I’ve been a car fanatic since I was a young lad. It started in high school with my first Mustang, then buying parts cars and modifying my cars. Then my uncle opened a body shop with another guy who was a car restoration expert, and a painter in the pilot plant at Ford. I got a job working there, first painting the walls of the plain block building white, and then as a helper and learning how to do body work and painting.

When I got into automotive engineering, lessons I learned in restoring cars and replacing body sheet metal went a long way towards being one of the pioneers in the field of Dimensional Management, where I specialized in body structures – how to build a car so that everything fit together properly. During that stage of my career, in addition to working on pick-ups, family cars and minivans, I got to work on some pretty cool cars.

After I moved to Florida, I bought a car repair shop and spent a couple of years repairing European sports cars and also used car sales.

Through it all, I’ve had a chance to work on some pretty cool cars! Here are the highlights

I learned how to restore cars in my late teens and early 20s, working on a number of pretty cool cars. My mentor was Tim Walling, who had been painting cars since a young lad and was working in Ford’s pilot plant as a painter for their show cars. He moonlighted at night doing custom paint jobs and restorations, where I worked for him and learned a lot. Tim churned out many trophy winners and I learned what it took to achieve that level of quality. In those days, custom vans were the rage and I had the dream of doing custom paint jobs with murals on the sides of vans, Lord of the Rings type of graphics.

Tim had painted the original show car for the Pinto Wagon and the matching Ford Van, shown in this picture:

Jeff Dunham has an entertaing video reviewing the “Pi Wagon” and the van.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=10156451997223827

My career as a conversion van artist never came to fruition, but I did do a wild paint job on my ’69 Mach 1, a glimpse of which is available on the “My Cars” page. I did get the chance to work on a number of pretty cool cars, and came to appreciate concours-quality restorations. And learned a few things along the way.