it's nice to have it there. And the positive thing is like, it helps people that need anything they need done to it. Like if you need an exhaust work done, I'll do it. If you need anything to do on your own car, I have a lift, for people to come and hang out and stuff. So that's kind of what I wanted to invest in some place so I could do things without being at home or somewhere to disturb other people. We're in the middle of nowhere in Prescott, so you can be as loud as you want and everything, and it's pretty nice.

So we're talking about welding, almost exclusively, but what are you guys... So in fab, there's all kinds of stuff. Are you running plasma cutters then, too? You've got torches? Are any of you running CNC machines, anything like that to cut stuff out?

I ran a little bit of CNC when I was at MAP for a little bit with Derek, but I didn't really get too far besides a couple of months of setting up some programs and stuff like that, but not designing. I wish I did, so I'm still actually trying to find someone to help me do training, because that's what I want to invest in, is CAD design. I've got a mind to create things, but I've never been really computer savvy, so if there's anyone out there that wants to show me how to do some CAD design, don't be afraid to contact me.

Fusion 360, a little bit on YouTube, man.

I'll teach you how to weld.

You can make anything you want, dude.

I'll teach you how to weld, and you teach me how to make CAD designs. That's a fair trade. That's the reason why I want to train people. If you want to learn to weld, teach me how to do things. I will easily invest my time.

It goes both ways, dude.

But you get what I'm saying? It's like I do the same way that I love about TIG welding is that I can do work for someone, and they'll do something for me in their field. I have a friend that does painting. I'll do some pipe work or whatever I want, and then, hey, I need this fender fixed. He'll paint it for me for free. It's a fair trade. Sometimes things line up, so it's nice to have a skill that you're able to hand off or help other people with and stuff like that.

That kind of goes through almost every industry. I was a restaurant manager and a cook for a long time. We used to make stuff and send it to other restaurants, and then they would trade. They would give us food. I'm a low-voltage electrician now, so I'll go hang TVs for somebody, and then they'll do stuff for me. That's an awesome thing to have, just have a trade that you can trade for. That kind of stuff is nice.

It takes you a long way. You don't realize how far it actually gets you. Welding, for the last eight, nine years of my life, is what kept me going. Otherwise, I don't even know what the f*** I'd be doing, respectfully. Like I said, I was moving refrigerators and doing stupid s*** before. And I was breaking my back, wrecking my knees, for literally dimes compared to what we make now. Like I said, we're not rich. I don't think we made great money, but MAP also, I guess the reason why we probably never got paid as much as we probably think we're worth is because they gave us the opportunity to build our own cars.

Which is huge.

They hire in a master welder, they made one.

Yeah, they made us. But it also...

You guys are also young though, like in the grand scheme of things, where you're going to be in 10 years is going to be a completely different ballgame.

In a way, that's kind of how you reel people in though. You're not trying to say in a way, but pay them a little bit less, but you give them the things that they wouldn't be able to afford. Even though I was getting paid less at first, I was never going to be able to afford the shop that I have now. So I had to slowly build myself to a level where I could afford that type of stuff.

I'm pretty sure Brian May did the math on what the shop was worth to us, working there after hours. It was like an extra $15 an hour or something like that. Not sure how he did it, but he's like, yeah, this is worth like $15 an hour extra on top of what you're making right now.

A couple of Red Bulls, he figured it out.

Yeah, I was going to say, I'm not surprised that he figured it out, because that guy's got a lot. I mean, it's like a human computer.

And yeah, like you said, we're not rich, but I'm happy going to work every day. You know, I could go be a pipe fitter. That's what I was going to do. And then Dave's shop came along, and I could be making a lot more, you know, or in a couple of years, I could be making over a hundred grand a year.

But also doing something you give a s*** about, too.

Right. I'm not, I wouldn't be happy out there in the pipeline, you know, welding all day in the hot or something like that. I'm building cool s***.

In an air-conditioned building.

Every single day, too. And it's like, you know, it's a dream, really. If you like welding, if you like cars, it's really a dream job at the end of the day.

There's something to like building something, to like be able to step back and look at it when you're done with it, is like, there's a whole nother like feeling that some people, like if you were doing data entry on a computer, you're doing something really stupid that you don't ever get that feeling. Like even when I was in construction and like, yeah, I'd build a deck, and at the end of it, you look back and you're like, f*** yeah, man, that like sweet.

Play the Home Depot theme song in the back.

Yeah, right, yeah.

I feel like only like a small percentage of the population can actually get that feeling of feeling accomplished after building something with your hands. Like, yeah, it's great.

I think that's why me and Matt probably got along so well because we'd both finish things and be like, dude, good job. Like I'd finish my 240, be like, dude, love your car, and he'd finish his f****** car. I'm like, dude, that thing sounds f****** mad. But we've always been like very proud of our work. The one phrase that I know he's heard me say a billion times is if I'm not happy with it going on my own car, then I'm not happy with it going on your own car. So like anything that I ever have built, I was doing something at JWP this last couple of weeks, this last week, it was a Civic that I'm doing, and one of the exhausts, the angle of it turned, it was supposed to go straight, and it bent a little bit. Somebody's like, oh, that's fine. I'm like, no. Dude, it bugged. I cut it off, redid it, and now it looks perfect, because I'm like, dude, that two-degree difference, dude, it just bothers the f*** out of us. Some sloppy mechanics, like whatever. It ain't going to change the difference of whatever, but it does. I won't sleep at night. I will not sleep. I'll wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning, just ready to go fix it. Like now.

The car's out there somewhere running around.

Is that his personal car? Or is that one?

No, the white one, that's some customer.

OK, I don't know about that.

But it was like that car, even then, just finishing a customer car. It doesn't matter if it's not my vehicle. Even the photos that I take, I know somebody will look at it and be like, hey, you could have done it. And I don't even want that comment to pop up. Like, I already fixed it.

Yeah, that's your portfolio. That's showcasing. Somebody could be going through your work and be like, somebody might recognize it and be like, eh, f*** that.

Yeah, and I've had people ask me, hey man, can you weld this muffler in for me? Just do it quick and dirty. I don't care how it looks. It's like, I don't do s***** work. Like, somebody's going to ask you, hey, who did that? Or, oh, Matt did. Well, why would I go to Matt for any of my work? So I turn down lots of work when people ask, just do it quick and cheap.

That's a good position to be in.

Go somewhere else. Like, I don't need it. You know, a couple hundred extra bucks would be nice, but I'm not going to do s***** work just to make a little bit of money. I'm going to do something nice.

It's like that whole, just because it took me 10 minutes, doesn't mean it's cost less. It took me 10 years to figure it the f*** out.

Get this couple inches closer, by the way. You can just pull it towards you a little bit.

You get what I'm saying.

It's like a hot dog length away, dude.

Whoa, whoa. You get what I'm saying? I mean, people want the cheapest prices for things, but it's like, I told you, my welder, oh, can you just do this for 20 bucks? To turn my welder on, it's 50 bucks, minimal. Because the gas, I'm paying now, my gas bottle is 100. It went up three times the price. I don't know if you knew that, but I was paying 40 bucks for gas. It pays 100. It's like 120 bucks now for the same bottle.

Build back better, bro.

Or that's the thing that's scary, because we back purge things, and it makes you get close to like, f***, the prices of back purging is when you shove gas inside the pipe. So when you're welding the outside, it welds the inside. When you don't put gas inside it, it kind of sugars on the inside. This is another fabrication thing that I like.

Just tell us.

Sugaring is like what? It looks like gray ash on the inside. So where the seam, the same seam that you welded, on the outside it may look pretty, but the inside it looks like gray, clumpy sugar, on the whole, because it goes through, but it burns through. It kind of looks like a s***** MIG weld on the inside. But when you back purge it, if you do it the right way, it will literally weld itself on the inside, because the gas that's on the outside of your welding is also on the inside. It's preventing it from sugaring. It's literally just, it's kind of forming it on the inside. And if you really look and you penetrate it right, you'll see a weld on the inside and on the outside.

So what does it matter what it looks like on the inside?

It doesn't, but it makes it stronger. For strength. Yeah, for structural strength. Back purging is like I said, it welds it on the inside where, now that if you don't back purge it, it can crack there on the inside and slowly crack outwards. And then here we go repeating trying to fix that type of s*** and stuff like that.

Hey guys, real quick, if you are this far into the show, you are probably enjoying it. That said, if you got five or ten seconds to jump on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever you're listening to just drop a quick review, it will go a really long way in getting us in front of more car enthusiasts. A share on Facebook and Instagram doesn't hurt either. Let's get back to the show. Have you guys worked much with like, I don't know, is titanium difficult to work with or not really?

I've dealt a little bit with it, but it's definitely a lot harder. It's like aluminum, but more difficult, I guess I would say.

Yeah, it's between like stainless and aluminum. I welded like a small, it's called a coupon. You get a two by four piece of flat stock or whatever, and you weld two of them together, and that's like the most I've ever done with titanium. But I've been doing a lot more aluminum lately, which is nice. So I was never really that good at aluminum when I was working at Matt.

So practice makes perfect.

Can you weld a pop can together now? I've seen that where the guys take two halves of a pop can. I'm like, holy crap.

It's crazy.

I've done it, but it didn't look great the first time.

I think I might be able to, but the first time I tried to, it was just atrocious. It's just a big hole. It's so thin.

I love aluminum.

I'll have to try that again.

The one thing that I hate is I had to weld some bungs this last week on some valve covers, and literally there was oil all over it. Dude, it fights you. Aluminum, okay, so TIG welding, stainless steel doesn't really pick up so much on that little arc, but when you transition to aluminum, it goes from AC to DC, so the current, all of it's different. The polarity, everything's completely different. For some reason, when you weld aluminum, anything around it, it pulls the porosity out of it. So if there's oil inside of it embedded from the ages that it was, it'll literally pull it out. So aluminum, it's good for you to burn it, bake all the oils, clean it, continuously wash, sandblast. You want to pretty much get it as clean as you can before you even start welding it. Otherwise, you're fighting demons. It's either way to say it. It's just popping back at you, looking like s***, falling down. You know what I'm saying. I've said some words I've probably never said in my life before.

Just kidding.

Make self-swear words.

Just because you're just like, oh.

Just learning languages on the spot.

