Behind the Build Ep 4 HOT ROD Shop Tour with Galpin Speed Shop MotorTrend

Galpin Ford has been a fixture in Southern California since 1948. Throughout their time in the San Fernando Valley, they've increased their footprint to include several new car dealerships, a museum, a custom shop called Galpin Auto Sports, and this place we are visiting today, Galpin Speed Shop. Part museum, part restoration shop, this facility houses Galpin's extensive collection of famous custom cars from the 50s and 60s. Dave Shutton is the guy in charge, restoring, maintaining, and even locating rare collectible cars and memorabilia that Galpin now owns. How did Galpin Speed Shop come to be? Let's go behind the build to find out. I work for Galpin Motors and I work directly for Bo Bachman, the president. Yeah. And this is kind of his little toy box that I get to play in, but I think we've got probably the raddest collection of custom culture in the world at this point. This is very cool. So I almost picture you as kind of like a historian curator of especially custom cars from like the 50s. The thing about this room is almost everything in here is just one of one. Yeah. Really it's just about preserving that crazy window of history where cars were art and art were cars and it got kids excited and it was very very like influential. What is this car here? I think that, you know, I've seen it before. The paint job is beautiful, but do you want to describe what we're looking at right here? This is my actual favorite build of mine. This is Iron Orchid, a 34 Ford five window coupe. I had been saving up a lot of tricks, you know, that were like cool show car things like the acrylic hood sides and in my brain it was what was the best craziest thing a guy could build out of a 34 Ford if it was 1964. So that's why it has a 427 FE motor. Yep, yep. That's why it has seats out of a Thunderbolt and I should also note that this car I did not paint. This was Daryl Hollenbeck. Okay. What's your background by the way, Dave? I don't think I've ever asked you like how did you learn how to do all this stuff? I ended up being a tool maker at General Motors for close to 20 years and then quit GM to move out here and and go to work for Boat. So now here we get into some of these these cars we were talking about. The 50s customs that were just way out there kind of mind-blowing things and there was certainly an era of like fiberglass and remaking things. So after I had recreated Roth's Mysterion and I had restored a couple of the Danwoods, I thought I could maybe pull off something and I built a chassis. I put a Hemi in it and then I sculpted the whole body out of plaster and vermiculite, hand laid the fiberglass, blew the bubble. I did this in four months while I was working full-time at GM. You just made me feel incredibly lazy. Four months? Yeah. Do you drive it? It's never been driven. Never, but Bo and I have talked recently about making it work. You know, when you build these as a full-on show car the last thing you want is brake fluid leaking, all the things, right? They sit with gas in them. I know everybody's going to be, oh whatever, drive it, do donuts. You know what? Spend a couple hundred grand of your money and then do donuts in it and we'll talk about how dumb that is. That's a good point. Right? That's a sobering thought because a lot of people would maybe think twice. Would you do donuts in your house? No, absolutely not. People are amazed by it static, but when you get in it and drive it everything gets really weird. Like, they don't understand what they're looking at. It's really great. When was this car built? 1964. Okay, so even then it would have looked like a, well, an Apollo rocket at that point, but like. As far as backstory goes, like there is no better story. It was found in front of a sex shop in Juarez, Mexico being used as a dumpster. That's real. It happened. It was missing from about right here forward. Yeah. The hood was gone. Yeah. The bubble was gone. The TV. The engine was still there, but there was enough of everything to where we could, you know, have things made or replicate or whatever. What do you like about this thing? Yeah. One of the things that I'm really pretty particular about when we do the restorations is not fixing any of his mistakes. Yeah. So like the back end is like three inches longer on one side than the other. Yeah. In the wheel openings, like one has like a quarter inch clearance and one has like an inch and a half. Was it hard to recreate the missing parts? What was that process like? Not super hard. So we got some high density foam and we sculpted it and one of the easiest ways to get that to delaminate is paint it with house paint and then lay the glass over it so that it doesn't like stick. Yeah. Just peel out all the all the glass or dump acetone in there to melt it and then that's it. One of the other crazy restorations as far as Roth goes was his original shop truck. His 56 Ford and basically restored this to a brand new mint green 56 Ford. Oh. And painted it white and did the flames exactly the way Roth did so all the overspray is still where the overspray was. Yeah. In between the bed and the box is still green. The inside of the box is green. You can see the hood lines. Yeah. Yeah. This and Orbitron again like how what are you using for research? Are you looking at old pictures and magazines? So for this one there wasn't a lot. I actually went through the Peterson archive to get as many detailed photographs as possible. Yeah. All those photos were black and white. Right. So I have some really great photos of just making a mess and then taking pictures of them in black and white so we could figure out what the colors were. Shades, yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. So it's it's extensive you know doing this stuff properly. So this one actually found us and everyone was looking for this car. Myself included. I looked for it for 25-30 years. Okay. And it just found us so it's really cool that this is now you know slated for a restoration someday at some point. I'm really looking forward to to restoring it and one of the other ones that I'm super stoked to get my hands on to do the restoration because I've really worked on this one for a long time. Yeah. Is the Exonic Corvette. The Exonic is probably the second most historical car in this room next to the Hirohata Merc. It was built from a brand new 57 Corvette. It had been painted and restyled I think 17 different times. But what really makes it next level crazy is it was the first bubble top custom. Yeah. It's also the first car with hydraulics. Really? So this is lowrider number one. No kidding. Which is really cool. The first candy fade