84. Patience Metal Fab, Building Racecars, Origins, EV Swaps, Rally Build w/ Bryan Hawk, Gary Rude

Able runner on any of your cameras in the event we need to switch the logo faces that way, and I'll see you next time.

On the top side of the table, it's backwards.

It's probably panning at that level, so.

And it'd be the same if we flipped it around, just that would actually be facing the camera, not us.

Let's roll.

All right, so basically, I'll just rock you an intro, introduce you guys. Basically, make sure I introduce you correctly, and then we'll be off to the races from there.

All right, sounds good.

Don't want to go too far out, though.

I'm going in, going in.

Cool, good, get yourself set up.

Yep.

See, this is my front on tall, right? So this happened in Chicago, too. All right, test, test, test. All righty. Cool, well, hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide podcast. I'm your host, Harris, AKA Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations, and I'm here with my co-host, Dan, Mr. Gun and Garage.

Yep, how's it going?

And, oh, oh, you got more.

I don't know, I don't know. You keep, got me driving out here all the time. The traffic was just as fun coming up 694 as it was going down 394, so.

And for those of you watching on video, we're somewhere different for once. I thought I would make Dan's commute a little bit easier, didn't. No. Today we are at Patience Metal Fab, and today we got both Gary and then Bryan. So basically, like, tell me what your guys' roles are here. So you're, are you guys both owners, or what's the situation here?

Yup. Yup, both owners.

All right, sweet.

Married 13 years now. Okay.

Well, I think it's, you know, so we recently had our first fab guys on. I think it was a handful of episodes, but you guys kind of call yourselves the one stop shop, or the final stop, or what was the terminology used with me?

One stop fab shop.

There we go, yeah.

Last stop fab shop.

There you go, that's it.

Kind of a combination of both.

Yup, last stop fab shop.

Did you guys make that a T-shirt yet?

No, we got a lot of T-shirt designs in the works. We just haven't really executed them yet.

You don't want to rush into this stuff. Four or five years to develop a shirt seems not right. We can finish a full turnkey build in a year and a half, but a T-shirt design, it takes a little longer.

One of the things I really like about this setup here, especially when we were talking a few weeks ago, is getting these cars in the backdrop. You guys do everything. I mean, on camera, you can only see the four or five that we have behind us here. But looking out on the shop, you had everything from the Renault to old trucks, and just a wide variety of things. So take us through what are some of the things that you guys work on, and what you're known for. I guess either of you could take it from there.

Might be easier to start with what we don't do. All right. We don't build engines. We don't paint cars. We don't do body work. Everything else from there is complete bumper to bumper, motorsport, metal fabrication. Roll cages is kind of what we're known for, and what we've built our brand on over the years. Roll cages and chassis fabrication. So with that kind of strings in multiple other talents that we don't particularly advertise. One being wiring. Not something we like to do, but find ourselves just having to do it as a build. A lot of people come in for one thing, and then once they see what we have the ability to do in here, then it's, oh, by the way, can you do this, this and this? So motorsport metal fabrication is really a good general explanation of it. Not sure what you got to say.

Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. Like Bryan said, you know, we've come to a point we've... When you're in the trust of a customer, especially a lot of our builds, we'll get pulled out of other shops or builders or processes in other places where somebody's either taking too long or somebody's kind of questioning the quality. That's where the last stop Fab Shop kind of came from. They wind up here. And then things like wiring where we're capable of it, the knowledge levels here, the skill levels here, but we don't really want to advertise it or bring it in from the outside. But, you know, if somebody wants to take a car all the way through to turnkey, you kind of have to do it inevitably because to farm it out, you don't control the quality on it. You don't control who's doing it. And there's those types of things. There's not a lot of people around that do them.

Well, especially with your guys' size, right? Like, you're able to reach out to any shop to collaborate with. Like, I know you guys worked, and again, there's some projects that we might not be able to talk about, but when you guys had those, I think, well, the little Ford things, not the Focuses, but the small one, was it the Fiestas?

Oh, you mean like the Ken Block Tribute build, that one that came over from Toon Plus? Adam Brunson over there?

Yep, those ones, yep, so that's a collaboration between shops. I'm sure there's probably a dozen shops that you work with just here in the metro area, but also farm out, I'm sure.

Yeah, what you really find a lot of is things like roll cages, it's hard to do quality and still be able to keep the lights on doing something like roll cages. And so unless you're set up to do just that, most shops try it, dabble in it, and realize it's a total losing place to be. So that's kind of where we make our initial relationship. And someone like Adam, that one wasn't a cage, but it was still some heavy lifting in the fab department. Places that'd be hard to find somebody to do that. The specific wheel tub work that we did on that, where you're picking up in the middle of somebody else's project, where it's been pulled out of another shop, something's half finished, and trying to pick up with that, most shops won't even entertain it.

I also don't want to get too far ahead of myself here, so let's go a little bit back in time. So how does Patience come to be? Like was this just like kind of like doing it in grandma's garage sort of deal?

It happened on accident, is what I tell people. I don't know, it's kind of, we started out building Air Ride mini trucks. Really our background is in Air Ride mini trucks, and we just kind of set out to build a few of our own, and then everything just kind of started happening organically. And I say buy on accident, not as a bad thing, but I don't know that my heart was set out to build a shop. We were just kind of doing cool s*** on our own, and I don't know if I can swear or not.

You're good.

Yeah.

You know, then collectively it just started to come to us. And that came from two backgrounds we have, which if you want to dive into that, we can on kind of the road to Patience has been described before.

Did it start with just you then, or were you guys working together back then? Or what was the situation there?

I've actually known Bryan since sixth grade.

Okay.

So we actually grew up together. And then went out to Arizona with a bunch of our buddies. Everybody went to go be UTI rats. We all went to UTI and went on to be dealer techs. And when we came back, Bryan had this little Ranger that he'd already built, that little air ride Ranger. And yeah, he always wanted a Tacoma really bad. And he told me multiple times, and like any good friend, while living out of state, I made sure to buy his dream truck that he wanted to cut up. So when we came home, I got to cut it up and wave it around in his face a little bit. Although his Ranger definitely was more functional and operational on a much longer running scale than my Tacoma was.

Yeah, and really where that kind of flavor came from was living on the West Coast is where a lot of the inspiration and that creativity developed. Because there, it's summer year round. And that's really where the air ride mini truck scene came while living out there, connected with a group of individuals and really just started cutting trucks up in garages and shaving door handles and painting cars is really where it kind of stemmed from. So taking that kind of West Coast air ride chassis mini truck skill set, bringing it back home. And then when Gary graduated UTI and went to Miami to work for Volvo, he kind of acquired that tuner aspect. He was probably one of the first guys to have an RB swapped S14 in like what, 2004? So really it was a combination and a collaboration of skill sets when we joined forces, both kind of moving back home from college. I was in the custom air ride mini truck scene. He was kind of more in the tuner, drift, you know, RB swap scene. And then from there, we just kind of collaborated, doing the fab thing on the side. And then our day jobs were dealer technicians. Excuse me. I worked for BMW for many years and he worked for Volvo, so.

So is that where your skills, so I guess, where did your skills come from?

Yeah, did you take welding? I mean, was it, I mean, is that something you kind of just taught yourself of you're going to UTI to be like an auto tech basically, but.

A little bit, maybe I should back up a little more. Previous to going to UTI, we both did, but I took three years post-secondary school when I was in high school. It was probably the only school I went to. Leaving high school, just go do that. So really kind of my background is collision repair and refinishing. Probably in the late 90s, early 2000s, back when shaving door handles and body lines and that sort of thing was cool. That's where, that's what really got me into cars, was my post-secondary experience at Hennepin Tech Auto Body. I had a really cool teacher that took me under his wing and taught me more than most kids pay to go to college for. So that was kind of the start of my customness and which bled into living in Phoenix, Arizona with that whole air ride mini truck scene. It's just, it was, you could cut a truck up and not really care what happened to it. As long as the suspension geometry was great, it lifted up and down, you could drag it going down the freeway. That's why people built those, you know, they're a pure exhibition, just kind of an auxiliary build.

So I remember before I even discovered air ride, hydraulics were a big thing too. Like, were you involved with that?

Not much experience hydraulics, same concept. You're just dealing with fluid and batteries and pumps versus, you know, air compressors, air ride lines and valves. The respect, I think, is the same, but.

Yeah, I think that changes as technology changes, right? It was probably hydraulics is what they had back then. Like, the air wasn't there. You couldn't do what you could do with it now.

Well, and what you saw is air ride really was, you know, your classics, your old schools, right? Or excuse me, your hydraulics or your classics, your old schools. You know, everybody thinks of the 64 Impala on wires, right? Air ride really came out of the truck scene. And what's really, really crazy, I was actually just talking to somebody about this earlier today, trying to explain what mini trucking meant. In an era now where everybody calls things like that Sonoma over there on coilovers a mini truck. To me, you can't call that a mini truck. A mini truck needs to lay on the ground and it needs to be air ride. I don't care if it's small and on coilovers, that's not a mini truck, right? So.

The static truck. Right.

So it comes out of this. And what you saw was this growth from the late 90s, early 2000s, guys building mini trucks, air ride, learning suspension geometry, learning chassis building, basically through failing and having things not work. And that led to eventually all these guys got into doing hot rods, because you went from mini trucks and then you grew up a little bit and had a family and then you needed to buy something a little bit bigger. So you bought a SUV or some of these guys went into 50s and 60s era trucks. And then they kind of just blended itself into hot rod building. And the chassis construction was always like that main focal point, the chassis and the suspension. And so some of the really good hot rod builders now can track lineage back to building, some of these guys were building air ride mini trucks back in the late 90s. And that's where that knowledge set kind of came from. But for us, when we, so we built Bryan's Ranger and then we built my Tacoma and I had my S14 at the time. So I was at the track, still trying to finish my Tacoma. And we had some buddies that were into drag racing and asked about cages. And we had all the tools already compiled from building our trucks to easily be able to get into building cages. And so it was just kind of a shoe over and we started doing cages and it just sort of, that's what kind of just took off was the cage work. You know, to your comment about learning to weld, well, you start welding cages inside a car, you pick up a TIG torch and you start, I mean, you just, hood time is the better teacher than anything else. So, you know, just from doing and building is really where all that skill set kind of evolved from.

So when I hear about a cage and they talk about having it certified, do you, is that something that you guys do on your own or is there a place they have to take it to get something like that done? Or after you've built a few, somebody come in and check out, be like, okay, these guys know what they're doing. Can you certify your own stuff or how does that work?

Kind of depends on the sanctioning body. So for drag racing, NHRA, there's regional guys. So Jim Bond guards, our local guy, we'll bring him out here. He'll come out, he'll inspect, certify the car that way when it leaves with the customer, it's got a certification tag on it. If they opted to not do it here, say they thought, cause certifications are only good for five years and then they expire and you got to get it renewed. So somebody thought, hey, it's going to take me four or five years to build this car. They might opt out of having it certified and just wait. They can also do that process at the racetrack. SCCA, like road racing, it's not done to just the cage. The car as a whole is certified. NASA, another sanctioning body of road racing, allows shops to become certified to actually certify the chassis. So like we build a car for somebody that's going to compete SCCA. They're going to have to go deal with that tech at the track. NASA, we're actually the only certified NASA shop in Minnesota. And that's an SFI certification that we carry to be able to certify and issue log books for the cars. So really it's a case by case basis. Some sanctioning bodies trust external certification processes. Some they'll only certify it at the track.

