I’ll be honest — there was a stretch this summer where I watched our subscriber count actually go down for the first time ever, and it made me nervous. Not “panic and quit” nervous. More like the kind of nervous that reminds you why you started making these videos in the first place.
Here’s the thing though: the gap wasn’t us losing interest. Life just took over for both of us, in different ways.
Alex works a 4-on/4-off schedule, and with his wife being a teacher and the kids out for summer, this year gave them 22 working days out of roughly 80. The other 58? Gone. Camping, four-wheelers in the woods, banana ball games, Mariners games, a lake he hadn’t been back to since he was a kid that somehow hadn’t changed one bit. His parents even met up with them out there, and he charged an ice cream cone to his dad’s account just for old times’ sake.
On my end, I work a 7-on/7-off schedule as a pharmacist, and my summer went a different direction. Church camp took up a week, and then my wife and I spent 16 days in Portugal and Spain with some other friends — not Alex this time. Somewhere in there we ended up racing go-karts next to an actual F1 track. I’m 240 pounds, which apparently means the advertised 55 mph top speed is more of a suggestion. I still hit 48. Still had to use the brakes. Still got smoked by a lighter guy every time we came out of a corner. Worth it anyway — you could hear real F1 cars running time trials next door the whole time.
And underneath all of that, my actual summer project: the shop. It’s signed off by the county, my stuff is moved in, and I’ve already pulled an engine in there without having to get off the creeper to skew myself around. Small thing. Big deal when you’ve been working in a driveway for years.
Money reality: the shop wasn’t cheap, so this fall is more prep-and-recoup than big spend for me. Alex saved himself close to two grand fixing the front pump seal on his F350 himself instead of letting the dealer have it — so that’s rolling into an ’05-and-up Super Duty front axle for his Bronco instead. Small wins funding the next ones. That’s how this always works. Bob the Buick, meanwhile, has something special coming that we’re not ready to reveal just yet.
The one I keep coming back to, though, is the Kiowa Racer. It’s a Model A my dad built a custom frame for, as a tribute build to a car my great-grandpa actually owned — a fenderless little race car named after a prairie. My grandpa was part of that story too, before he passed. Now it’s my dad and I carrying it forward, and we’ve dropped a five-cylinder Mercedes turbo diesel into it, which might be the strangest engine choice I’ve ever signed off on. Torquey as hell, though. Low to the ground. I have a feeling it’s going to feel a lot faster than it has any right to.
This fall, Alex and I are actually splitting up — he’s running the Baja 1000 again with Total Mayhem Racing, and I’m heading to SEMA with my dad and Jester’s Garage, with King of the Hammers sitting quietly in the back of my head as the next big goal. Different directions, same grind.
Wheel it, Wreck it, Wrench it, Repeat.
Watch the full catch-up episode on the DPV channel.
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