How Jeff Lutz Jr Changed My Life: When I Learned How To Fabricate!(Among Many Other Things)

that was always like my thing whenever i was over there helping with something he would go eat doing something and i would take it as like a personal challenge to get farther than i think he would expect me to on whatever task he had given me and aside from the actual welding there's one specific moment i can put my finger on where something went off in my head and it was never the same again so i thought i'd follow up the cooper video with another one that's similar this one probably should have been first and that's jeff lutz jr because without him i would for sure not be doing any of the stuff that i do right now for one huge reason and that is he taught me how to weld he put the torch in my hand for the first time and i didn't even really want to do it like i was not seeking that out i just uh i'd come home from class one day he texted me he's like hey can you help me come by the shop and help me push a car because he was there by himself a lot when his dad was out you know filming whatever it's just him so like yeah i don't know i wouldn't push a car i like didn't really know him that well at the time i'll get into how i actually met him in a little bit but just this specific story i'll finish it out i got there helping push the car talking to a little bit about what he was doing i was like a 4th gen camaro with a 540 and 288s and he was making a fuel cell for it and he's like yeah i just made this fuel cell you know i'm gonna weld it up tomorrow whatever he's like you ever take welder before i'm like no i've never welded anything before really he's like you want to try it and i said yeah yeah i want to try it so he's like all right he gets these pieces of scrap puts him on the table give me a helmet takes it home and he says all right just watch what i do so you know i put the thing on and i'm watching him and he lights it up melts two pieces and just you know starts putting the rod in like until then i had no i was not familiar with the concept of tig welding i didn't know how it worked honestly it kind of scared me like the thought of welding in general just looked like it was a good way to hurt yourself so i was kind of afraid to do it if i'm being completely honest but when i actually watched him do it that was the first time i'd ever watched somebody weld and saw what was happening and i thought oh this is pretty cool it's kind of like soldering he said okay here no you do it so i take it and he said he said light it up and i'll tell you when to put the rod in don't do it too soon it won't work i said okay so i lit it up and i sat there for a while and it starts to you know it was aluminum i started on aluminum just because that's what he was doing that's what he grabbed a piece of i mean it's it's doing its thing the ark's kind of you know it's breaking up starting to get shiny and it gets shiny he's like all right put the rod in so i did it moved forward a little bit he's like you know waiting for it to go and he's like all right rod rod rod and he was kind of like tell like telling me when to do it and i did it you know like a little four inch piece i still have the piece i i kept it and i labeled it so i didn't forget when i did it my stuff was like oh that's cool and he said dude you need to buy a welder what do you mean he's like you can freaking weld you need to go get a tick welder and i was like really he's like yeah people don't just do that they don't just pick it up and do that like you just did you need to go get one of those things like right now and it's like uh okay like i didn't i don't know i just did it i like watched him do it and it made sense and i did it like the machine was already set up for the right amps and everything so it was just a you know monkey see monkey do thing in my head i didn't think anything of it and at the time that was when the escalated first i first on the lsa and i did not have an ice tank i wanted to do one eventually and he's like go to horowitz and get some aluminum tomorrow and hopefully make an ice tank for that thing it'll be easy and i was like okay what's horowitz he said oh that's the metal place you know in butler you know tell them you want this thickness and you know this big so like the next day i went down to the shop and he helped me measure it all out took the measurements that he told me to use went down there got the stuff brought it back and i was like okay now what and he kind of he built most of it like i helped him do it but he did all the you know like the measuring it went it went right here and he yeah he kind of he kind of put it all together like he's like okay now we're going to cut the hole and you know showed me how he did that and all that stuff and i helped him mark it and bend it but he actually did the bending of it so it would line up right and he got it tagged up handed to me with the welder and said here put it together and then he got a phone call from his dad or something i think it was his dad so he left the area and i'm just there with this welder all i had done prior to that was just that little four inch piece so i'm like uh okay i'm just gonna poke this button and do it and i did the bottom first so if the top was you know kind of figured out then do the top last once i got my groove and it just started going together the same way that the other piece did i'm like heck yeah like i can do this and i remember thinking he was on the phone and i thought i'm going to get this all together before he gets off the phone he would think that was cool because he probably doesn't think i'm going to be able to do it that was always like my thing whenever i was over there helping with something he would go be doing something and i would take it as like a personal challenge to get farther than i think he would expect me to on whatever task he had given me and that was one of them and i did it i welded it up and he welded the feet on because that was a little bit of a different it wasn't a corner joint so i wasn't prepared for that but we put it in put water in it it did not leak i thought man like this is really cool like i need to get one of these things i can weld stuff this opens so many doors and it was then that it kind of clicked like you know i could i could build my own turbo kit i'd i'd go over there sometimes and i'd help him you know he'd be like making headers or something and i'd hold it while he tacked it and i'd i'd always put the helmet on so i could watch him i'd just go over there just to watch him i'd sweep the floor and whenever it came time for her to make something i'd you know run over