Season 2, Episode 1 - New Beginnings, Jason Wehrli, Ram Revolution

 

 

The following transcription was generated using a speech recognition software, and will contain errors. Please review the timestamp and listen to the corresponding audio for accuracy.

 

Holman (3s):

Oh, see?

Lightning (4s):

Dang. It’s quiet

Holman (4s):

In here. You forgot how quiet it was, didn’t you? Wow. Listen to that. It’s storming outside right now and windy, and there is almost no noise. Just listen,

Lightning (16s):

I can’t even hear your garage door going down right now.

Holman (19s):

And you forgot how comfy these seats were, didn’t you? I say that because I forgot how comfy these seat were. Okay. You can’t lay down on the job.

Lightning (31s):

Fired up. Feels so good. All right. It’s lightning and Holman. Hold on, let me put my seat back up. Lightning Holman Truck Show podcast, the number one truck enthusiast podcast on the internet. My name is Lightning. He’s Holman, and we are in a Nissan Titan XD Platinum Reserve.

Holman (49s):

So here’s the thing, Nissan, because they’re so awesome and gracious said, guys, we know you are moving the studio and we know you probably need a pickup truck and you haven’t been in a titan in a while, so why don’t we send you down a tight XD so it’ll help you in your move. And we said, that would be great. And then we are a week later and we went, we don’t have a studio yet, so maybe we can use our tight XD because it’s quiet. So I thought,

Lightning (1m 17s):

Are they okay with us using this as studio?

Holman (1m 19s):

Yes. So I thought it would be funny ish if we drove around and did the show since we have no, we have no home. We have no studio for at least like three more episodes. So I’m like, well, let’s burn one of those inside a tight

Lightning (1m 30s):

Seat. Yeah, we can’t record it inside your home because you have a loud child and I have a new puppy.

Holman (1m 37s):

She was loud and now she’s going to bed right now. But if she hears us working, she’ll

Lightning (1m 42s):

Pop up and yeah, and

Holman (1m 43s):

Barge in, which is why the pod shed’s in the backyard and not on in, in the garage or something like that. So the new studio is awesome. You actually haven’t seen it yet. And it’s the sound ending that’s in there right now before the drywall and stuff is actually really good. And we haven’t even done the ceiling. And when you walk in, it sounds almost as dead right now as this tight next eat does.

Lightning (2m 1s):

I doubt

Holman (2m 1s):

It. No, you’d be,

Lightning (2m 3s):

It’s pretty damn

Holman (2m 4s):

Quiet. It is. I know. But you will be surprised.

Lightning (2m 6s):

I think. Do me a favor, do me a favor real quick and roll back the shade so I can see the moon roof open. It’s

Holman (2m 12s):

Not panoramic. Sun roof

Lightning (2m 13s):

Panoramic sunroof. That’s exactly what I was looking for. Well, don’t open, I dunno what the rain to come in. Well, let’s just, we wanted to see it open. Well, I want you to retract the sun shade. No, you’re opening the rear window. Well,

Holman (2m 23s):

There’s so many buttons. There’s just, there’s We’re closing that one.

Lightning (2m 27s):

No, now you’re letting the rain in. Now you’ve just, oh look,

Holman (2m 30s):

The roof is open and it’s actually raining and light

Lightning (2m 32s):

This sunroof. Okay. Close

Holman (2m 34s):

The sunroof. I’m gonna do that here.

Lightning (2m 35s):

This is not good audio right now. It’s

Holman (2m 38s):

Funny audio

Lightning (2m 39s):

Right there. There’s shades going back. There you go. Okay. All right.

Holman (2m 43s):

Well enough of this craziness, but we are gonna be doing the show from the, the inside of this Nissan Titan Xee. So special thanks to Nissan. And of course if you are looking for a new half ton or half ton plus truck, you’ll wanna check out the lineup of Titans and listen, five year, 100,000 mile warranty. You know what I find amusing about this truck is What’s

Lightning (3m 4s):

That? I was just turning on my seat warmer. Sorry.

Holman (3m 9s):

I said, you know what’s amusing about this truck? What’s that? Is it used to have the five liter Cummins in it as an option and now they have the 5.6 liter endurance. Yeah, but if you listen to it on the outside, it still sounds really similar to the old diesel. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. There’s certain things you hear and you’re like, is this the gas truck? It’s just very burly.

Lightning (3m 28s):

Well, we’re gonna have to get the exhaust note as you rip down.

Holman (3m 31s):

It’s quiet.

Lightning (3m 31s):

No. As you’re conservative. No, this, this is really conservative.

Holman (3m 34s):

No, this the half 10 I think is way noisier. This is like, alright,

Lightning (3m 37s):

Like let’s go for it. Let’s pull out, hold on, it’s gonna digging me. I gotta put on my seatbelt. Hang tight.

Holman (3m 41s):

This is the,

Lightning (3m 41s):

I’ve just gotta set the mic down for a second.

Holman (3m 43s):

This is the road couch. This thing is like the truck you want on a, you know, on a cross country road trip. And it’s really super comfy.

Lightning (3m 52s):

Buckled in. Here we go.

Holman (3m 54s):

All right. Oh, is there, is that a tx behind me? Should I hit it?

Lightning (3m 56s):

Do not hit that, please. All right,

Holman (3m 58s):

Here we go. Close.

Lightning (3m 59s):

Alright. Excuse the rain noise. Here we go. Ears in exhaustion. I don’t know how much I could hear, but that was loud. That was nice.

Holman (4m 15s):

So the exhaust is super quiet until you get on it and then, then it mellows out. Right? Rule up your window, you

Lightning (4m 20s):

Knock it out. No, I wanted to get another exhaust.

Holman (4m 21s):

No, we’re not doing that. We’re doing a show. Okay. Nissan usa.com. If you want to check out or build and price the Nissan Titan, Titan next to you. Or even the frontier. Or you can go down to your local dealer where you can check one out in person the way lightning is right now. All

Lightning (4m 35s):

Right, Holman, I’m looking over at the dashboard in front of you and I can see quite a bit of data. All right, so this truck is equipped with a lot of pressures, temps, et cetera. But what if you have a truck that’s maybe a little on the weak side when it comes to data? How do you supplement that? How do you see your exhaust gas temperature, maybe transmission slips, stuff like that. What would you do?

Holman (4m 55s):

I would go to banks power.com. I would check out the awesome i dash gauge, which allows you to record or take a look at hundreds of parameters or view up to, what is it? Eight pages of

Lightning (5m 5s):

Five pages of eight

Holman (5m 7s):

Per page five page. So 40 different parameters can

Lightning (5m 9s):

Be visible. That’s so you can display 40 parameters and you can choose from hundreds. It’s up to you which 40 you want to display. Now you can choose like just two per page or eight gauges per page. It’s infinitely customizable. You can change colors, layouts. It displays more than any other gauge for its price. And if you get the data monster, it will data log. That means it will record data.

Holman (5m 30s):

And how do you mount

Lightning (5m 31s):

’em? Oh, how do you mount it? It’s two 16 inch. 52 million. It’s so standard.

Holman (5m 34s):

It’s

Lightning (5m 35s):

Standard. Yeah.

Holman (5m 35s):

Round gauge. So pillar pods, it’s a gauge pod, an eight pillar

Lightning (5m 37s):

Pods, any pod, any gauge you’ve ever had that’s round, it fits in that hole. Or of course, banks offers pillar mounts, suction, mounts, all sorts of stuff. Go to banks power.com and check out your I dash.

Holman (5m 47s):

All right. Well, before we start the show, we’re gonna remind you guys that this is episode one of the rest of our lives. So this is literally the, this

Lightning (5m 56s):

Season two.

Holman (5m 56s):

This is episode one of season two. So if you haven’t been listening and you’re jumping in now, this is the beginning of us owning the podcast and this is going to be the first day of the rest of our lives.

Lightning (6m 10s):

Sounds bittersweet.

Holman (6m 13s):

No, it’s, I think it’s, I think it’s just sweet.

Lightning (6m 15s):

I think it is cool. I think it’s rad. We should start the show right after this guy cuts you off. Move.

3 (6m 20s):

Move.

Lightning (6m 21s):

Thank you.

3 (6m 24s):

The truck show. We’re gonna show you what we know. We’re gonna answer What? The truck Cause truck. The truck show. We have the lifted, we have the lower net. Everything in between. We’ll talk about trucks that run on diesel and the ones that run on gasoline. The truck show. The truck show. The truck show.

4 (6m 55s):

It’s the truck show with your hosts Lightning and Holman.

Holman (7m 2s):

How about that? The, the same intro you have come to love. Nope, it’s not changing. It’s your same old truck show podcast. It’s just,

Lightning (7m 11s):

Come on. It’s just

Holman (7m 12s):

Ours. No,

Lightning (7m 12s):

It is ours. But don’t downplay it. It’s an awesome jingle. It

Holman (7m 15s):

Is an awesome jingle. That’s what I’m saying. We didn’t change it. I don’t want our listeners to fear change cuz it ain’t happening. It’s the same old normal rut we’ve always been in. No what? No,

Lightning (7m 24s):

Ever. How come you compliment us and then you It’s like backhanded every single time. It’s not a rut we’re in except we’re we choose. I can make another jingle. I like that

Holman (7m 31s):

One. Except we’re in a Nissan Titan XT podcast studio right now. Yes,

Lightning (7m 35s):

We are trudging through the rain. You are driving a little fast. You realize that

Holman (7m 38s):

Right? I’m not driving fast. 40 miles an hour.

Lightning (7m 40s):

Okay. All right, man. It just soaked up that pothole like, no problem. All right. It’s time to get into Jason Worley. I met Jason a few years back. Jason is the epitome of an entrepreneur, and you’ll find out why after we dial in. All right.

Holman (7m 53s):

All right, well I’m super excited for this guest. We recorded this interview before we got into the truck, so why don’t we play it now?

Lightning (7m 59s):

How do you feel about talking some diesel?

Holman (8m 1s):

I’d rather talk to an entrepreneur.

Lightning (8m 3s):

Well, it’s the same guy, diesel and Entrepreneur.

Holman (8m 5s):

Well, that makes it easy. Let’s

Lightning (8m 7s):

Call him. So, no, let’s not do that. Really. Let’s not be puy DJs. We,

Holman (8m 11s):

I didn’t do

Lightning (8m 11s):

Puy almost did.

Holman (8m 12s):

No, I was right on the edge. You were on. All right, hold on. Let me change that. All right, do it. All right. Lightning. That sounds swell. Let’s go coach. Give him a call. Hey Champ, let’s kill two birds with one stone. Oh, champ. What do you say? Sport. You wanna give him a call, tiger? Yeah, let’s go. Let’s do it. Yay. Dial And that smile. No, you ruined a dial and smile. It’s totally fine. Right point.

Lightning (8m 35s):

Yeah, it’s true. I, I Tank. Hello? Hello. Is this Mr. Jason

Holman (8m 42s):

Worley. Hey, what’s happening? This

Lightning (8m 43s):

Is, is this also the, the mayor of DeKalb? Not quite. I feel like you might be, I

Holman (8m 50s):

Heard he was the ambassador for DeKalb

Lightning (8m 52s):

The Ambassador.

Holman (8m 53s):

No, no, not that either. Nope. Okay.

5 (8m 55s):

I’m staying out of politics.

Holman (8m 57s):

Smart man.

Lightning (8m 58s):

Hey Jason, before we talk to you, we’ve gotta play a quick intro, so don’t move. Hang tight. What does

6 (9m 17s):

Always be another? This

Lightning (9m 20s):

Is what takes to be

4 (9m 21s):

An entrepreneur.

Holman (9m 23s):

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like there needs to be a ya at the end of that. No.

Lightning (9m 26s):

Yeah. No. Why would there be a ya at the end? Just,

Holman (9m 28s):

Yeah. No.

5 (9m 30s):

Who record that one? Oh,

Lightning (9m 32s):

We’ve got a group of contributors that,

Holman (9m 34s):

Yeah, we’ve got a few. Yes. Have you heard half of them?

5 (9m 37s):

I’ve heard a few of them. Really?

Holman (9m 38s):

Oh, you have which ones? Let’s see. Have

5 (9m 41s):

Oh, go and ask me to recite any

Holman (9m 43s):

No, no, no, no. I go through the list here because there’s some real gems we haven’t played in a while.

Lightning (9m 48s):

Innovator, moderator. We’ve got two versions of that one. We’ve got like a metal version and a country version.

Holman (9m 52s):

Old-timey shot talk.

Lightning (9m 53s):

Yeah. Yeah. We got in the club, which is like Ice cube. We have

Holman (9m 56s):

Guess the thing

Lightning (9m 57s):

Parts department with some, some soprano singers know your note inside. Job Star Hotline. Yeah. Truck Fa. Oh. Truck Fame is one of my favorites.

Holman (10m 6s):

Do you think Jason, is he truck famous? I

5 (10m 8s):

Think people on their toes.

Lightning (10m 9s):

Yeah. You know what I, hold on a

Holman (10m 11s):

Second. I think he might, let’s see. Let’s try it on, see if it fits. Let’s

Lightning (10m 13s):

See. Yeah. All right. Try this one for size. Here we go. Here

4 (10m 15s):

We go. Truck. Famous, hero, star, vip, ACE. Big weight. Hotshot truck. Famous. Big shot. Big deal. Big gut, big cheese. Heavyweight superstar truck. Famous. That’s what you are,

Holman (10m 30s):

Right? I think it fits. I feel like that fits,

5 (10m 33s):

That would’ve been a better intro for us tonight.

Holman (10m 37s):

Are we

Lightning (10m 37s):

Just gonna burn all of his time? Play

Holman (10m 40s):

Jingles?

Lightning (10m 41s):

Yeah. I think he’s more valuable than

Holman (10m 43s):

That. I’m, I’m delighted that he knows any of them and I just want to delight him further with ones that we haven’t played in a while.

Lightning (10m 49s):

You’re just impressed that one of our guests actually listens to the show. Well,

Holman (10m 51s):

I don’t think he went as far as to say that. He said, here’s some jingles. We play the jingles early on he could have bailed out like, you know, a, a third of the way through at any moment. All right, well I guess we can get on with like interviewing and doing whatever it we

Lightning (11m 3s):

Do. This is not the first time that Mr. Jason Worley has been on the program. I interviewed him, I think it was at 2, 3, 4 years ago at pick,

Holman (11m 10s):

Pick a year. Two,

Lightning (11m 11s):

Three or four. I don’t know what it was, but it was hot out and it was in, it was in Florida. I think it was Daytona truck

5 (11m 16s):

Meet. Yeah, Daytona truck Meet 2019.

Holman (11m 20s):

Oh, pre Covid.

Lightning (11m 21s):

So I’m like, oh yeah, pre Covid.

5 (11m 23s):

No, no it was 21. I can’t remember. They, they weren’t in Daytona last year. So it was the year before that.

Holman (11m 29s):

Oh yeah. It’s

Lightning (11m 30s):

Been instead for one or two years’. One year. I do remember there was a lot of covid going on and yet we just kept shedding our, they were going around with the carts saying Put your masks on and we’re gonna have to shut this down. And we would put ’em on for five minutes and then take ’em off. Cuz it’s

5 (11m 44s):

Florida. We were in Florida so it didn’t

Lightning (11m 45s):

Matter. It didn’t matter.

Holman (11m 46s):

Exactly.

Lightning (11m 47s):

So for those of you that don’t know, Jason Worley is one of the owners. It’s he and his brothers that own Worley Custom fab. And you’ll find him online@wcfab.com and he started as an enthusiast. And I wanted you to tell your story. We did it briefly, but that again, that was years ago. How you got into diesel performance and then where you are today. And we weren’t joking actually about being the mayor of DeKalb. He just broke, actually broke ground. Well,

Holman (12m 13s):

He’s actually the commandant of Oh, the DeKalb?

Lightning (12m 15s):

Yes. The Commandant. Yes. But like, he just broke ground on some massive freaking building that’s like largest in the city out there. I don’t even know if it is, but it’s very impressive, the facility. So start at the beginning and take us through. How’d you get here?

5 (12m 28s):

Well, if you got a few minutes, it goes back a little ways and I like to tell stories, so. Ooh.

Holman (12m 32s):

Cool. You know what, we’re gonna let you run and then Jay and I are gonna go grab some sodas and some popcorn and we’ll, we’ll be back just

5 (12m 40s):

Here. We’re hit to play the tunes when I need to take a break. No, I guess it started, it kind of started obviously when I was younger. I’ve always been a motorsports enthusiast. I was, I was big into snowmobiles, go-karts, dirt bikes, four-wheelers growing up. I actually raced motocross four-wheeler. I raced ATVs for about seven or eight years throughout high school and after high school state champion a couple years in a row. And that’s kind of what got me started in, in the diesel performance. Honestly, it it’s, it started with buying a race trailer that was a little too big for my mom’s suburban to pull in. 2006, I think maybe it was, I was in high school.

5 (13m 21s):

I was about a year. I hadn’t, didn’t have my driver’s license yet. And I bought a trailer because I was just that big into racing. And we needed a trailer to get around and you know, we were, we were leave on Fridays and come home on Sundays kind of thing and didn’t have a license. But I bought a trailer. Mom, dad took me around all over and it was a little much for the suburban. So when I got my license a couple months after getting my li well I had a job before getting my license. Worked my ass off, worked a lot. I worked and raced. And

Lightning (13m 48s):

So what, what, what were you doing? What was the job that, because you had to have flexible hours because racing takes up a lot of freaking time.