A lot of things for you guys to keep in mind then. So how do you get to that level? I mean, what is it? 13, 14 years now that you guys have been doing this?

14 years, yeah.

Is this sort of a situation where you just pick it up along as you go? Like, for example, when I learned taxes, right? It's like, oh, didn't know that. Is that sort of the same situation when you're trying to figure out regulations?

I think that's generally true in all business, right? I mean, whether it's regulations or anything, it's screwed up and figured out along the way, but.

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely that too. I mean, each sanctioning body has their own rule book. So if we get tasked with a cage, we'll do our pre-emptive homework to figure out, in the earlier years, how we need to build this, what materials to use, how to construct it, where bars need to land. As far as that interior construction, every class generally has some sort of rules. They're generally all the same, but they do conform. Most, I'd say, conform to SCCA.

SCCA is kind of the classic. You start to see FIA bleed into some of the faster stuff. There's a few additional bars that are required. But for the most part, we overbuild almost all our cages anyway.

I was going to say probably overengineering just to be safe.

Yeah, it's crazy what's required in some of these cars. I mean, like this one, for instance, here you've got a car that at Brainerd will do 165 miles an hour. And the braking forces are incredible in that car. The car weighs mid 3,000 pounds, forces what, mass times acceleration, mass times speed. Through the numbers, that thing's going to hit the wall real fast, real hard. And if you only have the bars that are in it, I mean, it's just not all there. So a lot of these bigger, faster cars, we will overengineer for sure. We're starting to see it a little bit. We're kind of starting to get into the off-road world now with the Razors and the side-by-sides, ProChamp Off-Road is our local series here, well, regional, and starting to get into doing some of the side-by-side stuff is the same way. They say these are minimum required bars, but you go look at any of the fast guys out there, they're all running additional bars in their cars. So it's kind of up to our discretion as far as the battle is always weight versus safety. Extra bars way more, but how safe do you want to be?

Well, so many people, we talk about this all the time, especially, I don't know if either of you guys watch F1. I don't know if you guys remember the crash that Joe Guen you had when he was flipped upside down and that halo saved his life. Turns out that that halo that they had on the Alpha was twice as strong as the Bayer regulations. So it's like, again, weight versus safety, but I feel like most, it depends who you are too, right? Like some guys are just like, eh, safety's, you know, safety third or whatever.

Safety's an inconvenience to most people.

Until you're tumbling around in a car on a racetrack at 120 miles an hour.

Then we've seen both sides of that spectrum. Guys come to us after they've been in an accident.

Those are the best customers.

Those are the best customers because they understand the importance of it, but most, I shouldn't say most, there's just a lot of people that safety is an inconvenience and not an important expense for them.

You don't think about it until it actually happens. Yeah, that makes sense. So where does engineering come into play? Because last time we were here, I think we mentioned like you guys work with an engineering company or something. I don't know, I can't remember what the specifics were, but designing stuff. Do you guys do a lot of that?

It kind of depends. It's a case by case basis again. The reason sanctioning bodies have all adopted kind of the same cage design is because if they ever get sued, they can point to the guy that designed it, right? So it's kind of that upstream thing of where's the liability stop, right? So the engineering generally is done in cages. You pick things up a little bit along the way. You see things that one sanctioning body uses that another may not have adopted, and you kind of look at it. It kind of makes sense, right? It's all about energy flow in a roll cage. Basically, if you can start in one corner of the car and draw a line to the opposite corner of the car and it doesn't end at the driver, and you don't have to take any hard left or right turns, the energy is gonna travel through the car in a way that's gonna save the guy that's driving it, right? But when it comes to, you know, chassies and a lot of the other things that we're tasked with, yeah, we have to do a lot of it. So, next Rev Motorsports are a couple guys that started as customers and have now become partners in a lot of the stuff that we do. They've actually got a spot in-house here. They're here a couple days a week. And we offload a lot of the real heavy engineering stuff, especially, we do a lot of CAD design here. We're able to do a lot of, everybody here is able to pretty much design some, you know, basic CAD structures, basic tube structures. Ben Tech software makes it super easy for the guys who have no CAD experience to jump in and just design tube structures. And then we might take that model and send it over to Next Rev and have them do some higher level stuff, like some stress analysis, some FEA, and then they can kind of come back to us. We see a lot when we do like control arms, that's a real big one, or chassis, where there's not really a rule book to it. We're working around spatial constraints. And then, hey, this is what we've got to make this fit. Now you guys test this out and let us know if this is gonna work or not. Where is this thing gonna break?

That's really cool. I'm just trying to mentally process all that.

Yeah, it's pretty wild. And it's funny because in the early days, I mean, I never ever would have thought we'd have got to the point that we're at, as far as the capabilities that we have.

I agree with that.

Almost all the capabilities we have come from not trying to keep everything in house. You know what I mean? You find the guys that are really good at the stuff that complements what you do, and then you just let them do that. And that's a perfect example of it. Those guys, I mean, I'll send them a file on a Tuesday at the end of the day here, five o'clock, and James is a night owl, I'll come in Wednesday morning, and all the stress analysis is done on it already. And it's like, yep, here you go. That's what you need to do, so.

Do they use a computer to do that, or do they? So they don't build it and then try and break it?

No, no, no, it's all SolidWorks. James, I mean, both those guys are smarter than I could ever even wish to be, but James is a whiz when it comes to SolidWorks. That guy is, he's very, very talented with it, so he can do a lot.

Well, outsourcing is a huge thing, too. I was actually talking with your interior guy today. Actually, I don't know if he messaged me back yet, but I reached out to him just for something else, and that's really cool. I mean, that's another thing is...

Sean at Topstitch?

I was just gonna plug him.

Sean at Topstitch Auto Upholstery.

Yep, and so the Porsche that's up on the lift over here, and we could talk about some of the projects you guys have done, because again, you look out on the shop floor, there's a lot of various projects here. You would not think a single shop could pull this off, but the quality of people that you outsource to, like I was looking at that interior when we were doing that photo shoot here a few weeks ago, and it's like top quality, you know, and you are who you work with, because at the end of the day, where's everything I come back to? It's where the buck stops. It's with Patience. Like, oh, I sent my car to Patience. They took care of it from there. And I think that's something that you guys have... At what point did you guys start doing that? Were you basically just wanted to do everything in-house and then just outsource things as needed, instead of just sending to a customer to do it on their own?

Gramps?

Yeah, really. I mean, we've done...

We've done Gramps for Michael Morgan. It's kind of when we started to offer it in-house instead of going, here you go, you figure out the rest.

Good luck, yeah.

It was... I'd say... I don't know how you feel, but I'd say probably Gramps was Sean at Top Stitch and then Tony at Damn Straight Customs, who's our body guy. I think that was our first kind of package, one-stop shop truck.

When did you first receive Gramps in the condition it was in?

It was something that he needed at that point, right?

You want to get right into Gramps? That wasn't where I was going with that.

Sure, we'll take it.

Gramps, man, that was a fun project. Michael Morgan was a super cool dude to work with.

It was such a cool opportunity to build that truck.

I know that was kind of your baby, so I'll let you take the first reins on that one if you want.

You get your baby next, whatever that is.

Well, I mean, you always have that thing in the back of your head that you want to build, right? And I've just always thought, open wheel is cool, old school is cool. And the first time Mike came to the shop, and he had called first, and it was a brief conversation. It was kind of like, all right, we get a lot of phone calls. And I hate to say it, but we're kind of the dream killers a little bit, because you get a lot of phone calls of guys that are dreaming, and I mean, there's nothing, absolutely nothing cheap about something that takes 2,000 hours to build, right? So, you know, he came into the shop, we sat down, we kind of went over the concept of what he wanted, and it was sweet right off the bat. It was way less than where it wound up at. It was like kind of a whiskey runner, and you know, steel wheel, kind of a matte gray, and you know, we kind of had a basic plan for it. And then I think the turning point was when he bought those wheels. I think those rotiforms was the turning point. He bought these rotiforms, he ordered these custom rotiforms, and it was like, all right, well, this whole thing is now taking a hard left. And that was one of those where we knew it was gonna be a turnkey through to the end. And so we had to kind of position ourselves. So we brought in, the cool thing about working with guys like Sean at Topstitch, who we've known since the old twisted concepts days to many truck name drop there, he came in and we came up with a cool concept for the interior. And the same thing with Tony, a damn straight customs brought him in. All right, let's talk paint. Let's talk how this thing's gonna look in the beginning. And unfortunately, at that point, we weren't doing any sort of rendering or anything. So it was all kind of multiple people sort of hoping we were all on the same page in our heads, right? But we started with a roadster shop chassis. We knew we wanted the geometry from the front end because it was gonna take too much to design an engineer suspension geometry. It's just, it's not cost-effective, other than, you know, the 5% of builds out there. So started with that, they spec'd us out a set of bare rails, basically a bare chassis. I think it was for a C10, I think it was.

67 C10 is what that chassis was initially for.

Yup, and then we cut up everything from the rear back, and you know, the cage stuff, and just the overall design of that truck. Everything involved, everybody that was going to have to do something on that truck was involved from day one on that truck, which makes it real easy. You know, the interior on that truck is probably one of the coolest pieces of it, and the most underappreciated. The fact that, you know, we built the cage to fit into the body in a way, and then welded all the flanges on the cage so that the upholstery actually mounted to like the center line of the bars, right? So the whole cage looked like it was kind of sunk into the upholstery. And then, you know, having that plan up front, and then being able to send it to Sean, where he already knows the idea and the plan of it. I mean, that's him just roll on it. I mean, he was super stoked about that build, and everybody that put hands on that truck was super, super into that thing.

Well, that thing was mint, right? Well, after you guys put your hands on it.

Until Mike touched it. 400 miles on it. Hey, I'm going to drive this thing across country. Okay, good luck.

I think it went well, too, if I remember correctly.

It did, actually. A little leaky windshield, and other than that, and an airborne moment in Chicago that resulted in some wiring stuff, but yeah, it was good.

Well, a lot of thought went into that, right? And like you said, it's not like you had this drawn up or anything like that. I mean, like you said, you were hoping everybody's on the same page. And the interior was awesome. So I think it was Moe that did the video, Boosted Minneapolis. So I think he still has the full video on his page. So I highly urge people to check it out because he documented that truck in a phenomenal way. Yeah, he was one of the first.

That was, I think its first debut was kind of at that Cars and Octane at Medina.

Yep, that drive.

I think you were there too. That's when we first met.

Yep. Yeah, I thought it was like four years ago or whatever in the old shop. Yeah, well, that was really cool too. I think I was just coming out to just help drive or whatever that day. I was like, all right, cool, I'm gonna check out Graham's. Cause I only somewhat knew Michael at that point. Got to know him a lot more on his podcast as well. Which by the way, the highlights from that truck build, I think were like over like 2 million views on that. Really?

You know, I'll give it to Mike while he probably wasn't, that probably wasn't the right truck for Mike. Mike needed something to drive in and go beat the piss out of, right? That truck wound up being a little bit high maintenance for Mike.