I dabbled in devil with titanium a little bit, but the thing about it is that it's a lot more expensive. So I did pie cuts on my 240, just because I had the skills, I decided to do it. And that probably only cost me $200 plus my time and whatever. But if I had done it in titanium, I probably would have spent over $1,000 in just material. And then cutting it all, I probably would have destroyed a bunch of blades because it's one of the strongest materials. And then the gases and trying to get it to, yeah, it probably would have cost two, three grand in gas, time, patience, blades. That's why I just, sometimes you have to leeway the weight of your money. I don't want to say, how much money you want to spend, I guess, is how much you want to invest into your engine bay because titanium looks cool and it's lighter, but it's not bang for buck, is the way to say it.

No, that's a lot of money.

I just got suckered into the same thing. I bought a new hub for my supercharger pulley now because I'm going to go to a smaller pulley. So I could have gotten it in stainless or titanium. It was like 200 more dollars, and I'm like, f*** it, it's titanium. I did it just because.

I like titanium, but like I said, it's a lot harder to deal with. That's the only reason why. If it wasn't for the price, I probably would go towards it. I do like aluminum, but I like a stainless piping and charge piping. I use stainless steel just because I feel like it takes more heat, it doesn't pop off couplers, and also when it gets hot, it doesn't collapse on itself. Because once you get aluminum to a certain heat, you clamp down, it can fold on itself. Or stainless, I don't think does. But everyone has their own preferences of what they like. Just my preferences, I like stainless, in my opinion.

So somebody came to you guys' open checkbook. You could probably make it work then. Yeah.

If they got it. A lot of people don't.

Well, in Minnesota, some of these other out-of-state guys, man, they'll just be like, all right, here's 200 grand, make it happen.

Just start an OnlyFans. We wear nothing but your leather apron and you weld s***.

I almost made it. Me welding, yeah, with no freaking mask on.

You know that's a category.

No, it is. We've talked about it multiple times. Like, man, I'm about to do something just to make extra money, sell feed pigs on these welders.com.

I think there's people making food and stuff on there.

Yeah, there's a guy who wears nothing but an apron and makes bread, and I don't even think he shows his face. He makes tons of money.

Yeah, there's comedy on there, I'm pretty sure. Some podcasts I listen to, they're like, oh yeah, I got special on OnlyFans. And I was like, do they really? I thought it was only for that one thing only.

Yeah.

Some chick, I was like, I follow this one guy on TikTok or whatever, and he goes into people's finances, and he's like, you're spending 4% on this b*******? You know, whatever. And he's like, I think it's an OnlyFans chick, whatever, she's making like 2 million a month, and I'm just like, get out of here, dude.

Yeah, it's... And they want to say that equal rights, respectfully. Some of these females are making a lot more money than I will ever make in my entire life, ever, respectfully. They're happy for you, but good for you. I will never be able to make that money.

It evens out somewhere, right? Yeah.

The only way it's gonna work for me is if I give it to everybody for free, and they have to pay me to not send it to them.

I mean, hey, it works, it works.

Tax write-off?

Maybe. Okay, so you've been on your own for how long, then?

I think since November.

Or is that when you left?

No, so I got Lego for MAP because of the whole... Well, originally I got Lego for MAP probably a year and a half ago, but instead of leaving for fabrication, I went over to the engine department. They still needed a disassembler, so I started disassembling slash welding their parts back on.

Because they were cutting off departments, right?

Yeah, like you said, there were two shifts, then they knocked the whole shift down, and then they were trying to take some of us out, and I think it was maybe pay grade, I don't know. I can't exactly describe what they were doing, but I was kind of up there. Either way, they asked if there were any other positions that I would want, otherwise they would try to bump me down and pay or whatever, but I kind of took that as a no, I wouldn't take less pay if I went somewhere else, but then they ended up finding a place for me to, like in the engine department, to disassemble engines, check for any problems, crack cranks, you know, spun bearings, any stuck ring lands or anything, and that's what I did for a while. I welded heads back together, did studs and removed studs and everything for a really long time, and then eventually they ended up having to let go of that area as well too. So I moved on from there, and I went to go work for Enth for a little while, do a little fabrication, a little mechanic stuff for them. Grateful to work for them, super cool place. Grateful for anything that I learned from there, but it just didn't work out. Just decided to do my own thing just because I wanted to invest into my friends a lot more. And that's just like, not just friends, but to do my own thing for people. And that's why I kind of did my own garage thing, invested a few grand into TIG welders and my lift and everything. And I've been okay for the last six, seven months of doing it by myself.

Getting by.

Yeah, well, it's still like there's a learning curve. So it's like, you can fab, you can do whatever, but still getting the part list of people's things. I usually just try to do charge pipe exhaust because that's kind of what pushed me through. But I had an R32 Skyline that showed up a couple weeks ago, and he wanted a 1JZ VVTI. So it's a 1J and a Nissan. It's kind of my thing, like I said. And he just wanted everything that he needed to get it as close as he could to get it running. And I finished the fuel system for it, did all the charge piping, mounted the intercooler, did an oil cooler. I did a tucked radiator for him, ran all the wiring for him, did the majority of everything else that he could want me to do. Full exhaust, all the way to the four and a half inch tip. And then pretty much he's like five percent from finishing it. So getting fuel, mounting the ECU, a couple of ground cables and wires, and you should be able to start it up. So that's kind of what I've been doing is like letting people bring their cars to me. And if they're not afraid to hand me a checkbook, I guess, or an amount of certain money to do whatever, I'll do it. It's kind of my thing. It's why I call it Elegant Garage, because at the end of the day, people's cars end up leaving pretty elegant in a certain way, like different stylish ways. I create my own fuel systems and stuff and bracketry and things that you can't buy off the shelf. That's the one thing I guess I'm really grateful for learning at MAP is you learn to fab, but then you learn your irks and quirks of things that you can do. I call it artism. He's seen it where I'll be training someone in it. Fabrication clicks into some of us in our minds just like that. I'll be training someone in and they'll be struggling with a piece of pipe to fit it in a certain area. He's seen it. He's laughed at me about it. Where I come up and I'm like, what's wrong? He's like, I can't get this to fit. And I just look around, go grab a different piece of pipe, not even measure it. I'm telling you, just cut, cut, quicksand pops right in place. They're like, f*** it.

I get what you're saying. Just kind of like this natural talent you can develop at home. I'm in this weird camp of there is natural talents, but there isn't. I feel like some people might be good at it. They just haven't discovered it yet. It's like a fish trend, climb a tree sort of deal. I feel like you kind of found that niche that you're really good at. I don't know, just keep getting better. So how far is Princeton from here then?

Prescott?

Prescott, yeah, same thing.

From right here now, probably about an hour. So from Hudson, it's 30 minutes, 35 minutes.

Like north?

How far is it from Bloor? No, I guess from map, 10 minutes past map. So you just go into the border and it's five minutes.

Yeah, I know that area.

That's pretty much where it's at. It's not super far.

It's a cool little town. There's a lot of mechs there, I think.

Is that where there's a crazy bridge, like the suspension bridge?

Yeah, the one with the mesh, like you can see through it. We drive through it all the time. We do our little car things, our little cruises.

Yeah, the Prescott cruises. And then in the split, there's a town that goes to the right, and then you go to the left, up the hill is where I am. Up to the left, then to the right, take a left.

It's actually pretty good. They got good food, good bars. It's a cool little place.

Yeah, I regularly drive an hour to go give food somewhere else in a small town.

I do it every day.

It's a gorgeous drive, like from Hudson to Prescott. I do love it. You go through that, there's that highway F, or a kind of road F, where you go through that little twisties and down in that little ravine.

If you get into Prescott, you take a right, straight to the town, and you go down in the 25 mile or road that sucks. As soon as you get past that, it's just trees and hills and train tracks, and you're on the side of the river and s***.

It's pretty cool.

We're going to be talking. I've got a Mustang that needs an engine bay shaved and all kinds of stuff. You bring it. We'll be. Now that I've met you, this whole Bronco 2JZ thing that I've had kicking here, I'm thinking it might come to fruition.

Let me know when. They're making a lot of stuff that's pretty easy and plug and play, too. Like I said, even if you talk to Sean, he'll probably get you a Haltech. It's damn near ready to plug and play. There's a few wires on it. Boom, ready to go. It's crazy. That's the one thing. When I first did my 240, it was like my first in my JZ swap. It was one of the first wiring specialties harnesses way back in the day, when the AM Infinity first came out. It's old EC now, and that was a test dummy for wiring specialties to see if it would work. And literally that was one of the first plug and play kits that they had made. Because back in the day before that, you had to hardwire your stock harness or convert it over. There was no plug and play harnesses. There was no hall tech. There was no wiring specialties. There was no panic wiring on any other companies that you could think of now. But now you could literally order whatever chassis, whatever year, whatever you want to put into it. It's just like, all right, square card swipe, boom. It's hard to do your door. All you do is plug and play, connect some stuff, run a power cable to whatever, and damn, your f****** starts up. Same with Holley. Holley is the same way with anything else down here.

It was crazy to see that when they took the Holley out and put the Haltech in. And that was a delay. So I got there at 10 or whatever in the morning, and I left at 2 in the morning, whatever. So a 16-hour day over there. I was filming for those guys. There was a number of things that they had to overcome. But for the actual putting in the harness and all that, I was actually kind of surprised how quick it was. Because in the back of my head, I'm thinking, how long does it take to wire a whole f****** car? I'm like, I'm going to be here till next Saturday. So that was cool.

Haltex is killing the game now with that new Rebel LS. It's the Terminator competitor, so I'm surprised to see how far they go with that and what other changes of stuff they'd make.

You've got to remember as well, though, them taking that harness on and putting it back in, that's their job. That's like the fabrication. It's no different than us. For fabrication, we get things done at a certain speed. Sean and them probably ripped out how multiple LS harnesses on that stuff, so it's like second nature to them pretty much.

Yeah, true. They were going fast.

I'd probably struggle. For sure, I'd be like, I don't know where this goes.

It's not too bad. You plug everything in, all the sensors and stuff, and then it's a switch power, constant power, and then a ground, and then figure out where to mount your ECU, and then you're done besides the tune.