5 (13m 54s):

Yeah, racing was weekends. Like I said, racing was every weekend, all summer long. You know, we, we raced from, from April 1st, pretty much through the end of October every year here in the Midwest from when the snow melted to when the snow started falling. So I had a job, I worked part-time after school at a machine shop actually, which is where I learned, learned a lot of the valuable asset assets that has gotten me where I’m at today in my business. So I was maintenance, did maintenance work at a big, big machine shop, working on equipment, everything from TIG weld into running and fixing machinery. And so I, I worked a lot both for my dad and doing that. My dad was a carpenter, so we’ve been, we worked, grew up myself and my brothers around woodworking and carpentry.

5 (14m 37s):

So we were working with our dad ever since we could, you know, go to work with him in the summer, you know, eight, nine years old. We’d go to work with dad all summer. So been saving money for a long time. And when it come to getting my license, junior year of high school, sophomore year of high school, first thing I bought was a diesel pickup truck because I needed a diesel pickup truck to haul my trailer around. What’d you buy? So I had it all figured out. I knew exactly what I wanted and it was a 2002 storm gray LV seven crew cab shorted. I knew what model I wanted. I knew the, the body style, I love the bubble nose LV seven s and I had to have storm gray and they only produced those in oh one and oh two. And I loved the Chevy with the bubble nose hood.

5 (15m 18s):

So I knew what I wanted and I was, I, I got my license and it was a month after getting my license, I, me and my dad flew out to Nebraska from Chicago. We, we live, we’re, we’re west of Chicago here in the suburbs and we flew out to Nebraska and I, I bought a pickup truck. And what did it have? It had I think 70,000 miles on it. Paid, how’d

Holman (15m 39s):

You find it? Was this like Craigslist or the recycler back then? No, they had the internet back then. He’s not that young though.

5 (15m 45s):

I mean we worked on the internet at all. It was, it was before Craigslist. It was, it was probably Autotrader or something online. Okay. But it was a lot of time online looking until I found what I wanted, found this dealer out there and they probably thought I was crazy cuz some 16 year old kid was calling him 17 maybe at the time I’m, I’m coming out, I’m flying out to buy this pickup truck. And they’re like, okay, sure. So we flew out there. Me and my dad flew out to Nebraska and I drove home my first, my my first Dax and that truck I still have today. It’s kind of been the icon of the business and we still have it, we actually truck pull with it every summer. It doesn’t get street driven. It hasn’t been street driven in a long time because how things always go performance wise.

5 (16m 26s):

They eventually hit a point where they don’t turn back and they, they don’t ever go back on the road. And mine hit that a long time ago. So bought my first diesel and at that time I didn’t buy it because I was a diesel enthusiast. So let’s say, I mean I knew trucks and I was gearhead, whatever, but it’s not like I gotta have a diesel and I wanna go soup it up and do crazy <unk> I got it cuz I needed to haul my race trailer around. So I did that, I bought it and I continued racing. I raced pretty steadily for several more years. And then it, it was a couple years after that I started hanging out with some other local guys in the local community that were big diesel enthusiasts. And at that time, you know, you’re talking late two thousands so you know you’re l guys with Lbz and, and Lois and stacking, stacking programmers, you know the old, the old bastard stack.

5 (17m 11s):

They called it

Holman (17m 12s):

The, what

5 (17m 14s):

Was that day? It was the Quoz the Edge, Illa and Edge I think. And guys like TTS and Kennedy Diesel and some of the, some of the bigger names back then in the very beginning I guess you could say that were starting to tune that were tuning them and doing crazy stuff. And one of my good friends, actually, his name’s Jeremy Moss, he was in the Diesel Power Challenge in 2006 and he was a local guy here that my family knew and I knew him, but I didn’t really ever think anything of it. Well I ended up going to some truck poles a couple years later, you know, after having this D max. And then I started getting into truck pulling and that’s when I started meeting all the local gear heads and it was downhill quick from there.

5 (17m 56s):

I, I think I blew the head gaskets and blew up the transmission in the first summer of truck pulling. And we were just tearing <unk> up and the racing was starting to slow down at that point. Was busy, busy at work and just getting more involved with truck pulling. Had another good local buddy Jake Thompson that I went to high school with who was had also had oh one duramax that we were, you know, pulling more regularly. It wasn’t really a street truck, it was getting more serious. And because of my job where I was at, I had access to a lot of equipment and machinery. So we started building turbo kits and, and you know, adding turbos and we did a straight axle conversion on his truck because truck pulling, we were always blowing, you know

Holman (18m 33s):

What I was doing when I was that age

Lightning (18m 34s):

Throwing rocks at

Holman (18m 36s):

Your, my neighbor Robbie Joyner? No, no. I was putting baseball cards on the spokes of my mountain bike. Look at my mod guys. Surely gonna jump that curb man.

5 (18m 47s):

So I guess I was probably 19 or 20 at this point. And

Holman (18m 52s):

Please, please tell me you made time for women,

5 (18m 54s):

You have a

Holman (18m 55s):

Girlfriend at that time

5 (18m 55s):

Of course we had, yeah, we had girlfriends. I met my wife when I was 21. We got married a couple, two years ago. So we’ve been together a long time. Congrats. So I was busy, I worked a lot. I mean, through high school I, I worked 40 hours a week when I was in high school practically. And I didn’t have much on the weekends cuz I was racing a lot. So I worked my ass off for a long time and obviously it’s paid off, but nonetheless I got carried away, hanging out with friends and blowing <unk> up and it turned into me building stuff for all the buddies in town with trucks and you know, we had to rebuild our own <unk> we didn’t wanna spend money so we were rebuilding our own transmissions and doing our own head stud jobs and fixing everything we broke and yada yada I suppose.

5 (19m 35s):

And all this time it’s outta my, at my parents’ house still. I had an apartment at home that we built above my dad’s shop so I didn’t have to live in the house. Me and my brother lived in the apartment, you know, so we kind of did our thing and we had a little two car garage that we were able to do all of our workout of. So the whole story goes, you know, if you go on our website and read our about Us page, it, it started in a two car garage in say 2010 or so, 2009. And that’s, that’s really essentially where it started. We worked on a lot of trucks out that garage, tore a lot of transmissions out on our backs and built a lot of turbo kits in that, that little shop with some tiny saws and, and little, little farm and fleet welders. You know how, how it all starts for every good story.

5 (20m 15s):

Trying to remember all this man, I haven’t told this actual full story in a while.

Lightning (20m 19s):

So at, at some point you decide I gotta take this, I gotta make it legit. I need a brick and mortar, I need a storefront, I need a shop space that’s not a two-car garage at my parents’ house.

5 (20m 30s):

Yeah, I’m working full-time at this job. I decided after high school, I, I tried college out. I’ll admit I’m a college dropout. I didn’t finish college because I was more concerned about working and making money. So I, I did the community college stuff for two years and was just bored with it. Took general stuff and I just, it wasn’t my thing. So I just went to work and I kept working and you know, parents weren’t very fond of that. But we made it happen. We, we made it work. Anyways, I’m still working my full-time job at this machine shop and right across the street a little, a little shop opens up for rent. You know, it’s a big building. It’s got seven or eight units in it, I think. You know, a bunch of 2000 square foot shops. I’m like, oh this is perfect. I’m gonna rent this little shop here.

5 (21m 10s):

It’s right across from work so I can pretty much get off of work and go right to work within a couple minutes and you know, save that half hour commute from home and we’re gonna start a little shop here and it’s not, it’s not too far from home but it’s close enough that everyone we know is still gonna bring our trucks up. We’re still gonna work on our stuff, you know, it’s gonna be the same crowd. So that was 2011.

Lightning (21m 30s):

Let me guess it lasted six months before you outgrew it.

5 (21m 34s):

Well it was, it was about a year. Yeah it was, it was winter of 2011, 2012 we moved outta mom and dad’s garage and they were excited as hell because their yard was full of trucks.

Holman (21m 45s):

There

5 (21m 46s):

Was always trucks moving, you know, there’s always a mud hole because you’re parked off the driveway, you’re in, trucks are parked in the grass, things are dead. We’re using four-wheelers to move dead trucks around and pushing ’em in and outta the garage and mom can’t park inside and you know, same old song and dance when you’re a kid wrenching on stuff at home. And

Holman (22m 2s):

I was never experienced my mom, her iron for me taking up the garage with one car and lots of parts while her and my dad’s cars were in the driveway. Never once did that ever happen. Really? It happened all the

Lightning (22m 15s):

Time. Not

Holman (22m 16s):

In the garage. It was my mom. My mom said, you know, you’re like a cat, you gotta piss on everything you own. It’s

Lightning (22m 21s):

True. Now my par my parents’ two car garage, I turned into a car stereo installation shop. I had pegboard on an entire wall. Were

Holman (22m 27s):

You making

Lightning (22m 28s):

Money though? And I,

Holman (22m 28s):

Yeah. See that’s my problem. I didn’t make any money. I took up

Lightning (22m 31s):

Space dude. So all the kids when I was a junior, they thought I was a drug dealer. They thought I, because I was roll, I had cash and

Holman (22m 37s):

Stuff. Well my neighbors said that anyway cuz I always have weird cars, how to say plates in my driveway. Yeah.

Lightning (22m 40s):

But then friends would pull up and they’re like, wait dude, you have an entire wall of metro kits. Like I could put any single d stereo in any car I’d every kid, like all the popular ones hanging on P board ready to go. It was anyway. So I didn’t mean to take it off Jason. But yeah, it’s funny how we do have similar stories. I,

Holman (22m 55s):

I think just think it’s important for the listener to go, oh, I relate to that. I exactly like those three guys. Every one of ’em, you know, pissed their parents off by taking up space in the driveway. And

Lightning (23m 4s):

My dad, I remember too cuz my dad bought a brand new like Jaguar XJ six this blue and I

Holman (23m 9s):

Put it on the street. Dad,

Lightning (23m 10s):

No, he’s like, he’s like, I’m parking in the goddamn garage tonight. Get that piece of crap accord out of there. I don’t care how big the stereo was and how much he’s paying you. I’m like, dad, it’s got two eighteens in the back. He’s like two what? Two 18. Ah, yeah. Anyway,

5 (23m 24s):

Just didn’t quite grasp it.

Lightning (23m 28s):

So you move into this, this 2000 square foot spot.

5 (23m 31s):

Yeah and we, we actually, we moved in and we actually built a, built a polling truck that, that winter from the ground up for a customer friend of ours. We were real, real big in the truck polling scene. I mean we’re in the Midwest truck, polling’s huge around here. We’re all country boys, you know, it’s, it’s farmers, it’s truck and tractor pulling around these parts. And and that’s what we did. And we, we worked on a lot of, lot of pulling trucks for friends and a lot of street trucks. You know, doing your, your triple pillar gauge in SAS and and exhaust systems and, and you know your, a lot, a lot of plug-in tuners back then. A little EFI live and we’re doing some transmission builds. And by the way, we were building stuff at that time

Holman (24m 8s):

Who back in the day won the G pod wars. Was it the dude who had a triple stack pillar on the A pillar and then had those, remember autometer had that like Mickey Mouse ear bile that would snap over. Yeah.

5 (24m 19s):

Meters. Our neighbor now auto meters Sycamore, they’re 10 minutes down the road from us and

Holman (24m 24s):

Neighbor. I got five gauges. Three on the A pillar, two on the steering wheel and then you’re like, and then got three under the console. It was Dodges. Yeah it was

5 (24m 31s):

Always the Dodges you could always put like 18 gauges in without,

Holman (24m 35s):

It’s like a Peter built when you get inside. What does that one do? I don’t know, but it looks cool.

Lightning (24m 39s):

And it’s funny cuz Autometer is still on that tip because they bought gauge works like that was their competition for a minute. Wipe them out. No they didn’t. They they bought ’em and now they just sell G Works pods. So they have every pod you’d ever want and every a pillar and all that stuff.

5 (24m 52s):

You could get the, you could get the factory match gauges too, you know, you

Holman (24m 55s):

Got yeah. Factory match or if you were baller

5 (24m 57s):

The factory match setup,

Holman (24m 59s):

You did the, the whiter silverback ones. The white

Lightning (25m 2s):

Ones are always my favorite because

Holman (25m 3s):

You’re like, oh yeah, my gauge that white background Phantom twos. Yeah, yeah.

5 (25m 7s):

Oh yeah. So we moved into that shop, we’re building stuff at that point. I mean WC Fab was the name cuz we, if somebody wanted something made, we built it. I was building, you know, at that time inter cooler pipes, turbo downpipes. We were building twin turbo kits, you know, adding s four 70 fives over the factory charger. Yeah. It was kind of the staple of the company back then. Is there, there wasn’t a lot of manufacturers offering, you know, the added turbo kits at a production level and you know, the internet forums are big. So this is when we’re on diesel place and Duramax forum and, and you know, you got your, your handles on there and you get to know people and selling product through the forums pretty much, you know, Facebook was around but you didn’t have Facebook groups and you weren’t really selling product on Facebook.

5 (25m 49s):

It was all the internet forums and word of mouth, you know, we were building turbo kits and, and wrenching on trucks essentially.

Holman (25m 56s):

All right. I have a question for you. Do you ever see any of those original customers or trucks come in or something like something old that you did early in your career? Yeah. And it comes back and you’re like, what did I do

5 (26m 7s):

Every now and then? And we all joke about the old version of this and the old version of that cuz things, you know, things improve over time and the designs get better and we manufacture things differently and you get something in it and I can look at it and say, hey, that was built in 2012 cuz we started doing it this way in 2013 or that kit was done in 2011 because of this, or because you, you know, obviously I’m like, I’m I’m the, the history book of the company and I could tell you when everything changed for the most part. Or, or when my brother, when this brother started working for me. And I can tell you that Ryan built that part and that my brother Mitch was built that part because I know when that version was built and you know, know when we were building it and who was building them at that time. Because at this time my older brother, Ryan, he’s, he’s working construction but he gets off work every day and, and comes, works at the shop too.

5 (26m 53s):

So he’s working part-time. My one one younger brother Mitch is still in high or just graduated high school, maybe was going to college and he was working part-time. So the brothers were all working for us at this time. And it’s like you bring that up, you see, you see a picture of somebody like, hey I’ve got an old turbo kit of yours. And they send you a picture and it’s like, oh you have a piece of history, not just an old turbo kit. You know, that’s, that’s a really old one

Lightning (27m 16s):

Now. Now if, and

5 (27m 16s):

That’s always cool to

Lightning (27m 17s):

See that stuff. Now if Jason, somebody rolls in and they’ve got like one of your very earliest like, I don’t know, turbo cancer piping systems wide kit or something wide bridge kit and you’re like, we weren’t really happy with that one. I’m gonna swap that out front. I’m Yeah, exactly. Do

5 (27m 34s):

You ever like, oh we’ve done that before. Yeah, we, we have to be honest, we’ve had trucks come in and they’re coming in, maybe they’re coming in for a motor build or a rebuild because it’s long past due and Oh I’ve had your parts for years and you know, we’re you decades?

Holman (27m 47s):

Yeah.

5 (27m 48s):

It’s like okay we’re gonna get you, we’re gonna get you into the latest and greatest here because I don’t even wanna put these parts back on cuz we got such better stuff for

Holman (27m 55s):

You. Just pull ’em off the customer truck powder, coat ’em gold and then give ’em out as an award at the

Lightning (27m 59s):

Company party.

5 (27m 60s):

Put ’em out on the history.

Holman (28m 1s):

Put ’em in the Yeah, exactly. Put ’em in the museum

Lightning (28m 4s):

Now. So Jason, when, all right, so you got your brothers working there, you’re still in this shop and you’re, you’re about to blow through the walls cuz you’re outgrowing it. At what point did you go from just bolting turbos on and larger piping and all that stuff to like wanting to better understand it, working on a dino and then understanding what the turbos were doing from an engineering point of view? Because I think that’s when the business starts to mature. Okay.

5 (28m 32s):

We, I I’ve been, I mean I say this like it’s some big deal and you know, you compare it to Gail’s history and it’s nothing or, or these other guys have been doing it a lot longer. But I was, I was engine dino and we were engine dino and stuff even before the business started. 2000, 2009 I think was the first time I went to the engine dino. Oh, okay. And that was part of me getting hooked because these, I had these buddies that went that were big in truck pulling and you know, you gotta go to the engine Dino if you’re gonna be serious, you know, you can’t do it on a chassis Dino. So we were engine dino and stuff and it was 2009 or 10 I think when we were taking stuff to the engine, Dino, I think that’s what it was, I guess I’m trying to remember. But, and we’ve gone every year since with the pulling truck engines and trying different combinations with yeah, tuning injectors, turbos, you know, doing all that stuff.

5 (29m 18s):

Just trying to make the most of

Lightning (29m 19s):

It. So that makes a lot of sense. I I didn’t know that about your history and I think that’s, that’s an important differentiation because your competition wasn’t doing that. Your competition just bolt <unk> on like your competition was out there just buying a turbo, not really understanding the matching and just putting it together and seeing what happened and wondering why. Yeah,

5 (29m 39s):

There was a lot of that for sure.

Lightning (29m 40s):

I mean there’s so many companies that make, you can buy Chinese turbos freaking on eBay right now and, and you don’t really know what’s gonna happen and a lot of guys use it and they, that’s part of the fun. It’s like Russian roulette. I, I mean yeah, I suppose so. But like, but the problem is is that the guys selling ’em think they knew what they do and then the guys putting ’em on or they’re usually, and

5 (29m 57s):

Most stuff

Lightning (29m 58s):

Talkers.