It was too pretty for him.

It was a little too pretty for him. But, you know, Mike knew details. You know what I mean? Like he had these, he has these little details in his mind that he wanted, like the gramps powder coated on the calipers. You know what I mean? And like, air dryer. The gramps powder coated on the calipers. And then the bed wood. He was, you know, I mean, we could have done anything on that bed and that bed wound up being one of the biggest hurdles and challenges in that truck. But that bed wood floor, you know, he wanted the Brazilian cherry. And like, he was, he was a cool dude to work with because he gave us creative freedom. But then on the flip side, it was like, this has to be like this. I want this little detail right here like this.

We need constraints too, right? Because if I just give you like here, here's a blank check, good luck. Like you're just gonna be at the drawing board for a year then, like you just can't figure it out. So do you thrive working off of constraints then a little bit? Or do you struggle sometimes?

A little bit, but what we've found is for the most part, a lot of customers in here don't keep their constraints. It's kind of like a kid in a candy store is the analogy we use a lot of times. We meet a customer for the first time, he's kind of got, this is what I want, this is how the car's coming here for this, and that's it. And by the time the car leaves, it's this, and this.

It's like, oh, by the way, can you do this, this, while you're in here? And that's usually what it turns into. Some constraints are nice, you know, if they got an idea and a vision, we kind of run with it.

Do you do a lot of like suggesting? I mean, when you're coming along, you're like, man, it'd be really cool if we did this. You guys got to have that conversation quite often, you think, or?

I would say absolutely, we do. And it's not in like an upsell kind of way. It's like, hey, we're faced with this challenge. What do you want to do? And we'll give our suggestions and then certainly get customer feedback. They're the ones kind of orchestrating the build and funding it. So I don't think we've ever run into a scenario where we've approached a customer and they've not wanted to do what we've recommended.

Well, you have experience, right? Like you have over a decade of experience. I mean, the proof is in the pudding. I'm gonna take your advice, especially if I'm coming here and I have the funds to do a build with you guys, I'm just gonna be like, all right, what do you suggest? So, but I'm guessing that wasn't always the case because like, I'm sure as a newer shop earlier on, you were probably getting a little bit of pushback or?

I think we backed ourselves into a corner a little bit in the early years, just working with customer supplied parts or just doing things differently. We've shot ourselves in the foot a fair amount in the early years and we kind of know what works and what doesn't. Knowing not to go down that road because we've been down there.

Well, I think a lot of shops build that way, right? I mean, you start off in your garage working with Harbor Freight Tools and you've got some two-stage compressor you picked up from Home Depot and you're trying to make what you can work with what you got at that point.

Essentially, yeah.

Then you start growing up, you know?

Well, and we fortunately had the background coming from dealership tech where I think that's something a little bit different about Patience than any other shop like this. One of the most common things we hear, once we've built a rapport with a customer, especially customers that come to us from another shop, or they've taken their car out of another shop, it's come here. There's immediately a barrier there, right? They've been burned. They are very weary. They want to just baby step through this process. And then as the process kind of develops a little bit, you know, they become comfortable with us in our process, right? And then, and I think some of that comes from our background as dealership techs, because what you see in the dealership, especially at European lines, I mean, Bryan, BMW, Volvo, like those dealerships, those are the ones that'll bend over backwards for a customer in the service drive, right? They just give stuff away. A lot of times at the expense of the tech, right? Like, yeah, we're gonna warranty this now, you know? This isn't customer pay anymore. But that mindset of the customer before all is how to deal with a customer, how to talk to a customer, how to have that customer service part of it. One of the biggest complaints we hear from people pulling their cars from other shops is communication. I wasn't getting communication. When I went over there, it was dirty. It was dingy, you know? I felt like my car was pushed into a corner, had piles of parts on top of it, you know? Here, it's not that way. I email, I call, I get a reply. If Bryan can't take the call, you're gonna get an email back or you're gonna get a phone call back, you know, within an acceptable amount of time. A day, maybe two tops. But these are things that all come from our dealership background. So as we approached a shop, even the first shop we moved into, this hood little spot over by Crystal Airport, the first thing we did, jeez, some people, the first thing we did was...

Speaking of phone calls. Right?

The first thing we did was move into that place and polish the turd. I mean, it was a terrible rundown. Like the place was nasty, but at our own expense, we floor coated it, we did all the walls, because we knew from day one that the way the shop appears, the way you present yourself is critical to how somebody feels. And so it was fun for a long time being in that space when people would walk in and the first thing they would say is like, whoa, I didn't expect this. They pull up to a little building. There's just half cut Russian rebuilders all over the place. They don't expect to walk into somewhere nice. And so it's carried through from those dealer days. So you're talking about tools, talking about how you present yourself. It was always, that was a priority for us.

It groomed us. It really did. Just in how we carry ourselves, how we repair cars and just the process.

Well, customer experience is everything.

100%.

Yeah, it just makes it a lot easier to work with you guys.

Well, keeping your s*** tidy will make you way more efficient too. My shop is an absolute mess.

I was about to say, please tell me what you know about tidy.

Well, I've got four kids and I have a running a business, and the car stuff is just a side thing for me. So like I'm in the garage for maybe an hour. I'm like, I just toss tools in my f****** cart and then I move on, you know? And then I'm like, where the hell did I put that half inch? Yeah.

That hour would be a lot more efficient if you're organized.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I need to get my kids better. I need to get them to clean up that s*** and put it away.

Speaking of labor though, how many employees you guys got here now?

Five.

Five.

Like officially?

Five plus us two, yeah. I guess we're employees, right?

Yeah, checks out. Government looks at it that way.

There's seven people in this roof. And then the two engineers, so nine total. But they're not on our staff. They're their own. At any given time, there could be nine people here, but seven is Patience Metal Fab, yeah.

So we talked about your baby. I want to talk about, do you have your own baby? I mean, do you guys share a baby on that one? What's the project? I mean, I can't, you guys have done so much. I want to talk a little bit about everything. It's hard to cram everything into one episode, but I'm just curious.

Well, you're welcome back and we can cover it then, you know.

Yeah, we'll pick, yeah.

You mean baby as far as like projects?

Yeah, you got one build you're particularly proud of.

I got a personal project in the shop that's been kind of lingering for 20 or so years now. It's an all-wheel drive swaps S13. It's sitting right there. I'm going to look at it. You guys probably can't see it, but it's right there. It's gone under, man, I don't even know where to begin with that cover. It's gone under multiple re-itions or whatever I'm trying to say. Reiterations. Reiterations. There we go. But basically in its current state, it's an S13. We all know what an S13 is. Currently now it's all-wheel drive swapped. And basically what we did is I sourced a R33 GTR from Japan in 2014. Mike Pollard, Opposition Racing, sourced me that car. And basically what we did is we basically cut out the strut towers on the floor pan and did like a body over. So we cut out the entire floor on the S13 due to rotten rust to accomplish that as well. And then we made the same cut on the GTR and laid them over one another. So basically what this S13 is, it's really just an S13 body with GTR, strut towers, floor pan, front and rear subframes. And that basically allowed the all wheel drive aspect to it. In doing that, we shortened the wheelbase just to accommodate what would be the wheelbase of the S13 because the R33s are eight inches longer as far as their wheelbase goes. So on top of that, we tuned it up a little bit and sourced an RB30 block. So it's an RB30-26 engine combination. We kind of refer to that as the 2J killer for all you 2J guys out there. So that's kind of been the shop build over the years. It's been worked on, on and off, but in its current state, in doing what we had to do, it's basically a full Cremoli tube chassis now. To be able to sew together the front and rear end and just tie the floor pan together and just everything we had to do, and maybe we can drop a photo in the video when we get there, but just so people can see. But that's kind of my baby. That's the shop build. It's been ongoing for many years. Is it ever going to get done?

Is it ever really done?

I mean, it might, you know, if we can hear it run this year, that'd be cool. But I think we're in a good spot now to, you know, to get moving on it again.

What's the purpose of the build? Is it just like a show car? Are you going to race it?

It's a great question.

That means he doesn't know.

You know, I didn't really have any. It's got a lot of sentimental values, so I'll never open wheel race it or do any competition racing. But the idea back then was to kind of highlight the shop on doing all wheel drive swaps. We got two of them under our belt now. So really, it's going to kind of be a little advertising, a little fun car. What I'll do with it is maybe a few, you know, light track days a year on the road course. But it'll never see, I say that now, later problem, you know, it'll never see any like competition racing just because there's really no class that could conform to other than an unlimited class.

Yeah, something unlimited would be about it. Hill climb or something goofy. But it'd be a cool exhibition car, though, you know, a time attack. I mean, it's set up. What was really cool on that is we did a bunch of research into the R33 stuff, especially look to Australia and some of the old touring class, you know, JGTC and, you know, Australia and touring. And you know, obviously, it harpens back to like the Kelsonic R32s and some of the just the most dominant Nissan platforms ever. The 33, they struggled with a little bit more after the 32. There was some changes that a lot of them would make to reposition geometry of the suspension. And we were actually able to find a lot of that information. So when we actually set that body down on that, we kind of accomplished that. We were able to move the front suspension up about an inch and a half. We were able to reposition the rear suspension and put a little bit of dive in the back. I mean, it was it was a pretty cool opportunity to, like, tweak some of these things that they would have had to cut up strut towers to do on the 33s. We didn't have to do that because we just had it all as one big unit, you know, and then the tube chassis in the back, I mean, it made for a pretty blank slate, you know. So a car is going to be an animal, you know, it's that's a that's a Dan, Dan Coats build, right? I mean, that's that's precision race engines and motors ready to take some serious power, you know, that could be a four digit motor. I don't know that Bryan will run around at that level.

But no, no, probably not, respectively, maybe six or seven hundred.

That's the name we heard two episodes ago with the GTO build. I don't know if you guys saw, but we had Benjamin on Butcher's Herzl, whatever, on the episode and put a RB motor into a Pontiac GTO.

I was going to ask what's with all these RB guys we've got.

It's a nice little stretch. It's a little it's a little refreshing. I'm sick of the Ford guys you keep inviting.

Yeah, I'm I didn't see that on your podcast, but that build sounds familiar. A friend of ours, Chase Berg, I think, did a lot of the exhaust work on that, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, is that the guy that moved to Nashville? Yeah, yep, yep, yep. So, yeah, that RB guys, nice little stretch of RB guys coming up.

There's some of us out there that like pain, you know, it's like I always tell people the story. I was living in Florida, I bought my S14, decided to do an RB swap on it, went to one of these warehouses that had all the motors stacked floor to ceiling, and literally had to walk around 20 2Js on the floor to pick like the one RB that was up on the back shelf. And had I thought a little bit more about it, you know, there's a reason for this, but Nissan, Nissan, and you know, after 20 years of pain with that thing, you know, it works. But yeah, it's definitely a platform that is a little more finicky than some of the others, that's for sure.

But I've heard that you're able to really make it a competitive motor with a 2J. That's still true, right?

Well, with what Bryan did, that's the whole ticket when the 30s started to surface.