That's where that shop rate comes from too, right? If I were to go do it, think about, again, I'm starting from ground zero, by the way, when it comes to working on cars almost. So it's like, I would never figure it out. But even somebody who thinks that, oh, I'll just do this myself in a weekend, that's never gonna happen.

It's like the dudes are like, it's $200 to LS swap your car. Because you buy a junkyard motor for $200, you're not gonna LS swap it for $200. No. Transmissions aren't cheap anymore. Dude, I tell people the Jay-Z world, nowadays it sucks because a Jay-Z is $4,500 used. I bought my first two 1Js for $400 apiece. My first R154 for $500. I haven't paid never more than $15 to $2,000 for a Jay-Z. They're all $5, $6, $7, $8,000 now because of the economy or the whatever shot its skyrocket. Even transmissions, R154s are $1,500 feet the s*** out of. And grind and people still want to spend that much. Even LSs aren't cheap anymore.

No, that T56 you said you just got, those were $2,500 a few years ago, and now would you pay probably $4,000 or $5,000 for that thing?

$37,000 shipped to the shop, so not bad. It's brand new.

I'm saying yous are $3,000. That's what people are trying to get for theirs. Back in the day, they were $1,000. $800. You used to be able to LS swap or Jay-Z swap, whatever, for dirt cheap. This isn't that world anymore.

The Magnum is actually like an aftermarket transmission, though, too. You've got the T56 that comes in the GTOs and the Camaros and stuff like that.

The Terminator Mustangs.

The Magnum is actually a TR6060 gear set and a T56 case. It's 700 horsepower, 700 foot-pounds of torque capable or something like that, and something smaller than a TR6060. It should be pretty stout.

Yeah, because Kyle has a TR6060, right? Either way, I think it takes 800 horsepower. I don't even know how that transmission is still alive.

The TR6060s are pretty stout. That's what I have in my orange car. A guy that I had put it in for me was like, dude, we're gonna have to lower the engine down and put things together as we put it up into the thing. He thought he might have to bang the tunnel a little bit. They're not small.

Kyle, he has a LSA S10. You've probably seen it at Power Cruise or Proving Grounds doing burnouts, the black S10 that does the nasty burnouts. Yeah, that thing's fourth gear, 870 miles an hour wheel speed. The burnouts are scary. When metal goes flying to you, it's like getting hit in the face with a f****** fist. Literally, it hurts. It's great. I don't know how that thing holds, but she's strong.

Are you guys attending any events this year?

Yeah, I'm actually going to a drift day on the 20th of April. It's a D-Day, Shano. It should be a drift day there. I haven't drifted in a few years. I stayed away for a little while to try to save money, buy the dream cars, and I was trying to get a house and all this other stuff, but the market likes to not let me do that. I've decided to go back and do a couple events this year and just enjoy myself.

Go hang out with Michael Morgan over there?

Yeah, Michael Morgan. Steal his Corvette.

I thought he was selling that thing.

Yeah, he is. He's trying to sell it. He wants to do that now, and then the season comes back, and you get that itch again. Yeah, I feel like he'll keep it.

I probably won't go to any events with my car. It's mostly just a street car, something to have fun with.

What car was that again?

The 1980 Fairmont.

Yeah, that's what it was.

It's brown, it's kind of ugly, there's dents on it, there's scratches, but it does sweet burnouts. Yeah, just street car.

I was going to do a Fairmont wagon, and then put all of the Fox Body front end stuff on it, like literally the body kit, all that stuff, the ground effects and all that crap, so it looked like a fox in the front, but then it was wagon on the back end.

Wagons are getting hard to find, too. Even the regular Fairmonts are hard to find.

You struggled to find even a hood and stuff, right?

Yeah, well, I was originally going to do a First Gen S10. I had a lead on one, and the guy sold it out from under me, and then I just found this thing in the middle of Wisconsin. I was like, well, I'm done with my DSM. I originally wanted a street car, and I overbuilt it. I built auto trans in it, so the straight cut gears are extremely annoying on the highway. It would reach this frequency, and it would just burn your freaking ears out. And the temps were that trans, too. I ended up figuring out the temps. I put a really huge trans cooler on there, but it was gutted, it was a cage, and I drive it, and I'm like, I don't even enjoy this thing anymore. So that's what I'm going for with the Fairmont. I just want to enjoy my car again. So it's been a very long time since I was able to enjoy a car. Sounds sweet.

What was that car that DeVito just sold?

Oh, that was another wagon. That was a good deal. I thought about hitting him up on that, too. If it wasn't so much Chevy crap in it, I would have been like, hmm.

My buddy bought it.

Did he really?

My buddy Junior, he's like my brother.

It sold in like three hours or something.

He came and talked to me about it. He's like, what do you think I should do? He's like, it's been a while. I know Joe builds his car pretty f****** well. So I was like, just make sure that she's not too rusty or anything. That's the only thing I ever check for people. But I know Joe would never spend money on a car and build it.

You said he was literally daily driving.

Yeah, he was daily driving for a long time. And it starts right up. I saw the video of the day that he sold it to Junior, and he literally started right up, cranked right up. And he's like, I hadn't started in five months. It started right up.

It has a right amount of patina. But I think, actually, Josh Stowell built that car originally.

Yeah, it is Stowell's car, huh?

I believe so. I'm sure Joe did a couple of things to it.

He did some things.

What was it called again? What was the car called again?

I think it's a Malibu.

Malibu wagon, I'm not sure.

It would have been right in the same wheelhouse of what you're thinking about Chevy. So it was like an 80s wagon, it would have been just like a Fairmont almost.

Yeah, I just got to fact check it.

Junior just posted it up because he's like, he literally just, he's like, oh, it's just good, you know, because you got to be happy with the stuff that you buy.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, I can't remember who I was talking to. I'm like, man, if I ever get on the financial up and up, like have money to throw around, I'm going to do the stupidest things. It was a Malibu. Like I might even Daza swap the Gulf or something.

It doesn't look like anything.

It looks sick, though.

But it's got power. It's sweet.

Does it make good power?

Yeah.

I think it makes like 400 or something like that. Maybe 400.

Yeah.

Especially when that car originally probably had 116.

Yeah.

I'm sure it does sweep burn all carbureted.

So that's a good thing about the new stuff, the technology of changing, because even if you had a carbureted car, they're doing the whole EFI stuff, where you're able to slap the carburetor on stuff, and literally it makes it just nice fuel-injected carburetor instead of the old... It would take you 20 seconds.

No, I think when I very first saw the whatever, the Phytek or whatever was one of the first ones. Yeah, I was like, man, that is ingenious. Even though Chevy was putting stuff like... They had that whole spider throttle body injection thing they used to have on their cars.

One of the TPI motors.

Yeah, they were horrible.

Because there was a 305 or something.

They never worked right.

No, no.

But yeah, technology comes along, you know?

Mm-hmm.

You guys have any specific cars that you guys like? The fabrication that you guys have seen? Uniquely wise that you guys like? You've seen it on a certain car that you like? Like a Jay-Z, RB, any specific vehicles you like?

No, I was thinking, I don't know when you bought your Fairmont, but I had a friend of mine, he had a shop down, it used to be Midwest Fox Rods. He did only Fox Body stuff. Now he owns Bodycrafters. He bought into an actual running body shop. Now they do insurance work, and he does a little bit of fab stuff on the side. But he had this black Fairmont, I think it was a two-door, but his paintwork, like this guy does, it was gorgeous stuff. It was black. He had like a caramel leather interior in it that he did all custom. It was, the Coyote was in it. I think the twin turbos were in there too. It was all fabbed up, but he hadn't done like the fuel and wiring. And when I saw it, this was probably 10 years, no, five, six years ago. He had it like 12 grand. He was asking for the whole thing. And I'm like, dude, that's a freaking killer deal. Yeah, that is.

Yeah.

I can't remember where it ended up going, but I think it ended up going up to about 20 grand before he finally sold it.

Okay. Yeah, I mean, that's probably easily worth the paint work.

Yeah, absolutely.

I painted it up to 40 years ago, like 10 years ago. That was f****** seven, eight grand. Over 90, 240. You can only imagine some classic, you know? Yeah. Like it adds up fast, and it's only specific people like to touch certain cars too. I know when it comes to like classics and stuff, like I would only bring it to certain areas, so I guarantee you the payment there is even higher than a regular make-o paint job, like no offense to bring it to make-o, but you know what I'm saying?

It's hard to get. That's why I thought it was, like I said, I wanted to talk to you about shaving that engine bay, because it's, you can't, my only other option I thought was to like go to a body guy, but they don't want to do that onesie, twosie stuff. They don't do that. They want to do, they want to kick out as many Ford escapes as they can that have a cracked bumper or hit a deer or ran into something else, you know? Because they're getting that insurance check.

That's where the money is, too.

Yeah.

You have a buddy who does quick fender paint jobs for, I don't know, cost them $250 in material or whatever, and they got a $2,500 check from whatever, from insurance to fix it, and the rest of it's profit.

Yep.

And it cost them four hours of work, and boom, done. I'm like, man, I'm in the wrong business or something. But yeah, no, it's, the other thing, if you want that shaved bay, like I said, hang me up, like I said, all of the time. Like right now, at my shop, I have a 20B RX-7. So it's a three-rotor RX-7 that I'm building a turbo kit for it. Still trying to figure out to finish the wastegate situation. He knows about it. I've been trying to figure out how many wastegates to put on it because it's a three-rotor, but it's probably running 90 mil turbo. It's ginormous. Like it's literally bigger than the freaking motor.

Yeah, I was like, those rotors are tiny.

It's a T5 flange. Like most turbos are T4s. And T5, T6 is like, dude, I'm telling the flange is like that huge.

It's like a basketball under there.

Yeah, and just like, so like people really custom stuff all the time. That's probably one of the coolest things that I've built.

I was just going to ask you, what have you had some really cool s*** roll through so far?

Yeah, the 20BRX7 Rocket Bunny as well. So it's full Rocket Bunny kit. It's part show. It's also DCT transmission. That's really cool. So it's got an auto BMW transmission. So it'll be probably close to as quick as Gus's car, like that type of transmission. And then I've built multiple RB and JZ manifolds because it's kind of like my niche has been doing that stuff. I got the opportunity to build an S2000 with Larkin at MAP. That was one car that we did get to finish there together. It was an S2000 with a K24. And then I was able to build a full turbo kit for that and our cooler charging pipe. And that was really cool for a stock K24. It made 480 on 15 pounds of boost on a 6262.