5 (29m 59s):

Most of the stuff we were doing then, I mean it’s, it’s nothing like, I mean the kits we’ve built in the last five years or even the stuff you do today, like it’s, it’s on a whole nother level of extreme turbo wise versus back then it was, it was pretty basic. You get a, your box borg charger with the big turbine housing and the, and the, you know, 96 88 turbine wheel and the 75 millimeter cast compressor that that nice $600 Borg cheap turbo and you throw it over the stock charger and everything’s pretty happy in most cases on, on all the earlier Duramax platforms. Obviously it’s not necessarily the best for the V gts, you’re definitely gonna run into some drive pressures. But for a simple cheap bolt-on added turbo kit, they worked really well and you know, we weren’t engine Dino in that stuff.

5 (30m 42s):

We were engine dino, the competition pulling stuff, big single chargers. But I was actually, you know, hand in hand with that. I met Nick Prance calibrated power solutions in 2010, 2010 or 11, roughly right when the business was starting. Cuz he’s local to us. You know, he’s, he’s 45 minutes north of us and he’s had a name in the industry as far as tuning DAXs for a long time. Obviously he’s been in business since oh seven I think.

Lightning (31m 8s):

I think he was there for kind of the birth of EFI live in the US right?

5 (31m 12s):

Yes, he was a beta he was a beta tester with EFI live with, with all the other guys and I met him and he pretty much, he’s done all of our tuning and been a, been a part of, you know, our success in regards to, he bought turbo kits from us back then. He saw what I was doing and I was just some, you know, country boy in his garage building turbo kits for his buddies and he’s like, who the hell is this guy? You need to sell these. And you know, he, me and him worked together a lot in the very beginning there because he was already established with his business and had a name in the industry and he actually sold a lot of turbo kits for us there in the beginning and, you know, kind of pushed me to take the step and say, Hey, it’s time to take this gig full-time because you got something going here and you know, we can help you sell these things.

5 (31m 53s):

So he was a big part of it and he is been a good friend of mine for a long time and you know, we, we do bond business together still to this day.

Lightning (31m 59s):

Yeah, I mean Nick’s, Nick’s been a, a guest on the show a couple of times and you know, I know that he’s, he’s an important name in the industry. Where were you getting, where were you sourcing the turbos? Were you getting factory BorgWarner turbos? Were you buying them new? Were you getting replicas of certain turbos? Oh no, I’ve been, how did you get into? So

5 (32m 18s):

We’ve been a big, we’ve been a big thing. You know, my business has always been built on, like we’ve always tried to be, you know, we’re made in the usa we’re not outsourcing garbage, we’re not using garbage. And you know, you go on our website now, you see any of my YouTube videos today and it’s all about made in the USA and we take great pride in that, in the craftsmanship, the material, the products, the powder coat, the everything about it from design, test engineer, everything in-house in the usa and even back in the very beginning, you know, I bought as much stuff as I could from, you know, US based companies or people within the industry. I was buying turbos from, you know, industrial injection, high tech turbo, you know, all the names you still know of today that sold turbochargers.

5 (32m 59s):

And today I know Borg is changing things and a lot of things are moving overseas and, but at the time, you know, a lot of the Borg stuff was still made in the USA and you know, whatever, you’re gonna deal with that with them. Bigger, bigger corporations and and whatnot. But we’ve always been a big proponent of made in the USA and you know, USA production and I did my best even from the very beginning to try and promote that. And it’s always been a big thing, you know, a lot of guys in this industry are hardworking, blue collar guys and you know, a lot of guys that are union workers and, and understand and made in the USA and they’ll spend that little bit of extra money to to support, you know, a a USA quality made product versus a lot of the <unk> out there today. You and I both know is, you know, not the nicest stuff and a lot of it’s overseas and just garbage.

Lightning (33m 45s):

No, I know, I guess what I, what I meant to say was not where you were sourcing it as far as location of countries, meaning you weren’t at that time when you started casting your own aluminum, you know, compressor housings or turbine housing, et cetera. No, I mean, castings were are really expensive, you know, 10 to $50,000 for a casting. So that’s what I wanted to find out is how you were engineering those parts together and that, that situation

5 (34m 13s):

We were real old school, you know, it was, it was probably 2015 or so before I actually started getting into casting and designing our own parts up in, before 2015 we were old school, we get a truck in the shop, we build it all in hand on the truck. I didn’t, I didn’t have an engineer at my disposal. I wasn’t an engineer, I didn’t have CAD programs. We, we bought, we bought two bends and we cut ’em up and we made things fit. We saw cut ’em until they fit nice until the joint was good enough. It could be TIG welded together and we made things, everything was one off custom and you know, it’s kind of where the name derived from, you know, worldly custom fab. Like today people look at it, oh it’s not so custom because you can only do this, this and this, or they only have these catalog of parts and you know, I kind of, I kick myself and as a little bit for that because when it started it was legit custom.

5 (35m 4s):

Like it was one off, there wasn’t one that wasn’t like every single one was, was special built and, and special made to your specs. And obviously as the company’s growing and volumes have increase in production has increased, you gotta narrow what your offerings are to be able to do it efficiently and to be able to offer at a, at a price that people are gonna pay. I don’t wanna say it’s worked the custom word out of it, but it’s the roots of the company is, that’s what got us to where we are is everything was special and one off and you know, it still is obviously, and we’ve got our own, our own symbolism of, of what makes our product ours. But in the beginning it was, there wasn’t one turbo kit that was alike,

Lightning (35m 39s):

Whether that was planned or not. And

Holman (35m 41s):

They all had names. Yeah,

5 (35m 42s):

Just how man it was just how it was, you know, it wasn’t full-time. I didn’t, I didn’t leave my other, my other job at the machine shop in maintenance, oh it was late 2013. So there was a good three, three and a half years where I pretty much worked myself to the ground. It was, I was pretty brutal honestly. I, I worked the one job, I was, I was first shift, I worked 6:00 AM to three, 6:00 AM to four and I’d get off work and I’d grab a bite to eat and I’d get back to work in my shop and I’d work at my shop till midnight, one, two in the morning and I’d on the way home I would be driving home. There was a local powder coder at the time. I dropped off a couple boxes of parts every night at the, at the door of the local powder coder in the middle of the night.

5 (36m 27s):

They would get ’em there and the first thing in the morning and I’d drive home, I’d get a couple hours of sleep and I’d do it all over again. I did that five days a week and Saturdays too. And I would take vacation time at work just so I could work at my job. You know, my vacation time didn’t consist of going on vacation at this point it was, I went on vacation cuz I had so much work to do at my place. I just, I had to go do that. Like I said, it was brutal. It was, it was some years there where I look back on it, I don’t know how I did it, you know, just obviously when you’re young it’s easier nowadays. I don’t think I could go on three, four hours of sleep like I used to.

Lightning (36m 59s):

I had a similar experience where I was doing that with, I, I worked at the radio station. I had to be at work at 4 45 in the morning. I generally leave around 6:00 PM at night, then I’d go down to my clothing store and we would print shirts or I’d stock the shelves, talk to the manager, do the books. And then I would drop off blanks at a local screen printer at midnight. And then I would get up and I’d have to be at work the next morning at 4 45. And I So

Holman (37m 24s):

Is that what you’re gonna do with our

5 (37m 25s):

Come

Holman (37m 26s):

This is, I’m just finding this out that, that lightning has this work ethic and I’m gonna ask, is this what you’re gonna do when we do merch?

Lightning (37m 33s):

I’m gonna have to, yeah. Oh well our listeners don’t know what we’re planning yet. Oh, that’s true. Yeah, so there’s, well they

Holman (37m 40s):

Might by the time to hear this

5 (37m 41s):

Outta the bag yet.

Holman (37m 43s):

Hmm.

Lightning (37m 43s):

Okay. So where we left off on your story is that you’re growing out of the first 2000 square foot unit and you’re, you’re, you’re getting bigger and where are you now and when do we end up in this massive building?

5 (37m 56s):

Well, there’s a few stepping stones between there and where we are now because it, it really blew up after I finally took the jump and left my job. Like I said, it happened in sometime in late 2013. It was three and a half years or so, four years or so running the business. And I had enough, we were so busy. I had my girlfriend at the time, wife now, she was working for me part-time and I had like three or three other guys that were pretty much full-time. I had a mechanic full-time. One brother was part-time and then another brother was pretty much full-time at that point and we were getting busy. We had a lot going on and it was just, I couldn’t, couldn’t handle the, the double jobs anymore.

5 (38m 36s):

So I finally made the split from our other job and went full-time. And then it was not a month after that our neighbors right next door moved out and we’re like, oh yeah, cha-ching. So we didn’t have to move. We were able to knock a hole in the wall and essentially take the adjoining 2000 feet building next to us. So we were just ecstatic. We’re full-time. I think at this point there might have been four or five of us and we just took over the building next door. We just doubled in size. We had, you know, 4,400 square feet or something. Two nice little, you know, 150 foot square off, fair square foot offices and it was doing great. So we’re building stuff. I’m, we’re buying some equipment, getting some iron workers, getting some breaks, getting couple ma manual mills and lathes and we’re, we’re able to make more parts.

5 (39m 23s):

I’ve got a local friend of mine that’s got a machine shop that’s been machining stuff for us that we can’t handle on the manual. Mills got a couple nice tig welders, got some mig welders, got a couple lifts going, you know, we got a legit shop going here. It feels like something. And then it wasn’t six months after that, you know, we might have gained a couple more hands at this point. Maybe there was six or seven of us. The, the next door neighbor from us from there moves out and instead of taking over another 2000 feet, we took over 4,000. The middle unit was a double unit. So we doubled the size again and it’s less than a year later. And it was 2015 or so, mid 2015 we, we had 8,000 square foot here in this building and we’re just doing great.

5 (40m 6s):

Everything’s going awesome. We’re working a ton, we’re having a lot of fun. We’re truck pulling in the summer, we’re busy and we got, yeah, maybe seven, seven or eight guys working for us.

Holman (40m 15s):

How many thousand square feet

5 (40m 17s):

This is 8,000 square feet.

Holman (40m 19s):

Our podcast studio is 120 just square feet.

Lightning (40m 23s):

Hold on, hold on. I’m listening to a story to dig. Hold on a second. I

Holman (40m 26s):

Think as we grow, will our shop be ever be that

Lightning (40m 29s):

Big? No, you and I will physically grow, but our, I mean do all we need is a desk in two microphones. My laptop might sound four micro, four microphones, four microphones. We have

5 (40m 37s):

Trucks take up a little bit more rubic. Especially when you got projects that are sitting there all the time. Yeah. Lighting equipment coming in. Yeah, so at the end of 2014, we were in 8,000 square feet. It was going great, but we’re outta space again and I’m starting to look for a bigger building cuz the, the next two guys in the building, they’ve been there since the building was built and they weren’t going anywhere and landlord didn’t wanna sell and I didn’t wanna kick him out if I did buy it. So it just, it wasn’t gonna work. So we needed to find more space. But this was our first big move in the worst time of year in the Midwest to try and move a business is in January. Let me tell you, I’ve done it three times now. Every time we move is in the middle of <unk> winter and not ideal in the Midwest. So we found a building about 35 minutes away.

5 (41m 20s):

We moved from Sugar Grove, Illinois to Sycamore, Illinois. And I found a building that I thought was gonna be my forever home. It was 22,000 square feet. So we almost tripled in size in 2015. Did

Holman (41m 32s):

You have any room there in DeKalb in the corner for the little podcast. We don’t take up much space. About hundred 20 square feet.

5 (41m 38s):

Hey, if you wanna move from California to Illinois, you

Lightning (41m 41s):

Might

5 (41m 42s):

Give you a space. So we made our first big move. We moved, we filled up the whole shop with a couple trucks. All of our buddies helped and, and we moved in the middle of wintertime. Did it in probably a, a week’s time. At that point we didn’t have near as much stuff to move and we moved into our new building at this time in Sycamore, 22,000 square foot. We moved in there and I thought, oh my god, we got so much room, we’re gonna rent out this back unit. It was, it was 22,000 square feet, but it was three units so they were like 7,500 each. And I thought, I’m gonna rent out this back one, this 14, 15,000 we got here will be plenty. And then about three months later I decided I should start powder coating in-house because we were, when we moved from Sugar Grove to Sycamore, our di driving distance to our powder coat shop doubled cuz the powder coater was the opposite direction.

5 (42m 31s):

So every day we were driving an hour one way to go to our powder coder. And we’re, at this point we’re taking, you know, a a a truck bed full of parts every day to get powder coated cuz everything that we’re building gets coded before it can ship out. And I’m like, this is not gonna work. This is too much back and forth. And my, one of my younger brothers was going to school for autobody work and I said, what do you think about powder coating? And he didn’t know what powder coating was much at the time. Checked it out like, yeah, sure, let’s try it out. So we bought our first powder coat equipment in, in the spring of 2015. And by summer of 2015, we started our powder coating business and brought all of our powdercoat work in house.

5 (43m 14s):

And that essentially took up that last 7,500 square foot. So six months after we moved in, we were not renting it out and we were using up the space and doing our all in powder coating inside now. So that was, that was a big step for us. It was a lot of big equipment and a whole process we brought in-house and that was, that was a pretty cool thing we did.

Lightning (43m 32s):

And it’s wow. Today, I don’t think any of your customers know that there was a time that WC Fab didn’t offer custom coding because that is such a, an important piece of the business today.

5 (43m 44s):

It’s huge. I mean it’s really, it’s, it’s what brings the people in, you know, if you’re building a show truck or even guys that are going for all out performance, they still wanna, they still wanna be picky and, and they have a color they want or a scheme they’re going with on their project and their truck, and I gotta have this shade of that or whatever, and we’ve always offered it, but until we brought it in-house, that’s when we were really able to get custom with the different combinations of colors and a, and a wider variety. But the biggest thing for us was being able to bring the quality control in-house. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s the paint job on your project and it’s, it’s what the final, it’s what the customer gets to see and it, it’s, it’s what makes it, because, you know, you can have a, a beautiful body work done on a car, but you get a <unk> paint job and you ruin it, you know, the same concept.

5 (44m 27s):

So bringing that powder code in house was a huge thing for us. And we were able, obviously one of my, of my brothers running that shop, you know, his, his name’s on it just like mine and take great pride and, you know, very important that it is of the utmost perfection. Yeah. I mean,

Lightning (44m 42s):

So bringing, you’re, you’re able to use you, I remember you were one of the first guys who were using prismatic colors, right? Prismatic pr.

Holman (44m 49s):

Pr

Lightning (44m 49s):

I’m sorry. Pr yeah. As our friend over there says, yeah, you gotta call pr you weren’t at the mercy of whatever the powder coat shop had. Maybe you wanted red and they’re like, oh, we’re out of, we’re outta pr and we we’re gonna sub it with some cardinal red, and, and Jason will never know. And then you’re like, crap. You know, we

5 (45m 7s):

Bought that a lot. Stuff that didn’t match. We ha I said, I wanted this car. Why doesn’t it match? Oh, well we used a different brand. Well, that, that’s not the same. You can’t <unk> do that.

Lightning (45m 14s):

Right. So now you control it.

5 (45m 16s):

Yeah. And that was a big step for us. So we, we were busting, we were, we were kicking ass. We were in the new shop. I think when we moved in there, there was 10 employees at this point. 10 or 12. And we just blew up at that point. I think we still didn’t have a website where you could buy product online. We’re still taking all of our orders over the phone. My wife and a receptionist at the time were, were full-time taking orders over the phone. I was still doing a lot of tech support. I was still a salesman at that point. So I’m working in the shop and I’m taking sales calls and, you know, I know the product the best and I’m still selling <unk> in 2015, 2016. Who

Lightning (45m 55s):

The hell is doing your bookkeeping, by the way? Who’s paying your employees?

5 (45m 59s):

My wife. I’ll show it. I’ll throw it out to her. She was, she was my girlfriend at the time. She, she did the books. She took phone calls, took orders, and she helped ship. She was a, she did all kinds of stuff. That’s

Holman (46m 8s):

Super smart to date your bookkeeper. Yeah. Especially when you’re small business owner.

5 (46m 13s):

Hey, it’s, it’s still working out. Okay. So we’re killing it. And we hire, we’re hiring a lot every year at this point. My fourth brother is about to graduate high school, I think 15 or 16. He graduated.

Lightning (46m 27s):

I feel like we’re gonna find out that Jason’s got 16 brothers. Yeah. And then

Holman (46m 31s):

They

5 (46m 31s):

Just, they just keep coming outta the woodwork.

Holman (46m 33s):

There’s,

5 (46m 33s):

There’s,

Holman (46m 34s):

Oh, is that where your parents told you where they came from? Coming outta the wood, outta the woodwork,

5 (46m 39s):

The mailman, the FedEx man. Ah-huh. We’re just plugging along. And we were in this shop, and then it was 2017, we finally launched a website where you could purchase product online. Got hooked up, hooked up with shop manager and, and built our first website with an online store. And that was a game changer for us because it didn’t require business hours to take orders. You know, you could take orders all weekend and any night, any time of day. That really made a big difference in, you know, sales. And, you know, we’re still doing our staple product, you know, duramax y bridge kits, Cummins, second gen turbo swaps, inter cooler pipes, traction bars.

