Growing up in a suburb of "The Motor City", I grew up with a passion for art and automobiles. From an early age, I can remember attending car shows with my Dad. My father, now a 40-year seniority factory worker at Ford's Wixom Assembly Plant had a keen interest in Kustoms of the 50's which he shared with me at an early age. My father grew up around the corner from the "Alexander Brothers" custom car shop in Detroit as a teenager. He'd show me pictures of cars, and I would try to draw them. I built models of Kustom cars and entered them into competition, winning several awards. Cars were all I was interrested in after that initial exposure.
I started dabbling with REAL cars in 1991, having just bought my first car. It was a 12 year old 1979 Mercury Cougar. They say that you buy what your Father buys, and in 1978, my father bought a new 1978 Mercury Cougar XR-7. The ironic thing is that I had absolutely zero interest in this bodystyle while I was being driven around in one in my elementary school years. I only got interrested in them after they had become "old cars" and fell out of fashion.
Having learned auto body repair work and custom painting in high school, I had always had a talent for it, it just became more pronounced when I learned "the right way" to do things. After deciding to enroll again in school in the fall at U of M, I took a "part time" job with a local guy who was hoping to grow his small 1-stall shop into a full-fledged autobody repair facility. AMT autobody was born.
The owner and I worked our way up as any small business would; the hard way. I came in and changed into my overalls around 1 PM, and would usually work until 6 or so. There were some late nights. We primarily dealt with a few small-time local used car dealers. We did the best quality we could for what the customers were willing to pay, trying to both gain a name for ourselves as a quality shop and to spread the word that we were out there.
Eventually, a year or so later, a lease was signed on a new, larger facility. We bought a "real" spraybooth, and even hired a dedicated bodyman to work full-time. We still didn't have a modern frame rack, we had an old stand-alone puller that was older than any of us. We really weren't equipped to handle major damage-type collision work. That was the way we needed to head, so eventually the owner invested in a frame rack.
After getting to the point where we had too much work in the lot and not enough room in the shop, we aquired a lease on a second building down the road. Eventually, the landlord of our first building decided to build a new, larger facility that we could use to combine the 2 shops. By this time, we had rented two spaces...one to do bodywork in (it was bare-bones) and one to do the final paintwork in. The two shops were a couple blocks apart, and I remember driving partially completed cars (without windshields) the several blocks neccesary in sub-zero weather in order to take them to the other shop where they would be finished. To say the situation was less than desirable would be an understatement.
We worked through all this though, and eventually we were in one, nice, brand new building, with all of our equipment. It took a lot of work to set up the new shop, which was basically a giant pole-=barn, but in the end it was worth it. By now we had hired a full-time body guy, painter, there was me, and the owner did all the "other stuff" as needed.
Things went along pretty wel for a while (about a year), then things started to fall apart. In 1999, I graduated from school. In between jobs, I stayed on full time as the body guy/collision guy/painter/office person/computer guru. It became tiring and i couldn't wait to ba able to use my degree in something non-auto-related.
I left AMT Autobody in late 1999 to persure a Graphics Design position with SBC. Through friends, I found out a year later that the owner had decided to sell the business and get out. The last I heard, he was employed by the company that bought him out, repairing their vehicles as an amployee.
My dream job has always been to start and run a Kustom Car shop. "Bring us your car and tell us what you want, and we'll build it for you" -type of thing. We tried that a few times while I worked at AMT, but the people for the most part became detached from their projects after we carted them away to our shop. Their cars, because our money (paychecks) was made doing insurance work, turned into "corner queens", since when we had both the extra time to work on them and the funding from the owners, had been pushed out of the way to make room for the quick-turnaround cars that otherwise kept the shop going. Those cars were my passion. Unfortunately, we didn't get to work on them much.
I have always had a dream to pull all those "corner queens" to the forefront, and make them MY shop's primary concern- and my full-time business.