Was that the one YouTuber you guys' car?

Yeah, Alex Martinez. Yeah, so he used to work for EE, and then that whole thing happened with their letting people go as well. And I think we were building that car when he was getting like pushed out, and at the end of it, they didn't pretty much want any media stuff that we did to link with that.

I hooked up with him on their second rally, so he is partnered with, or him and another girl, Gretchen, started River Valley Road Rally over there. I did their second rally ever, and that's where I got to meet all of those guys. So I've been watching Alex kind of grow and do all this stuff, but I remember I made friends with a lot of those guys, and a lot of them went to Fitment over there, and none of them, like they all, it was like maybe a year, and they were like, f*** this.

Well, I think they were putting a lot of time into the media, but I don't think it was the right media that they wanted to. I guess they were letting them do it, and nothing against there. I think they were too goofy, I guess they didn't want to. They wanted to be more of a professional straight line, and they were kind of, no offense, kicking those guys out. And I don't think it was fair, because I like their media over what they have now. I'm not trying to talk down. I just feel like it attracts the people to be more, I guess, focused to it, you know? Because somebody that's talking, that actually kind of knows the car, where now it's like, come buy our wheels and da-da-da-da. You know, it kind of feels more, I don't know, I don't know how to explain it. It just feels more formal. They wanted to be like straight wheels, nothing, no jokesters, no nothing. It feels really corporate. Yeah, I feel like that makes the character of the company.

You want it to be more natural.

And that's where they were slowly kicking them all out, because when they actually came to us and did a car interview, Mike 240 was on there, it was a couple other people that ended up taking over Alex's job, and then eventually those guys got kicked out too. And they're all the same way, Alex just really good entrepreneurs that do their own thing. They have good egos and good character, I guess they are. And then just the business had a completely different visual on what they wanted in the future.

That's a huge thing, though, too. I'm finally done dying over here from choking on the water. I went down the wrong pipe.

I choked on mine in the beginning.

Yeah, mine was worse. Yeah, wrong pipe doesn't end well. But no, there's something to be said about that too, though. It's like the fit, people have to fit together. You have to be on the same mission as the company. Otherwise, it's just not going to work out. You could try and try and try, but somebody is going to be unhappy. You're going to get s***-canned because they don't like you the way you operate, or you're going to try to fit their mold and you're just going to be depressed out of your mind working for somebody that doesn't like you for you.

Some places are like that. They feel like a cult instead of an actual building. That's why me and Matt always got along with Max. Me, him, and Max every morning would damn near have a quick half-hour conversation, make chit-chat with each other, kind of like brothers.

Yeah, and the boss is dying. I see how it is.

He said quick half-hour.

What's a fast half-hour?

Believe me. Some days, it would be like, we gotta get back to work. But we were able to keep up with one another, check on any problems and issues. Like I said, all the people that I worked with at MAP, I probably felt like they were family to me over anything. So losing that, I felt like I lost my cats.

A lot of people are hurt by it.

Like I said, it hurt a lot of us. From the first cuts, because like I said, it's more than just even the fabricators. We had other friends that were sales, that they were slowly plucking and doing all that, and there were friends that worked there, and it just sucked. But at the end of the day, whatever the business, whatever they want for the company, that's the decision, which sucked, because people that were very hard working were definitely let go. People that I would have never let go, but money takes over anything.

I'm curious, did anybody actually end up taking up the offer to move or whatever? Some people did.

Two people did. The sales, I'm not going to say names, but sales, all the sales teams, sales guys still work for them. Sales still works for them, on phone, remote. And then shipping, and then I think one of our old managers for fabrications named Michael, nobody really knows him, but he went over there. But apparently, it's really cheap to live there, Appleton.

It's actually a nice little town over there.

I just don't.

That's what I've heard as well.

I think it would have been more like if I didn't, I have a kid, all my cars, all that s***, it's hard to just move all that stuff there. Where I think if it was like I didn't have anything, maybe I got a good opportunity or a good pay.

It's easy for a guy like me who's single, has really nothing holding me over here. But for you...

You got us, bro. You can't leave.

They're very corporate, though, too. I can imagine that's all gonna get cat over to China and all that stuff. They're just gonna get... I don't think you would have been happy over there.

Like I said, I think it changed to a completely different vibe. I think it was just, yeah, they wanted to change everything to either being already pre-made somewhere, and then, you know, or that's... They even... It sucked because the last couple months, I was actually still working for MAP, doing a couple, like I would say 1099 myself, and I was contracting stuff, and there was people coming in that were hired at Appleton, and they were training them in because they were gonna take over their jobs. It was a hurtful thing to watch because I've been... Me and Matt have been there for eight years. Me and him have developed a lot at MAP. Besides just the fabrication, eventually we started creating instructions, photos instructions. So the certain... We first started working at MAP, we didn't have any instructions. It was literally, here's your jig, you gotta build this in two hours.

Good luck.

And it was like, you're sweating figuring it out. There was days that I was getting in trouble because I wasn't hitting time, and eventually I was like... It's hard for us to continuously hit times when you forget... Like if you do this one downpipe every two months, you'll forget how to build it. Whereas when you completely, completely, repetitiveness did the things, it was like, you just kind of remember, it was like the back of the hand. That's why I said when me and Matt were doing manifolds, it was like the back of the hand, because that's all we did. And then I was eventually developing where only certain people did like, Subarus, other people did Hondas, other people did Ford stuff. There was a few different genres, but you give them to certain people, they just get really good at it. Then you don't switch them from going from a Mitsubishi downpipe to a Subaru downpipe. Because that would confuse you, because you're like, oh, it's supposed to be this much measurement. Oh, wait, it's not. And then you're like...

It's slow going at that point.

But then we would also only bend a certain amount of bends. So it's like, if I gave you 10 bends and you f*** one up, I can't just bend you another one. The other person's on the program right now, he's on two and a half, not on three inch anymore. So that's why eventually we were like, okay, we got to stop f****** this up. Let's make instructions, write everything down. Originally, Max started doing it, and then he got too much into R&D. I took over and did a few of them, and eventually I handed over to Matt, because I was starting to do all the computer work for dispatching. So I was the one, like I said, I'd give these people all Subaru, all Honda, and then he took over taking all the instructions, where he'd take photos, write things down, how to do it, next step, this pipe, weld it to this, this pipe. And it just became very easy to just hand off. Even a job that someone hadn't done, you could get it done, and you would actually be very close to hitting the time doing it that way, compared to me having to come and train you, and you try to remember it every f****** time. Because it was hard, because there would be days like, oh man, I forgot how to do them. I'd have to talk to Matt, hey Matt, do you remember how to do these? He'd be like, oh man, it's been like two years since we did that. And that's why writing, doing it in structures, I think, is what probably helped them. And that's what we were trying to start and do with that production stuff that I was telling you about. Eventually it was like, hey, let's gather four people on afternoon shift and see how many we could get done. They did like 100 downpipes in like two weeks one time. It was like so ridiculous.

For Black Friday.

Yeah, it was like 80 downpipes.

Yeah, that was wild. And then I ended up training people in and stuff like that after Jose moved more into a manager position. And I also helped Max with R&D stuff. And were you there that day when they let 13 or 14 people go? Yeah, yeah, one day, half a fab just disappeared because they got let go, a bunch of shipping people, a bunch of salespeople, I think some engine people.

Dude, it's a weird feeling when you see people leave like that.

Well, yeah, and then Max was one of them. Yeah, 13 people just gone. The next day, it was weird.

It's a weird energy it leaves behind.

Yeah, it wasn't the same since then. And then I was actually looking at maybe getting a different job or something like that. I did look into the whole pipe fitting thing, and then Max got let go, so I moved into R&D. I took his position, which was cool, but unfortunate. Max was probably my best friend there. And then, yeah, it just wasn't the same ever since. It was really weird at the end there. And then I stayed until the very end, which I think my very last day was January 29th or something.

Yeah, so I think I might have even met you when I was over there with Kyle when I popped through that one time, once or twice, maybe.

Probably.

When I got a little tour of MAP before he was leaving.

For a shutdown.

But no, dude, the dude I was playing with, when I was on my way out at this logistics company, when I was just like, f*** this place, I'm going to do some job hunting, I survived the round of layoffs, but the dude I played ping pong with every day, because we had a ping pong table over there, just one day, gone. It's a weird energy leaves behind.

I'm not going to put myself in a higher aura or anything like that, but I'm really good, I would say, I'm friendly with everybody. I come every day, we talk every morning, and then after those people getting let go, it just felt wrong. And then when I got let go, people would call me, dude, it's just weird. I saw you every day for the last, and I messaged him all the time, dude, I miss you, bro. It's like family, bro. Yeah, every day.

Seven and a half, eight years.

Me and Matt's thing is we see each other, we flick each other out, f*** you, that was our thing, drive, come in, he'd be in his truck, smoking his cigarette, come around the corner, roll my window out, flick him out, good morning, you know?

Well, they say that you spend more time with the people that you work with than you even do your family.

That's 100% true.

Especially on the weekends, we'd be there after hours, we could use all the lifts and equipment and stuff like that, so we were able to build our own stuff, which was pretty cool.

But this is kind of like the next chapter of your guys' lives, right? You're over here doing your own thing, I guess in an entrepreneurial way. That was a big word, I realized.

You nailed it though, you got it.

I had to give myself a little pat on the back. I'm going to be like 50 still trying out new words. But no, it's cool to see you kind of on the up and up, doing your own thing. That's the thing, you've been doing this part five, six months, whatever. The struggle does start to get a little better, especially, I don't know, a handful of times people have come on this podcast and been like, dude, I just got three engine builds.

It's like, what the f***?

I didn't realize that I had that kind of impact, but it's exciting to see people grow in this community, because when people put that effort in, it's so... You could have just found another job. Right. And same thing with you, you could have taken that, what do you say, working on...

A soulless job.

I can't remember what the exact term was, but it's like, I don't know, it's just kind of cool to see, this is kind of like that next chapter. It's super exciting to see, especially when you have people that want to invest in you, like JWPP is investing in you, you got Dave over there. It's kind of wild.