Lightning (47m 20s):

So you’re making all these parts, or you’re selling ’em as fast as you can make them. And at some point you outgrow this 20 some odd thousand square foot building. And you, you decide, I’m gonna go lay and buy DeKalb. I’m gonna go buy the city, the town of DeKalb, and I’m gonna lay down a, some concrete that stretches from one edge of the town to the other edge of the town. And I’m gonna put a tilt up on it.

5 (47m 46s):

Well, you getting ahead of yourself there, you missed, there’s one more shot between that. Oh, Jesus Christ. We’ve been in five buildings in 12 years, so we’re on, we were just talking about building number three in Sycamore. We launch our website and we can’t keep up. There’s shipping’s out outta room. The mechanic, the performance shop, as we call it. We’re all the mechanics work. We’re outta room. The fab shop’s full Powdercoat needs another oven. There’s, there’s no

Lightning (48m 8s):

Room anywhere. Stop, stop, stop for one second. Jason, let’s think about this for a second. I know you, your, the parts are great and the custom colors are awesome. What can you attribute the explosive growth to? What hole in the market were you filling?

5 (48m 24s):

I mean, at the time, and, and even today, al I, I still feel there’s what we do, our product line is a very niche product line. We have competitors, don’t get me wrong, but we don’t have 10 competitors. I mean, we, we hardly have five competitors in our, in our market. And the, the, the type of product, the quality of the product, the fitment, the fitment was always a big thing back in the day is you could buy stuff, but you pretty much had to rebuild it to get it to fit. And it drove me nuts because I dealt with some of that product. And we’ve always tried so very hard and we’re still human, like mistakes happen. It’s still hand fabricated stuff. But we’ve, we’ve always strived on trying to have the best fitting product, top it all off with a custom color powder coat that is, you know, out of this world and color options and, and quality and all that together.

5 (49m 14s):

And then when the website launched, and I think just the brand awareness, I mean, we started marketing a little bit. We started, you know, you get a clothing and apparel and going to shows and, you know, the ultimate call-out challenge started and you’re going to SHS and you’re going to P R I and you’re going to different diesel events that are going on and setting up a booth. We started doing all that around that 2017, 2018 area, which I look at it now. That was only four years ago, five years ago. But that’s when we really started pushing, you know, we had the manpower, we were able to, to push, you know, before then it was, we could barely keep our heads above water. And when we started marketing is when things really exploded. And then it’s like, oh my gosh.

5 (49m 54s):

And that’s when in 2017 the website launched. All that stuff’s going on, we need more space. So we started looking again for another building. I told my landlord, Hey, sorry I was gonna buy this place, but now I’m not because it’s not big enough and I don’t have any room to make it bigger. So that’s when we moved to DeKalb, to our first building in DeKalb. Luckily that’s only about 10 minutes down the road, so it wasn’t, it wasn’t a 40 minute track in the middle of winter because we moved shops again in January, best time of year to move in Illinois. And we moved from Sycamore to DeKalb. Unfortunately at this time there was not a lot available in the real estate market as far as shops in this size. Like you could find everything all day you wanted for 10,000 square feet.

5 (50m 35s):

And DeKalb is full of a hundred and 200,000 square foot warehouses for distribution. There was nothing at 30, 40, 50,000 square feet, which is, which is what I thought I needed. I thought if I can get 30 or 35,000 because we’re in 22 now, we’ll be good to go. So I found a building in DeKalb that was 35,000 square feet and we thought it was gonna be great. So we, we bought that building up and we moved in in January again, like I said, and that was 2018. And we thought that was great. We bought another powder coat oven, we bought another powder coat spray booth. We bought a, a wet booth so we could do all of our ceramic coating for all the exhaust components in-house, cuz we were still subletting all of the ceramic coat.

Holman (51m 16s):

Damn dude.

5 (51m 17s):

So we brought, we, we brought that in-house. And then the other big thing that happened for us in 2018 when we moved into this building is when we bought our first CNC machine. I had mentioned earlier, my one, my youngest brother, he had graduated school and we, we actually sent him off to school to do some computer programming and CNC courses. And in 2018 we bought our first CNC machine. We actually bought two, we bought a, a lathe and a mill in 2018. And my youngest brother Chad, runs a CNC shop now. So we moved into this new building in DeKalb. We had CNC machines, we had more powder code equipment and we had bigger space for fab. We had more office space for salesmen and, and marketing and and admin. And we had a bigger performance shop.

5 (51m 58s):

Everything was going great. It was awesome. We’re just, like I said, it’s just things are going great, busy as can be. And that’s when we put up the big concrete pad. Now where you mentioned earlier your, your story, the building we’re in now, that’s what happened next. Ah, so we, we, we were in that building in DeKalb on Harvester Drive. 35,000 square feet. We were in there for, we, every building we were in was about three to three and a half years. And then this February, January, January of, again, every time we move is in January, January of 2022. We moved into our, our current building, our our big building. Huh?

5 (52m 38s):

In 2020

Holman (52m 40s):

January of 2023. Lots of January stuff happening

5 (52m 45s):

In, in the summer of 2020, a lot down the street. Went up for sale and it was like 12 or 13, 12 acres. And the building we’re in now, we didn’t have any room to expand. So I knew if we were gonna keep growing at the rate we were, we gotta kind of start planning ahead. So I’m

Holman (53m 1s):

Now did you put a roof, did you put a roof over the entire 12 acres or did you leave any four like a backyard?

5 (53m 8s):

Only three. The acres, only three of the acres are under roof. Not all 12. No, so, so I knew that I had to start kind of planning ahead cuz we were already filling this place up, especially with the addition of the CNC equipment and the extra powder coat. I was starting to plan ahead. So we, I bought this piece of property and any sort of construction at this scale, it takes a long time. I started talking to realtors and, and contractors and they said, you know, you need 20, 24 months to, to build a building of what you’re talking about. I’m like, okay, I better start planning. So I bought that property in, in 2020 in the middle of Covid. And obviously when Covid happened, it’s like everything blew up even more. People are spending all their, all their checks they’re getting, and people are sitting at home and just spending more time on the internet ordering <unk> It seemed like the sales just went through the roof during Covid and we were busy and didn’t know what was gonna happen.

5 (54m 0s):

But I bought a piece of property and started planning the new building and we had our 10th anniversary in 2020. We actually held a, a big truck and tractor pull on our property in September of 2020. And the week after the truck pull, we started moving dirt and we broke ground on our building in that September. And then the following year, 2021 is when construction actually started. And essentially the year of 2021 is when the building was being built. And we moved in in January of 2022.

Holman (54m 32s):

And when were you elected mayor of DeKalb? When did that happen? So

5 (54m 37s):

The mayor visited us when we

Holman (54m 39s):

Moved in. No, no, no, no.

5 (54m 40s):

Ribbon cutting. He I did not become the mayor.

Holman (54m 42s):

That’s right. I’m sorry. He is, he is the chamber of commerce. Oh, he’s, oh, really? Entire chamber chamber really?

5 (54m 50s):

We actually, you, you keep talking like we’re the biggest ones in DeKalb, but in 2021 we were, we built 112,000 square foot building on our property. That’s what we’re in now. And that was like the, the, it was only the fourth largest building being built in DeKalb at the time. Our neighbor is Facebook and, and Amazon and Ferrara. And there’s

Holman (55m 12s):

Huge, that’s a thousand times bigger than this room. Yes, yes. And there,

5 (55m 17s):

There’s like 3 million square feet of new building that’s been built in, in our area where, where our shop is. So there’s a, a ton of industrial buildings in our area and we’re, we’re just a little peon really. Our building fits inside of these other buildings 20 times over. But it was still huge. And you know,

Holman (55m 35s):

I hope you have time to take your wife on vacation.

5 (55m 38s):

Oh, we’ve been on vacation. Yes. Don’t get me wrong. We, we take some time away. So yeah, that’s where we’re at now. We’re, we’re moved into the new shop and obviously, I mean, you check out our YouTube channel and we’ve done shop tours. We had a big open house this year where we had the place open and had a bunch of vendors and, and did a truck show. We had a

Holman (55m 57s):

Hundred. I’d go do that. Show up. What are you doing that again? Yeah, yeah.

5 (56m 0s):

We’re talking about doing one again. We might do one another year or so. I don know if I wanna do it every year, let

Holman (56m 5s):

Us know. Let’s know if we can make an I’d love to go out there. And I had, I had some friends that actually went out there and, and they said it was a really good event. Are you bearing the headline about having friends? I have a couple. We

5 (56m 16s):

Had people from all over made the trip. We had, we had guys drive close to 20 hours that made the trip out to it.

Holman (56m 22s):

Listen, lightning and I both have vehicles that get 10 miles to the gallon. We’ll ro shambo for it. And that’s

5 (56m 28s):

Perfect vehicle to take across the country.

Lightning (56m 29s):

Absolutely. I would freaking fly. We’re gonna fly. It’s like when we went to Miami, we’ll just do that again. Oh yeah. So at what point do you start taking on other manufacturer’s products? So for example, you know, you’ve got transmissions, you have, it’s not just the whirly product now you’ve supplemented with in, you know, fuel injection systems, et cetera.

5 (56m 52s):

Yeah, I mean, over the years we’ve built relationships just like anything else. I mean, when you’re selling turbo kits and Y ridge kits and, and intakes and everything else, like, oh, I needed some injectors too. Or I need a CP three pumper, I need tuning. I mean, everything goes along. You know, we’ve got a really good relationship with, you know, extra g performance over the years with our fuel system parts. You know, as I said earlier, calibrated power solution with a lot of our tuning and I mean, we do everything from Jeep suspension lift kits to, you know, cognito lift kits on trucks. You know, we’ve got an alignment rack and tire equipment and you know, we’ve got a 3000 square foot clean room, not 3000 square foot, like 2200 square foot. The size of my original building is like the size of our clean room where we build our engines and transmissions now.

5 (57m 35s):

So to give a perspective of the building I started in 10 years ago is now the size of the building that we just do our engines and transmissions then, which is pretty cool. So we do a ton of Allison builds, we do a ton of motor builds for D Max’s, you know, stock rebuilds, performance truck pulling stuff, all that in-house local machine shop that does machine work for us, but a lot of assembly on our own. When we moved into the new building, our, our biggest issue over the years is with our volume of orders is being able to keep up on the powder coating side of things. And some of our downfalls that we’ve had is, is long lead time on our product. Someone places an order and it takes, you know, you know, 30, 40 days to get a product because it’s just so much backlog in the shop.

5 (58m 17s):

And I’m proud to say we’ve finally gotten over that hurdle and we’ve got, we’ve got six ovens and four powder coat boots in our new shop and on top of ceramic coat and sandblasting and everything else we do. But we’ve actually finally got the equipment and the manpower in our powder coat division where our lead times are back down to you can place an order and, and get it in two weeks, which we haven’t been able to do that since 2000, probably 14 or 15. It’s been seven or eight years since we’ve been able to do that. So Wow. We’re really excited in the new shop. We were able to increase production capacity so much that we’re able to, we’ve got product on the shelf now, which we’ve never been able to do almost, you know, everything up until the last six months if you ordered it, it has to be powder coated or it has to be built.

5 (59m 4s):

Now we’ve got enough manpower and enough production capacity. We’ve got every one of our top moving product on the shelf ready to be powder coated or we have it on the shelf in some of our popular colors. We’re ready to ship out. I

Lightning (59m 18s):

Mean, you’ve got stuff, it’s so funny that Jason, like, so you and I, we, we have some of the same resellers, right? Internet drop shippers, stuff like that. And some of the little guys, dudes, I, I know two guys that are both auto shop teachers and by night they’re Facebook sellers. They go on and they lurk in the groups and the minute someone says, I’m looking for a pearl white wc, fab Weybridge, or I’m looking for the inter cooler pipe system or whatever,

5 (59m 44s):

Whatever. It’s Thanks Ram horn.

Lightning (59m 46s):

Yeah, ex that’s exactly right. Yeah. So they want a, a monster ram, right? A bank’s monster ram in white.

5 (59m 53s):

We’ve got, we got pallets of ’em on the

Lightning (59m 55s):

Shelf and, and that’s exactly, someone will go like, dude, I’ve got three of ’em in stock and it’s like a feeding frenzy. What I’m saying is there’s so much fervor over your product. So much fervor Yeah. Over, over getting it because yeah, there was these long lead times. So once someone actually got a pallet of your stuff, it was a feeding frenzy.

5 (1h 0m 14s):

Oh yeah. It’s gone before it hits the floor most of the time. Our dealers, we got a lot of great dealers, we got a lot of great vendors. I mean, and suppliers too. I mean there’s a lot of big names in the industry. Like I mentioned Cognito and banks are two of ’em where we buy their product raw just so we can put our custom color on it because the guy that’s buying our whole high flow bundle package for their duramax or Cummins, well I want the banks intake horn or I want the upper control arms for my duramax in the same color. Perfect. We got ’em on the shelf, we’ll powder coat ’em with the kit and it all ships out together. Or I wanna throw ’em in with my traction bars. You know, traction bars are another big thing for us. One of those longstanding products that we’ve made from day one that we still pump out today. You know, we, we ship, you know, dozens and dozens of traction bar kits a week and dozens and dozens of different colors.

5 (1h 0m 59s):

And it’s wild to be able to do it all in house. I mean, to think that you can, my brother Mitch, you know, there’s dozen plus people that work in the powder coat shop. We got an excellent team back there, but you know, we got three guys, four guys that powder coat that just spray powder. That’s all they do. And we spray, we can spray 20 colors a day sometimes, you know, 30, 40 racks of, of product because of all the different color variations. It’s, it’s absolutely wild. It’s a rainbow sometimes walking through that shop or it’s a day of WC Fab Red and it’s just a hundred or 300. Its

Lightning (1h 1m 32s):

Like a murder scene happen there.

5 (1h 1m 34s):

Yes. I mean, you’ve seen the pictures. I send you stuff sometimes when we got eight or 10 banks horns hanging up and all different colors and they, oh yeah, they’ll pay I’m sure to have the bank letters and a different color from the horn or they’ll pay extra to have the, the WC Fab logo because it’s, it’s just so customizable. Or they’ve got a, they’ve got a plan, they, they’ve got an idea on what they want their truck to be, or I’ve got these gold gold accents on my, on my truck there and I want ’em under the hood. So I wanna do the gold WC fab logo and when we do that kind of stuff, and

Lightning (1h 2m 6s):

Dude, it’s, it’s such an undertaking. So people ask us why, why we don’t do it in house at banks and it’s just such a massive undertaking to do that work for me. It’s just easier to say, go to go, go to Jason, he’s got these things. Yep. And he’ll put it any color of the Skittles rainbow. Hey, there’s something I wanna touch on really quick. I’m just curious. You’re in the performance space in diesel. We can’t not talk about emissions. I’m just curious Oh yeah. How you are handling it. You’ve been to sema, you know, the talks, you know, carb, you know, the whole process. Where is Worley in this equation? How are you handling it?

5 (1h 2m 42s):

I’m proud to say we’ve, we’ve been ahead of the curve for a while now. I mean, we’ve e we’ve all seen it coming and as much as I, I don’t wanna always feel like it’s a big thing the WC fab name is is is bigger in the industry. It’s not like we’re a nobody, we’re not on the we, it’s not like we’re not on their radar. I’d be stupid to think that, you know, they don’t know who WC Fab is. You know, we’ve been making product and everybody and their brother talks about us on every Duramax and Cummins for ’em. So, you know, years ago, obviously the, we, we’ve seen it happen. You got friends that own shops or friends that work at other shops and you hear about it through the grapevine, oh, so-and-so got a visitor, so-and-so got an rfi and, and you knew it was coming. And we’re not dumb. We, we go to sma like you said, you know, you listen to the speeches and, and you see all the amendments that the EPA gives out and all the talk and, and all the fines people are dealing with and it’s scary <unk> It’s, you know, I’m, I’m supporting 50 plus families on top of my own families and all my brother’s families.

5 (1h 3m 40s):

It’s, it’s not like I, this, you can’t be stupid about it here. Like, we don’t wanna be doing something so dumb that we gotta close our doors and I gotta lay off and, and put 50 people outta work. Like that’s the last thing I wanna do. And I, I’ve gotten ahead of the curve ball. Years ago we, we started changing our, our scope of our product. You know, like every diesel shop back in the day, we all did it. There isn’t a diesel shop that, that hasn’t, and they’d be lying to you if they, they say that they didn’t because everybody did it back in the day. Just like everybody cut catalytic converters off of their cars in the eighties and nineties. It, it’s just, it is the thing, and we’ve all moved past it. We’ve learned, we’ve watched people go down around you and if you’re smart, you’re gonna, you’re gonna make a wise decision and you’re gonna, you’re gonna get ahead of it and, and change.

5 (1h 4m 25s):

And we’ve done that. We’ve, we’ve actually discontinued a lot of product as of lately that, you know, was in the gray area, you know, trying to do it proactively. And we’ve actually spent a lot of time in the last year, two years probably now redesigning and redeveloping and re-releasing updated versions of our product that we’ve been known for. But emissions compatible, you know, you’ve got, I’ve got 3, 4, 4 engineers on my team that are constantly working on new product development and redesigning and improving of old existing product to bring it up to WC fab’s standards of today, because I’ll be honest, the way I built parts or the quality of parts I put out the door in 2010 isn’t the same as the quality of parts I put out the door today.

