I Didn't Set Out To Start A Business

Remember when you got your first “enthusiast” car?

For a lot of us it was probably a bit too beat up and a bit more trouble than it was worth.

 I was 15 when I inherited my dad’s 1991 Jeep Cherokee.

Now, this was a great vehicle, but it wasn’t a car. Growing up on Need for Speed Underground and Midnight Club filled my head with dreams. These dreams eventually manifested themselves in the form of a 2003 Mitsubishi Eclipse broken down on a curb two blocks over from my house. I passed by this thing for a few weeks before leaving a note on the windshield:

“Hi, I’m interested in purchasing this. Here’s my phone number.”

 I didn’t think anything would come of it, but a few days later I got a call.

“My son is using this for parts. $400 and it’s yours.”

At 15 didn’t have a job. But I had a will, and I had a way. Two weeks go by, and I scrounge up the money, and a few friends and I push it the two blocks home. 

It, of course, didn’t run, so I had no idea if the engine was even good. I also knew next to nothing about working on cars.

But I learned.

I spent the summer fixing it up, breaking it, and fixing it again. I acquired a good bit of knowledge. I even made use of my high school’s collision course and painted it! The cheapest Napa Fleet White available.

 I made friends because of this car.  I made connections (mainly the Pick-N-Pull employees, but hey, networking is networking). Some very fond memories only exist because of this car that was saved from the scrap yard.

 I eventually sold it for about $3,000 and I bought a 1995 Eagle Talon Tsi AWD. An upgrade, right? On paper it was. In reality it presented a new issue: The interior was garbage, plain and simple.

Panels didn’t fit. Plastics would break if you looked at them wrong. It was just unpleasant to be in.

I spent a few years with this car. I swapped the gray interior to a nice black from a 1998 Eclipse donor car after spending two years trying (and failing) to make the original work. This car really built up my skillset. I did my first power mods with this. I dipped my toes into “tuning” (an ancient A’Pexi Power AFC). I eventually had to rebuild the engine.

I fell in love with this kind of work.

But there was one thing I dreaded every single time it came up: Doing any work that involved taking the interior apart. I swear every single time I wound up breaking a clip or the brittle plastic would just crumble.

I parted ways with the car in 2018 and went through a few different platforms before landing myself a Turbo II swapped 1986 Mazda RX7. I have been pining for a FC since I was a kid. Initial D anyone? Unsurprisingly, the aforementioned interior issue was here, just about 10X worse.

I scoured Google, new old stock from Atkins, Ebay, just about every marketplace that offered interior parts for the FC. I found out very quickly that some of these parts just don’t exist anymore, are outrageously overpriced, or will leave the interior in the same shape that it’s already in.

I was just getting out of college after pursuing an engineering degree. About the only thing that stuck was CAD modelling. I had even dabbled with modelling some parts for my Talon.

I started experimenting with making small parts for the FC. The door lock, the fuel door release, the handle trim, etc. Anything that was broken or felt disposable. I still had a big problem, though: if I can’t hold these in my hands, then they’re still just an idea.

So I bought a 3D printer.

An Ender 3. A real tinkering machine.

But it brought these ideas to the real world.

Now, at the time, I wasn’t thinking about starting a business, or even making “products”. I just wanted parts that didn’t break every time I handled them.

After printing a prototype for the door vent assembly I posted a progress photo to Reddit. The response surprised me.

“Do you sell these?”

“Do you have any other designs?”

“Could you make X?”

The most DMs I had ever received from strangers.

A switch didn’t flip immediately in my head to open a marketplace for these parts. They were still crude, at the “good enough” stage. I had to make them as close to perfect as I could. I iterated and reiterated. Designed and redesigned. Many nights extended to the early morning (and they still consistently do).

Eventually, it stopped making sense to treat it like a side project.

That’s how this started. That’s how this is going. It’s not about selling parts.

 It’s about refusing to accept that “this is just how old cars are”.