The Gearhead Project

Keep it simple. 

Everybody’s talking about new year’s resolutions and I’m just over here thinking, “I wish I could get my shit together a little bit better EVERY day.”

Meet Ken Theis, gearhead like us, but also a seeker of work-life parallel he is.

Ken and I first connected in earnest back in the spring of 2017. I’d bought my first mountain bike, shared a few pre-work ride results online, and was looking to develop something of a co...

TGP S01E29 | Glenn Wallace Went All-In

How many engines have you built this year?

As of November 19th, Glenn Wallace had built 155.

Let me put that another way. 46 weeks into the year, that’s more than three a week. If you divide 155 engines by the 322 total days already passed the night we had our call, that’s a new engine every other day. And get this—that’s only Mitsubishi 4G63s. He built several other engines this year, too.

As if...

The first two-time guest on the podcast!

Driving into an unknown future.

He did something crazy, something nobody in their right mind would do—he spent days driving a small car across Japan on B-roads.

Wait. That doesn’t sound crazy at all.

But when you think about it through the lens of leaving a horrible job in a still largely new-to-you country on the far side of the planet, relocating to another job in that same country, a country ...

You don’t have to be a gearhead to be a gearhead project.

Anthony isn’t. And the more I think about his path—even though we hadn’t spoken in nearly 10 years—the more I see he’s doing the exact same thing I am. The same thing we’re ALL doing.

Chasing our dreams of doing stuff that matters.

He’s a self-taught software engineer who shares his path from playing video games to law school. And in this episode, Anthony and I talk about t...

Eric’s one of the small handful of people I consulted with prior to making this podcast the replacement for Gearbox Magazine.

He’s a fellow Montero owner. He backs up his technical positions with facts, hard data, and—get this, math.

He recently asked me if I’d ever noticed my projects get done faster when I don’t tell anyone about them. Considering I’ve long found my projects get done faster when I’ve told others about them, I wa...

Berry Lowman is a gearhead like us.

I met Berry on Twitter almost 10 years ago, but we didn’t get a chance to really talk until we recorded this episode of The Gearhead Project.

He does open road racing in a Corvette. He drives the latest Ford press vehicles. He doesn’t get into religion or politics online. And he help organized Motorama LIVE, a weekly Twitter chat seen by millions back in the golden, pre-shillbot days of Twitter.

He’...

David Lovett has some very interesting cars. 

If you don’t already know David Lovett, and I tell you he lives a mile from his nearest neighbor, deep in the heart of Texas; so far out in the boonies he still has to budget his bandwidth because it takes all night to download a single gigabyte on his “high speed internet” service.

What’s your brain telling you about him?

But what if I told you David has pet rabbits, speaks Japanese, and ...

OMG. I am SO over it. ?

In the month leading up to Gearbox Magazine's 9th anniversary, I realized I no longer cared about all the magazine-related stuff. I took a month off—and nobody noticed.

I like to chalk it up to Facebook being the Walmart of the Web, simultaneously eroding attention spans and reversing nearly 20 years of the Internet effectively uniting the people of the world through common interest, but the fact of the ma...

Sometimes you just gotta start over. 

It's easy to discover something new and exciting, go all-in, and have a number of very meaningful experiences—to the point where you it starts feeling like a calling. But it's also easy to get burned out, lose interest, and find yourself struggling with sunk cost fallacy—you don't want have wasted all that time. 

It's not a waste of time—but only if we learned our lessons. 

The Gea...

Sometimes you end up in business for yourself purely by luck. That’s how it happened to Justin Mohney. And it all started with a Christmas present back in 2009.

Tired of crusty brackets and whatnot under the hood of his first gen DSM, Justin asked his parents for Eastwood powder coating kit for Christmas. They put in a good word to Santa, who delivered, and Justin was powder coating stuff almost immediately.

He loved how the durabl...

Dan drives a Montero. Dan lives on a sailboat.

I drive a Montero and want to live on a sailboat. When I discovered this fact about Dan, I got his number and called him up. He gave me some good advice.

Suffice to say, while living aboard a sailboat makes for some of the most affordable housing in Berkley, it’s like living aboard a project vehicle. That floats. In water. And will sink if not properly cared for.

Where do you think he wor...

They say the best things in life are free.

But you’ve got to invest in the skills and experiences that prepare you for the best things in life.

Elise Bent and Mercedes Lilienthal are doing just that. They are Team Free Range Dames—and they’re working their asses off to get to the Rebelle Rally in October

What’s the Rebelle Rally, you ask? It’s the first women’s off-road navigation rally raid in the United States.

In this episode, we t...

Get this.

There’s an old saying about starting a business—find a problem and solve it.

Josh Bent bought a fancy awning for his truck, only to learn they don’t sell mounting brackets because people install those awnings on all kinds of vehicles all over the world. It’s not a cost effective thing for an awning manufacturer to do.

So what do owners do? They fend for themselves.

A lot of people go out and rig something up using angle brack...

Everyday, we see gearheads like us living the good life.

They have the toys, the trips, the titles. They make it look effortless. It’s like they have perfect lives.

But we don’t see the dedication. The sacrifice. The sweat equity behind those carefully curated images.

Today on TGP, a conversation with my old friend, Kris Marciniak.

Kris had been a gearhead for several years before I met him back in 2004.

He’d bought a WRX and helped sta...

SAVE THE FORUMS!

Once upon a time, there were places gearheads like us could go online to find other gearheads, learn to maintain, modify, and fix our own vehicles—and make lasting friendships that border on family. These places were called “forums”, and they were the original social media.

Sadly, Facebook has all but killed the forum.

Our collective attention has shrunk to the point of being almost non-existent. We used to strictly d...

We gearheads are a special lot.

We know what we want—and we’re not afraid to roll up our sleeves and sacrifice a few 10mm sockets and wrenches to get it. We take things apart. We figure out how they work. We put them back together—better than ever.

Some are content to remain consumers, buying go-fast bits and playing cars. Others take things a bit more seriously. We want to modify our lives alongside our machines. Such is the focus ...

Ever notice how easy it can be to talk to some gearheads? You meet someone new and, after the usual chit-chat around common ground, discover they come from a completely different background from you.

Most of us would agree (the cool kids, anyway) that, while the machines bring us together, it’s the people who keep us coming back. I met Wade Stoddart through our mutual friend, Phil “Mr. Powerfist” Hansford. Phil drove his Pajero Evol...

Acura’s 500,000-mile legend talks about making the miles count.

I met Tyson at a Phoenix Automotive Press Association (PAPA) meeting back in April. It was the first of hopefully many engagement with the local motoring press.

Sitting down next to Tyson in the small conference room, after getting my name, he asked the only question a true gearhead would ask of a new connection—”So what did you drive here today?” Looking out the windows...

Based out of Oklahoma, Darren and the DTR family have been showing up to events around the country for over a decade.

When I first interviewed Darren, way back in 2009, he was a full-time heavy diesel mechanic with an 8-second, automatic 1G DSM and a couple Import Face Off national titles under his belt. When I caught up with him again three years later in 2012, he was deep into the eights and racing all over the country.

What you’re...