5 (1h 5m 11s):

It’s, it’s much better. It’s, it’s tenfold better. And sometimes that older product gets left in the dust and you gotta go back and, and and talk about, you know, do we just discontinue this or do we revisit it, update it, make it better and, and re rerelease it. And we’ve been doing a lot of that lately and we’re really excited and really proud of some of the new product we’ve got coming out in 2023. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff coming out that’s gonna be some industry first for our type of product where its emissions compatible. We, it’s maybe not 50 state legal hasn’t gone through the hoops at CARB yet, but you know, Nick and myself saw a hole in this industry. SEMA is the only company you can go to to get your product certified and after sema, you know, you get it 49 state certified fairly easy through sema and you gotta wait for Carve and you gotta go through the hoops to get the 50 state legal.

5 (1h 5m 59s):

So Nick and I, a couple years ago, or little over a year ago now, decided that, you know, we need to make the jump here and, and get into some, some stuff where we can get the equipment and, and do some of our own testing and do some third party testing. So we, we hired a guy that has some industry background, let’s say, and some industry knowledge and some chemistry and, and and backgrounds and that type of stuff and bought the equipment and we’re able to do testing just like SEMA now without the lag time of months and even up to a year or more to be able to put a stamp of approval on our product that it’s legal to sell and at least the 49 states before you go through the hoops with carb.

5 (1h 6m 39s):

So, you know, we’ve got a, a company we’re, we’re gonna be getting ready to announce here pretty soon. We’ve been doing testing for a while on our own stuff and doing some validating and slowly starting to do some testing for some other guys to be able to put a stamp of approval and, you know, reasonable basis for the EPA and, and make ’em happy while, while you wait for the backlog at at carb because it’s, it’s unbelievable that you gotta wait a year after you spend hundreds and hundreds of hours and thousands and tens of thousands of dollars designing a product, then you can’t sell it cuz you gotta wait for the government to tell you it’s okay to sell. We saw a knit or a hole in that and, and we sat out and we got all the equipment and we’ve got the Dino and we have a third party company that is able to do testing just like SEMA so that we can put a stamp of approval on our stuff and get it to market and sell it with at least known it’s 49 state legal and meets the reasonable basis that the EPA wants to see.

5 (1h 7m 33s):

And that’s huge for us because otherwise you’re kind of, you’re shooting in the dark hoping that they don’t knock on your door and whip you with a big fine because you can’t prove to ’em that this product you made is legal. It’s scary. I mean, it, it sucks, I’ll be honest. I’ve lost a lot of sleep for years now trying to find out the best way to work around this and, and expand our product offerings and our product lines to different bra, different markets, different trucks, different types of products that we, we never produced in the past and we do now just to try and we wanna keep our guys busy. You know, I’ve, I’m proud to say I’ve never laid anyone off in 12 years of doing business. Hey,

Holman (1h 8m 12s):

When you launch your new company, will it be something of of interest with our truck show podcast audience?

5 (1h 8m 17s):

Yeah, I think so. I mean it’s, it’s not something that your end consumer probably gives a shit about because most of the end consumers out there have the F D E P A mentality, but us business owners, us manufacturers and our resellers and distributors, you can’t have that mentality cuz we’re the ones with our ass on the line. I

Holman (1h 8m 36s):

Think we’re changing that. I I I think over the years of the podcast of education and, and warnings and well fateful storytelling of people been on the wrong side of it. I think that, that, that mentality is slowly changing. But I’m asking, I agree. I would love for you to come back on when you’re ready to talk about the new business and, and, and give us an update and we’ll, we’ll have you back to talk and tell the audience about it.

5 (1h 8m 58s):

I’m sure Nick and myself would both be interested in doing that. It’d be awesome.

Holman (1h 9m 1s):

We put a lot of, yeah, we love to have Nick back on.

5 (1h 9m 2s):

I’ve a lot of time and a lot of money and getting it up and going and anybody who’s ever looked into doing any sorts of emissions testing to the standards that the EPA looks for, knows it’s not a cheap endeavor. And it’s been a battle, but we’ve gotten it and we’ve got the right guys working on it and on our side with it and it’s awesome. And like I said, the consumers might not care so much about it. I agree with you that people’s ideas have changed. They’ve seen guys like Corey Willis go through the <unk> they’re going through and know that it’s serious. It’s not just <unk> and move on because it, it is a big deal and it affects a lot of people. I mean, we all know it’s a very huge industry that performance aftermarket and it’s not gonna just go away.

5 (1h 9m 42s):

We’ve gotta shape and mold, unfortunately to meet the government’s demands. You know, we all gotta pay.

Lightning (1h 9m 47s):

I have a question.

5 (1h 9m 48s):

Their

Lightning (1h 9m 49s):

Rules, I I, I’m Diane asked this, so, and I do agree with Holman, this is lightning. I agree with Holman that we are one of the few that are trying to shape the conversation, right? Saying that if you guys want to kill the diesel performance industry, then keep saying f the government because eventually the government’s gonna win. Why? Because they can out

Holman (1h 10m 8s):

Spend money more time

Lightning (1h 10m 10s):

Because they can outspend all of us resources, right? They have infinite resources. Take everyone to court and bar us. But let me ask you this, you are known as like the guy that was building the big horsepower, winning the races and you were part of that quote unquote delete crew, right? So now it’s on you to help spread the word and explain to the F D E P A guy, what’s the conversation like between you and the guy? It’s like, Jason, I want this device that’s gonna like, I don’t care if it, if it rolls Kohler, I don’t care like f the man, blah, blah. How do you have that conversation? You’re like, I’m not going to jail for you. Like what do you, what do you say to this guy to convince him and he needs to come up into 2023?

Lightning (1h 10m 51s):

You know what I mean?

5 (1h 10m 51s):

Well, believe it or not, I mean, you see all the keyboard warriors and you see all the guys talk online and all the, all the fp f the EPA guys and the conversation actually happens a lot easier than you think. And you know, we’ve got a sales team, we got half a dozen guys that are on the phone and dealing with people face-to-face on a daily basis. And honestly it was, it was a big hurdle to try and get over that years ago when we put the kibosh on doing that kind of stuff as far as deleting trucks, quote unquote, you know, that’s, we haven’t done that for years. And everyone thought, oh my God, we’re not even gonna have any work. Like, what are we gonna do? And it was like nothing really changed. Like you had the conversations and the guys carried on, they either went somewhere else and got it done by the other guy down the street that’s probably outta business now.

5 (1h 11m 34s):

Or you sold him on the intact tuning and all the other product that we still sell that you can still make power with and still get better fuel economy with and still, you know, pop the hood and have something to show off. Like the conversation actually happens a lot easier than you thought you would. And it was a much easier transition than we would’ve expected. If you would’ve me this question four or five years ago, I would’ve laughed at you and said, oh yeah, that’s never gonna happen. But obviously times have changed and they’ve changed quickly and it’s unfortunately it’s taken this big impact in the industry for people to really get the big picture. But the more you talk about it and guys like you, you know, podcasts like this and, and people that are vocal about it, it, it makes a difference. And I, I’m proud to say, you know, honestly, we, we did emissions Intact stuff a long time ago.

5 (1h 12m 19s):

We built twin turbo emissions, intact turbo kits. There’s still video on YouTube. In my very, very beginning of this story, that first 2000 square foot shop in 2013, I built emissions intact twin turbo kit 630 horsepower on an on L M L Duramax DFI Live came out for L M L I think it was in 2013, it wasn’t. But a couple months after that we had built a twin turbo kit with all the emissions intact on that truck and it was making over 600 horsepower. But nobody gave a <unk> about it back then. Nobody cared about it. Nobody wanted to buy it because it just, the market was so different then. Well,

Holman (1h 12m 58s):

And I, I think part of it too is, is there’s the, the, the measuring contest, right? They’re not impressed with the acumen of engineering that went in to make that happen. Because back then it was all about rolling coal and to like GA point,

5 (1h 13m 10s):

It was huge. And we got like no credit for it. Like there was no interest. It was, and it wasn’t just me, it was Nick calibrated powers a huge part of it. I mean tuning a set up like that emissions intact crazy on let alone on a brand new model that was never gonna be cracked and

Holman (1h 13m 23s):

You were ahead of your time is the problem. And people like Gail had said for years, every time you blow black smoke, it’s wasted horsepower potential because that’s unburned fuel. And part of that education started there and I think people today are more tech savvy. Part of it is because the trucks themselves are more complicated and have forced people to be more tech savvy. Part of it is government regulation has required the trucks be more complicated. So you need to understand

5 (1h 13m 47s):

I’m excited to see the change though. Yeah. Because I know it can be done because we did it nine, nine, almost 10 years ago, nine and a half years ago we did it. Yeah. But no one bought it and it was like a slap in the face, like well <unk> all that effort. It went for nothing. Well, you have to remember, and to, to back it up again, we did it again in 2015. We took a 2015 lml and did it again with an emissions intact twin turbo Kitt. It had a CP four stroker pump, it had oversized injectors. We made 740 horsepower emissions intact. Yep. On an L M L Duramax in 2015. That

Holman (1h 14m 20s):

Should be part of your story of what you guys have accomplished over the years of the company and be like, we were the first to do this. We were one of the originals. If,

Lightning (1h 14m 28s):

If you go back and you listen to like, and not to have like the, the Jason and Gail story here, but when Gail was working, he and another guy were lobbying carb back in the seven, late seventies, early eighties. No one cared. Like literally no one cared. Gail’s like, I have a feeling that if we don’t try and get ahead of this and get emissions testing set in stone at carb, that they won’t, we’ll never be able to make equipment that will ever pass. The only people with pockets deep enough to make aftermarket parts or any parts for diesel will be the oes. And no one cared. And then, and it got so bad that just a couple of years ago, there’s memes about Gail and he’s the man, he’s the guy in Scooby-Doo that they unmask and he’s the, you know, oh yeah.

Lightning (1h 15m 18s):

You know,

5 (1h 15m 19s):

Like the paid churns and he’s the, he’s the enemy.

Lightning (1h 15m 21s):

He’s the enemy. Like it’s all of that. And he’s like, dude, if it weren’t for you guys, you back 12 years ago or whatever it was, making an emissions compliant compound turbo system or Gail in the eighties fighting for this <unk> would never exist. But you gotta be the punching bags every once in a while, which sucks. Yeah,

5 (1h 15m 41s):

I know. Again, I, everyone gets depressed talking about it and oh my God, can’t delete my truck. Like all my trucks, aside from the actual trucks that we race in truck pole, they’ve all got emissions on ’em and we drive ’em around and like, I enjoy a quiet truck that doesn’t smell like whatever. It still makes 700 horsepower on the street. It’s wild. It’s a blast. Like we we’re still making mid 700 horsepower easy with bolt on components and tuning and the emissions intact and still decent regen cycles. You know, it’s not like you’re regen in every 200 miles. You’re still going 5, 6, 700 miles on a regen. You know, it’s wild. And we’re kind of excited because, you know, we had to recently shut off some of our twin turbo offerings that we sold as race only components.

5 (1h 16m 24s):

But it, again, it was that product that fell in the gray area that, that doesn’t qualify. So we just bit the bullet and said we can’t offer no more. But we’re excited because we are taking these turbo kits. Like I said, we, we did it in 2013 and we did it in 15 and it, the, the project got scrapped. We built like a dozen kits and we couldn’t hardly give ’em away. People didn’t want ’em. But we’re taking that product and we’re going back to the drawing board and we’re bringing it back up to today’s standards and our, our design and our engineering and our new equipment, we’re excited to re-release in the future, in the near future here. Hopefully compound turbo kits that are legit, that have a green stamp of approval that are 49 even potentially 50 state legal.

5 (1h 17m 4s):

And a guy can actually go buy his brand new truck and put a turbo kit on it and say he has twin turbos and be happy. Cuz there’s still plenty of guys out there with brand new trucks. Not everyone wants to delete their trucks. All the guys that wanna delete, you know, they talk loud on the internet and I’m not, I’m not talking bad about those people, but they make the biggest noise. There’s way more people, there’s just as many if not more people, way more that are way more happy with an emissions intact

Holman (1h 17m 28s):

Truck. Way more people. And honestly, the headache that you’re avoiding, I mean the factory trucks come with so much power now, really the issue isn’t the amount of power they put out, it’s drivability. And if you can improve drivability and give a guy a a little bit of a bragging right and they don’t have to worry about emissions and the headaches that come with that, you’re, you’re winning right there.

5 (1h 17m 49s):

And then of course you got a boost gauge and needs to hit 60 too. Well

Holman (1h 17m 52s):

That too, that too. Well dude, thank you for coming on because that’s a ton of information. I wanna talk to you when your next venture is ready to be discussed cuz we’d love to have you and Nick on. I think it would be awesome.

5 (1h 18m 4s):

Yeah, I think there’d probably be a lot of shops out there that, I mean, everyone you, you read and you talk about if you’re a shopper, a manufacturer, about how scary it is to work with SEMA and the, the cost of it and the lead time and the moving vehicles back and forth and, you know, we’ve got a fleet of vehicles between myself and Nick. We, we believe we’re gonna be able to come in a little more affordable for that than Sema comparably. We’re not running quite as big on operation as them and offer another alternative for these manufacturers that maybe aren’t the size of my shop or the size of of banks, but the small time guys. But they still need to get their product stamped so they can sell it. And we’re hoping that we can be a, be an option for those guys to get something done a little quicker and a little more affordable in the near future here.

5 (1h 18m 47s):

And I’m excited to talk to you guys about it when we’re, when we’re ready to give more detail.

Lightning (1h 18m 51s):

Jason Worley doing the Lord’s work.

5 (1h 18m 54s):

I hope I

Holman (1h 18m 55s):

Go that far. And also being the mayor of DeKalb

Lightning (1h 18m 58s):

For people. Yep. Yep. Being the mayor of DeKalb

Holman (1h 19m 0s):

Lord’s work, the mayor of DeKalb.

5 (1h 19m 2s):

Here’s this podcast. He’s gonna be concerned.

Holman (1h 19m 6s):

Well all brother. Well well thank you so much for your time and dude stoked on the success. Glad you made the effort to come on and let us waste that valuable time that you have.

5 (1h 19m 21s):

Hey, no, it wasn’t a waste. I know I’ve been trying to hook up for a while here and have a show and it hasn’t worked out. It’s 1130 here where I’m at, but that’s no big deal. We’ll still make it happen.

Lightning (1h 19m 31s):

It’s not the first time you stayed up this late working, so.

5 (1h 19m 34s):

Nope. Certainly isn’t. My wife’s not concerned. She knows. She knows. That’s just how I am. It’s it’s how it goes sometimes.

Holman (1h 19m 40s):

Oh yeah. Mine’s in bed right now because she goes to bed at about eight o’clock,

Lightning (1h 19m 44s):

Eight 30 mine too.

Holman (1h 19m 45s):

And we doesn’t,

Lightning (1h 19m 47s):

She’s like, I don’t care how hard you’re working. Yeah.

Holman (1h 19m 49s):

Yep. Just don’t wake me up when

Lightning (1h 19m 50s):

You get home. Nope. Tippy toe in.

5 (1h 19m 52s):

We’re leaving in the morning. We’re leaving in the morning for p i. We got a big show ahead of us this weekend we’re excited about and it’ll be a good time. Awesome.

Lightning (1h 19m 59s):

Awesome brother. All right, have fun and we will, we’ll catch up soon.

5 (1h 20m 2s):

Thanks a lot guys. It was good talking to you.

Holman (1h 20m 4s):

All right. All right. Talk to you soon later.

5 (1h 20m 5s):

See ya.

Lightning (1h 20m 8s):

Hey, you have a Chucky cheese on your block.

Holman (1h 20m 10s):

Look to your right. What’d you see?

Lightning (1h 20m 12s):

I have, oh Hans, look at that. Oh, that used to be an old Taco Bell or something right back in the day.

Holman (1h 20m 18s):

No, I don’t. It was, I can’t remember. It wasn’t, it’s got an aframe roof. Yeah, but it wasn’t, that’s not what it was.

Lightning (1h 20m 23s):

Was it an OG Wiener? Schnitzel?

Holman (1h 20m 25s):

Nope. It’s a different building than a wiener Schnitzel. Hmm. Did ice cream and stuff? Is it tasty freeze or something? Oh,

Lightning (1h 20m 31s):

That’s the tasty freeze. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Real tall. A-frame style building. Hmm. What else you got around here?

Holman (1h 20m 39s):

Look around. Oh,

Lightning (1h 20m 40s):

No way. No freaking way. Two blocks from your house is a wiener schnitzel.

Holman (1h 20m 46s):

I think people have missed that. The old studio was so close to wiener schnitzel and I’m pretty sure that they miss Wiener schnitzel talk.

Lightning (1h 20m 53s):

They miss, I was talking about wiener schnitzel eating chili

Holman (1h 20m 56s):

Dogs. So I’m rolling. I’m

Lightning (1h 20m 57s):

Feeling that that’s, that’s not the

Holman (1h 20m 58s):

Case because I think this is what we’re gonna do with season two and trying to test out, you know, new ideas and new segments. Inbox and chili dogs.

Lightning (1h 21m 8s):

I’m down for

Holman (1h 21m 8s):

That and if they don’t like it, we won’t do it again. But right now I’m really hungry and we’re driving around so, all

Lightning (1h 21m 13s):

Right, what are we gonna order?