paint. At one point it was fully remote control. All the hydros came from a military surplus store. For parts and stuff like if it's military surplus are you rebuilding what is it like landing gear? All the hydros are still in it and we'll rebuild them and use them. Wow. The grill is out of a 58 Opel sedan and I had to buy a whole car in Texas and I went there and took the grill and left the car. Thank you. But yeah it's you know these are the kind of things that nobody understands. And then you just mentioned the Hirohata Merc which is right behind us. Exactly. That's a car that we recently a couple years ago we featured in Hot Rod. I think that's the pinnacle of traditional custom cars. I think you know Sam Barris this was his opus. Just it's great. All the original Von Dutch stuff in the interior. The caddy engine which was the perfect choice. Well you're right. It does have as a complete car. It all works. I love when I did the photos the pictures but all the interior too. The switches and the knobs. And you know the owner here I had him made those himself back then. That's amazing. Dave we've seen a lot of the cars in the collection but you do a lot of the restoration work here. Actually you do all the restoration work in the room next door right? Correct. Let's go check that out because I want to see what's involved with you know making fiberglass and all the stuff you have to do. Here's the shop. This is where kind of everything is going on at the moment. Mainly focused right now on this Thunderbird which is really going to be something pretty special like perhaps we'll say Sloniker-ish. And that's the Sloniker award that's given out of the Grand National Roadsters. Correct. Just so people know. But is this your car by the way? No this is a really good friend's and customer's car. And what started out as a pretty simple T-Bird you know as things usually do it evolved into a very crazy show go kind of a build. And there's it has a Fatman tube chassis. The body's been channeled over the frame. Yeah. All new floors. I'm actually building the trunk today. Yeah. 427 side oiler FE with a Latham supercharger. Four side drafts. Yeah. Tremec five speed. Ford nine inch. Tomorrow it'll get the firewall put in for real. The pedals put in. Steering column mounted. And then start finishing up all that little stuff. Yeah. But right now it's just going to be black. And I'm thinking sage green interior. This is your car you're building right? Yeah. In my spare time I'm throwing this roadster together. Hopefully I'll have it done for Grand National. Okay. So I actually just sprayed the frame last weekend. Okay. And this is just the way it it came out. It's decent. It's actually the color of my very first car. Aquamarine poly. Chevy color. Yeah. And all these are all the trim and the suspension pieces. Yeah. There's quite a few things that are ready to go. The grill. Headlights. Certain things. Yeah. I already have one load coming back from chrome but now I have to send one more for all the things I didn't think about. Got it. And then yeah you were telling us the the engine has an interesting background right? It's it's crossed the ocean to Japan and back I think three times. Wow. It was in a race car in Japan and my buddy Tom and I just fired it up last Sunday and man it's great. I'm super stoked. I actually bought this from Shige from Mooneyes and couldn't be happier. I can't wait to now take it all apart and make it pretty and stuff it in that thing. What era Hemi is this? It's an early 354. This episode is brought to you today by Kaeser compressors and Dave actually uses a unit from Kaeser here at Galpin and we've got Jim Tatone a representative from Kaeser to talk about what makes their screw type compressors unique and then Dave you can talk about too versus a traditional piston style compressor. So let's look at this. Jim what is this? What makes it unique? Well this is our air tower 5c. We make this is an all-in-one. It's a rotary screw compressor, dryer so the air is moisture free and storage tank and filtration all in one unit. This has a unique feature that there's an oil warm-up feature. This unit keeps the oil at a predetermined temperature so that it's ready to go when it starts. It's not cold and it has to be comfortable in periods of extended non-use as well as running flat out. All I can say about this is it's never let me down. In five or six years of almost continual use, every day, all day, minimum 10 hours a day this thing's putting in work and I've never had to touch it. So thanks again to Jim. Thank you for being here and thank you Kaeser for sponsoring this episode of Hot Rod Behind the Build. All right well Dave we just checked out your air compressor and obviously you need a lot of good tools here to do the work you do. Of course. I love the fab area here so it's kind of cool you want to just sort of show me around what you got, what you use them for. We'll start with the Vibers here which is basically a lesser model pull max. It does all the the same stuff it just has a little bit more of a limited adjustability. This basically builds whatever you tell it to so the do-all bandsaw is a must. I prefer old equipment. Yeah it's the best stuff. The only new stuff I have here is the the two bailey pieces, the shear and the magnetic brake. Magnetic as in it holds the steel in place as you bend it right? Yeah you know it's magnetic so whatever you put on top is the shape that things will become. There's a very old Bridgeport milling machine that I don't know how I would live without and my favorite tool the lathe. It's just a four foot one and a half foot swing. Well and then the last thing we should touch on too since we're here and surrounded by it is some of the memorabilia. Yeah I need constant visual stimulation. I constantly find myself just looking around when I'm trying to think of something or figure out a problem or design. What's cool is when you walk into this place you immediately know where you're at. Sure inside a sterile environment and you're not doing sterile type work here. You're doing very creative work. I can totally see you get a lot of inspiration. I hear that all the time. People get inspired from articles and features and you know you look at color combinations and wheel and tires and all that stuff so you're surrounded by that. It's only got to help you work right? Definitely yes. There's a ton of history hiding inside this innocuous looking warehouse in Van Nuys, California. Cars that truly are works of art from the inspired minds of the early customizers. Which car did you like best? Let us know in the comments and tell us where you would like us to go in the next episode of Hot Rod Behind the Build.