Meet our new GRM workshop

One of the most common questions I get is, “So, where’s your company shop?” Everyone seems to assume we’re building project cars in a spacious company shop stocked with assistants and a craft services table. You know, the type of shop most people assume every car magazine automatically has.

The thing about that: We’ve actually never had a company shop. Instead, we’ve each built workspaces at home, varying from driveways and undersized two-car garages to Tim’s big metal building we call the Car Church.

Nearly a decade ago, I even chronicled building my own backyard shop in these very pages. Each of these spaces has become our own, full of quirks, questionable plumbing, eccentric decorations and weird side projects. Oh, and project cars, since we’ve built dozens of them in our own backyards over the years. We’ve taken pride in the fact that we really are building cars in our own backyards, just like our readers build theirs.

Sounds like the perfect system, right? Well, not quite, which is why I’ve spent the past few months setting up our very first company shop. By the time you read this, we should be working in it. It won’t replace our backyard buildings, but rather augment them, increasing our capacity and letting us build more project cars and document those builds better than ever before.

Why leave the safety of our backyards and venture out into the great unknown? Well, a few reasons:

First, we need more space, especially as we’ve been filming more and more video content for YouTube. Compared to still photography, filming means more people, more lights and equipment, and more time. These requirements were making it tough to shoot at home, especially in smaller spaces where we could barely walk around the car.

Changing brakes is one thing. Now try doing it with two people and a 4-foot-wide tripod standing next to the car. Cars have gotten bigger, too, and shops sized for a Miata feel awfully tiny when working on a modern Porsche.

Second, we’ve been building more project cars, and they’ve been getting more extreme. Sure, we still do plenty of street cars, but we’re also now working on unmuffled, high-compression V8s running leaded race fuel at all hours of the day. As my neighbors have certainly noticed, their house is approximately 20 feet from where I built my home garage. My home garage has started to look less like a hobby and more like a business, and that’s just not sustainable.

And lastly, we’ve hired the next generation of GRM staff to join me in the shop, including Paris, Chris, James and Colin. This generation doesn’t yet have their own shops–or in some cases their own houses to build them behind. So while every single one of our employees seems likely to eventually own their own home, it’s a lot to ask a new hire to buy a house and build a workshop before they can start building cars.

All this is what started my search, and I eventually found a commercial warehouse condo in an industrial park a few miles away from home. It’s still not a “big company” shop at just over 1000 square feet, but it’s a major upgrade, centrally located and should work perfectly for us. We even found another GRM reader in the complex!

So, how do you turn an empty warehouse into a shop capable of churning out project cars? In my case, you call your friends, clear your calendar and spend a few months assembling a mezzanine, installing a BendPak lift and moving every single tool, piece of equipment and spare part into the new building. Oh, and every single item out of the company’s old storage unit for good measure. After months and months of work, most of it after hours, I’m proud to say that the new shop is (nearly) ready for its first build.

That first build? Well, I’ll be finishing up my own projects in the new workspace–look for more on the LS-powered 350Z and the LFX Miata soon–but I’ll also be facilitating the next generation’s first project car, a S197-chassis Mustang built for the SCCA’s Club Spec program. Parts are already stacking up, a gross used Mustang has already been acquired and baselined, and our greenest staffers are ready to get to work building their very own race car under the tutelage of senior staff.

Will they succeed? Probably not the first time–building project cars is really challenging, a fact I’ve learned firsthand over the years. And many of those hard lessons can only be learned by failing. So I’m sure the team will encounter roadblocks, broken parts, late nights and dead ends as they learn what it takes. At least they’ll be doing it in a spacious, fully stocked, well-lit workspace: our first company shop. Here’s to the next generation making the most of it.

Comments