Holman (1h 21m 14s):

Yeah, can I get two chili dogs beef or regular? Regular two chili dogs. Okay, we’ll do two Chili cheese dogs. Okay. And two regular Dr Peppers.

Lightning (1h 21m 28s):

What? What about fries? Why don’t you get the combo? You gotta get the combo. What are you high.

Holman (1h 21m 33s):

All right. Can you make those combo?

Lightning (1h 21m 36s):

This guy’s not enthusiastic to have us as clients.

Holman (1h 21m 39s):

Yeah. Two number ones but one with cheese. I mean that was a cheese and one not cheese. Correct. Okay. One out Dr. Pepper. That’ll do it. Great. Thank you.

Lightning (1h 21m 47s):

Damn, I forgot coupons.

Holman (1h 21m 48s):

Dude, here’s the deal. I was trying to protect you from yourself and you had to go ruin it with fries. What

Lightning (1h 21m 53s):

Are you talking about? Protect me for myself. What? What?

Holman (1h 21m 55s):

Yeah, you don’t need to be any fatter.

Lightning (1h 21m 56s):

I want fries, wiener. Shit.

Holman (1h 21m 58s):

The problem is that this place is far too close to the new podcast studio. Yeah

Lightning (1h 22m 1s):

It is. Oh,

Holman (1h 22m 2s):

We’re gonna be completely fricking fat.

Lightning (1h 22m 6s):

You think the guy serving our food at Wiener Schnitzel knows that he’s in the presence of podcasting royalty?

Holman (1h 22m 15s):

I don’t think I’m even aware of that fact.

Lightning (1h 22m 17s):

How about podcasting court Chesters.

Holman (1h 22m 20s):

Okay, thank you. Alright, I am ready for a plea dog and some

Lightning (1h 22m 25s):

Email. What do you say? Let’s do it.

3 (1h 22m 27s):

You email? Yeah, I email. Do it. We email. That’s right. Everybody email type it up. You email proofread. I email Send it. We email. Click it. Everybody

8 (1h 22m 41s):

Email

Lightning (1h 22m 47s):

Your nice hot pro. Oh my god. Ride. Those are fresh. Damn, those are hot. Woo-hoo.

Holman (1h 22m 51s):

Whoa. Crash.

Lightning (1h 22m 53s):

Dang it. Those are right out of the fryer.

Holman (1h 22m 56s):

All

Lightning (1h 22m 56s):

Right. This has nice bright L e D white lights in here so I can read really clearly.

Holman (1h 23m 1s):

Patrick Hines says, congrats email for distro list and show ideas. Hey guys, just wrapped up the the final Embargo show and wanted to first of all say congratulations on the new Endeavor. I’ve been a loyal listener since show four or six or something around there and eagerly listening weekly while on the road for wireless tower construction sidewalks. Thank you for the free entertainment, which I look forward to weekly. Anyways, figured I’d throw out some show ideas for the new year with the changes coming. You touched on Aim Industries a few shows ago and we all remember the Fbss setups for 4 99 with their 40 page ads. Some deep diving into that company or the mini truck scene in general. First car truck was my 98 s 10 regular cab fleet side. Sadly no bags on my high school dry cleaner job salary, but eventually got to two three Bell Tech drop with a Z Q eight coils on some nice 18 inch wheels

Lightning (1h 23m 46s):

Bell Tech solid.

Holman (1h 23m 47s):

I’ll never forget the call from my college mail room when I got Leaf Springs and spindles delivered to my dorm telling me they had no way to get them over to my room and I had to come pick them up at the loading dock. APC would also be some fun history of rising and falling, not failing because I still to this day love me some clear corners and tails. Oh

Lightning (1h 24m 2s):

My God. APC was like way before spider and all those other brands.

Holman (1h 24m 6s):

APC is another piece of crap. That’s what we called them in the magazine world piece of crap. Yeah. Because everything was cheap Chinese and horrible.

Lightning (1h 24m 13s):

Mm. But they had clears when everyone wanted to get rid of the

Holman (1h 24m 15s):

Everybody Al Teza. That was the thing. Ooh, Al

Lightning (1h 24m 18s):

Zaza. Yep. Was it just a made up brand?

Holman (1h 24m 19s):

No. Toyota Al Teza Oh was the Is of Japan. And it had was the first production car that kind of had that style of crow. All the clears, all the chrome with the clear and the the red lights. And so everybody wanted the quote Al Teza style taillights and APC brought ’em. They sure did. All foggy and everything after your first car wash. Oh yeah. All right. Moving right along. Also, Brad Deber and his dad, who I believed owned trans bill grills from a few years ago. They seemed like good pair.

Lightning (1h 24m 44s):

They, let me pause you right there. I spoke to Brad and his father about a week and a half

Holman (1h 24m 49s):

Ago. I’ve spoken to them twice as semen. They said anytime and then we never followed

Lightning (1h 24m 53s):

Up. And I did the same thing about two weeks ago and they’re in

Holman (1h 24m 56s):

And we haven’t followed up. Says they seem like a good pair. And the tie and mini truckers never seem to hurt. I’m sure you guys will come up with tons of great content and hopefully some more relaxed rains will allow the juices to flow. Unfortunate phrasing. Anyway, I know you are working on the merch game. I would ask that you try to include three xl, four XL for some of your bigger fans. Might be tough to stock, but pre-sales help. Just saying also I prefer a flex fit hat over snapback. Mainly because I can’t stand the gap between the forehead and the face of the hat. Just food for thought. By the way, Patrick, I’m in the exact same way. I only wear flexed hats. I do not wear Snapbacks at all ever. I refuse

Lightning (1h 25m 30s):

To. Yeah. I had to make one’s truck show podcast ones just for

Holman (1h 25m 34s):

Holman. Yep. That’s the only way I wear it. And it’s actually replaced my quote unquote purple four-wheeler hat that everybody laughs at. That has been on my head for 15 years.

Lightning (1h 25m 41s):

It wasn’t purple. It was some kind of weird brown stain

Holman (1h 25m 43s):

Going, no, it’s blue. It’s a light blue cuz of the uv.

Lightning (1h 25m 46s):

I don’t know what it is anymore. It’s not a normal, it’s not a naturally occurring color, I’ll tell

Holman (1h 25m 51s):

You it’s not. It’s been, it’s a four continents. It’s been all over the world. It’s been in freezing temperatures, the hottest temperatures in the desert. It’s protected my head for a number of years. And now my covering of choice is my brand new truck show podcast, flex Fit Hat, which I’m hoping we can offer on the, on the merch site. He continues speaking of food with the location being relocated to the backyard, maybe some TSP barbecue for an any in-studio guest TSP brand

Lightning (1h 26m 16s):

TB barbecue

Holman (1h 26m 16s):

Sauce. That’s what he said. TSP branded Dr. Pepper barbecue sauce. Hmm hmm. Okay. Don’t hate that

Lightning (1h 26m 23s):

Idea. I don’t hate it either,

Holman (1h 26m 24s):

But I don’t

Lightning (1h 26m 25s):

Like we should team up with gringo Bandido Dexter from Offspring on Gringo band hp. Well he’s not anymore. I mean he lives in havoc

Holman (1h 26m 32s):

Businesses. Yeah

Lightning (1h 26m 33s):

It is. I know the guy that runs

Holman (1h 26m 34s):

It’s right off Warner. Well

Lightning (1h 26m 35s):

Then, right. Maybe we should team up with him for something. Bucks from here. Hot sauce.

Holman (1h 26m 38s):

He continues. I’m rambling at this point. So in any case, just have fun with it. You’re combining efforts and long hours are hopefully paying off. Thank you for the continued shows and for both entertaining while teaching this gearhead way more than the specs or sales pitches. But the real BS aside honesty, five stars,

9 (1h 26m 52s):

Bus reveal, five stars

Holman (1h 26m 56s):

And finna buddy. Yeah buddy to the pod shed and beyond. Thanks Patrick Hines. Thanks buddy, we appreciate that. I’m gonna use your email to soak up the Dr. Pepper that’s spilled all out of my soda here. New

Lightning (1h 27m 8s):

Listener thoughts on the 88 to 98 Chevy from Jackson Frobel. Hey guys, my name is Jackson. I found your podcast a few days ago and love it so far. I’m not sure if you’ve done a segment on the 88 to 98 Chevys. And if you have, forgive me as I haven’t gotten that far. Listen to the last few episodes, then went straight to the beginning anyway. I’m just wondering what you guys think of the 80 18 98 O B S Chevy. I heard you mention all the other newer trucks and that’s awesome, but nothing about the O Bs Chevy picture. Below is my 98 K 1500 that I’ve been building over the last four years so far. I’ve done an old school, early two thousands, Rancho three inch upper control arm lift, rear springs threequarter ton, and one ton springs put together. Swapped out the 4 0 60 E four A, an NV 4,505 speed.

Lightning (1h 27m 52s):

Yeah, 33 12 and a half fifteens on old school, 15 by 10 American racing rims, a floor pan, both rockers and cab corners front pump. And now it’s all torn apart to put a five three Ls in it. Anyhow, figured I’d share my project with you. Hope all is well. And for lightning chill bro, lights are supposed to melt the snow.

Holman (1h 28m 13s):

All right, I like this

Lightning (1h 28m 14s):

Guy. Five stars as usual. And that’s from the hills of Vermont, Jackson Frobel. PS please excuse the disaster of my garage. Feel free to post on your Facebook page if you like. And that is a pretty damn sweet truck. It’s hard to tell when black and white on these printouts, but the engine looks pretty, pretty nice as well. So congrats on It’s an Ls, it’s an L. Yeah,

Holman (1h 28m 32s):

Congrats. Listen

Lightning (1h 28m 33s):

On the, on the build there,

Holman (1h 28m 34s):

Right? That’s awesome. We love O Bs Chevys. I think the 88 to 98 is a modern classic for them. It’s one of the best trucks out there except for that stupid off-centered steering wheel. But they had definitely the, if not the best interiors. They had a decent interior as toward the end of that run. And obviously the Chevy small block was a staple in that platform for its entire existence. Just I, I would, I think that truck with the Ls is awesome. So yeah dude, kudos to you. All right, got this one from Peter t. Says New year, new use Lighting home. And congrats on ownership of the podcast and truck famous llc.

Lightning (1h 29m 7s):

I dropped a fry,

Holman (1h 29m 7s):

I heard the jingle in my head each time you said it. Looking forward to the new merch. The timing is right to add to my Warren Truck Show podcast shirt from the old KA Motor Trend cough shop. Good luck on the new things to come. I also dislike the name Pod shed, but I don’t know a better option. Pod shop. Cash shop. Who knows? Keep up the good work and mount those parameters.

10 (1h 29m 27s):

Monitor key engine parameters.

Holman (1h 29m 30s):

Peter Ps add me to the newsletter. So we’ll, we’ll ask you guys when the newsletter gets up. We’re trying to get everything set up right now, but there will be a newsletter probably through MailChimp or something like that. So as soon as we’re up and running with our new infrastructure, we’ll make that happen. And then

Lightning (1h 29m 46s):

You call it an infrastructure.

Holman (1h 29m 47s):

Yeah, that’s what it is. Our, our infrastructure of the business. Right? So I think the other thing is when you guys are asking about have we ever talked about this make or that make a truck and and about ’em, we’re working on some really cool podcasts, spinoffs and extensions that we’ll tell you about when it’s closer. But I think you guys will be pretty stoked with what we come out with. So got a few things brewing. It’s not just gonna be this show. There’ll be some other cool stuff in there as well that hopefully will make you laugh and, and keep you

Lightning (1h 30m 12s):

Educated. Hold on,

Holman (1h 30m 13s):

You guys stop eating french fries for a minute. I’m going to hold on long enough to read

Lightning (1h 30m 16s):

Putting this

Holman (1h 30m 17s):

Down sentence from Ray. One second.

Lightning (1h 30m 18s):

Alright. Pod shed. Nay <unk> That’s from rb. Oh Pod Cave he suggests and no, the answer is no. I don’t like Pod shed Pod Cave Pod garage. I don’t like pod anything. Think it’s all dumb.

Holman (1h 30m 35s):

Well

Lightning (1h 30m 36s):

Thanks

Holman (1h 30m 37s):

Ray. So far Pod, pod shed is what’s trending and most people, most listeners have been referring to it as

Lightning (1h 30m 43s):

Cuz you started it. That’s right. Just cuz it it it’s bad. Doesn’t mean it’s good.

Holman (1h 30m 48s):

Just because it’s bad

Lightning (1h 30m 49s):

It doesn’t, doesn’t mean it’s good. All right,

Holman (1h 30m 51s):

Great. Hey truck show likes Blake Prickett says Hey Lady and Holman. I wanted to get in on that newsletter for sure. I like the truck new section and to hear y’all’s opinion on trucks coming out and old trucks. I have two questions for y’all as well. What’s the better motor option in the F-150 35 Eco Booster, five liter coyote. Also, what are some of the MOS that y’all think truck owners should stop doing? Five stars.

9 (1h 31m 12s):

Bus reveal. Five stars.

Holman (1h 31m 16s):

Yeah buddy.

Lightning (1h 31m 18s):

Yay buddy.

Holman (1h 31m 20s):

And thank y’all for a great show. And that comes from Blake Prickett. I think the three five EcoBoost and five liter coyote are for two different customers. I think if I had to say the Gen one trucks that had that option against each other, I’d probably go five liter Coyote. I think if you’re towing a lot, the coyote to me is better because it’s got more displacement. The peak power numbers aren’t as much as the EcoBoost, but you also don’t have to worry about those turbos and the e GTS and things like that. If you’re towing close to your, your towing gross combined weight rating limit. If you’re towing mild trailers medium and you want a little bit better fuel economy, I think the three five EcoBoost is great. Obviously the tuning potential that EcoBoost is there on the current trucks.

Holman (1h 32m 3s):

I still think the five liter is a great choice. Again, it, it comes down to what your use case is. And if you’re into modding, they both have some really great solutions. You can buy a tune as Holman alluded there for the three five and for the five Oh, you can put a Whipple on it. I mean the sky’s the limit for both of ’em. Yeah, I think, do you For me, I’d rather have the, the VH sound and the fuel economy is better than the three five. Yeah, I would agree with that. As long as you’re not in boost. But the second you’re in boost, like towing a big trailer up a grade. Yeah. 3, 3 5 tanks compared to five meter. You buying a three five to pull a 27 foot travel trailer. Not absolutely. Absolutely. You are. Yeah. Really? That’s Ford’s premium engine.

Holman (1h 32m 43s):

That’s their top line engine. Is that, I get it. But like, aren’t you buying your like a, you’re getting a a three liter duramax before you’re gonna get an eco? Not if you’re not, if you’re not a GM person, well then be a GM person. Well, that’s, that wasn’t the question. And this email from Ryan Evans and now this is largely just a photo and it’s a Beamer truck, it’s a bmw, it’s kinda rad. That is a BMW three series, what’s referred to as the E 30 body style and everything from the B pillar back is a pickup truck and it has a roof rack on it or a cab over, you know, rack over the bed portion. And it has, what is those probably eighteens with performance tires. And I’m gonna say those are seventeens.

Holman (1h 33m 24s):

It looks awesome. I never thought an E 30 could look so cool. Someone do that. Wow. I don’t know, but it, I’m not, I don’t hate it. But that, that took a lot of work to do this. Yeah. And I still don’t hate it. Look at the back. He’s got a tubular bumper in the back. Yeah, I know. Nothing’s rad. Actually. He took, yeah, he took off the plastic and, and just, well you remember this wrapped a piece of No, no, no. You remember pom around it? No, no, no. You remember those E 30 s had a metal bumper, wasn’t part of the body styling. Oh, that’s right. And so he just unbolted it and put on the tube. Yeah. Huh. BMW truck. Huh? Rock on. All right. Yourself enough of these letters. What do you say? We get into some news, right?

11 (1h 34m 2s):

What’s new in trucks? We need to know what’s new in trucks. We need to know what’s new in trucks. We

4 (1h 34m 10s):

Need to know lifted, lowered and everything in between. What’s happening in the world

Holman (1h 34m 16s):

Of trucks? I mean, there’s so much to talk about. So I guess, did you hear about any of it? Nope. Did you just, you didn’t even do a sound clip there. That was literally you fighting off Wier schnitzel trying to come out of your body. It was wiener. Schnitzel or your body. One or two were, one was rejecting the other. I don’t know which way, but that was normally, it normally play my mouth or my pores. Normally you would play a drop and he didn’t. You just went bra. You just had sound and you tried to form it into a No and it was not successful. Which is hilarious. No, I have not heard. I’m gonna play a drop on the next one. Okay. Ram revolution concept onset ces.

Holman (1h 34m 58s):

What’d

Lightning (1h 34m 58s):

You think? I posted it on her

Holman (1h 34m 59s):

Facebook page. What’d you think? You think

Lightning (1h 35m 1s):

I really like it?

Holman (1h 35m 3s):

It’s four wheel steering, two motors. It is envisioned to have a, you know, 500 mile range. But the concept didn’t have the gas range extender, which I’m told is coming to the production version. Really? So I don’t know if it’s 500 miles from a charge or 500 miles total when you take into the gas engine and it has a 800 volt architecture where most of the EVs today are 400 volt, which means faster charging, things like that. So on the right equipment you can get a hundred miles and 10 minutes. So that’s a big thing for, for ram. You know, kind of like how you can fast charge your iPhone, you know, in the, for like 70% and 30 minutes or something like that. Similar kind of idea on the revolution.