Well, you can build an RB. There's only one way to build an RB. It's the right way. RB really broke. It's what they stand for. Can you build them to be reliable and be just as good as a JZ? Personal opinion, yes. But a lot of people kind of shortcut on how to build an RB and they wind up with the issues they do. Now, can a JZ make just as much power with half the amount of work? Absolutely. I mean, there would be no reason not to go JZ. I think RB guys just want to be different, you know, and both have their place. You know, we have a JZ guy in house now, Max Odegaard. So there's definitely some internal kind of battle.

Art's got a 1J.

Oh, yeah, Art is a JZ guy. And then me, Gary and Ben are RB guys. So, you know, there's definitely a friendly feud in the shop of RB versus JZ.

Yeah, because I've heard that rumor before. It's like, all right, you can make it just as, you know, powerful and all this stuff. But that's interesting. You put it that way. It just needs a little more love.

It just costs a lot more. And you got to do it one way from the beginning. There's no way to, you know, weedle around.

Okay, quit selling it to everybody now, you know.

All right, checks out. Just costs a lot more. Yeah, yeah.

It's a motor of love. You know what I mean? Yeah, there's guys that build Volkswagen's too. So what do you know?

What's that supposed to mean? Well, you guys have had a handful of cool Volkswagen's come through here as well. I think I met a guy at the Amola Open House last year. What was it? It was... Scirocco? Or am I thinking of something else?

Which one are you talking about?

It was like a white one.

The all-wheel drive swap car?

Yes, I think that was the one.

So that's a Golf. You're talking about Nick Braddock?

I think it was like a ridiculously high...

It's an ongoing build, right?

It was like a high horsepower build.

Yeah, he's talking about Nick. That's an all-wheel drive Mark II build. It's a collaboration build we're doing with two other shops in town as well.

Yeah, that was actually just over at Moe's earlier today on the Dyno. They're struggling to do some motor issues with that, speaking of Volkswagen stuff. But, you know, yeah, that's been a really cool build. It started as just, hey, mount my all-wheel drive system and turned into a turnkey. I mean, that's... Man, where do we start on that thing?

Well, it's originally for people that may not know their Volkswagens, it's a front-wheel drive vehicle. And he wanted to do an all-wheel drive Haldex swap, is, I think, the kind of the term Volkswagen guys use. So it started out as a roll cage, and then we fabricated an entire rear subframe for it and widened his rear strut towers and mounted his Haldex. And, you know, we make it sound that easy, but custom axles, front and rear for that, and it was really just trying to get the track width the same, the wheelbase the same, to be able to functionally run the Haldex. I think a lot of people in the Volkswagen scene, correct me if I'm wrong, will do like a Synchro swap, where they use the old style versus the Haldex, but another build that kind of catered to that all-wheel drive swaps after my build, we were introduced to Nick's build with the Mark II. So still an ongoing build, I'd say near the end for sure.

So those are the only two all-wheel drive swaps you've done so far?

From two-wheel to all-wheel, yeah.

Okay, got it. You kind of paused on that. Was there another thing I missed in there?

We've done all-wheel to two-wheel too.

Yeah, we've done a Subaru build, an STI build that essentially was all-wheel drive, and now he's just rear wheel drive drag car, LS swap twin-turbo.

Okay.

That one was a lot of custom work too, custom sub-frames front and rear.

That one came to us from JM. And again, going back to collaborations, we get a lot of the shops that send us the stuff when the car just exceeds a certain level. And Matt was dead set on getting into the eights with it, and he was really struggling to keep an EJ together. He'd hit it, and then motor would have to be gone through. Yeah, exactly. So he just went all in and did, I don't know which motor's actually in it. It's an LS drive motor, twin turbo. Got a T56 behind it, 488.

That'll do eights.

Yeah, I'm forgetting the name of the company that's got that rear cradle, that tubular rear cradle. I forget that in the company.

I'm not familiar. I'm not sure. It was five years ago.

But that's a cool build, and that's one where not everybody can come in and thumb a check to build a car start to finish. And I think a lot of people get intimidated by that fact and think that it's outside of my ability to have these guys build my stuff. But we work with a lot of people that over the full scope of their build, excuse me, they just need little things done by us. And they bring the car in for little bits and pieces, and then the car will go back, and they'll do a bunch of stuff that they're able to do. And then it will come back in for some other little bits and pieces. And, you know, I mean, we would, we're never against that flow to build a project. And so he's a perfect example. I mean, we built that car over the course of five years. I mean, Cody's another one. He's 2JFCRX7, like the better part of ten years. He's actually one of our earliest cages we put in a car. So a guy will bring a chassis in. We'll do a cage in it. They'll take it back. They'll do what they can do. They'll reach a stopping point where, hey, I got this stuff in, but I got, you know, seven, eight things that need to be mounted, or I need intercooler piping, or I need exhaust. It'll come back. We'll do that stuff. They'll take the car again. We might not see it for a year. Comes back in. They're ready for their next round of work.

Build them in phases, essentially.

And it lets them do the stuff in the middle that they can do so you don't wind up with billable hours on stuff that otherwise you can do in your garage.

What does that look like if somebody comes in here with a two-year build, let's say a six-figure build, just for $100,000 over probably going to take you guys, let's say, a year and a half, two years to build? Do they half up front, or how does that work? Do you guys do just chunks throughout the...

Every 40 hours. Is where we've groomed ourselves to now. There was a time when we would take half up front, and then I wouldn't see any money for another six months, and it really killed our cash flow. So long-term projects like that, and on a case-by-case, we'll usually get on the same page with the customer, depending on what they can financially afford, but generally we'll bill in 40-hour increments. Now, that 40-hour increment might be over the course of maybe three or four weeks, depending on workflow in the shop, but generally on super long-term kind of question mark builds like that, we'll bill in 40-hour increments.

Okay, so it's like you're having a real job getting a 40-hour work week in, as soon as you hit that 40 hours, they get a bill, you pay it. Yeah, that makes sense.

And a lot of times what we do is, it's done on a weekly basis. You know, some guys, Bryan's referenced a 40 hours, like that's true, it's usually a 40 hour, but a lot of the builds that are currently in here, guys want us to roll for 40 hours on it. When we get somebody who, that's something we establish up front. How much can you actually cash flow? What is comfortable for you on a weekly basis to actually work on this project? If you can afford 15 hours a week, 20 hours a week, and that number is established up front, then we can schedule the workflow around that. We're going to put 20 hours in on your car, and then your car is going to not get worked on. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, your car gets worked on. Thursday, Friday, that guy is on something else. Right? Because the last thing we want to do is create a situation where somebody builds a burden. Right? Like, oh, man, I'm billed again. I can't quite afford this. No, let's have this conversation up front. What can you afford? And let's bill around this. I mean, you can see in here right now, count the cars. We got what? There's 10, 12 cars in here right now. There's four full-time fabricators. Most of these cars are not getting touched every day, and whether it's because they're on parts hold or it's because somebody says, hey, give me 20 hours a week on my car till we hit this point, and then I got to come grab the car and I got to recoup a little bit, and then I'll bring it back in. I mean, we're game to work with people however they want, and it makes the build process a lot more enjoyable for everybody, because we're not dealing with somebody who's feeling negativity toward us, and it also allows for us to communicate really well about what's been done to the car. That's a huge thing, right? You get a bill for 20 hours, and it just says, you know, fabricated wheel tubs, right? And it's like, well, wait a minute, why did this take this long? Whereas we like to be very itemized, very descriptive with our work, and again, that goes back to the dealership days. Justify why it is to a customer that they're receiving an invoice that they are. And rarely do we ever have anybody that questions it or, you know, a lot of guys will come in every week. We'll invoice them, they'll come in, they'll pay it, they'll check out the progress. Sweet, you know, when they see it, touch it, feel it, they leave excited, they're ready for another week.

It's such a smart way of operating.

Oh yeah, it makes staring down the barrel of a hundred grand makes it, you know, a little more easy to take than all at once.

But that's also a conversation you have up front, like, hey, this is gonna cost you a hundred, whatever grand it is, you know, because that's the other thing. It's like sometimes you go back and you look at your bank statements, like, did I spend that much on that?

Oh, I've got 75 grand into a $25,000 car out there, so I totally...

We're all guilty of it.

Even on a personal level, I mean, yeah.

No, it's tough, man, and just to your comment on that, you know, if you can imagine flipping a shop a hundred grand and then, you know, getting one invoice for it, it's like, where did all my money go?

Right.

So itemized, you know, it's basically, we call it an itemized invoice.

Breakdown.

Yep, breakdown. You know, exactly what your money went to in parts, and then labor. You know, just transparency is key there. I've been doing this a while now and kind of figured that out along the way. And it just helps for any discussions that need to be had six months, you know, previous or prior to that, excuse me, of, hey, where did all my money go? And it's like, bang, we can pull up every invoice and just tell them exactly. And some people just kind of want to know, they're not second guessing you, they're just like, man, I really got that amount of money.

Especially when they tell their buddies too, right? Or just like a future customer. What can I expect? For example, when it comes to some of these high horsepower guys, what does it cost? Well, $100 a horsepower or whatever. Just easy to have those conversations when you're talking about 2,000 horsepower builds. Expectation setting. Now, I definitely want to touch on these two projects, for sure, and having met Nick, I think a few weeks ago now, he's being coached by one of our previous guests, Alex Sajadi, on the road course. So I kind of want to touch on a, what is this build? Because you guys have done a number of things here from the, I think that's Active Aero back there, right?

Not on this one. Active Aero is on the C8. He can't run Active on this one.

Gotcha.

That's why John's faster.

It's from the same company, I believe, right?

No, this one's actually our design of wing right here. G-Stream is the company that makes that wing, the actual airfoil unit. But, and not to hijack your question here, but so one thing that we've struggled with throughout developing the race cars that we've built, there was a Mustang we built a few years back. There was a full Aero car. The thing was just insane. When you start to get into the real high levels of Aero, wing is obviously super critical, right? Wing to chassis. Everybody talks about chassis-mounted wing, chassis-mounted wing. Well, there's right ways to do it, there's wrong ways to do it, and then there's everything in between. So what you commonly see the challenges with something like those wings is that you're trying to make a connection between something that's mounted to the deck lid and mounted to the chassis. And so the reason we kind of ran as many features on that design as we did on our social is because this wing actually allows us to mount the wing to the deck lid, but still make a link to the components going on to the chassis. You have a chassis mounted wing without the challenges. And the challenges usually look like a deck lid that's cut, have to be lifted off, or a wing that has to be removed to get into a deck lid. So one of the reasons this, again, we highlighted this wing so heavily is this comes from the better part of five, six years of trying to figure out a way that makes something that's serviceable at the racetrack by a single guy still be chassis mounted. So yeah, there was a lot of development that went into that, those uprights and that whole system.

Well, it's crazy what goes into wings. I was just watching a video about the AMG Black Series, right? So that wing has so much downforce, but it's still deck lid mounted or whatever. But then under like into like the trunk area, they have like extra support because it pushes down so much, which makes me wonder how that wing on a GT 500 doesn't just crumple that thing.

I always thought that too, because it is mounted right to the deck lid.

That's a lot of arrow that thing has.

A lot of wings are, and that's just to Gary's comment on the chassis mounted. You know, if you get a wing that can actually function, it's going to smash down that deck lid, which, you know, can change the pitch of them as well.

