now there's guys that have a wheelhouse and by that i mean a certain genre of
car that they love to do and then there's guys that are fearless and by
fearless I mean they're afraid of nothing there's nothing that's off
limits and I say this as a compliment but the mini truckin guys are in that
group because they will cut anything up and make what they want to see and
that's what I find with John Margo and the custom shop
this car should have been a restoration I'm so glad it's not
tell me about his car well you know it's funny that you say that I came from a
mini truck or background that's how I kind of got into the city radical paint
stuff yeah it makes perfect sense and yeah it's the nineteen seventy nine
eleven t is what started as and it was a racecar on for years and years
uh the customer had built for Jeff harder come to me and said hey I've got
a shell of a race car
what can we do with it so same a little scenario i did a rendering through some
ideas at him
originally we were started i was going to be a turbo porsche motor
yeah we realized that we really couldn't get the horsepower we were hoping for so
i talked him into an ls3 of course of course I don't you know I'm i thought
was you know the old Porsche motor is used to have the side drafts and stuff
like that was cool
so I came up with the idea of let's do stacked injection
so we did a stacked injection system using the Holley EFI i'll build it all
kinds of custom intake manifold parts and things like that but we came up with
the short cross ram stacked injection on an ls3 dynoed 534 horse 543 foot-pounds
of torque
very nice numbers obviously transaxle with an IRS
these cars are known for their 50 50 weight bias in stock trip
what is that heavy aluminum v8 due to the weight bias in this car does it mess
up the handling believe it or not it's 34 pounds difference
that's it that's it that is that you can compensate with a little bit extra body
work or by balancing or something about that throne the fuel cells in the front
anyway so as is the radio yeah because you're going to have pure safe
you ruined that car and you did everything but you made this thing so
much better if we didn't know how many times I've had people say you ruined
that car
I could even tell you how many times will you write to me
this car here was probably going to sit in the junkyard or whatever somebody's
warehouse in a crate I saw the picture of it as the body and you know it's
never going to be a vintage race car you know your paint job is outstanding it's
a mile deep
tell me about the process all this is pro spray paint that's who's booths were
in here at SEMA arm
this is a base maroon porsche color
I laid that down first then there's three coats of a prismatic pearl and
then there's three coats of a wild cherry candy over top of that and then
it's clear coated with the 8500 clear coat and then cut above
yeah i did a little bit of accessing around the scoops around the roof scoop
of the knows the tale stuff like that with a bronze color and then accent of
the forgeline wheels with a bronze center
it's not a typical two tone so to say because most time you don't even really
notice that even has it on again but it does give it a little bit of classiness
my idea was race car meets you know the Italian sports car kinda feel yeah I'm
and you know the reliability and drivability of an LS motor
there's just lots of things that I twisted together all the cool stuff that
I've done over the years and pieced it together in this you know 2,900 pounds
street-legal racecar basically I'm you obviously don't have cnc aluminum
milling equipment at your shop but you've got an aluminum CC diffuser the
intake girls on the hood of this car bonnet which is on the back are cnc
aluminum but you make them out of wood
tell me about that process I like to do unique billet parts i mean as you see a
lot of the big builders do but beyond that I don't have that you know ability
to do it in-house on
I make the peace out of MDF whether it's three quarter inch whether i glue to
enhance the three quarter
exactly you cut it to the shape the size you want you can router it you can if
you screwed up you throw it away if you build it again until you get what you
want yeah um like the side panels on the the back wing
you know I didn't know for sure the angles i wanted so i made three
different ones so that i could lay it out said the topping on it and then I
once I got what I wanted
then I send it to Dean he's got a CNC machine I taking the wood nice a
transfer this inability and he plots it puts it in his machine
programs a CAD spits it out and you have a perfect piece is ready to polish and
put on the car doing this for 27 years you always come up with
how do you do it faster how do you do it better you know I didn't know for sure
the angles so how else are you going to do that you can just start making billet
piece of all Chuck that one away
it also to do it out of the wood first you know your your waist and three
dollars for the wood one of my favorite food products is their polyester hi Bill
primer surfacer i use it on every bill that i do now
classic restoration whatever what's what are some of the things that you used to
be splits on on a car like that
oh this is another one typical Midwest car it was rusty rusty rusty yeah you
know the whole bottom of this car has all been treated with the you know the
the rust treating the undercoating on anything that we could do because this
guy is going to drive this car
yeah i mean you might look at this and go boy this is a full-blown show car but
you know a lot of these guys take them out and they play with them and they're
gonna get caught in the rain and they're going to get mud and junk underneath
them and we wanted to make sure that you know they don't rust out on a later so
those Eastwood products really helped us to create something that in the long run
is going to last these guys a long time and you know there again like we talked
earlier handed down to the next person in the family
you see all the little details like molding the emblems into the body I was
almost afraid to ask you about that that's very cool
so that's the name boss look is that just filler around they don't forget the
glass
yep yeah so durable ice is strong enough substrate sure it's not going to crack
it's not going to deal am
this is actually a piece of brake line tubing well it onto the hood and then
just you know build around and then the throw names all finished off to
who is your interior work i do those are wilwood billet reservoir so it's kind of
neat gives a little bit of a custom feeler and these supports threats were
already integrated into this space for because the race car has the racecar
heritage
how cool is that to turn a former race car into a street car yeah build the
custom front end on it
this started out believe it or not as a audi TT peace
okay and I sectioned it it's fiberglass so I section it up and molded it to make
it fit the car got rid of the big large turn signals that were normally up here
put in the LED pockets these are the JW speaker headlights their age
i dled projector lights yeah super super bright yeah and then all the trim on the
cars all nickel-plated advanced plating Nichols all the windows stuff and the
the mirrors and the handles and that's what I like about those guys that they
have a feel for what they could they can almost sense what you want to do that
they're very intuitive when it comes to you wanted to create I just think that
creates more of a classy look
it is it's almost like an anodized the loo look but its nickel plate so it's
going to be stronger right
very cool and then all the you know all the vents obviously we cut all that
that's all made out of steel and of course we did the raised white letter
kind of race car look on the tires as well
hey this is Seema you gotta pop it on and to me there again it kind of goes
with that racecar feel you know taking the the newest latest technology these
lightweight forgeline wheels
you know and continental tires that make it stick now you know you can do that
1970-now you so now we took the technology of today to make it being a
drivable race car
the other thing that you know we were talking about build you know this was a
four-month bill along with the other two cars and the material product from
paints you know from the body fillers and things like that you know that we
have now that are dry so much faster the salt is dissolved so much faster
you know back in the lacquer days and things like that I mean you have so much
shrinkage on a car
yeah you couldn't do it as fast as we do it now yeah you know and it really makes
it you know where if you know how to work that chemical process
you know you can get that finished and it'll stay like that yeah well i don't
know if you remember not but when vehicles are transitioning from
carbureted to throttle body to throttle body injection to full-on singlet
sequential fuel injection people were hollering needs to do with the
aftermarket it's the doom of hot rodding this because computers controlling we
can use it we can't work on it we can't work on a nobody move it
look what's happening
now you can control you can tune your car in your iphone that mean it's it's
amazing
so you know you can call your car from a hundred miles away and started
exactly anyway well thank you so much for showing us around this car
well done again Thank You Anwar go the custom shop
yeah