Holman (1h 35m 44s):

Less grill, more LEDs. There’s LEDs everywhere, including the RAM logo on the door.

Lightning (1h 35m 48s):

Well I’m not hearing how you felt about it cuz I, I’m getting there. Really liked it. And this is again from a guy who is, I guess I own a ram, but I, I’m traditionally not a big Ram fan, meaning I’m not a ram homer, but this is good looking and I like some of the styling cues they pulled in. I feel like they took a little bit of the rivian and a little bit of the cyber truck. I don’t you’re gonna say no, I

Holman (1h 36m 8s):

Don’t see Rivian and I don’t see, I see the RIV truck at all. What I, I see the rivian, I see the GMs for sure.

Lightning (1h 36m 13s):

Where the, where

Holman (1h 36m 14s):

I see Badger, iola badger. Oh I

Lightning (1h 36m 17s):

Do

Holman (1h 36m 17s):

See Badger. I don’t see cyber truck.

Lightning (1h 36m 19s):

Oh my God, you’re right.

Holman (1h 36m 21s):

Badger.

Lightning (1h 36m 22s):

I’d

Holman (1h 36m 22s):

Forgotten about that. And it doesn’t even look like a ram to me. Like if, if we’re sitting there looking at a ram or somebody showed me and it had no logos on it, I wouldn’t say Ram like nothing about it screams ram. It doesn’t have the drop fenders on it. It’s beautiful. One of the magazines called it brutal, like brutally beautiful, which I think is probably good. It’s super aggressive. It’s got 35 inch tires. It’s on 20 fours and the little Ram center cap stay level like a Rolls-Royce when you drive. That’s cool. Which is kind of cool. There’s a lot of interesting stuff. It’s long and mean looking, but it’s actually only four inches longer than I think a mega cab in terms of the cab. And it’s on the S T L A frame, which is,

Lightning (1h 36m 59s):

Don’t blow that off. Like the mega cab is freaking monstrous. Well

Holman (1h 37m 3s):

It’s stupid, but this thing has such a short overhang on it compared to a regular ram because it doesn’t have the engine that they kind of moved everything forward. So you still have a similar bed space and all that kind of stuff. It’s on the TLA frame, which is their skateboard, but it’s a, it’s a steel frame, like a body on frame truck. So it’s their body on frame architecture for heavy duty things and you know, all their heavy duty vehicles and SUVs. It’s long and mean. It’s cool. I just don’t know if it’s Ram Now

Lightning (1h 37m 30s):

When you say long and mean, you can put an 18 foot two by four all the way down, down

Holman (1h 37m 35s):

The center of it has a pass through. It’s got a mid gate, it’s got a gate to the front. In the front. Although the front’s a lot smaller than some of the other vehicles and this is only a two motor where Rivian is a four motor and you can get a three motor and an F-150 is two motor enough? I don’t know this. That’s just, it’s the concept. There’s a lot of concepty stuff on there that, I

Lightning (1h 37m 53s):

Guess it depends what type of of motors and yeah,

Holman (1h 37m 56s):

This has four wheel steering up to a 15

Lightning (1h 37m 58s):

Degree. Four motors does not equal better necessarily.

Holman (1h 37m 60s):

No, no, but I mean, I’m just saying on the spec sheet, that’s what all the truck guys are arguing about right? Is well I got four motors here too. Well might make this much power. Whatever. The benefit of four motors is when you have one per axle or half shaft is you can control things a lot better like tank turn and things like that. So that’s where the real benefit comes in on there. It’s got a flexible interior removable center console. It’s got jump seats to fix to the mitigate, which you can remove and put them on the tailgate for tailgating. It also effectively makes this a three row truck, which is kind of crazy. So you, I wouldn’t put full-size adults back there, but it’s like the old midsize, you know, extra cabs from the, you know, the nineties right. With the, with the jump seat. So that’s, I mean that’s kind of cool.

Lightning (1h 38m 41s):

Really come in handy.

Holman (1h 38m 42s):

So there’s no gauges on it. It’s all augmented reality in the windshield, which I don’t think truck guys are really gonna love not having gauges truck guys like gauges. So as we know the steering wheel disappears. It’s a level three autonomous if you want it to be. Again that’s a show car thing. It’s probably, I could see it coming for, it’s teased a van concept with the disappearing steering wheel where the, the rim goes horizontal and then the whole thing slides into the dash or out of the way or it makes a little desktop for your computer. It’s got little tiny, tiny mirrors so no toe ears on it cuz it has a cameras, they’re 3D printed, it has what they call in floor 3D printed. Yep. The mirrors are 3D printed. Huh? The floor has ram tracks, which remind me of what the badger setup was gonna be from Nikola when they, he talked about the aerospace kind of tracks on the floor.

Holman (1h 39m 28s):

The

Lightning (1h 39m 29s):

Floor in, not in the bed. The floor

Holman (1h 39m 30s):

In the cab. In the cab. They’re stacked 14 inch screens in the center. They can be put together to make a 28 inch screen where the 14.2 inch lower screen can pop out and become like a tablet for doing cool things outside the truck, like their shadow mode where it’ll follow you. So if you have

Lightning (1h 39m 47s):

No

Holman (1h 39m 48s):

Way, you know, all sorts of, I don’t know, equipment you’re repairing a fence line for example. You

Lightning (1h 39m 52s):

Mean like a drone the way a drone has follow mode?

Holman (1h 39m 54s):

Yes, exactly. So you could walk along a fence line and it can carry all the equipment and follow you like, oh, like a mule, like a puppy dog. Again, it did not have the range extended gas engine. So we’ll have to see what’s, what’s up with that. I don’t have any specs on that. They didn’t really, you know, tell much about power or, or any of that kind of stuff. The suicide doors good for concept, not prefer production. They’ve said it’s basically gonna be a crew cab pickup truck. So don’t expect that there’s an,

Lightning (1h 40m 20s):

I can’t remember was there a B pillar

Holman (1h 40m 22s):

Or not? No B pillar. Okay. And one of the cool things, so there

Lightning (1h 40m 24s):

Will be a

Holman (1h 40m 25s):

B pillar. There will be a B pillar. Okay. So it has this cool app that can tell if the load that is on the ground will fit in the truck and then like Tetris will tell you how to arrange it. So if you’re going to your buddy’s house to help him move and he’s got a big couch, it’ll be like, no, that couch doesn’t fit.

Lightning (1h 40m 40s):

So it’s using one of the existing apps you can get like the, the app store

Holman (1h 40m 43s):

For Apple? No, it’s using its own ram in in the vehicle. It’s all it comes with that.

Lightning (1h 40m 47s):

What I’m saying though is you can get an app right now on your phone today where you can look at a, what hell, you were doing the studio weren’t you measuring with your

Holman (1h 40m 54s):

Phone? No, right. I’m measuring, but it’s looking at the size, the depth I can measure from point A to point B, but I can’t say if this big cubic couch with complex angles and turns is gonna fit in the space of the truck.

Lightning (1h 41m 7s):

I gotcha. So

Holman (1h 41m 7s):

There’s, there’s some cool tech. I, I don’t know how much of it will make it to production. I guess it’s revolutionary. It had to be they’re late to the party behind Lightning and, and Silverado. Everybody’s online was saying, well it’s an F-150 Lightning competitor. I disagree. I think it’s more of a Silverado competitor because of the mid gate and the battery architecture. Isn’t

Lightning (1h 41m 26s):

It a Rivian competitor?

Holman (1h 41m 28s):

E Rivian is a much smaller truck. Okay. So I would say no. Okay. I mean if you’re looking at ev I guess, but no, the, the real competitor’s gonna be the Hummer and the, the Silverado and the Sierra EVs. The F-150 is more of a traditional truck like we know it today. I think it’s a stop gap from what the manufacturers are thinking actually prefer it because it’s still is a traditional two box pickup design and all the F-150 accessories that fit in the bed fit in this. None of the ram accessories that fit in the bed today will work on this truck. Gotcha. And one last cool thing is, if you notice the, the tailgate was barn doors and what they, if you imagine the 60 40 split tailgate today where you can open up each side independently or it can fold down like a tailgate.

Holman (1h 42m 9s):

It’s similar to that, but the split is in the middle. So what’s cool is it’ll open out to 90 degrees and then a, a panel drops down to extend the bed floor all the way out

Lightning (1h 42m 19s):

To the end. Oh my lord.

Holman (1h 42m 20s):

So that then you can basically get a long bed, but it’s not by a cage or the top of the tailgate. The tailgate slides open, you know, like out like 90 degrees, 90 degrees out. Sure. Like two tables full down for the floor.

Lightning (1h 42m 30s):

It’s kinda like the one of the back of your jeep.

Holman (1h 42m 32s):

It kind of like that. I mean it’s just, it’s really innovative. There’s a lot of really cool stuff. I’m sure you would love the capacitive glass roof that can turn, you know, various levels of tint. It’s got, you know, some of the cool interior modes when parked, you know, all that stuff. So is it a truck? Yeah, I guess it’s a truck. I think it’s cool. I think it’s maybe cooler than what GM showed with the Silverado. But GM showed a production version and Ram showed a wild out there concept with a bunch of stuff that isn’t quite ready for prime time. So let’s see what the real truck is gonna be. But I think there’s a lot of excitement and buzz around it.

Lightning (1h 43m 6s):

How much do you think will actually make it to production?

Holman (1h 43m 9s):

I would say 75%. Okay. Hey lighting, did you hear? No, the guy with the overloaded ram 3,500 where the frame broke in the middle.

Lightning (1h 43m 21s):

I saw that about camper 75 times.

Holman (1h 43m 23s):

Yeah, I I figured we should probably talk about it because I also saw it at least 75 times, maybe 400. So I

Lightning (1h 43m 31s):

Love how it happens to a dude and everyone extrapolates that all ram trucks break in the middle right at different, right. Where the, they don’t see exactly.

Holman (1h 43m 44s):

So here, here’s what’s interesting about the truck and, and this is the reason I bring this up is, is not to make fun of that guy or not to sensationalize, oh my god, the ram duly broke. It’s that you guys really have to understand gross vehicle weight ratings. While this guy had hauled, you know, I guess he said the Rocky Mountain Pacific Northwest Baja 25,000 miles in a 3,500 Dooley. He had a eagle cap 1160 5 cents new. He said he had no issues until apparently he did. He said the payload on the capacity of the truck was 7,800 pounds and the camper dry weight was close to 5,000 pounds fully loaded probably at 6,500.

Holman (1h 44m 23s):

So he was thinking he’s way under. Right. And that number happens to be for the regular cab gas 3,500 duly. Not the Cummins 3,500 duly. Oh. And so the, what does

Lightning (1h 44m 36s):

That do to the frame right there in the center? Like I don’t really understand

Holman (1h 44m 40s):

Because that’s where all the, the weight is.

Lightning (1h 44m 42s):

Wait a minute. The Cummins is all the way in the front of the truck.

Holman (1h 44m 45s):

The frame. Yeah, exactly. So if you took a straw and you held it between two fingers and you had a fulcrum in the middle and you loaded each end, where’s it gonna bend?

Lightning (1h 44m 56s):

Oh, the

Holman (1h 44m 57s):

Center. Right in the center. Got it. So the real max payload on his particular truck, again a four by four diesel dually was 5,850 pounds. Well short of what he thought of the 7,680 pounds. So as of this point, Mopar has said, no, go on warranty because you were way overweight. And he’s going, no, this is the weight. And they said not for that one. And when you had it,

Lightning (1h 45m 19s):

It says it in the owner’s manual,

Holman (1h 45m 20s):

The camper itself was 4,900 pounds empty. So plus a week’s worth of gear and you know, all the fluids and everything. You can see he’s way over. He’s at least a thousand maybe

Lightning (1h 45m 33s):

More. Interesting. Did anyone write that

Holman (1h 45m 35s):

Story? There’s been several, yeah. Several different outlets. The drive was one

Lightning (1h 45m 40s):

Of ’em, which sucks because by the time they write that up, that would’ve been something that you corrected. You’re like, oh, that’s BS and here’s the real deal. But the, by the time your story gets out, everyone just has already made up their mind that the Ram 3,500 is weak

Holman (1h 45m 53s):

Sauce. Yeah. And it’s not, has nothing to do with that. He, the, the ram failed after 25,000 miles of being a thousand to 1500 pounds overloaded. That sounds pretty awesome to me.

Lightning (1h 46m 2s):

I hadn’t really thought of it like that until you describe like I I’m seeing like a teeter-totter, right? We’ve just simply got too much weight on either side and it snaps in the middle.

Holman (1h 46m 12s):

Right. I mean that’s essentially what happened. Yeah. Was it it was way over overweight and you gotta remember you’re going off road, which he was. And then Baja roads, all that vibration, you know, you’re, you know those axle loads, all

Lightning (1h 46m 24s):

It takes is a weld to start weakening. Right? Well

Holman (1h 46m 27s):

I don’t even think there’s a weld there, but they, they had welded a plate on the frame at some point, I think to try and fix the, the crack temporarily. And then that also has the possibility if you weld it wrong on a heat-treated frame of, of causing the frame to be even weaker

Lightning (1h 46m 41s):

Than it was. Yeah,

Holman (1h 46m 42s):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can see there’s a plate in the photos where it’s cracked along the plate.

Lightning (1h 46m 46s):

I I didn’t know that. Where, where did that come out? That he had tried to repair it?

Holman (1h 46m 50s):

Oh, that’s all the articles on the, on the internet. There’s got it three or four outlets if you just search for it. Like I said, the drive is one of ’em. And there’s plenty of pictures that the, the owner provided. I guess his name is Mike Pavel or Pavel, p a v e l. You know, I’d, I’d be interested in hearing more about his story, but Yeah, provided plenty of photos. You can just see how massive a camper

Lightning (1h 47m 11s):

Is that that is the biggest camper you can put on a truck. Holy crap. But he was pretty proud. I mean look, he was, look, he posted it, the snot out cuz he wanted ram to pay.

Holman (1h 47m 21s):

Right. And I don’t know that helps him or not because once you figure out, you know, the weight and the internet sleuths kind of figured out when

Lightning (1h 47m 27s):

He was in the

Holman (1h 47m 27s):

Wrong, you’re over, Hey lighting, did you hear?

Lightning (1h 47m 30s):

Nah.

Holman (1h 47m 31s):

Tesla has apparently backtracked on making standard the yolk and so on the s and x you can go back to a steering wheel now, thank God. Which means on the cyber truck, they, I am sure they’ll have a steering wheel.

Lightning (1h 47m 43s):

A steering wheel. Yeah,

Holman (1h 47m 44s):

Because yolks suck. Hey lighting, did you hear? I wanna go into sales because there’s some pretty cool numbers coming out.

Lightning (1h 47m 56s):

You should stick with the podcast. You’re not a great salesman.

Holman (1h 47m 59s):

I’m a awesome salesperson. Okay. All right. So Ford Maverick outsold the Hyundai Santa Cruz by more than double. Oh my Lord. And Maverick Cruz

Lightning (1h 48m 8s):

Is a pretty popular

Holman (1h 48m 8s):

Truck. Maverick’s or did I

Lightning (1h 48m 10s):

Call the truck?

Holman (1h 48m 10s):

Truck lit? Truck lit or a sport utility truck? So I’ve been seeing the, the Mavericks all over the place. I’ve seen a few Santa Cruzs starting to pop up around here. I think we’re lucky in southern California cause we literally see everything before everybody else does. And Hyundai sold 36,480 units of the Santa Cruz. That’s actually pretty darn and good. But Ford sold 74,370. I mean, people must just love,

Lightning (1h 48m 37s):

That’s a runaway and is a runaway success.

Holman (1h 48m 40s):

Yeah. I don’t even know if you can get one without a markup right now. I don’t think you can get one for the base price.

Lightning (1h 48m 45s):

Have you seen one on a dealer lot? Cuz I have not.

Holman (1h 48m 47s):

I may have seen one or two like,

Lightning (1h 48m 49s):

But they don’t

Holman (1h 48m 50s):

Mark up. Right? Yeah, but not, not out and about. Yeah. And you know, that would be something that I think is a great beginner car for somebody or just a cheap around town. And I, I desperately wanted to hate it and I, I didn’t.

Lightning (1h 49m 2s):

Yeah.

Holman (1h 49m 2s):

All right, so moving on from the Maverick sales to the mid-size sales, some actual great news for Nissan and the Frontier, because we have talked about this before. The frontier is all over the place. I saw three more today. I actually saw a young girl looked like high school age driving a king cab red base model S Was

Lightning (1h 49m 23s):

She hot?

Holman (1h 49m 24s):

No, she wasn’t hot. She was in high school.

Lightning (1h 49m 26s):

Oh, high school. Sorry. I didn’t,

Holman (1h 49m 27s):

What’s wrong with you? It didn’t accidentally offensive. Offensive. T-shirt comes in in,

Lightning (1h 49m 32s):

Well cuz chicks are hotter when they drive trucks. You know that. Right? That’s the

Holman (1h 49m 35s):

Rule. All right. Lightning moving right along. You

Lightning (1h 49m 38s):

Can be 18 in high school. You understand

Holman (1h 49m 39s):

That, right? I I’m not going down that road with you. All right. You are all alone.