For sure.

And do damage because it's mounted to just tin with a little bit of substructure underneath.

Yeah.

Yeah, it messes with the attack angle of the wing. You know, as the deck lid is on a radius, so as that deck lid crushes the bump stops, all of a sudden, your attack angle goes down. So you got a 12 degree wing, that all of a sudden is 10 degrees instead. And you're trying to dial in arrow when the car is parked, you don't realize you got a two degree change.

Well, that's part of active arrow, right?

Well, that is. And so that's a new venture for us, that C8 Corvette that we just did. We were up at Brainerd with that on Monday, and last Monday, and that thing is there's so much that goes into that. You know, we do a lot of data logging. We were a retailer for AIM. We use AIM products to do a lot of our data logging. They make a lot of extra sensors and things. So like that one, we were able to actually put travel sensors on the wing, data log, wing movement to speeds, to g-forces, lateral and yaw, and really get the thing kind of dialed in. But even when you think you have it dialed in, then you go out and make a run that's a slightly different line, and all of a sudden, what we found is because the threshold is speed on where that wing positions itself, as the driver gets faster, all of a sudden he's going faster in the same corner. So you dialed the wing in to work on that corner at this speed, and now all of a sudden he exceeds this threshold, and the wing puts itself in a different position, and all of a sudden the car is unstable. It really is, it's totally just a day at the track of trial and error, is what it comes down to. And a driver that's got the balls to be willing to push a car, that hey, if the feel of this car changes midway through turn two at VIR, you're going to be able to adjust when it gets loose in the rear end. You know what I mean? So it's, yeah, there's a lot to it.

So let's take this a step back as well then. So how does someone like Nick or anybody who wants to get into motorsport with you guys, because like you also do trackside support, right?

A little bit.

A little bit, right?

A little bit.

Because you mentioned the data logging and all that stuff. So how does this conversation happen? Like let's say I just got a brand new ZL1 Camaro, and I want to start doing track days. So why come to you guys?

Start with a Miata.

Yeah.

Oh, here's nose. It's on his bucket list.

Most guys don't just do this.

Right. This is a lot, you know, from the carbon doors. I mean, this is a car.

This is the equivalent of like, hey, I'm going to take my flight license course, and I'm bringing an F16 to do it in. You know what I mean? Like the learning curve to this is incredible. Absolutely incredible. And Nick has positioned himself through coaching and sim time and other things to be able to actually do this, which is actually super impressive, because most guys that would jump into something like this and try to go race it, the first thing they'll get in their way would be their ego. And they'd go out there and they'd try to be fast, and they'd wreck the car. And so checking your ego is the first step to that. Most people should start at a level like a Miata or a momentum car is what we'd call it. Learn to line, learn to drive, learn how to carry speed, then go into something like this. Talk to Nick at the end of this season, and I'm sure he'll have some moments to elaborate on that.

And I want to get him on a podcast at some point too, because again, I only just recently met him, but it seems like he's got a cool story.

He's a cool dude for sure.

So what's everything you guys have done to this car or worked with him on?

So, take a step back. I don't know if you followed last year at our open house, and prior year, two years ago, we had a red ZL1, 1LE, that we built for a guy out of Missouri that was a complete build. That was fuel cell, cage, suspension, turned that thing into basically a GT3 level car right off the bat. One of the things we learned from doing that with Dustin was while it worked for him as a customer, that was way too much for somebody to bite off that level of a build on a car that they needed to grow into. So we kind of took a different approach with this one. This is kind of what I would like to call, you know, maybe like a phase one to stepping out of an HPD e-car and into something where you're going to go actually competitive racing. Suspension, brakes, roll cage, and all the supporting safety features. Kill switches, fire suppression, that stuff.

And that's all the stuff that you guys have done?

Yep.

Okay.

And other than that, I mean, the car is totally stock. Motor, and this thing could use 100 less horsepower. You know what I mean? Like this thing is, there's so much motor there. This thing's still got the stock exhaust. We all joke when he fires it up. You know, this is that EV Camaro that you can't hear.

Yeah, I was saying that because I was sitting in my orange car out there and I saw that and I was like, are they, we're not pushing it out of the trailer. How come I can't hear that thing? It looks like a race car. It doesn't sound like a race car.

You know, you build things in phases, right? And certain things don't make sense to do before something else. Exhaust. As much as it's killing Nick to not be able to hear this thing roar and you would love to have exhaust on it, it doesn't make sense to do exhaust yet because there will be a fuel cell in this car in the future. Right now, it's still a stock tank. As he increases in speed, probably this off season will be the need for a fuel cell. And that's because the basic saddle tanks, they starve the pumps, especially on 35, 40-minute sprints. This thing will starve for fuel by the end of it. So we'll put a fuel cell on the back, 22 gallons larger than the factory tank. At that point, that changes the way the rear exhaust has to run in the car. So there's no point in doing exhaust yet because there's a future modification that's going to be required that's going to change the way the exhaust is done. And so trying to keep someone like Nick who wants to just like, of all the things he's done, he's like, God, it just kills me. It doesn't sound good. You just got to deal with that for this season. Next season, you'll get your exhaust. And it makes sense to build a car in steps like that for somebody like Nick. I mean, it's $250,000 to build a GT3-level GT-class car. If you want to build something to what you'd see, even GT4-level, you go to Ford, you want to buy a GT4 Mustang, it's $268,000. It's no cheaper to have somebody build that car. $240,000, $250,000 easily is what you can have into it. So for somebody to bite that off in the beginning doesn't make a lot of sense. Build the car in stages, grow into the car, to the point where the car is now your limitation. Once the car becomes your limitation, then let's do the things to it that are going to make you faster, because now the car is limiting you. So, you know, you take it in stages and he'll get his exhaust next year.

Yeah.

You want us to highlight any of the kind of components we put on the vehicle?

Yeah.

Essex, AP Racing, a great company we work for. They provided the brake kit on it. I'm not sure which one it is.

That's their, it's not their endurance kit, but it's their 9668, so it's the bigger calipers. They do make a larger rotor than that now, but 18-inch wheels are way cheaper to buy slicks for, and it makes a lot more sense to run an 18. The little bit you gain from running the 19 to run the 380-millimeter rotors doesn't make sense.

Essex, AP, good company we work for. They've helped out with the car. And then, Tractive Suspension is what he has on there. A relationship we've built with those guys over the last few years.

That's a super cool company, too, Tractive. So they actually make, for anybody that's got electronic dampening in their cars from the factory, they make plug-and-play kits where it's a coilover that's much better suited for track use than what your factory stuff is. A lot of these cars have MagneRide or, you know, similar setups on them. Tractive really started by positioning themselves to make a bolt-in coilover that operates off of the same electronic signal, but the mapping of it, you can adjust, you can change, you can put DSC's control units in it. So that's... it's a fully electronic system. In this case, it's totally standalone. So Nick can actually adjust pitch, roll, compression, rebound, on the fly, on the track. So instead of having to climb in and out of the car and click different settings and figure out, rebound, high speed, low speed, compression, in this case, it's all adjustable from the dash. So Nick can go out there for test and tune, and instead of having to pull in the pits and make changes, he can literally make changes on the fly, on the track, to really feel out how it works for different tracks.

So kind of like GT4 formula wheels, where you just adjust stuff on the go? Okay, that's really cool.

That's pretty wild. It's the only car we have built that has it, that's actively out on the track right now.

That is crazy. I didn't even think that, I didn't even know that was like a consumer level thing you can get.

Well, and what's cool to your point about the wheels is one of the future phases for this car, because GM integrates all their electronics the way they do, all their CAN network stuff. You can't take the wireless cell phone charging module out of this car, or it won't start anymore. You know, there's these things because it takes the network down. So there's goofy things in these cars. Once the electronics are removed from this car, and we get to that phase of it, we'll actually be able to put a steering wheel in there. It's a CAN protocol wheel by AIM. And then we can actually connect it to the tractive. And instead of having it on his dash, then he really would have it right on a dial on the actual steering wheel. That is crazy. So he can change it. So it's super cool. Like, all that stuff's available to the consumer level racer. You know, these things you see at the highest level, all this stuff's available. It's just understanding, A, how to make it work, and knowing that everything's universal at that. There's no bolt on stuff, right? So it's buy it, figure it out, you know. But CAN protocol's been around for a long time, some basic research. If guys are into computer stuff at all, I mean, some basic research, and you can figure out how to write that stuff and get them to talk to each other, and it's not that hard. If I can figure it out, anybody can.

Do you want to continue? Is there a list of more things to continue pointing out?

No, just as far as modifications of the vehicle, I think, is where we're going with that. It's just generally stock driveline, just brake, suspension. It's got our safety equipment in the car. It's a race tech seat, so we have a working good relationship with. Just the overall safety equipment. Fire suppression and then kill. Window nets, I mean, it's just kind of a, I don't want to say a basic race car by any means, but a lot of people think race car. They think, you know, engine modifications. It's this car's got plenty of power.

You don't need that quite yet, you know, and it's still under factory warranty.

That's the best part. You go buy this car, GM will warranty this car. As long as the driveline isn't modified, you know, that's why he still takes it to the dealer for flushes, for fluids, build a relationship with the dealer. And then, you know, anything fails on her is a problem. I mean, the car's under warranty still, which is wild.

That is crazy. Yeah. I can imagine seeing that thing on the lift at your GM dealer.

He actually just brought it over here from the dealership today, and he said it stirred quite a buzz over there.

Yeah.

I can't imagine that.

Damn, I had a question and just got away from me. Oh, the advising side of things, right? So again, did Nick come to you with, all right, here's all the regulations I had to worry about, here's what I want, da-da-da-da-da, or did you guys, like, did you guys just coach him through that based off your experience with your previous customer?

That's a good question. I'd say he kind of tasked us to, came to us and said, hey, I want to start racing. He wanted to specifically race American Iron Extreme, which is what this class is built for under NASA. A lot of people think NASA, no, not the space, the other NASA. So American Iron Extreme is the class he races under, and I think he wanted, you know, basically to consult us to, hey, this is what I want to do. How can I get there? And from there, we can kind of break it into phases. All right, phase one, let's do roll cage safety equipment, and then suspension and brakes and kind of go from there. I don't know what your thoughts are on that.

Yeah, I mean, and that is a big trust thing, right? Like, he came to us, he didn't know what suspension he wanted to run. He didn't know what brakes he wanted to run. So that is an opportunity, like you say, where we've spent a lot of years figuring out what works, right? And we sell AP brakes through Essex for a dealer forum. There's a reason we picked them. The cars that we've dealt with, we've split wheel-wood rotors down the center vanes, right? I've seen Brembo major failures in them. On that same car that we worked through that, when we got to APs and put APs in the car, it just worked. Not to say that they're necessarily better or different than any others, but when we put them on these cars, they work. So that's what we're going to sell. Same thing with race techs, like Bryan said. Race tech seats, there's no other company that has the integrated seat back support center the way that race tech does. You drive a car from your a**. The more planted that car is, that seat is in the car, the better you feel it. So for race tech to have the integrated framework in them and tie into the bar up high as well as down low, again, go buy whatever you want. Bring it to us. We'll put your LPM seat in or your Sparko. That's fine. We're building your cage. But if you ask us, if you leave it up to us, that's the parts that you're going to get. So to your comment, did he trust us? Did he bring it to us to build? Yeah, and he's not going to flip through a rule book. You know what I mean? He just says, this is what I want to go race. Build me a car that can go do this. And I need the safety stuff and the performance stuff.

