When I was a kid back in the ‘80s there was a TV commercial for a brand of work wear in which a know-all corporate executive is bringing his clients down to the dock to take them to his yacht that was moored in the middle of the harbor. The friendly ferryman tells the exec that, due to the size of the dinghy he’ll be using to get them there, it seems as though it will require two trips to get the job done.   This is met with an angry reply of, “Don’t backchat me, I know boats!” and...

We want to spend some time profiling shops that utilize My Shop Assist and understand the benefits of it.  Within the first month of our public release in 2012 Sebastian Chacoff, owner of Specialty-Z in Chatsworth, CA signed up for our trial.  Specialty-Z ran through the free trial but as a early product, the interest wasn't there to continue.   Fast forward a year, we took a trip from the 2013 SEMA show to head out to compete in the Global Time Attack Superlap Battle at Button Willow with the MSA EVO.   We had several days between the end...

Introduction   Evolution Dynamics is a relatively small shop just outside of Dallas, TX specializing in the Mitsubishi Evo platform.  It has anywhere from 20-30 cars at the shop and between 15-20 engines being built at any given time.  Handling 15-20 engine builds can be a daunting task if you only have 1 person building the engines.  Keeping the parts straight, knowing what each customer wants, and various components going to different machine shops adds to the difficulty of getting every engine exactly right.  To top it off, building race engines isn't just putting parts together using manufacturer supplied specs. ...

About English Racing Unless you have been living under a rock for the past couple years, you have probably heard of English Racing.  They are a premier destination shop in Camas, WA which is about 15 minutes outside of Portland, Oregon.  English Racing has been a go-to shop for Evo, DSM, and Honda tuning for many years.  More recently, they have been taking in Subaru work as well as building several of the fastest GTRs on the planet.       English Racing's race rig at TX2K15    The shop is owned and run by Lucas English who, like most...

Every mechanic and engine builder knows how essential it is for engine components to be free of any contaminates. Traditionally, shops have used labor intensive and/or crude methods to get parts as clean as possible.   Every machine shop will wash your parts in a hot VAT cleaner. It spins your parts around and sprays them with a hot and caustic solution to remove contaminates. This machine does a pretty good job but it has many downfalls. Parts cannot be left unattended because the solution can actually eat away at the material. And the solution rarely gets down into all...