there and just watch what he was doing because i wanted to learn more about it so that's the actual story of how i learned to weld but we'll jump back to how i met him in the first place it was through a guy named george messer who had a silverado work truck with a ladder rack and it was turbo i met him at a test in tune in 2015 when the escalade still had a converter i wanted to do a cam in it and here's this guy with this truck who's going pretty fast i mean relatively it was running like low 13s at the time and that's kind of like you know it was right in my wheelhouse and i started talking to him about it he's a cool guy and he's like yeah that's winter i just want to do a cam and then that's it it'll be done i was like oh well let me know when you do that like i want to help because i want to learn how to cam an ls motor that was my goal i wanted to learn how to do it from somebody who knew how to do it so i didn't screw it up because i screwed up my big block enough times by not just kind of winging it with some of my friends who were also winging it this guy he's got this turbo truck it's working i want to learn so i put that out there and i didn't hear from him for a couple months and then he sends me a message on facebook because i had offered to like come do the cam up at my garage because then you know he has a place to do it because he said he did all his work outside he's like hey i think uh if it's still on the table like take you up on that offer to you know do my cam in your garage so i was like heck yeah dude bring it out because he did he had kind of like a a junkyard whatever was laying around turbo setup on there that was built like you know kind of roadkill style just like oh let's see if we can put together with this random stuff and it worked and uh jeff jr was the one who built it i didn't know this and one day we're you know we're gonna pull the motor out of this truck to put a different one in because it you know snowball and i was cool with it because i was learning so much and he you know jeff shows up i've never met him before i met his dad a couple years before that because he had dynoed my car but i never met junior and he helped us pull this motor out and he was like oh he's like i never knew what was here you know i drive by here every day on the way to work i would see the lights on but oh my god you know with no idea i was like oh that's cool it turns out he lived like two miles down the road and so you also pull this motor out and you know we get to doing every now and then he would just stop by when the lights were on because he knew i was in there and he was going back from work and we were messing with something and he can be like oh well you could you know make this panel and bead roll that i'm like what's this what's that he'd always say oh well i could show you how to do that i could show you how to do that and i feel like he probably said that to a lot of people and nobody ever actually called him on it like hey i want to learn how to do that what do i need to do to do that right now because i want to figure it out but i did if he offered to teach me something i was like okay let's do it i think that's kind of how that dynamic happened i don't know why he was always willing to teach people things and i was really eager to learn stuff somebody asked me before and it was a good question i said was he a good teacher were you good learner how does that work i think it's both i think you need to have both to really create that because he would teach me things that i didn't even ask to learn like when i'd be over there helping him with something he'd be doing something he'd be like hey here's how you do this and i would i didn't know what he was doing but i would stop what i was you know sweeping or taking out the garbage or something and i'd watch him do it and he'd explain it unprompt i did not ask and i also kind of explained like 16 other things at the same time and i was like this is great like i'm learning so much i'm gonna absorb all of this i was just a sponge when i was in there all the time and so yeah he pushed me to get the welder and when i got that welder took it back to my own garage i could like freaking barely figure out how to use it like i was you know all pumped like yeah i can freaking weld then i get mine and it's like blowing out doing all kinds of weird stuff and then i realized a lot of the part of welding is the setup of the welder in that configuration so i just kept messing with it until i figured it out and then i was able to continue learning the motions once i learned how to use the machine and it helped that i got one that didn't have a whole lot of settings to mess with that's a note you should take too if you want to get into it fancy waters are kind of confusing to a newbie well fast forward i did you know a bunch of stuff with them like the first time i went to sema was with them eri the first time i went to oklahoma was with them the first time i ever towed a vehicle on a trailer was his truck on a trailer behind his dad's dooley and the second time i ever towed a trailer was his dad's dually with a 48 foot goose neck that had pro mod and the second 57 in it i'd never towed anything more than his truck on the open trail the first time you know you going to texas or something like yeah i'll go so this is just me and him he drives for like four hours he's like all right your turn now it's dark i can't see anything this trailer is longer than anything i've ever seen in my life when i look out in the mirror and i'm just like oh god there's you know it's not just an empty trailer like there's important stuff in here it was very you know throw me into the fire and now i you know that was i do that all the time it was the first time i'd ever done it those guys really brought me out of like the local bubble that's how i was exposed to the world and really shown what was what was possible i guess with this kind of stuff and aside from the actual welding there's one specific moment i can put my finger on where something went off in my head and it was never the same again i don't even know if he'd remember this because it was just such an in passing thing and it's weird how that works or someone can say something to you just kind of in passing and it just triggers something and you never forget it and it's just it's in there all the time and it was this before i did the supercharger on the escalade i was considering turboing my monte carlo instead the big block at least that's what he wanted me to do because i had a you know money saved up and i wanted to do something with it that was cool and he's like yeah you could