So he did a lot of rule book reading then?

NASA we're super familiar with. Just because we are a certified NASA shop. So NASA we deal with a lot. We don't have to open the rule book usually to build something for NASA.

And he did very well in his last outing, right?

He did.

Or series or whatever it was.

He did. He licensed and wound up on the podium all weekend, except for the race that he got disqualified for, for being a bully to one of the Rush guys. It's kind of an inside joke there. But yeah, he did wind up on the podium. He actually wound up first at the last race, which he kind of disregards because the other two cars didn't make it through the final race of the weekend. But the first step to winning in racing is finishing in racing.

Absolutely.

And so if you have the most reliable car out there and everybody else breaks, that's a valid win. That's a valid first place right there. If they can't make it through four heats all weekend, guess what? Trophy's yours.

That's legit.

100%.

Shout out to my friend taking out the two people in front of me on iRacing last night. Still a win. So then what's phase two look like? Are you able to disclose that? Like if you were to take a customer through to phases, like let's say I wanted to go race my GTI and year over year just get progressively better. Granted, we would figure out a series and all that stuff. But what would phase two look like in this instance?

I think it'd be different for every driver.

What they're comfortable with, how much money you want to shell out.

The phases really come out of necessity when you advance past the ability of that car. So a car like this, clearly power is never going to be an issue that we're going to run into on this.

You'll never need a thousand horsepower Camaro ever for those types of racing.

You want to go race ST3 with early 2000s Volkswagen? Well, they allow engine stuff there because balance of power basically. Next rev guys run 350Zs in ST3, same thing. Every year it changes. They continue to balance the power every year. And so you make adjustments based on what you're given or what's taken away from you. You have from like, that's a good example of a car where the 350s were super competitive, and they made adjustment for the E46s, and all of a sudden that's the new cheater car because it's just faster with the balance of power. So phases in the initial build, you know, generally will work up to all the safety stuff, right? Like Bryan said, cage, suspension, brakes, fire suppression. Then you get into like fuel system. Do you put a cell in it? Do you run a surge tank? Beyond that, you really start to get into specifics to the car itself. You know, what's allowed? You open an ST or excuse me, an SCCA real book and all the different classes. It all varies on your specific model, which you're allowed to run.

It gets dense.

Exactly, it does. And so, you know, you might pick your next step, your next phase based on what you're allowed to do or not. Guys run a time attack, some of the unlimited stuff. Well, then it's just an all out, you know, what's the next limitation on my car?

Have you guys done a time attack build?

No.

Not yet?

No.

Something you're more than capable of, though, I'm sure.

We've built some GLTC cages for Gridlife Touring Cup, but never a full on time attack build, no.

Have you guys seen that crazy Corvette that's been going viral recently? His name's Feras or whatever. That thing is crazy.

All over the world, breaking records.

Yeah, just nuts.

What people don't realize is the amount of time that's spent dialing that car in. You know what I mean?

Over each track.

Just an infinite amount of time. You know what I mean? You get there a week early, and you're there for 10 hour days, as long as you can be, to just every track. You're on Razor's edge with that kind of car. Super impressive, but man, that's next level for sure.

Yeah, when you're chasing records, it's a whole different thing. I do want to talk about this Porsche though. And we can come back to this at some point if anything comes up.

I say we move on from the Camaro.

Set by a Mustang guy.

So tell me about this Porsche, right? Because I'm just going to let you introduce it. It's different.

Yeah.

Deep breath.

This has been a really cool build with a really cool customer, but I'll just kind of introduce it. You know, it's a 92 Porsche Carrera II. The guy found us kind of really on Google. He couldn't find anyone on the eastern seaboard to want to help him EV swap this Porsche. So he got in touch with us probably three years ago now and sent the car over on a transport with a Tesla LDU and 16-ox drive batteries. That's kind of where it started.

Does it hey, figure it out?

I mean, kind of. This one's definitely been Gary's baby and just kind of the left and right turns it's taken to get to where we're at now. But I think the initial idea was to build an EV swap that we could sell to the public. The whole driving force behind this was no modifications of the body. It's basically two, we'll call them subframes, where the weekend warrior could physically bolt all this in his vehicle with no modifications to it, as long as they had the ability to string wiring. But that's kind of where it started and where it's still at, but with battery technology and how far it's come, I mean, we would probably do it much differently. What you want to add to that?

To start with this, I want to give a huge, huge thank you to Electric GT out in California, specifically David Montanez out there, because what we ran into with this build was Holley bought AEM halfway through this build. This control system is AEM. When Holley buys a company, it seems to scare off everybody that knows what they're doing in that company. And so we ran into a scenario where we were working with AEM, and we started to have some issues with things that were supposed to work, and they weren't, and there was nobody really to help us. We weren't getting the help we needed. I wound up going to EGT because they, Ted actually bought a bunch of the, handful of the components for the swap are from EGT. So I got ahold of those guys out there, and they really, they could have just told us to pound sand, but I mean, countless hours, I spent on the phone with David out there, and you know, he really, really made it possible to work through a lot of the problems. Fortunately, now, some of the old talent is kind of either back at AEM or whatever happened. A couple of the guys we were in touch with early on have kind of resurfaced back there, and we've been able to get some further assistance, but yeah, this thing's been a huge challenge.

Why don't you highlight the fact that it has a full AEM standalone in it, which is what controls the Tesla battery.

So the way AEM positions this product is this is their VCU, which is the equivalent of an ECU for a car, right? So it'd be your standalone computer. But the brain to a lot of these is actually in the battery management system. So the thing that monitors each individual cell and maintains that battery pack, because batteries on EVs are only as good as the weakest cell. So you need a system that monitors each and every cell, what the voltage is, and especially with charging, to keep those voltages balanced, right? So this one in particular, one of the issues you ran into is AEM integrates their ECU or their VCU into their BMS, which is their battery monitoring system. And then they've got PDUs, which are your standard power distribution units, that are all sort of tie in together. Now, when we run, when we wire a race car, we'll use AEM's power distribution module. It's totally open. We can configure every in and out channel. Because of the sensitivity to somebody really being able to screw up big time with these things, AEM doesn't allow that programmability quite the same. So a lot of the issues you ran into were with channels that were supposed to do one thing, that were trying to be repurposed for something else, which wasn't going to work the way we were sort of told it was going to work in the beginning. But as far as the build as a whole, yeah, Tesla LDU, 16-ox drive batteries, AEM standalone, electric GTs, high voltage junction box, which is what actually manages all the major connections in the 400-volt system. Man, electric GTs, onboard charger, yeah, just running through the components. Electronic 400-volt, high voltage, electronic air conditioning, AC compressor, power steering off an Opel, Volkswagen-style electric power steering system, and just integrating it all into a cradle that mounted into the back of the car in the factory bolt-in spots and didn't require any chassis modifications. There was a lot to it. There was a lot to it.

A lot of design and engineering.

It has. And Nextrev played a huge role in that. To Bryan's point about battery technology coming along, companies like Hypercraft have now come along where with this one, we were dealing with individual battery modules that we had to basically build an enclosure for to house 16 batteries. There's nine in the back, seven in the front. It actually put the car closer to 50-50 weight ratio than it was from the factory because of the batteries up front.

That's impressive.

But now companies like Hypercraft, we could reach out to, and they would build us an enclosure to our size specs. It would already have all the batteries in it. It would just be two connections for the battery monitoring system, but one of the really cool things they're doing is they're doing flame propagate, anti-flame propagating foam to keep, if one cell starts on fire, it doesn't spread to another cell. And even the OEMs don't do that. And so what you're seeing is you're seeing companies like Hypercraft positioning themselves to be the only ones that can get EV accepted in motorsports. Because like I said earlier, motorsports is all about passing the buck, right? Who's the next one to get sued, right? Where can they pass liability on to? So nobody wants to sanction EVs because they don't know the safety of them. But companies like Hypercraft coming along, doing things like the foam, and then also having ports for fire suppression built into their boxes. You know, you see these Teslas burn down and the fire departments are putting all the water on them and it doesn't get into the box. So having internal fire suppression, where you can take a standard Novak fire suppression bottle like what's in this. Lifeline now has the ability, Lifeline is a company that makes Nix fire suppression. They now have the ability to monitor through the BMS system on this car when you get a cell that gets too hot and automatically set off fire suppression inside that battery box to keep these big lithium battery burn downs from happening.

That is crazy. Because we talked about this with Jared Bowen on episode 62 or 1 or whatever, and he's a firefighter on the side, volunteer firefighter. I'm not exactly sure what the term is, but he's saying it's like you see these Teslas and they just keep burning. They'll set back on fire three days from now. I mean, that is a huge thing. Especially like you said, the OEMs aren't doing it. That's really cool.

But it opens the door to the motorsports. And don't get me wrong, I've driven this thing. It's fast. It is coming from somebody who likes to drive with my ears. You know, I mean, it's a little underwhelming. The lack of noise.

Fair enough.

But I can totally see how it would be for somebody, especially people that, you know, kids that are growing up now with these things, you know, whether we like it or not. This is the type of stuff that's going to, you know, that's going to bring kids into it. And one cool thing about this that I have to say is someone like this customer probably never would have been a car guy, never. Wouldn't have had any interest in building something like this, you know. But you let him kind of have this type of thing, and it brings somebody who otherwise would never be in the aftermarket automotive industry is now a customer in the aftermarket automotive industry. And they're doing things like this, showing up to car shows, you know. And it's in that right, it's cool because it's growing the scene as a whole. Again, you won't see one of these in my garage anytime soon, but you know, it is cool in its own right, for sure.

Well, all this stuff you're talking about is kind of funny because I'm in the middle of a build on an electric golf cart. So I'm the same thing. I bought a prefabbed already BMS built in box because I started looking into this, getting EV batteries, doing my own BMS, all this stuff, and I'm like, holy crap, man. I don't have time for that s***.

No, and you don't want to.

Yeah.

All the complications that came along with this thing 100% came out of physically putting those batteries together, physically wiring those batteries together. I mean, that was the biggest hurdle with this thing. This thing would have been down the road a year ago had Hypercraft been an option at the time we started this build, you know. It would have just been physically mounting everything. But the challenges that came with wiring these actual batteries together, building out the BMS connectors, physically putting nine batteries together in a configuration that fit in here where they bolt together are enclosed and still have the ability to, you know, be serviced is just an undertaking.

Yeah, you can't have them get hit or damaged either, because then that's not good.

Why say yes? Because a lot of times, if he approached any other shop, they're just like, yeah, nope. Like you guys said, on the East Coast, people were saying no. Why are you the guy that said yes?

I don't think we've ever said no to anything. And that may be, you know, that's good. That's definitely good.

Well, you guys don't look aged, so.

We've backed ourselves into it.

I'm 22.

I mean, it's just kind of that fearless mentality, you know.

Like, we'll figure it out.

