My first sand rail that I ever “beefed up” I took a 1500 and made it a 1641 and put a bug spray on it. It was fun but just wasn't happy with it. So I kept tweaking on it and playing with the compression and doing different things. Then got a set of 88 MM pistons and made it a 1679 and made my own single port dual carburetor setup. I took 2 stock single port carbs and cut the carburetor bases off and welded them onto the end of the intakes after cutting the intake in half and it worked flawlessly. It had a lot more power than I had ever had before. Then a few years later I discovered turbos. I found a turbo at a junk yard off of a Pontiac 3.8 that had a 4 barrel quadrajet on it and then adapted it to my 1835 that I had at that time. But unfortunately it was too large, it had so much Turbo lag it was pitiful. Once it got moving it was OK but it just did not want to take off. After some more searching I found a Mustang with a T3 Turbo off a 2.3 4 cylinder so I adapted the 4 barrel intake off of the Pontiac onto the T3 Turbo from the Mustang and it worked amazingly. I could pull a wheelie through third gear in my sand rail while doing 60 miles an hour.

Then I realized I need better ignition so I created an HEI Chevy ignition and welded a VW shaft on to the Chevy distributor and it was the smoothest running VW I think I ever had. It was very throttle responsive with an immense amount of power. It could run a 1233 in the quarter with a 1835 at 18 PSI and not miss a beat. I ran that same engine for a year and a half until I discovered NOS and added that to my setup. I started out running at 15 PSI with 40-50 horse NOS but couldn’t get past the 1190’s. My rail was pulling wheelies all the way through first and second gears coming straight up. I played with that set up for a year or two until I dropped the valve seats and blew the engine. At this point I started over and built another 1835 with a turbo cam.

A friend of mine owns a business called Lockwood Performance, an American speed shop. Another friend of mine Tom Ollinger was building chassis at the time and they helped me build a dragster. It was 17’ long with a Volkswagen transmission and the engine from my buggy and ran with that for a while till I got bored and then started to play in the off-road world. I started with a 1776 Turbo Baja and used a stock carb with a blow through and made my own alcohol injection system and instead of increasing the richness of the carb I chose to do it with winter washer fluid because it has a high alcohol content and it worked great at 18-19 PSI and it never spark knocked, or missed a beat, it just ran. I was hitting 70 mph in the 100 yard with this set up.

At this point I built a couple race cars one was a 1914 with a t3 turbo and another homemade 4 barrel intake from a Pontiac and a NOS set up. The fastest I was able to get out of this set up was 760 in a 8th mile with stock gearing and super diff and a heavy side plate. Then off to the the next project. I built a 1959 Karmann Ghia with a 2387 with a t3 turbo and a 4 barrel intake and a holly 600, then had to learn how to modify to feed high amounts of fuel under boost conditions.

Since then I have built many other cars, buses, fiberglass buggies and an entire fleet of sand rails. In my machine shop I do most of my own engine work as well as manufacture a lot of my own parts for my projects. I adapt the same level of care and attention to detail in everyone of these kits that is produced as I would if it were going onto one of my very own personal projects….

I love to build and create and push the limits on how to make things better and more efficient, and I pride myself on growing and learning and being able to do as much of the work myself to keep quality at its highest and the price at its lowest for my loyal customers.