put a couple put a couple 88s on that 502. it'd make 1500 real easy and at the time i thought 700 horsepower was like freaking god and i'm thinking 1500 like geez what am i going to do with that i remember this we're standing in their shop looking at some car and i was like 1500 like i don't need that i don't do this for a living and we were like walking out of the shop with like a camshaft or something i think for this george guy's truck and just in passing he you know we're walking out and i was like yeah i don't do this for a living and he just said he does and pointed at his dad's pro mod in the corner and i don't know why that memory is as vivid as vivid can be in my head because i looked at that car and the light bulb went off and i thought you're right he does huh nothing nothing was the same after that it wasn't at that specific moment that i decided that's what i wanted to pursue for a living but it just it made me look at things differently way differently it's really significant all of that because i learned so much that they probably don't even realize that i learned just by watching them like sometimes they would be talking to me and i wouldn't even notice i'd be like off in space or something and i'd be like staring at a car or like yo you there and i'm oh what i was like staring at this car just kind of piecing it together in my head thinking about what i've seen them do and how this car is and trying to picture how they did it for example you know a piece of pipe let's say oh that piece of pipe looks like this i think they probably cut it like that and then did this to it because i saw him do that once like that's the kind of stuff that i think about when i'm walking around in there look at all these cars but something that comes to mind why it was important for me to be around that and to see it and how impactful that was there's a specific song a lyric that comes to mind that i actually heard for the first time when i went to tow those cars to texas with jeff jr and he probably doesn't remember this either but you know when you're someone else is playing music and you hear a good song you pull out your shazam thing figure out what it is and download it well this is what happened to this we're pulling on the on-ramp to get on i-79 south and all night long by machine gun kelly comes on from his phone and i don't i don't really listen to the lyrics that closely but i heard it for a few seconds and i'm thinking oh this is a good song download it so i did and one part of that that sticks with me is this how we supposed to know what's what we dream is possible if don't nobody that looks like us makes it a grammar's terrible but you get the point how are you supposed to know what's possible if nobody looks like you is doing it seeing jeff senior and junior do that stuff showed me that some guy from butler could go do stuff in the real world and make a dent a big dent it was real it be they made it real for me that that could be done and that's a big factor in why i do things the way i do them as far as explaining and trying to teach because not everybody has somebody like that in their life that could show them it could be done and is also willing to teach them how to do it i was extremely fortunate that i crossed paths with those guys and they served that role for me because i could tell you for sure this would still be my daily driver and i'd probably be in some job that i hate right now doing god knows what all the things i learned from junior fabrication wise when i was building that he'd come by when i was doing it he didn't do any welding or anything on there but if i was stuck or i had a question i had to go about something he would stop buying his way from work look at it and say oh you know you know put this bracket here don't put it there use this thickness if you use it too thin it'll break there over this and stuff like that he'd just kind of advise me if i hit a roadblock or just wasn't sure on something which is why that thing works so well i'm just put that out there i was the first turbo kit i ever did but i was using knowledge that was accrued by those guys through him through his dad that took them you know 20 years to learn i was just the hands that did it i had the the knowledge of 20 years of experience at my disposal the determination of a 22 year old to sit there and figure it out until it was done that's why i do that because the lessons i learned from junior were most of them probably taught to him by his dad so i went from his dad to junior to me who does that go to it's not my call to let that information stop with me it's just a baton i have to pass it somebody has to learn that next somebody has to do something with it that's my duty with this stuff that i've learned and i feel like i've learned it and i have these opportunities that other people don't have because i'm gonna be the guy to put it back out there not to just one person but thousands or hundreds of thousands however many end up picking up the things that i say over the years and that's why i do it it wasn't for them i wouldn't be doing this right now honestly i could sit here and pace around the shop for hours explaining all the critical stories of the role that both senior junior their whole family played in my process over the last few years and you know at some point i'll address more of them when they come up with other significant moments but this video is about that the the main gist of it with basically learning how to fabricate stuff which has opened so many doors for me like i wouldn't be i would never have stayed in oklahoma if i didn't know how to do that i stayed there to build a turbo kit on chase's car if i didn't have that skill i don't have that opportunity when you learn skills people can't take that from you that's that's in your pocket forever no one can say you know what you're not allowed to know how to weld anymore i got that no matter where i go that's in my pocket i can pick up a welder and do something with it you don't need a piece of paper that tells you you're allowed to build a turbo kit there's so much stuff on youtube and just while we're on that topic that welding tips and tricks guy i learned a lot by watching his videos too because i didn't want to bother jeff with all my stupid questions when i could find that basic information on the internet myself and that's something you should take note of too is that when people are willing to help you don't bother them with super basic questions all the time see if you can find it out on your own first it's respectful of their time and ultimately makes you 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