I mean, yeah, you know, I know we have the confidence to do it and the resources to do it. If someone approaches us just because we haven't done it before doesn't mean we'll say no. But there's been a few times where, you know, we'll take a project on and then it's, you know, a day later, it's like, s***, well, how the hell are we going to get through this? But, you know, we've been blessed to have really knowledgeable people around us, you know, especially in our upbringing.

What about because this thing, I don't think these cars were designed to take on that much instant torque. Is there any concerns on that front or?

It's all self-contained. It's all self-contained in that cradle. You know, James over at Next Rev, heavy on the FEA and stress analysis on that cradle. What's crazy is that cradle only weighs 40 pounds. That's all plate aluminum laser cut formed. And I mean, you can carry the thing from one end of the shop to the other when there's nothing on it. But the way it's reinforced and then ties into the factory mounts on the car. Because I mean, Porsche doesn't mess around. You know, that may be a career or two, but that's the same car that houses, you know, the turbo, right? It just doesn't have the widebody on it. So, you know, when Porsche sets out to build something, Porsche, sorry, sets out to build something, you know, it's a race car with a radio, basically, right? They build the race car first and then engineer the street car out of it.

Checks out. Yeah.

So, you know, it makes a great platform for it because the support is there, the car is well built. We don't have to trust, you know, worry about it too much. And, I mean, hey, like everything, this customer understands, like any project we do, like, this hasn't been done, man. You know, we're going to do it and we're going to see how it works. And if things have to be changed after the fact, well, they got to be changed after the fact.

You might go through brakes quicker.

Brakes and tires.

Do you know how much more heavy it's going to be than in its stock form?

Great question.

It's about 230 pounds heavier.

That's not bad.

And it's almost all in the nose.

And that helps the 50-50 that you mentioned earlier.

Now, granted, this was a Triptronic car, so it's heavier than a manual car. But we scaled it in the beginning, scaled it at the end. We're within 250 pounds. And the car with AEM's inverter control board in there, I mean, you could set this thing up to be, I mean, conservatively, drive-wise, you can have a solid equivalent to 450 horse right there with the torque and manage it drivable. I mean, you could turn it up, but it just doesn't get drivable at that point. So you got to duty cycle it out and ramp it up so it's not just an on-off switch, but all that stuff's controllable through that AEM. So you can tune it, regenerative braking, that's kind of fun, because you can heavy brake it, so you let off the gas, and the thing's just got a ton of what we would equate to engine braking.

They'll make you sick. If you've ever driven in a Tesla, it's the same thing. It's on or off.

I drove a dual motor one that my friend got a few years ago, and it's a unique experience. Again, especially like you said when you let off, and it's just weird. You never really had to touch the brakes.

I don't like it. It makes me sick. It's like riding a roller coaster. In my old age, man, I just... Even driving them. I've driven a few lately.

That plaid.

I drove a... I don't know what that was. The SUV was at the Y. It was a Model Y plaid. Just to another shop to get PPF on it. It was just driving.

Pass.

I almost just tried to keep my foot on it, because as soon as you let off, it's just that D-cell. It kind of throws your stomach and your throat.

So let's say somebody else wants to do a carbon copy of this or whatever the next iteration is of that. First of all, how long would it take to do another one of these if somebody came to you today and ordered one?

Great question. A lot of good ones. Knowing what we know now, I mean, we could probably turn that around in about half the amount of time.

Yeah, I mean, probably a year, honestly, because there's definitely some re-engineering we'd want to do around the batteries.

And it'll get faster if you wanted to do a third or a fourth after.

Yeah, for sure. And I mean, the thing is, there's a couple companies out there now doing turnkey 964s. One of them is about 250,000. The other is north of 500. They do the wide body convertibles, but you know, I think all said and done, you know, you'd probably be looking up 125, 150.

In addition to the car.

In addition to the car. Which, you know, would still keep you well below, you know, the turnkey ones out there. Because these things haven't hit 100 yet. I know singers doing everything they can to drive the price of these things through the roof, but they're still out there. You can find the wife versions in the Carrera 2, automatic, still fairly easily. The nice thing is these things aren't beat, you know what I mean? You find this one, they're not just beat to piss. It's like it's, you know.

Do you still get the same 300-mile-ish range like you would with an EV or anything like that? No.

Yeah, it's like, so it all depends on, there's different capacities you can get with the battery. This is a little bit of a smaller battery, so this is still a 402-volt system, but this one you probably get 200 out of.

Yeah, depending on how you drive it, too.

Yeah, for sure.

If he's got it juiced up, but yeah, I'd say 250, maybe at the most.

And let's face it, if you get 300 miles out of one of these other ones, you're driving like a b**** anyway.

Yeah, I test drove a Mach-E, because my wife drives a 7.3 diesel excursion right now, so I was like, let's see if we can offset our carbon footprint slightly, right? She's kind of daily driving stuff now, so I'm like, all right, we went and test drove it, and they're like, yeah, it's 300 miles range, but if you don't listen to the radio or run the AC and drive it like a grandma, then you maybe could get 300 mile range. But no, if you want any other creature comforts, I don't think so.

It's crazy because when you foot it, like this thing, so we had two battery cells go down in this and get weak, and the test was to go out and just like a couple hard pulls. I went to pull out of the garage, just pull out of the door right here, and I just hard footed it, made it halfway across the parking lot, and the thing was totally dead. Because the fact that you had one cell that was weak in the battery, and it's only as good as the weakest cell.

I'm dealing with that, right? That's why I'm in that golf cart problem right now. I got one battery in there that was messing with my six pack, and it was, yeah, screwing the rest of them, tested all right.

Yeah, it's wild.

So I think just, I do want to start sort of winding down here. Did you guys want to touch on one more project, and then we can kind of get into our usual pick three question? Is there any, like, there's this, you know, you got the bug back here, but I don't know if there's anything else in particular.

The Renault, the Renault, the bug, they're both super cool builds.

I really like the Renault. I really want to talk about that if we can. That is different.

That's a dream build right there. That's another dream build. I was a big rally guy. I followed rally quite a bit in the 90s. To do that, I mean, that's, somebody shows up with a Renault, you know, 5 Turbo 2, and they're like, I want to build a Group B rally car. And you're like, well, yes, sir.

Okay, how old are you? Because I can't guess. You said you grew up in the 90s. How old are you then?

39.

Okay, because I was just starting.

The three guys that are wearing their hat, like Bart Simpson, are probably in the same range.

Absolutely.

We'll do a little branding advertisement.

Yeah, there we go. The table didn't cover it.

Man, that build is super cool. The funny thing about that, he has another one of those. He has two of those things. And that all started because it overheated one day, and he took it apart to figure out where the coolant leak was, and then he just kept taking it apart. And kept taking it apart, and then he found us, and he was like, I really want to do this Group B replica. And what's wild is the following in those things has gotten pretty big now to where there's a lot of companies, there's a few companies that make good, legit replica Group B rally parts for them. So utilizing the same motor, that's actually what they call an A221, so it's the VIN that's on it, and it means it had the actual motor that was homologated to go racing in Group B. So if you're a privateer team in 1984, you wanted to go Group B rally racing, that's the car you would have actually gotten from Renault, would be an A221, Renault 5 Turbo 2, or whatever the hell the name is. So those things are... it's actually the right car to convert. And Bryan, what's the name of that shop in Texas that's going to do the motor on it?

Engineered Performance. Mitchell at Engineered Performance is someone we've hooked up with recently, and he's kind of more of a heritage style, specializes in the L Series for like the 280s and the 240s. That Nissan heritage. But our struggle, even with engine machinists, is trying to find someone who can work on something like that. So he perked up when I kind of pitched it to him. He was doing some work for my GTR build, and that's kind of who we have slotted right now to do all the engine machining for it. But I mean, Bryan, as a customer, his vision for that is just a real treat, man. He's got, you know, everyone we work with, every customer, every build, is special in their own right. That's why we take them on, just to your comment earlier on. Do we ever say no? I mean, yeah, we have. But just a build of that caliber is just, it resonates with all of us in the shop, and to have a super cool customer who's equally interested in it is really going to be a sight to see with that. Just with all the livery and the body kit and all just the error-correct restoration he's having us do might be the better way to properly explain that at Pitt.

The best thing about that car is that when it's done, he's going to go drive the wheels off of that thing. He's going to have a $250,000, $300,000 restoration, or re-creation would be a better way to say that. And he's going to go drive the wheels off that thing. He's going to take that up to Jibway. He's going to go do the stage rallies with it. He's going to go out and do Redmond with it. That's what's cool about customers like that. And it really makes it fun to build for them.

You know? That's, I don't know.

So what goes into it, because you just dropped in, subtly threw in a big sticker in there. So what goes into that, right? So you said it's going to be period correct. Is there going to be a lot of modern aspects to it as well, or is it going to be entirely period correct?

Well, modern and the safety.

Okay.

Modern safety, but a lot of the period correct other components on there. And if I'm not mistaken, that car originally in Group B was an aluminum roll cage, wasn't it?

Yeah, we've got the actual French Group B homologation paperwork from Renault for that. There would have been a 40-pound aluminum roll cage in that car, which is why they canceled Group B after a few people died in it, because it was just too nutty. But yeah, you know, the motor, we're kind of walking this line where originally he wanted to do a real, accurate recreation. Well, like anybody who wants to build a small car, he's like 6'2. I don't know what it is about big guys in small cars.

I got a GTI, man.

They don't fit. So the first issue was the pedals, the seat positioning, the way it was set up for racing back then. Renati, I think, was the guy's name that raced for Renault, and he was like 5'4, so he fit in the car just fine. But Bryan does not. So seats, seat position, steering column, we had to do a custom steering column, seat position, pedals, we did a pedal box instead of doing a Renault's box to give us adjustability around him. The cage was obviously done in a more modern fashion. It's styled right after an FIA WRC rally cage. And then once we did all that, he kind of started to, you know, walk the line with, well, do I want to run the original Jetronic mechanical fuel injection system in it, which there's probably two people left in the world that know how to work on that? You know, or do we throw a trigger wheel on it, put a modern ECU, you know, do some of these upgrades, but let's keep the car as a whole, you know, very, very harkened back to its era. And so I think that's kind of the direction we're going. You know, again, it all started with trying to find somebody to do the machine work to it. Man, it's like that motor is not obtainable. That motor is like one slip, and that thing is unobtainable. The crankshaft in that thing is like gold, you know? And so to sleeve it, do the headwork, all that stuff, we were really striking out. And then, like Bryan said, he got those guys on board. So we'll kind of finish... We'll finish doing some of the mock-up stuff we're doing right now. We just got another big crate in from France of like these super wild reproduction-looking parts for, you know, to make the intercooler and, you know, a lot of these engine pieces, specific reservoirs, you know, so the bay looks original, but like we'll build a header for it. We'll do a modern turbo on it. M-Oter makes like 6.9 to 1 base compression, and then it had this wild little old 30 series turbo on it, so we'll do something... Turbo technology has only come a little ways since 1984, so, you know, modern management, modern injection, modern turbo, you know, make it so when he wants to drive it, it actually starts, runs, drives down the road.

Hopefully.

It's not a battle. I mean, try to find something that will work on a K-Jet system. You know what I mean? Like, it's just non-existent, you know.