Lightning (1h 49m 43s):

I’m not saying you’re all

Holman (1h 49m 44s):

Saying alone. All right, so the Toyota Tacoma came in at a whopping 237,323 trucks. But that’s a 6% decline from last year. Hey

Lightning (1h 49m 55s):

Listen, light bars

Holman (1h 49m 57s):

On the road

Lightning (1h 49m 59s):

Are illegal, buddy. Right in our eyes. Thanks. Thanks.

Holman (1h 50m 2s):

I drove by with Light Bar and now Lightning’s yelling at him verses turn on your headlights. Now turn off your light bars. He’s got light. People are confused.

Lightning (1h 50m 8s):

Dude, I, if I was a cop, I’d pull the

Holman (1h 50m 10s):

Guy over. You’re not turn your light bar off. You’re sitting a parking lot in a Titan next to Yep. With me Sweating out Chile Chevy Colorado sold 89,197. That’s a plus 22% from last year. Any

Lightning (1h 50m 22s):

Breakdown of the engine

Holman (1h 50m 23s):

And the GMC Canyon sold 27,819, which is up 15%. So together the GM twins came in number two. Okay. At one 17,016 for a 20% increase year over year. Next up is the Jeep Gladiator, 77,855. It was a 13% drop from last year. But still 77,000 is is a pretty tight

Lightning (1h 50m 45s):

Number. Yeah.

Holman (1h 50m 46s):

And then the Nissan Frontier, next up 76,183. That’s a 25.5% increase from last year

Lightning (1h 50m 56s):

Because it’s a badass truck in the redesign is really well executed.

Holman (1h 51m 0s):

76,000. I mean they, they’re behind the Jeep Gladiator by like 1500. That’s it.

Lightning (1h 51m 6s):

What would it take to push them up in the rankings?

Holman (1h 51m 9s):

I would like to see a, a even further, you know, done off-road model. Okay. I think a pro four x plus or something would be awesome.

Lightning (1h 51m 16s):

What? And the Nismo parts aren’t really in the market yet. They’re just trickling

Holman (1h 51m 22s):

In. You can get ’em, you can get the NISMO stuff. Yeah, there’s new stuff trickling in all the time. But I would love to see a Nismo version of that truck that has, you know, a a 33 or 34 on it and all the, you know, the Bill Stein shots. I

Lightning (1h 51m 33s):

Mean, they need the halo to really hit the like magazines. And

Holman (1h 51m 37s):

So, so look at Ford Ranger. Ford Ranger has those Halo vehicles, but they were down 39%. They dropped from 94,000 7 55 to 57,000 0 0 5.

Lightning (1h 51m 46s):

Yeah. But you’re not a Ranger fan, are you? I guess you are

Holman (1h 51m 49s):

A little bit. It’s okay. I mean it’s, it’s, I don’t like the interior. It feels like a a I know there’s a lot of Ranger fans out there, but it feels like an economy car on the inside and it’s really soft and mushy. The suspension, the seats. It’s just, I don’t, it’s not just not my style and I’ve owned three rangers in my path. I just don’t like the current body style. They’re just, eh. And then the Honda Ridge line came in at 40 2007. 62 is actually up 3%. So those people have no taste.

Lightning (1h 52m 13s):

So you know Rick Young, right? Okay. He used to work for banks way back in the day that Rick Young.

Holman (1h 52m 18s):

Okay.

Lightning (1h 52m 19s):

No, you know Rick Young? Yes.

Holman (1h 52m 21s):

I’m saying, okay.

Lightning (1h 52m 22s):

Okay. Why didn’t continue your story? Pull me off. Like you didn’t know who really, who he was. Anyway, he’s, he’s back at banks and he parks in front it’s

Holman (1h 52m 28s):

Ridge line

Lightning (1h 52m 29s):

In a freaking ridge line. And we’re like, you know, that’s, that’s not okay. Right? He goes, what are you talking about? He said, he goes, park my truck out front. We go, that’s not a truck. You can’t work here with that. And he thought we were joking and it was serious

Holman (1h 52m 41s):

And pro. What did you guys do?

Lightning (1h 52m 44s):

I’m putting the, the pressure on him. I want him to sell. Did you

Holman (1h 52m 47s):

Egg his car?

Lightning (1h 52m 47s):

No, I’m, I wouldn’t never egg a vehicle.

Holman (1h 52m 49s):

Did you let all the air out of his tires?

Lightning (1h 52m 51s):

I did.

Holman (1h 52m 53s):

That way, that way the truck he didn’t want parked in front of banks couldn’t go anywhere? No,

Lightning (1h 52m 56s):

No, no. I waited until he moved it and parked it elsewhere. I see. Let all the air out.

Holman (1h 53m 0s):

All right. So

Lightning (1h 53m 1s):

I also put a banana in his tailpipe.

Holman (1h 53m 3s):

The 20. Okay. Beverly Hills Cop. Geez. Like 1980s. They’re calling 2022 full size SUV sales. Were kind of some interesting numbers here.

Lightning (1h 53m 14s):

Oh, okay. Wait, hold on a second. You said 2022 SUV sales. Right. All right. I’m gonna guess that the number one selling u v last year was, oh, I wanna say a Tahoe, but I know it’s

Holman (1h 53m 27s):

Not. You’re right. Toyota Land Cruiser sold 48.

Lightning (1h 53m 30s):

Right. Okay. Wow.

Holman (1h 53m 31s):

48. 48. That’s cuz that was the last year of it in the US Last year. Okay. But it’s on the list. Ah,

Lightning (1h 53m 36s):

Alright. What was the best, gimme just a moment here. What was the best That’s

Holman (1h 53m 40s):

Right. Lighting.

Lightning (1h 53m 40s):

What’s the number one?

Holman (1h 53m 41s):

Chevy Tahoe. It is the Tahoe 105,000.

Lightning (1h 53m 44s):

I said it wasn’t. And it and is damnit

Holman (1h 53m 46s):

Pretty flat from last year down.

Lightning (1h 53m 48s):

Push back with his light

Holman (1h 53m 49s):

Bars again. Next GMC Yukon at 82,000 3 0 4. We

Lightning (1h 53m 52s):

Almost

Holman (1h 53m 53s):

Crashed minus do you see that minus two point? We’re doing a show.

Lightning (1h 53m 56s):

I know, but he almost

Holman (1h 53m 57s):

Hit that stop rover. Nobody can see. But you can we finish

Lightning (1h 54m 1s):

This? All right, go ahead.

Holman (1h 54m 1s):

GMC Yukon 82 3 0 4 down 2% Ford Expedition 62,000 down 24% Dodge Durango at 55,000 down 16 Chevy Suburban up 5% at 50 Cadillac Escalade 40,000. They’re down half a percent. But check this out. The new Jeep Wagoneers, grand Wagoner coming in at 36,219. First year in the market up basically 577% for its first full year versus the previous partial

Lightning (1h 54m 28s):

Year. It’s spendy though. I don’t know if it’s spendy gonna be number

Holman (1h 54m 31s):

One. No, I don’t, I I don’t think they expected it to be number one. It’s right. It’s not their volume. It’s I think by the, that’s Grand Cherokee for that

Lightning (1h 54m 37s):

Dude. The, the Tahoe. I mean, can

Holman (1h 54m 39s):

You 80 90,000 now I

Lightning (1h 54m 41s):

Was gonna say, can you get into a Tahoe for under 60? I

Holman (1h 54m 43s):

It would be a pile with nothing. So I lied to you and told you that was Wagoner and Grand Wagoneers sales. Now they’re broken out here. 36,219 was just Wagoneers Jeep. Grand Wagoneers was another 11,700. So together they were 47,000 or so. So that would be together more than the Escalade and just short of the Suburban. So for a first year product, that’s pretty good. Yeah. And that’s only the short wheel base. They just released the long wheel base this, you know, a couple months ago. So that’s pretty incredible. All right. So Lincoln Navigator next at 13,206. So nowhere near the, the Jeeps in the, the caddy minus 15% Nissan Armada 11,923.

Holman (1h 55m 23s):

That’s minus 47%. Infinity QX 87,000 2 0 6 minus 42%. Toyota Sequoia 5,314. But that’s because the old model was coming out and the new one’s coming in, so I’m sure that’ll change. Yeah. And then the Lexus LX at 3,600. Alright. And the last thing to report on sales is the fact that that Ford F-series is continuing. Its US sales dominance despite the supply chain and vehicles being hard to, hard to come by in 2022, an average of at least one F-series truck sold every 49 seconds. Oh my God. So Ford ended up claiming bestselling truck for 46 consecutive years and the bestselling vehicle in America for 41 years.

Holman (1h 56m 8s):

And of course that includes the F-150 2 53 50. They sold over 640,000 trucks last year.

Lightning (1h 56m 14s):

How many did they sell during this podcast?

Holman (1h 56m 17s):

Well, I don’t know how long it is yet, but figure one a minute. Quite

Lightning (1h 56m 21s):

A few

Holman (1h 56m 21s):

At least. Probably a hundred.

Lightning (1h 56m 23s):

Holy crap. But again, it’s not fair that they’re combining all the trucks. Do you think like the, the F-150 2 53, 54, 55 50. Sure. Really? Yeah, just lump ’em all together.

Holman (1h 56m 32s):

It’s all a full size truck. I know, but GM does the same thing. The only thing GM does differently is they don’t combine Chevy and gmc. They combine Chevy and gmc. Some years they beat Ford or they’re right up there with, with them. Well,

Lightning (1h 56m 42s):

Ford doesn’t combine the Lincoln. Well, I guess Lincoln hasn’t.

Holman (1h 56m 45s):

You’re undoing your own argument right now.

Lightning (1h 56m 46s):

You’re right. All right, just let’s move on.

Holman (1h 56m 48s):

Oh, the lightning. What, what’s wrong with you? A lot. Okay. And the, the last thing, this one’s just for you. Did you see the, the special edition of the tx the, the last one that just came out? The

Lightning (1h 56m 58s):

Bright yellow one? The havoc. Yeah. Now before you get into the havoc,

Holman (1h 57m 2s):

Okay.

Lightning (1h 57m 3s):

I’m not saying that this is the majority of TX owners by any means, but

Holman (1h 57m 7s):

Okay, here he comes. Everybody something offensive is about to come out. He prefaced it. Go ahead.

Lightning (1h 57m 12s):

The 23 has the digital instrument cluster. Okay. Okay. I was watching guys over the last week or two weeks cuz people are taking possession of the 20 threes now. Okay. All right. And they’re showing their digital dash and you can change the modes on your dashboard. Right. As opposed to doing it on the 12 inch screen like I have. Right. Anyway, guys are going, oh my God, I love the dash. I’m going to trade in my 22 for 23 to get that dashboard. And I thought,

Holman (1h 57m 38s):

Oh, good for him. If that’s the case. But,

Lightning (1h 57m 40s):

And, and they’re, some of these guys are

Holman (1h 57m 41s):

Serious. I like gauges. I still like a mechanical sweeping gauge.

Lightning (1h 57m 45s):

I like it too. But it just says a lot about some of these guys.

Holman (1h 57m 48s):

They’re just wouldn’t be enough for me to trade

Lightning (1h 57m 49s):

The truck is just pure vanity.

Holman (1h 57m 51s):

Yeah. And lose all, you know, the 20 grand or something. Although the resale value of those have been pretty darn good. So the 2023 Ram havoc edition is in a bright new yellow color. It’s still the same 702 horsepower, but it’s got a lot of yellow. So the headlining feature is the bold baja yellow exterior paint. You also get graphics 18 inch wheels that are black dual paint sunroof, you know, all that kinda good stuff inside the interior gets prowler yellow accent stitching. And then you get the carbon fire accents on the dash as well. I

Lightning (1h 58m 22s):

Mean, it’s the same as my truck just with

Holman (1h 58m 24s):

Yellow

Lightning (1h 58m 25s):

Dashboard and yellow.

Holman (1h 58m 25s):

Yeah. Yep. There’s also a havoc edition badge right in the middle of the center console. There’s also a havoc edition badge on the center console rather than the regular old TX badge. And then under the hood, the, the dinosaur is bleeding yellow.

Lightning (1h 58m 39s):

Is that true? No.

Holman (1h 58m 40s):

Oh, I just thought it was funny. This truck gets the TX level two equipment group. It features the 19 speaker Harmon Cardin premium sound system. And it gets a bunch of other options that are pretty much a, a, a clone of your truck. And Carrie,

Lightning (1h 58m 55s):

You gotta get the 19 speaker system by the way. Oh yeah. If you get that level one, you instantly regret it.

Holman (1h 58m 59s):

I’m

Lightning (1h 58m 60s):

By the way, telling you don’t do that. Get the level

Holman (1h 59m 2s):

Two price. What do you think the price is?

Lightning (1h 59m 4s):

I think the havoc is going for sticker is 99 5 1 0 6.

Holman (1h 59m 14s):

4 45.

Lightning (1h 59m 15s):

Oh my lord.

Holman (1h 59m 17s):

So

Lightning (1h 59m 18s):

Becky, look at that butt. Listen,

Holman (1h 59m 20s):

If it, if it’s yellow, it must have real gold in the paints or something.

Lightning (1h 59m 25s):

All right. Starting the engine

Holman (1h 59m 26s):

Firing up the old titan. We’re getting outta here. We had our chili dogs, our wiener schnitzel. We’ve reconnected with our favorite worst fast food in the neighborhood.

Lightning (1h 59m 37s):

I gotta be honest, I’m not sure if the chili dogs are gonna come up or go down.

Holman (1h 59m 40s):

Lightning has been treated to the Nissan Titan xd, which I think he probably forgot how much he liked.

Lightning (1h 59m 46s):

I do. I think it’s quiet, powerful, luxurious, roomy. Oh, hold on. That’s me. And it’s, it’s good at notifying you that you’re not waiting and

Holman (1h 59m 58s):

It’s full of safe features. Leg lighting. Put your seatbelt on.

Lightning (2h 0m 0s):

Hold on a second. You gotta stop.

Holman (2h 0m 2s):

We don’t have time. No, we,

Lightning (2h 0m 3s):

I got a mic between my knees here

Holman (2h 0m 5s):

Buddy. We have places to go. Where

Lightning (2h 0m 7s):

Are we going

Holman (2h 0m 7s):

Home?

Lightning (2h 0m 8s):

Alright, so what do you guys think of the first episode of the second Season Truck Show podcast?

Holman (2h 0m 13s):

The one from Inside New Mobile podcast studio filled with leather and premium materials.

Lightning (2h 0m 20s):

Unlike Lightning at Holman,

Holman (2h 0m 22s):

I don’t know what that means.

Lightning (2h 0m 24s):

We’re we’re not leather and filled with premium materials.

Holman (2h 0m 26s):

Okay, well that’s still weird. All right, well if you’re looking for a new truck that head on down to your local Nissan dealer or go to nissan usa.com where we can build and price a Titan or Tighten next to take advantage of the industry’s best five year, 100,000 mile warranty. Or check out the Nissan Frontier, which is one of the fastest growing mid-size trucks on the market today.

Lightning (2h 0m 46s):

And if you haven’t seen the redesign, I don’t know what rock you’re living under. It is gorgeous.

Holman (2h 0m 50s):

All right ladies. So what if I have a truck already, but it doesn’t give me all the data I’m looking for. It doesn’t have one of those really cool digital configurable displays and I need more.

Lightning (2h 0m 59s):

Well, my good friend Holman. You head over to banks power.com and you check out the i dash super gauge or the ID dash data monster. They’re identical with the addition of a data recording feature in the data monster. Basically the gauges are a diagnostic device you can read and clear codes. You can display up to 40 gauges across five customizable screens. Go to banks power.com and check out the most cost effective gauge you’ve ever seen.

Holman (2h 1m 23s):

All right, well hopefully you guys loved the first show of the new season of the Truck Show podcast.

Lightning (2h 1m 29s):

Yes, man. It was a

Holman (2h 1m 30s):

Big letdown. And we want to hear from you. So Truck show podcast@gmail.com or of course you can follow us on the socials, which we promised to be more active on going forward, but it’s been a little bit busy lately. But you can follow us at Sean P. Holman at LBC Lighting or at Truck Show Podcast. And we want to hear from you. Of course. You always leave a message. Five star hotline. 6 5 7 2 0 5 61 0 5.

Lightning (2h 1m 52s):

Okay. Holman, how do you feel about a street takeover with the Nissan Titan Next D Platinum Reserve?

Holman (2h 1m 57s):

You, are you talking about doing intersection donuts?

Lightning (2h 2m 1s):

Yes,

Holman (2h 2m 1s):

I am. No, we’re not gonna do that. Why not? I just checked with ownership and they said, no, you are the owner. Well, he said, no.

Lightning (2h 2m 9s):

What? You can’t veto everything I come up

Holman (2h 2m 11s):

With. I’m only videoing the dumb ideas. Listen, here’s the deal. Nissan has been far too good to this podcast for us to go out and do a reckless behavior like that and to put a stain on our relationship with them by treating their vehicles in a reckless manner. Really? Yeah. Really?

Lightning (2h 2m 32s):

No, come on, let’s

Holman (2h 2m 33s):

Do it. You still recording? Yeah. Just, just kill the mic for a sec.

Lightning (2h 2m 38s):

Yes. The Truck Show Podcast is a production of Truck Famous llc. This podcast was created by Sean Holman and Jay Tillis with production elements by DJ Omar Kahn. If you like what you’ve heard, please open your Apple Podcast or Spotify app and give us a five star rating. And if you’re a fan, there’s no better way to show your support than by patronizing our sponsors. Some vehicles may have been harmed during the making of this podcast.