It's a good feeling to feel like... That's the biggest thing, that's what I think I struggled with the last few months myself. Not that I didn't feel wanted, it was different when you're working for a company that every day, dude, you're doing a great job. That's how we always patted each other, and it went from like that to just dead silence. It's kind of like that thing where you share a post that you got a job, everyone cares about it. But then you share, I did it as an entrepreneur, no one gives a f***. That's how it felt, honestly. But the good thing is I have great friends that back me up. Dude, you did a great job, keep pushing. That's what kept me going. Honestly, having good friends is what helps a lot with that stuff. I get on my downfall, I'm like, I don't think I'm doing good enough. Me and Matt both know our work kills 90% of what Minnesota has to offer. But it's just because we did it for eight years straight. Right, that's just part of the game. Not to be big headed, it became our second nature. We could walk in and do whatever at any time. That's why Dave took him. I've talked to Dave about doing stuff at Ford, too, because he knows what me and his value are worth.

You guys got that street cred.

Yeah, and he's done multiple cars, I've done multiple different vehicles, people that maybe you guys don't know, but now they're happy customers that are on the road right now making five to eight, nine hundred horsepower, you know, happy with good quality and visual works. Like I said, mig welding is one thing he talked about. You can get it done, it will work, but it's not aesthetic-pleasing where it's like, damn, that person f****** took time to make that look good. It's like, yeah, because it's like, it's a reflection. It's kind of like a chef, you know? That's how fabrication is. It's literally prepping all the stuff for the food, then cooking it and see what the outcome is, what the flavor is at the end of it. It's like, that's how it is, like fabrication. Yeah, literally, let's just see what I'm saying. Let's see how it comes out. Just because you know, and there's a lot of people that are like, oh, they can tax stuff really well, and then boom, like the end of it, it's just horrific. I've seen some wells that tax look great, everything fitment looks perfect. It's like you just need a little bit more time. A little bit more time, see time to get it to look a little better.

There's not anything really wrong with, you know, I even do this because what I do, I'm super freaking good at, right? So, but you gotta, you almost gotta have that level of, I don't even wanna call it cockiness. I call it tooting my own horn, whatever, you know, I'm old. But like, if you don't have that confidence, or like, you know, in what you're doing, and when you step back and go like, f*** yeah, that if you don't have that, then you're not as good as you probably aren't. I don't know where I'm going with that, but anyway, you gotta have like, I understand what you're saying, because I don't like to talk that way about myself either. You know, I'm like, you know, it feels weird, right? But when you're really good at something, and you can be like, f*** yeah, then it just kind of... I'm really struggling here.

No, I'm not gonna help you either. You can ask anyone that has gotten work from me and Matt that they're gonna be happy with the work that they've done.

You basically need that to be successful almost.

Like, no one I think has ever down talked on any of our work ever. I think we get, I get shout outs all the time to be the person to do certain fabrication work on people.

That's a huge thing when people tag you in the comment section. That is such a huge thing to share your work.

And even though I can't do it, it's a good feeling to know that there's people thinking about you. And that's what I think I love the most about fabrication. Like, even Matt, I've tagged Matt when I can't do something. Hey, Matt, do you have time? No, you got time. It's like we try to help each other out too. And even like material, I needed material for that civic. I couldn't find it locally. I'm like, Matt, do you have anything? And like, anytime he needs a heat sink or anything, like do we help each other out? Because at the end of the day, if the community doesn't help one another out, then we're all going to struggle. Like that's why I think me and Matt became super close. That's why I asked him for me to bring him on the podcast.

I'm glad this worked out, by the way, for that man. Yeah.

He asked me, and I was like, the only person that I could think of is this man. I would bring Max, but I think he's a little bit more busy. But even then, if you ever want to have a version two of this, like bring Max, I could probably bring two other people. I could get two more couches here, but you know.

In this little closet, it ain't gonna fit.

But yeah, we have plenty of people that.

It's a relationship.

Yeah, like I said, we all are very happy with one another's work. And like I said, we help each other in any which way that we can. And I think that's what I think keeps us going as well, is having, like I said, good friends, slash family. I call them families. They're my brothers. I don't care what anyone says. They're my brothers.

Okay, Vin Diesel, calm down.

Look, seriously.

Perfectly timed. It's family.

We should count how many times he freaking says that in any one of the movies. I'm going through the whole series with my kids right now, so take a shot every time it's his family.

Yeah, you're wasting.

Yeah. I'm glad that, you know, like literally, like we were hanging out at JWPs on Saturday. I was like, you want to come on the podcast? I haven't had a fab guy yet or whatever. And like, I've seen, like, I kind of met you like once or twice at, you know, Dave's. And I was like, all right, at some point, I'll pop the questions. Just, you know, trying to get to know that, dude, there's so many people like Dan and I have met through this community that like, it's impossible to know everyone, but like people come out of the woodwork just commenting like, oh, you should have this guy on. And then like six people will like it. I'm like, all right, that's something we should definitely get on.

Yeah, no, that's even the half the people that you had. I know Joe. I know half of those people. I know some of the ratified people. I know like a lot of the people that you have on there. I know a lot. So it's like I've been in the scene since I was 15, 16 years old and 33. Like I said, I've been street racing.

You're an old head.

Yeah, I'm old as s***. I sat behind Jesus in third grade.

Wait till we get John on here talking about Strictly.

Yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's just the community is just like, it's awesome. Like I said, I've been doing it for so, so long that I've known so many people in different ways. Street racing, drag racing, drifting, circuit, like I am going to say, I'm kind of like, I'm not going to call it the slut of the community because I know everyone, but like saying some people like Matt probably knows more drag guys, like not like that, like drag racers, you know, then over.

Let's put that in the room.

Like drag racers.

Like somebody saw the Diddy house bus.

I don't want to say something wrong, but nobody was assuming it the way you present on this program, especially like an automotive podcast.

I think you were probably safe, but you know, but you get what I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I get it. Drag racers and circuit racers. And that's it. A lot of people don't know drifters, don't know anybody outside the drift world. That's literally it.

So I heard that's a rowdy bunch.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's rowdy, but every little community has a little bit of toxicness, I would say it that way.

Rowdy, fun, whatever you want to call it.

Stay away from those people.

So here's a question I have for you guys, because both of you guys could probably like build a project car from the ground up. Is that a fair assumption? To a degree.

A couple of them, yeah.

Yeah, so like from the ground up, right? So what are your thoughts on the whole built, not bought thing, right? Because I've been arguing with people with comment sections, like for the last like week and a half, like people have been getting under my skin, and here's why, right? Because for Michael Morgan's like truck, which you guys have seen, right? That patients did. It's like some guys are like, oh, we shouldn't have taken it to that other shop that ruined it. You could have just built it yourself. And the number one thing I've been commenting to people is like, well, are you trying to tell me you don't support shops here? Because that dude, you know, let's say Dan's making a thousand dollars an hour doing this other job. It's like, yeah, I imagine, okay, whatever, let's say you're making $200 an hour, somewhat more realistic. It's like, would you rather spend that time building a car? You know, I get it's your passion, whatever, an hour a week. Or would you rather keep making the money you're making and pay somebody else to knock it out for you? I'm going to take a second to support the home team. Many of you know, the podcast is based out of ratified motorsports who make some of the sickest builds out here. But I know you all here downstairs have seen some serious cars. Whether you're looking for a standard tune for your cute little Volkswagen to a full-on Supra or RS3 build, you should get ratified a call to get the sauce. Check out ratified motorsport.com/performance to see what they can do for you. Let's get back to the show.

Yeah, no, I would rather pay somebody else. Yeah, I still feel like building though is like you'd be like, I'm going to take your own contractor. I'm going to take this guy to do this. I think the people that just drop their keys off, like, I don't know, it's still, I guess that's you're right.

It's tough, right?

Right? Yeah, because you could come one stop shop here. Yeah. So too, I could just give my keys a rat and be like, I need this to be f****** cool. And then you can walk away and come back and pick it up in a week.

It's not black and white is what I'm trying to get out here, right? It's like, yeah, like, and I got into a fight with another guy. I'm like, this is not your piece of s*** 370 Z where you're putting on some rivet fenders and stuff and saying it's built because you put in f****** coil overs. It's like, this is a one, like, this is a hundred thousand dollar bill. This is a six figure build. So I don't know, what are you guys thoughts on that? Do you want people to build their own s***? Should they go to shops?

Well, bring your car to DRSC. We'll do everything. DRSC, everything from general maintenance to full custom builds. But I'm honestly like, you got people that can build cars and you got people that can drive them. And there's some people that build cars that don't even have their own project car. And there's no problem with either way. Like, I like building my own stuff. Or for the most part, I like it. I did spend a lot of time away from the girlfriend last year building my current car, and I kind of felt bad for it. But it had to get done, but it's done now. So honestly, if you have the money, there's nothing wrong with having someone else build your car. Just don't be a dickhead with it.

And we all know the cheapest way to go is to buy a car already built.

Exactly.

You'll save thousands of dollars.

Yeah, just don't, oh, my car's better than yours. Well, you didn't build it, so yeah. That shop that builds $100,000 cars is gonna be better than mine that I built in my garage, right? So yeah, there's no issue with it.

How about you? What are you saying? You've been saying controversial stuff all the time.

I'm back and forth. And shout out to JWP as well, because they've been helping with a lot of stuff. If you send your car there, if you need anything customized or modified, don't be afraid to holler at them. I'm kind of 50-50 on it. I feel like if I wanted to build something ground up, I would probably, if I would send it to a company, it'd be like for things that I can't do. Or like a cage, if I wanted to do certain ways.

So like half the stuff you can have.

Half the stuff, that's me, because I don't know, the way that I look at it, some people can build stuff better than I can, like that stuff. And then I feel like the last little thing is the things that I want to finish, like the engine or the fuel system and stuff. Because sometimes people don't do things the way you want them. And those are things that unless you tell them directly that's the way you want it, they're gonna do it their way. And sometimes it isn't the way that you want it. And like, I don't know, that's where I would probably cut it off, where I'd probably send my chassis, get it rolled cage or whatever, painted. And then from back, I'd stall the engine and finish the fat work and stuff like that. That's just me because I want to finish the heart project of it. The rest of it, probably myself.