I would love to see the final invoice of like how much of it is shipping related, because I'm sure a significant part of that is coming from, what did you say, France?

France. He's got a guy out of, Neil Duncan, out of, I think he's in like Ohio, brings over, he kind of specializes in these things. He brings over parts, crates at a time, containers at a time.

That helps.

And Bryan jumps on to those. But it does make it a little challenging to navigate the project, because there's been downtimes, you know, a month and a half, two months downtime between parts received. So, we're not a real big shop here, so it does definitely throw a little wrench in.

Yeah. I could talk all day just about that thing. Like, it's crazy. But what's the timeline looking like, then, to see... Because you're doing two of them, right?

Nope. One is going to stay as a streetcar. So, he's got the cool little perfect, you know, mint little streetcar.

And you guys aren't touching that one at all?

No. We added in for some service recently, but that's it.

But that one then, so all said and done, when will we see it up at Ojibwe?

Probably next summer.

Next summer.

Holy s***, really?

I think he's going to driver school out in Pennsylvania, whatever the big rally school is out there. He's going out there this fall, and he's going to do the full session. So, we start on front wheel drive, then do all wheel, then do rear wheel, because that's going to be, I mean, that's 375 horsepower, rear wheel drive, rear motor, you know, thing weighs like 1800 pounds. It's pretty much just a rocket ship through the woods.

I have to ask, what's his background? Like, what's he going to be practicing in? Like, learning?

Not dying?

Yeah, practicing not dying, yes.

That's pretty much it. Like, Bryan's just...

No, I mean, like, what's the car, like, that he's doing and driving in Pennsylvania to prepare for this?

Oh, they supply them.

Okay.

I don't know, whatever, whatever. You know, it's maybe a Ford Focus, and then a WRX, and then...

Yeah, something like that.

I'm not sure what their trading cars are.

It's probably all one brand, I'm sure, because they're sponsored by somebody. I'm not even sure.

Interesting.

But, you know, Bryan's kind of a connoisseur. He's been to a few driving schools. I think it was Barber that he did, and I think he's done the Porsche school, so... You know, he's got a few cool, allocated Porsches in his collection. But, you know, the fun thing is, he'd way rather be out thrashing that thing than any of the new cars. He's got a Rally Fighter, too, which I don't know yet.

That's cool.

You know what the Rally Fighter is? Yeah, they made 80 of them, and he has number 81.

Is he... Is this the guy that's out of Rochester?

No.

Or somewhere in Minnesota? No, he's in the cities. He's in the cities.

But it's got a Martini livery on it.

Okay, I know what you're talking about. I've seen it. Yeah. Okay, same guy. Checks out.

If you ever get passed in 100 miles an hour by some a****** on the highway, that's probably him.

All right, shout out. You were worried about this being a boring conversation. This is going to be a 10 minute podcast.

I don't know that I was worried. I just, you know, you were kind of, you're really driving home that you don't want to go over two hours. So it's like, can we leave for two hours?

Oh, we could keep cooking. Easily. So over there, it says an hour 42. Okay. But I think...

I feel like we were just getting warmed up.

Oh, yeah. And we can keep cooking. But...

We can go get the bookers down here and just keep going, you know?

I think we'll definitely have to do a round two. Sure. Especially with how many projects you guys have cycling through here. But I think, for the sake of time, I think let's just pop the usual three and then...

Can I highlight one more thing? Sure, go for it. On just our upcoming open house. Oh, yeah. Saturday, June 8th from 11 to 3. The last we've done two open houses kind of highlighting our new space here. Just to touch on that, it's something we're real proud of, you know, how long it's taken to get to this point. So we invite anyone and everyone that's heard about us or wanting to come see the shop. You know, shops like us don't come off as uninviting, but they're not like your typical mechanic shop. So it gives people an opportunity, you know, once a year to come, come check out our shop, past projects, present projects in progress. You know, we'll have the shop nice and tuned up, real presentable for people.

So the variety is incredible here.

Yeah, we'll have Nick's car here. I think John's C8 will be here. The Renault will be here for sure. The Beetle, which we didn't get to touch on, but come out, check it out. That thing's super rad. You know, the 240. There'll be all sorts of stuff here.

We have a handful of vendors that work with us. Other shops we work with, other shops that work with us. So we'll have a couple of those highlighted and then we'll have a Taco Libre food truck on site. Sweet.

Well, Dan. All right, at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests to pick three cars. Three cars, a daily driver, a show car and a track car. You have unlimited budget. You can slap together, swap, whatever you want. What are you picking?

We'll start with you.

Show car is gonna be a 59 Eldorado. Just low, long and slow on the ground. It's always been kind of my dream car. I'd say a track car would probably be a 991 GT2 RS. Kind of really growing a soft spot in those for building cages in them over the years. And then my daily, I'm gonna R34 GTR, you know, Midnight Purple 3. That's kind of where I'm at, so.

I like it. Were you prepared for this question? No.

That was very concise.

Actually, I didn't know you was gonna say anything, and then you mentioned it. So during the course of this podcast, I'm like, f***, I gotta come up with three cars, but they all just, I mean, those are mine. Now, obviously, modifications to each of them, but that 59 Cadillac, man, it's just something about 30 feet long just sitting on the ground is just, that's the Air Ride Mini Trucker coming out.

That's one of our fastest answers ever, I think.

I think so, yeah. I had notes, and I still took longer than that.

Well, you really threw me when it was like daily driver track car and then show car, and it's like, well, they all just happen to work out.

Yeah, that's awesome. Those are awesome answers, by the way.

Yeah.

All right, let's see.

Show car, I want another shot at my Tacoma. I let it go unfinished, and I got that soft spot in my heart to...

It's like a 96 Toyota Tacoma.

It was a 95, yeah, five, six. It was the first year of that body style. Single cab, just I want another shot at it. With the capabilities we have now, and I want to see it through to finished, that'd be super cool. I know where that thing is still, by the way. It's now living in Texas. It's been through four owners, so, you know, if it ever falls back in my lap, I will probably pursue that. Track car, I think early 90s Nissan R32 GTR touring cars. I mean, dude, there was something just insane about watching those cars just mop up absolutely everything else on the track. It was similar to like the early 2000s Audi S4s when they just couldn't be touched and just got limited down and everything to try to slow them down. And then daily, man, I'm a Duramax pickup guy. I just, you know, it's comfortable, it rides nice. And it's why my S14 gets driven like two to three weeks out of the summer, and then I'm back in my truck. You know, it's just, it's comfy and it just works, you know. So there you go.

For now.

Mm-hmm.

For now. That's what I mean.

That's what you see, you know, it's all the creature comments.

I mean, you know, I would certainly entertain a nasty Duramax in the future. I got a little eye for wild diesel stuff too, you know. But I'm more of a snowmobile guy than anything, so it kinda, you know, it caters to my other.

I'm so glad you didn't bring that up earlier. You guys would have talked half an hour on snowmobiles.

What do you ride?

We'll do it as a new podcast.

What brand are you picking on?

Harder Cat, the only one.

Oh.

Well, you drive a Mustang too, so it doesn't matter.

Yeah, well, I ride Yamahas, so they're half cat.

That's okay. I thought you might have said Skidoo and then we'd have to end this now.

That's why I love this podcast, man. There's so much variety.

For sure.

So much variety. Like somebody asked me, like would I ever run out of guests or things to talk about? I'm like, no.

No, well, and the cool thing is you can circle back through too. I mean, how many of your guests you've had that if you came back six months later, it'd be a completely different conversation.

Yeah, or even like two, three months later in some instances, like granted, you know, our sponsor raise a hood, like, you know, he comes on, I think I want to say every 15 to 20 episodes, just because he's a care of the sponsors. But he's also, I mean, he's a guy like with a lot of life experience and just always something different to talk about. So, but I think that just about covers it. Where can people find you? I shouldn't say it just about covers it. We haven't even scratched the surface, but. But where can people find you guys?

Social media, man. Instagram is where we're most present. Got a pretty strong YouTube following and all. So I'd follow those two. Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. Those are really the three. And then a website in progress. Those are, you know, we don't TikTok and there are any of the other ones. So we got a really good social media guy in house, Art. Yeah, where is he?

I was gonna give him a shout out.

He's, Art's out of here.

Oh, he's gone, gone?

He's gone. But yeah, he's, that was a big move for us to bring on a full-time guy in marketing. And he's, he's done a hell of a job with it. You know, he kind of had a vision for it. He saw what we were doing and kind of pitched himself a little bit. And we brought him on. And you know, the YouTube, the YouTube stuff is really the most fun to watch, I think. You know, we hear repeatedly, both customers and vendors, guys that say, you know, over and over again, like, man, I just, I can't get enough. I love watching the episodes. But you know, it's easy to overshadow. And I wanna, I really wanna point out, like, it's the whole team here. You know what I mean? Like, the guys, it used to be me and Bryan fabricating. You know, for the most part, Bryan's in the office almost 100% of the time now. You know, I'm in the shop, but rarely am I actually hands on anymore. It's more helping and teaching. But the guys we got in here, the fact they come to work every day with drive and excitement to do what they're doing, I think really shows through in the work. It's easy for, no matter what you do, no matter how cool it is, every day, if you do it every day, it becomes a job. And it becomes easy, especially when things don't work, which are common. You plan something out, you put it together, and it didn't work out the way you wanted it to. It is 100%. Bryan and I sit here and do this, but man, it's the guys that you see on our YouTube and on our Instagram. We like to spread the love and really highlight what these guys are doing. So that's what it comes down to.

Art Scout, what would be, if I were to get a day job again, that would be the dream job. That's the only job I've applied for for a company down in Chicago, is basically what art does, because that's again, the variety and doing everything. It's super sweet here. So that's awesome.

You just reminded Art of that.

No, yeah.

There's other people barking up that tree, Art, you're very good at your s*** together.

No, we'll see. This Minnoxide thing's going pretty good so far.

Well, it's been fun to watch, and it's fun to get a chance to sit down and do it. We've done a couple podcasts with people, and it's go, go, go around here. And so sometimes to actually sit down and reflect on everything is rewarding.

Well, on that note, thank you so much, guys, for coming on. Make sure to check out The Open House, and what was the dates on that again?

Saturday, June 8th.

Saturday, June 8th.

11 to three. Perfect.

Perfect, yeah. So I think I'll have to double check the dates to make sure it's not the same.

The same weekend is back to the 80s, so I know it's gonna conflict. Weekends are always tough in the summer, but.

Yeah, yeah. But nonetheless, if you can make it, I went to Your Open House, what was it, a handful of years ago.

Probably the first one.

Yeah, that was super cool. So, and this, I mean, this shop is awesome. Amen, thank you. It's awesome. Again, lots of cool stuff. So be sure to come check that out, guys. Dan, thanks for existing, Mr. Gunner Garage, where everybody can find you. Yep, two N's. Two N's. Yeah. And you guys already know where to find me, because, well, this is kind of a Minnoxide podcast. So thank you very much. Thanks, guys, and we'll see you all next time.

Thanks.

All righty, gotta clean up.

F***, I am just itching and scratching to build one right now, man, I just.

We have an S10 that's gonna be coming back in the paint and body here very shortly to be finished.

You guys wanna do a Rocko 2? Rocko 2?