Yeah, you want to feel like you contributed something.

Yeah, but I do agree if I was just a straight driver, then yeah, I mean, that's probably, if I didn't know how to do anything at all, then yeah, I would probably send it to be completely fully built. And that's if I had the money to do so and I was just a driver, that's probably what I would do. But being a half builder myself, then I would just try to attack whatever I can, if I have the time, honestly, like you said.

Yeah, exactly, because if I make a six year project, it's a jack stand.

Yeah, no, if it's a six year project, then yeah, I'm going to pay somebody else. But I mean, how long is a six year project going to cost?

Right, exactly.

That's what they do too, is like, how much money do you invest in that? Like, that's where I look at it. It's like, you could spend a hundred grand on someone. Like, I know Morgan's truck, Michael Morgan's truck is expensive.

I think he said on the podcast how much he spent, it was a lot.

Yeah, whereas I'm not saying I could do it for cheaper, but like, I don't know if I would have spent that much, you know, but it's all, I guess. How big your checkbook is.

Yeah, your parts could go up. Look at over the last six years, some parts have doubled, like you were talking about two Jay-Z's and stuff. That's the thing, you sit on that project, you think it's expensive to build now, five years from now, it's gonna be even more expensive to build.

Yeah, like I said, I work for a company where they're bringing two to $300,000 builds there, money that you never would see in your life, you know? And that's just the way they build them.

Yeah.

People have the money for that, like awesome, make 2,500, 3,000 horsepower.

Well, some things are also turnkey, right? Like we talked about Jeff Storm's last episode, too. It's like, who's gonna take the liability? Like if I build something myself, which if I build it, it's f*****, let's just put it that way. Like, if something blows up, that's completely on me. But if I come over here to Raffi, not saying that something would go wrong, but at least there's somebody there that can attest to the work that's done. Whereas me, YouTube University, ain't gonna end well. So, but yeah, so the way you kind of put it, there's kind of three categories then. Sign the check, have a completely done build, beginning to end. So you know, you're Bear Jackson cars, stuff like that, Mecom, whatever. Then you kind of have the half and half, which is what you would do. So it's like, oh, I could do all the fab work, but I'll have somebody else do whatever.

Well, the problem is, the cage work is because that stuff needs to be certified to a certain point. If I don't have the actual rules, I'd rather just have somebody that knows exactly what's gonna go on, tuck the cage, do everything I need, instead of me guessing how to bend the cage or whatever and have it be two inches away from A pillar, B pillar, because that's the issue that I see people run into. They want to do their own cage. They don't make it tucked enough. And next thing you know, you're hitting your head left to right because you decided to do it yourself. Yes, you saved money, but now you're banging your head consistently.

Yeah, and cages can also hurt you.

The best cages are the ones you don't see.

Yeah, so that's the positive. That's the other thing, too. Like nowadays, we were saying things are easier. Like the roll cage kits, they can get, it's called cage kits. There's a dude named Chair Slayer. He's a guy that was in a motocross, got in an accident, and he's now handicapped down. So he created his own system of handheld driving. You know, like for he does like a handheld, with a clutch and everything. His name's Chair Slayer, cause he's on a wheelchair. And he actually kills it. Shreds like a thousand horsepower LSA setup in like 180. But he started 3D scanning chassis and creating cages. So literally he scans a whole chassis, and then he'll bend you a tube, like a whole cage, with all the markings exactly where it goes. And it's the tightest fitting cages you could ever get, literally. So you can barely tell they're in your car. And it's like, instead of having to spend, no offense to patients, like you could bring it there, but you're gonna spend five to 10 grand, or now you can buy this cage for 1,500 bucks. You can either do it yourself or have your buddy who can weld it. It's a lot cheaper. So that's where if I want to do a cage, I could do it that way as well. But if I had the money to pay someone to do it a specific way, then I would probably send it to somebody to do it too.

Right, yeah, and I'm currently in talks with the guys at Patience, so we might have one or two of those guys on here in the next few weeks.

Max will be, ask for Max, he works there.

Yeah, I'm not sure, I'm talking to Art, and he just, I still haven't got back to his text, I feel bad, but it's like.

I know Art as well, known him for 10 years at least.

Yeah, because he was a, I think I met him when he was at Grimm Speed. Yeah, yep, and then they left Minnesota too, right?

Same thing, they didn't leave you, they got bought out.

Another company that got swallowed up.

Yeah, yep, yeah.

Buy better ones, so.

Yeah, Minnesota's losing a lot of good shops, that's for sure.

Dude, I'm telling you, a lot of things just kind of fell apart, like as COVID kind of was like, coming in.

Yeah, it was hard, because those two years were the most money that the company actually made. That was the reason why I think we did, we were sold, because the year of 2020, everyone got free checks and dude, the amount of money that they, we were busy as f***. And then a year after that, it was like, all right, are we selling? Or like, Black Friday was like, a lot less than we've ever done, and like, all right, and then.

Once those Excel sheets look good enough, too.

Well, that's what it does, it makes you look appetizing to another buyer, right?

Well, another thing that companies will do just before they go public, for example, is they'll access a s*** ton of employees, too, because it just affects the ratios on the sheet or whatever on your Robinhood account.

Well, we had a feeling things were going bad because I was luckily on this thing called Slack, like a bunch of, so they had their own channel, and we had our own channel, we combined them together when Map combined, and they had 500 and plus people, you could see it. And not even like two months later, from 500 to 300, I'm like.

Uh-oh, yep.

From there, yeah.

Ticking down, that's crazy.

When you could see it, because you could see how many people were in a chat, or in a group, because how many people they had, they had 500 plus employees, because that's how busy, I mean, they were a billion dollar company, not a million dollar company, at least for some reason, they could sell enough wheels and make good enough money, which is awesome, but that's how many people they had, and chopped it literally almost in half, and that's how I was like, all right, I'm starting to get a little worried, and then yeah, soon after that, they started getting into fab, cutting other people, and I'm like, man, here we are. So.

Yeah, I think it's gonna work out for you, fellas.

I could see the future. So far, so good, man.

It's like I told him, it sucks what happened, but I think this is both, not to say it in a wrong or right way, but it's kind of a chapter that maybe we both needed, because we're so comfortable being there.

Blessing in disguise, I'd say, for sure.

So if you guys were going to get, yeah, let me restart that question a little bit. I'm getting a little tired here. I'm honestly thinking about what I'm gonna eat after this. Well, I'm thinking about asking Dan, I'm like, should we go, I don't know, do you want to get food after this? Oh yeah, exactly. See, I've been wanting to ask him for 30 minutes. I'm like, I don't know, I think the taco place. Just text him. Well, okay, the reason it's in the back of my head, I'm not some selfish prick, right, is because, well, maybe I am, but it's like, so we start a little bit later than we usually do, right? Because sometimes we'll start right around five, so it's like, well, we come in just in time to bother the taco shop up the street here. So I'm just sitting here thinking, all right, so what are we gonna do? Okay, anyways, back to my actual question, the whole reason why I stuttered. If you guys were to talk to somebody that's like 17, 18 years old, right? Because a lot of people are getting this whole college thing pushed on them, like, oh, you guys gotta go be a f****** marketing major, which by the way, I might end up doing marketing for a company. No marketing major, because it's easy as s***. What advice would you give to somebody that's trying to figure out how they want to get into cars? I guess we'll start with either one of you who wants to go first.

Well, what do you mean get into cars?

Into the industry.

So I got lucky getting into MAP, and that's what got my foot into the door for being a fabricator for a career. But school wasn't a bad idea, honestly, for welding.

Because you went to DCTC, was it?

I think I paid 11 grand for a nine-month program or something.

It's not bad.

Yeah, MIG, TIG, STIC, spray arc. So I did all different types of welding. And I don't know, I don't really know what to say about that.

I mean, it's a desirable field right now, too, I think.

Yeah, I got lucky. So, yeah, I guess just really think what you want to do before you pull the trigger.

I kind of think tech schools were like a thing that people were... There was a point there where we were like, nah, this just seems like an out or whatever. But I think we should be pushing way more people that direction, man. It's going to get to a point where we're not going to have anybody like that. I'm in the trades right now, and it's rough out there.

It's like that meme that I read a while ago. It's like, we need more electricians. Everyone needs to stop being a rapper.

Well, it's kind of like, I feel guilty about doing this, too. It's like, maybe I should go learn something that's going to be useful.

Yeah, stop waiting for another GameStop bubble. You're not going to get there.

Come on now. Me, I would say, if you have the drive and you're not afraid of, I guess, going into a field that you're not comfortable with, try it. Like I said, I was never used to trying fabrication at all until I literally just went to school, see if I was going to be good at it. Literally, the way that I realized that I was ready for it is that I went to school for Dunwoody. Our first test at Dunwoody is called the settling torch welding, where you're pretty much putting straight, like a torch, like fire, like a straight settling torch, and then you're just melting a rod. But the thing about it is that it pops back at you. So if you get it too hot, it goes, it's kind of like MIG welding, but literally the bubble pops at you, so it kind of freaks you out. After a week, we had an over, we had too many people in our class, it was like 35 people, we were probably supposed to have 32, 33. After that first week of how many people got popped at and scared, it went down to 17 people. Wow. It just shows you how many people were just afraid of it. And that's not even like, MIG welding is way worse to me, of splatter than that. But I just showed you that people didn't even like the concentration, that it was hard for them to even... And that's a very hard thing to learn with welding, but it's also like, it teaches you hand coordination and much other miscellaneous things that people maybe just weren't patient enough for.

Left hand, right hand?

Either or.

Play plenty of video games when you're a kid.

Like that stuff. And I guess if you have the drive to go to that and then learn other things, because MIG welding was a pain for me to learn, because it was so much splatter and everything burning me, annoyed me, but I was just like, I'm going to keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing so I can learn TIG, because TIG is what I really wanted to learn. And then eventually the last week when I was going to transition over to the second semester, they let us dibble and dabble into TIG. That's literally all I did was one week of TIG, and that's all I ever got to learn, like train on. And then it was going on to the next semester, I wasn't allowed to go to the next semester because I couldn't afford it. You had to pay like half of whatever for Dunwoody to even, and I thought it was like a student loan thing that I would pay it at the end, but no, they want you to pay a certain amount before you can go to the next. So I stopped after the first semester. It was like four months of welding, and it was just dibble and dabble at friends houses, and somehow I got a job at MAP and became the shift leaders, trainer, stuff like that.

Well, it sounds like you guys both moved up there, right? So you kind of get into this entry level thing. So I guess that's another thing for people. If it looks like an industry you want to be in, who cares if you're pushing a broom? Get in there.

Oh, absolutely.

Start somewhere.

There's people that wanted to just be our cutters, our centers, like they teach us how to weld. There's people that went to shipping just to like come on the weekends and we teach them how to weld, do little things like that.

Like I said, you put the effort in, kind of.

I'm not afraid to teach anybody as long as you put the time and the effort to do so.

Respect my time kind of deal.

Yeah. And like I said, there, it was free gas. Like that was the positive about Matt. Like I said, they let us free gas. Not free materials, but there was something like scrap that you could grab. But I think we would get it all at cost. Everything was right in the back. It was like a dream. It was like a grown man's playground, is the way to say it. Toys R Us for adults, is the way to say it. Anything that we needed was there.

Legos for adults.

Literally, legos for adults.

Adults still do legos. I do legos.

Like I said, our toys never get bigger, but we never get older. I don't know how to say it, but what the f*** is the phrase?

We don't...

I know what you're talking about. I'll butcher it.

Somebody's screaming at the windshield right now.

But it's like the older you get... You can get older, but your toys will just get bigger. That's literally the way to say it. The older you get, it doesn't matter how old you get, your toys just get bigger, because we're still kids at heart no matter what. And like I said, it was the coolest thing to be in there, because we could build anything, train anybody, teach anybody, and it felt great to just be there. And all the weekends, we would just party. Not like party, but jam, music, get stuff done. All right, see you tomorrow, and we'll be here tomorrow, the next day. We were there almost every single day. And that night, we'd be there till 8, 9 o'clock at night. It was just like a completely different time.

Weekends, like 2 in the morning, Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday morning.

Red Bull and the like that. I was like, damn it, Brian.

Here's going to be the coolest toy idea, dude. What if there was like, you know how we had like those toy RC cars, like the battery-powered ones and all that stuff? What if you had, like, what if you could do like engine swaps? Like if kids could learn how, I mean, it wouldn't be like legit advanced or anything like that, but like, you know, just be like, all right, here's the electric 2J or whatever. I don't know.

So I mean, that's what we did when I was like in VOTEC. We did small engines, stuff like that's what slowly got me into it. Like if you're not even in college, if you're still in school watching this, like, get yourself into VOTEC, get yourself into any tech school. Like that's what got me into it. I wasn't in there much, but just enough to like spark my interest. But I've always been into cars, like I said, and it just, I wanted to put those two together. I wanted to learn engines, but then I realized like working on cars is kind of like it's my thing, but I didn't want it to kill my drive. And that's when I learned that, oh, you can fabrication is a huge part of like cars. And I was like, oh, well, maybe I can learn that and come to find out fabrication is a ginormous part of like a fabric for cars because cage work, fixing like stuff that's breaking, you know, broken studs, like things that you didn't expect that you would need welding for it. It's there. It helps you live a lot.

Sometimes you're like, you know what I need? I need this and this and I need a part that doesn't exist and you need to frickin make it.

We did that. What's it called? Well, for the Camaro. It's like Dave needed a part that, you know, like a spacer for the throttle body.

Yup. Yeah.

He just went ahead and made a spacer. He's like, and he kept saying like, this is the perks of having a fab shop right in the corner over there.

Yup.

Super cool.

That R32 that did the 1J, like he brought me a fat inner cooler and then like a tucked radiator. So there was no room for it to fit an oil cooler in between it. So I just made him a bracket on the side, then I made nut inserts, a bracket, hold it, another end, and like just customize the whole bracket. You can't even buy it, you know, and then just he came and looked at it. He's like, you made that? I was like, yeah. I was like, yeah, I have to figure it out. You know, he's like, it's like that, that artisan was telling me about like, I just, it just clicks in. You just figure it out. I don't know how to explain it. But once you could be watching us one day, you'd be like, it just clicks. I can't even explain it. Like, honestly, it's like, it's one of the probably the best feelings where you're just like, huh, we figured out like somebody earlier is like, hey, what about doing this? Because I saw somebody adjusting a camera arm earlier today at JWP, and they were trying to line it up to the stock one. There was an aftermarket lower controller arm. And I was like, oh, I want to make a jig that you could bolt it both on, right? And you lock it where the OEM one is, like lock the pins, you know, so it stays there. You remove it in the aftermarket when you put it on, line it back up exactly where the holes are. Then you have to worry about measuring it. And it just looks at me. I was like, artism is literally what I said, because I was like, it just that quick 10 seconds is just how fast it clicked into my head.

You just like looked at me like, well, that's the production like jig fab work that you did. That's the whole map stuff kicking in too.

Yeah, this thing we made, Matt did, we made a lot of mistakes. We had a lot of jigs because we had to redo version one, two, rev three, rev four, 4.5, all this stuff. Like, it was, that's all me and Matt did. Or like, we had to chop something. Like, hey Matt, cut this, do whatever, and he'd be the one to do it. And we, like I said, it was handoffs one another. That's why I said we became really good friends. I mean, don't get me wrong, we butt heads and stuff here and there every once in a while, but we just squashed it and figured it out and just realized that work is work and gotta push that s*** aside, you know?

No, I've built a lot of s*** in my garage just with a vice, a drill bit, and a bandsaw.

You can get a lot of stuff done with just those things.

Like, oh s***, I need a piece of angle iron. I'm gonna cut here, here, here, drill some holes, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, like I said, it became something that it was just an interest, and then now it's like, holy s***, like I said, I look at my old welds and I'm like, somebody, like I always say, I was like, somebody let me post this up, like how bad it looks. I was like, you let me post this up eight years ago? Now I'm like, but now you gotta remember where you came from.

Right, yeah.

That's the good thing about becoming something that you want to always be. It's like I've always wanted to find a career that I could be happy with. And 10 plus years ago, I was definitely not doing as good as I was. I was a felon doing dumb s***. And now I have a career that I deal with, and I would say a really good life where I'm not afraid to attack any type of job and it makes a little money and it makes the customer happy. And it's like, at the end of the day, it's a revolving cycle where I feel happy about it and wake up every day and go on to the next day and do something else about it, do another job.

I think we're going to get a really interesting three today. I think we also just crossed the two-hour mark here, I think.

Oh, sorry.

No, you're good.

You're cooking.

I've been dreading this question.

Yeah, it's kind of becoming our new average three hours.

I know, I keep talking, like I was talking to Art. He's like, what could he expect for like time-wise or whatever? I'm like, yeah, we usually average about an hour 30. I'm like, we're on a nice long streak lately though. Like the last one we did with Jeff Storrs is two hours 40. Before that was Kyle, he was like 320. He set the record. You know, not too long ago, we had Paul Rody. He did 315. It's like, we don't try to do this. Like after Caleb, I'm like, all right, no more chasing records. Like that one we were chasing records because that dude's got stories. But other than that, I was like, yeah, let's put a cap on him.

People come into this nervous and they're like, man, I don't even know if I'm be able to talk for the long, but you just start to get b******* about cars and stuff. Right.

It's like Brian, he's like, I'm nervous. I'm like, dude, you come in here. That dude, I've had some very deep conversations with Brian. That's the person you should try to get on here.

Yeah.

He's got some stories and that's one of the most knowledgeable he means, I probably know.

No, he's definitely in the pocket, I think, but he's right here, right? So we can grab him anytime. So that's gotta be like a desperate thing, right? When we're like, s***, nobody showed up or.

I'm definitely grateful to have him as a resource. Cause like one time we did it, finished the podcast with, who was it? Was it, I don't know, somebody. And like after we finished, like Dan left, he was long gone and I ended up having a 45 minute conversation with him, Brian, just learning stuff. So yeah, definitely.

Just ask him one question and have a microphone with you. He won't even know. And then you guys.

That's one of the best parts about having a podcast. Like when I do the highlights for these episodes, like I go back and it's like. Just have a loud mic. But no, it's like so cool. Cause like I go back and do these highlights, right? And I'll watch, like, here's the thing. When I do a highlight, like a one minute video might take me three hours sometimes, like two to three hours. And I watched that video no less than 20 times, right? So it's like, I start memorizing some of the stuff that the guests say. It's like, all right, cool. Like during the episode, I didn't learn anything from you guys. But like in two weeks, I'll be like, oh s***, that makes sense.

Dude, that's, I mean, that's anything. As long as you're not afraid to pick things up too. Like I said, don't be so closed minded. The other thing that I tell people, like if you're not afraid to like learn things, try it. Like, but if you're afraid to try things, you are your own like wall. Like that's the thing is like, I was afraid that I wasn't gonna ever be good at welding. I was like, you know what? If I don't try it, I'm never gonna know.

Well, that's what you're saying. You looked at your ones from eight years ago, and they were s***. If you're not growing, then what the hell are you doing anyway? You know?

That's like any, anything. Like I said, if you're not trying to do better every year, that's it, then maybe that's not the type of thing for you. But like in fabrication, every time we worked, we were trying to make it look better, try to do faster. Like you just try, try, try, try. And before you know it, it's just second nature. Yep. Like I said, there's things that jobs will show up. People are like, this other place wouldn't even attack it. And I'm like, I'm already done. Like that Honda that I'm doing, you know? They brought me the, not talking down on it, one of the s******** fitting manifolds I've ever had in my life. But I worked around it. Like I said, I also work around people's budgets. Where if this is all you have, okay, well, let's see what we can do. And that's the positive about what it's, with me and Matt, it's like, that's what we try to do is help whoever has whatever. Cause at the end of the day, nothing is impossible. You just gotta work around it, you know? So.

Well, part of it is also finding you in a, like, I don't want to say a good mood, like a good timing too, right? Cause like, you know, especially like when it comes to like budget, right, it's like, I want to help you, bro. I just have all this other stuff going on right now, but eventually it kind of works out too.

When you're first getting started, like to get your name out, you know, you want to be more, you know, when it becomes more, I don't want to say legitimate, legitimize because you are, but like in that beginning, you gotta eat some s***, take some good with the bad, right? And then once you get to a certain point, then it just doesn't even become like viable. I mean, they're sure there's some people you'll help out and stuff like that. But if you're giving out too much, then people and you're popular at the same time, then you got people coming to you for handouts or expecting it, you know what I mean? So it was like a fine line in between when you...

I only give as much as I receive. That's the way I look at it. Because I used to give a lot, and then you have to figure out that a lot of people won't do the same thing for you.

Absolutely.

Just keep taking.

Yeah, take, take, take. Not trying to call people out or anything, but it's just the way it works. That's why I look at it as, I think we're giving you pretty good prices where there's a lot of shops that are $170, $190, $200 an hour, where if I'm like, hey, $60, $70 an hour, $100 an hour, that's still half the price.

You better not be asking me for a discount.

No, but yeah, and then discount on top. And it's like, okay, then you have a job, and you do something, then I'm going to come ask you. You say, oh, you sell houses? Cool, well, am I going to get a 30% discount? No.

Right.

Like, it doesn't work that way. And it's just the way I look at things. You got to make it where I can still eat, and you're still happy. That's the way I look at it.

Dude, nothing pisses me off more. Well, actually, there's a lot of things that piss me off. But nothing, it does upset me, though, like when somebody's like, where's my friends and family discount? I'm like, you think the price I just gave you wasn't the discounted price already? Like, that's usually what I'll do. Like, for like, you know, Dan wants a photo shoot, right? I'll be like, or no, I told Caleb last week, I'm going to do a photo shoot half off for him. Because like, we hang out all the time, like I'm not going to do this absolutely for free. It's like, otherwise, that's the thing. If I do it for free, it's going to sit on the backlog forever. It's going to be there for months. I'm not going to touch it, just because I've got to focus on whatever.

Well, when you shot Malini's car, we were talking, we were setting it up, and I'd never even asked you. And then you were just like, hey, this is what I'm going to do for you, this, this, and this.

Exactly. Same thing applies over there. It's like, I'm going to give you a discount if we're homies, but don't be asking me for it.

Let's say my buddy Tim, if he ever needs anything, he's a towing guy. I was like, you ever need anything done, let me know. Get it done, rocked out. Whenever I need to use a tow truck, something breaks down, he just helps me. I don't have to call anybody but him. Little things like that, it's the things that I appreciate from other people that I'm happy to have a skill. Because like I said, it's not about one-upping on somebody. Like, hey, I did this for you, I need you to help. No, it's a good trade.

I won't do that s*** either. You'll just do it. You'll never hear from me. I won't ever be like, hey, I need you to do this because I did this. I don't play that game.

I'm not a friend that won't ask for it.

Yeah, I'll just start. You'll slowly see me just like, hey, not talking to you nearly as much.

If it's my last $10 and we're both hungry, we're eating. That's how I am. I'm not the kind of person that I eat in front of you. Let's both get this bread.

Yeah, the whole keep and score thing. I'll keep scoring myself. For example, I do this with Dan all the time. He's like, oh, I'll pick it up or whatever. And then eventually, he'll see a random $30 coming. He's like, what's this for? I'm like, that one time. I'll keep scoring myself. But I'll never do it on somebody else.

It's good. I mean, it shows good character. Because a lot of people are just like, oh, you're going to buy dinner again? Again? Again? Again? And I'm like, dude, am I your freaking husband? Like, what the hell? We're going on a date?

Well, you didn't realize that this is, you know, what it is.

I just assumed I've adopted him at this point.

So I was off to the black couch, you know, for anything.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, this is actually casting for The Bachelor. Yeah, we'll make it work. Yeah. But no, that's a huge thing. Yeah, definitely. You want to pop the usual three?

I think it's time, right? Yeah. All right. At the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests to pick three cars. We'd like a daily driver, a track car, and a show car. You have a limited budget. Swaps are OK. Whatever you want to do, we'd like you to pick three cars. Can you do that?

I can.

Yeah. You're up, man.

Daily, I think I've always wanted a CTS-V wagon, manual, just for a daily driver. Because even though it's LS9JZ, it's still one of my favorite cars. I'm a dad now, too. So it's like that.

There's something about four door sports cars that I like.

I mean, I have my chaser, which I love. But something about a good 800, 900 horsepower daily that can just gap the f*** out of people is pretty sick. Track car, I've been actually daily a Honda Fit. And it's one of my favorite dailies that I've owned. But I want a K-Swap one and track that for a circuit race. Because dude, I'm telling you, I could take off ramps at 50, 60 miles an hour, and it takes it like nothing.

I've been on tracks with Honda Fits. And yeah, no, I'm blown by them. But they're out there. They're having fun.

Dude, it's a go kart on wheels, for sure.

A go kart on wheels, you know what you just said, right?

Yeah, it's a go kart, but a lot bigger and a lot safer, I guess. Yeah, a DOT go kart.

I just have to remind them that I got it.

I wasn't even thinking. I was actually thinking about the show kart when I was thinking about the show kart.

So the track car was the V?

The City of the V is a daily. And then K-Swap, Fit would be my track car, like a circuit car. I guess show car slash, I think it would be an old Lambo Countach or a Diablo. Oh, that's the two?

We have to choose now. I'm going to make you choose.

I think Diablo. That's my first really, really wanting of cars, and that's be like, yeah. Otherwise, if I was aiming for it to keep forever, maybe the Countach is one. That's like the first car I've ever owned.

He's trying to do two again.

It's hard, dude.

It's like they're both very good vehicles that, as a kid, I grew up fighting over which one I would really want.

That's crazy. I don't agree. Diablo all day long. And the reason I say this, because on my Facebook memories today, it popped up, and I asked this question on Facebook last year. Countach or Diablo? And I think it was a three to two ratio, right? Diablo. For me, it's dumb and dumber, right? Because you're also almost 10 years older than me, or whatever, 33, right? Yeah, so nine years older. So it's like dumb and dumber, that red Diablo. That's my dream spec. Now, I'll never fit in one. We saw the one at the Hamilton Collection, or at the whatever, Iron Gate condos. And I walked up to the car, I literally laughed. I'm like, there ain't no f****** way I'm fitting in this car, dude. Like, I can squeeze into some things. Like, I sat in my buddy's Pantera, right? The white one that's around here. I sat in a supercar Saturday, and I immediately became a support pillar. Like, if that car was in a rollover, I'm dead.

They're meant for small people. A lot of those cars are. Wolf of Wall Street, I think that's the white vintage that got me.

I love that one, yeah.

That's what I'm saying. It's like, that white has got me, but a Diablo has been like, like...

Yes, now you gotta choose. Which one is it?

I was gonna say Diablo. Diablo is a little more...

Would you do anything custom to it or anything like that?

I'd probably build a turbo kit for it.

Turbo kit?

Yeah, a twin turbo. Like, the sheepy stuff or whatever.

I know, I know. I'm gonna bring in that animal.

That's the only, I guess, underground UGR does twin turbo.

Yeah, UGR does twin turbo.

Wait, does sheepy do a Diablo?

I was about to say that.

All right, let her in.

Showcar, probably one of those RWB Porsches. That'd be pretty sweet. Daily C6-06.

Okay. You went to a ZR1?

No. Just a plain Jane, seven liter NA. Track car, probably Fox Body. Cliche for drag racing.

Right.

Yeah, probably Fox.

It doesn't get much better than that for drag racing, though.

Honestly, everybody does it, but they work.

If you can get LS in it.

Oh yeah, of course.

Every s*** gets in there.

I just sold one to a buddy of mine that's going to put an LS in it, and I'm like, just don't tell me that, man. Just drive away with it. And yeah.

Our buddy Derek, he was a CNC guy at MAP, he has a Fox body as well, and twin turbo LS. But he left it with a stock seat, and we went out to Proving Ground one time, he did a freaking dirty launch. It snapped the seat. He was like, and it broke right away. And then you hear the wheel stop, and then you just floor it, hit, and then he's leaning back, flooring it all the way down with a snap seat, trying to pull himself back up because it looked like the seat snapdack was so hard. After that, we shoved a ball or a cooler back there.

Trailer tire.

Yeah.

Trailer tire.

Yep. He went back on the track, did the roll racing and stuff like that, and yeah, he's kind of a wild man, Derek is.

Yeah, you got to do what you got to do, you know?

Yeah.

I guess so.

That's up there in the wildest stories we've heard. It has to be. It has to be.

I love Derek. He's f****** hilarious.

Yeah, we need more people like that on the podcast, too. Just people that just like don't necessarily like, I just have ridiculous stories, dude. They're so fun sometimes.

You got Kyle on here, Kyle Nelson. Yeah.

Yeah.

The final party we've had at his place, we do every year, we do a burnout in years, which is like, right, it's ball drops. We do a nice burnout until the tires blow out and piss off every neighbor.

Nice. I wouldn't be pissed.

I don't know. The neighbor behind his old house. The old house f****** hates him, calls the cops on him all the time. But, you know. Fun stuff.

Yep.

Well, sweet, dude. Where can people find you? We'll start with you.

I don't really post on Instagram or Twitter or anything, so Matthew Corniea and Facebook. I post a bunch of fab stuff there usually. Sweet.

And mostly DRSE stuff going forward, probably.

Yep. Yep.

On Instagram, my tag is NissanJunkie, N-I-S-S-A-N-J-U-N-K-Y. And then my also tag for Elegant Garage is underscore Elegant Garage. So that's where you'll find any of my stuff if you want to see what I do for work.

So we'll go, yeah, work.

Yeah.

Yeah, man. You're building dreams out here. You have to start selling it that way.

If you have one, I'll make it.

What can people find you, Dan?

You can find us at Gunna Garage, with two N's.

Nailed it. And you guys are, what, two hours, 13 minutes deep in here. You know where to find me at this point. Well, I appreciate you guys coming on. We finally ticked the box of fab guys. We're slowly working our way through the whole car community. So yeah, we appreciate you.

Yeah, thank you, man.

Yeah, it was awesome to bump into you. So we'll see what comes up next. What do I usually do for these outros?

It's been like a week.

Kind of taper off.

I think, yeah, a lot of taper off.

Cool.

Well, Dan, thanks for existing. Thanks for coming on, guys. And we'll see you all next time.