How NASCAR Drivers Custom Helmets Are Painted! Inside Off Axis Paint Shop Tour!

yeah you guys paint each other for fun like you're already bored oh yes paint something on me every friday night we breathe a lot of pain here i don't know so the whole helmet's carbon fiber and then we candy it red first so the whole helmet goes red how do you manage to keep it clean because i don't see glitter anywhere in here when we're doing metal flick little girls call it glitter but um if you're a dog what do you do um i finger paint helmets i guess guys come in race car drivers of you know nascar nhra supercross whatever and uh they have ideas in their head usually and they say make it on the helmet and that's uh that's our job so this is kind of my office i i don't really use this a whole bunch this is actually sam bass's desk um i had the pleasure of working with him you know quite a bit before he got sick and passed on so his wife didn't want this in a storage unit somewhere or a closet and and wanted to be seen so um i didn't i told her it's not mine it's on loan she can have it back whenever she'd like but you know everything on here is how he had it too you know so like the pencil sharpener phone all the markers um you know the goal is to like set it up exactly how he had it wow i feel like i shouldn't even be standing here i don't know right that's why i don't work in here a lot it's just it's too much so wow but is that a real no these are like these are just a couple helmets he had uh sam had in his gallery um the paint guns are mine this is my grandfather's he was a auto painter like collision painter so those are exactly how they came out of his shop uh everything's like always racing but i'm really into music and that's kind of helped me and sam connected with the guitars and everything so i found these headphones and i was like oh this is the coolest thing so i framed it and if you look at his signature it's like before he had like his real yeah like legendary signatures so i thought that was one yeah i thought that was pretty cool to have something like way back in the college days before he was you know the sam bass that we all that we all know wow did your painting interest start with your grandpa's painting yeah i think so i mean i had a really cool art teacher and and noel too we both went to high school together and uh that i don't know i didn't really have like any hobbies or anything crazy when i was younger and the airbrush kind of just fell into my lap with this art teacher i had so like helmets weren't really like a career path i guess and then the more i got into racing i was like oh you can paint this helmet and we can literally ship it anywhere in the world so that's uh that's how it started and then moved to north carolina like 10 years ago and it just uh it kept growing so when we moved here it was literally just a storage unit and myself and we just kept getting bigger and bigger man so you actually do finger paint helmets i thought you were kidding that's yeah so everything has like a story here these four helmets are all just in all guys in the xfinity series and his daughter comes and helps me paint a helmet every year for the playoffs and justin has no idea what it's going to look like harper obviously does it's in her head and she's you know thinking about it all year round so this was when she was three i think and it was just like finger painting just her hanging out and now she's uh you know seven or eight so we're on like our fifth one and uh she comes in like throws the paint mask on like grabs the paint gun like i don't have to i don't even have to hold her hand anymore it's all it's all her so wow yeah it's cool have you ever gone like justin allgeier's youtube page too um we filmed the whole process so every year he gets to like go back and watch it after it's done because you know he doesn't he doesn't have any idea what it's going to look like until he puts it on the car well that's awesome pretty cool yeah well i guess let's move on to where the magic happens yeah oh he's got a dunder is that sam's dunder mifflin mug or is that yours cool stuff uh we used to pay for the gravedigger which is always cool chad reed uh this is a cool suit i think it's from uh 1985 or 86 something like that so it's a phil parsons but it's cool to see like how thin these are compared to like the newer fire suits and it blows my mind to think that there's like some kind of foil you do that with like crinkle plastic or something in there pretty close yeah yeah so yeah it's all all pretty much paint most of the time like maybe we'll throw a logo like this will be a sticker or that's a sticker but anything else like if it's a you know two color design or something like that it'll it'll always be painted we try to use the least amount of stickers as possible more helmets oh we gotta you gotta show this one because my buddy we do the off axis 500 every year which is our big go-kart race um and it just keeps growing every year but one uh one year my buddy was racing first time in town and he came here and raced he ended up getting spun out and hit head-on and the helmet went flying off his face with a gopro on it and uh so we retired that one it's it's now on the hall of fame we like to call it and then this is this is where the magic happens so noel's doing the magic now oh yeah i'm just putting some trim on the bottom of this before we put our final clear coat on it yeah see so i guess walk us through the process how it's made style you get a helmet in a box yeah pretty much so all these are in the boxes just came in um off season obviously for us is insane because every driver you know for all three series um and everything else they all get new helmets new new sponsors new everything so uh it's kind of like a race against the clock since you know october to february of how quick can we get stuff done for photo shoots and um i don't know whatever commercials anything like that and then the final push for kind of daytona for all the pit helmets and everything else yeah they come in on the box they get checked in and then they get everything torn out of them it's all taped up um you know sometimes they're carbon sometimes they composite just depends on on what the driver prefers and then it all gets sanded down so all these are waiting to get sanded and then we draw up stuff on the whole computer like this for the chili bowl for alex once he approves it once ally approves it then we i kind of figure out which artist in the shop is best for the job so it's kind of like a tattoo shop there's there's four of us that paint in here so when one comes in i kind of know uh you know the best artist for the job basically and as more drivers come in here since we are in town like a lot of the you know drivers have relationships with noel or mike or whatever so when they come in they usually don't want to talk to me they just want to go you know straight to their their own artist in here basically so um yeah once we get it done we start with the the base colors it's all hand taped you're sitting at your desk taping most days everyone thinks it's like painted but you're honestly taping more than anything and then uh it goes in the paint booth and we start we start spraying so what's the paint boob look like the best super dirty right now yeah so all these are primer getting ready these are almost finished these are indy car helmets wow so yeah that's kind of the last stage is getting ready to get sanded uh this one's like halfway through how do you what is this like chrome is that brushed or is that chrome that's all crumb based first so all these gray ones right here they're getting ready to get chromed tonight and then that'll be the next batch next week that gets started to be painted so yeah the cowboy swinging ready to be done this is matt crafton's uh dirt helmet he'll race that in volusia so finishing it up does it irritate any little bit of part inside of you to scuff down and repaint a helmet that's already has paint on it now we already i mean we get pretty used to it by this time you know and then most of our guys like everyone gets brand new helmets you know for the most part so we don't have to like sand anything down or stand our work off you're basically just putting base colors on clearing it let it sit over the night and then you know sanding it down doing more artwork so all of our sanders they do like they kind of have a hard time grasping the concept when they're you know sanding over fresh artwork so you kind of gotta use them into it and figure it out but oh so this is sanded to put more on top of it yeah that's more on top yeah oh so they get cleared probably three or four times depending on the design or whatever else so like that one's pretty well done like it's just waiting for final clear so like these will get sanded down one more time just a quick scuff make sure everything's super smooth and then it gets final cleared and then it'll be shipped to bell and they'll they'll build it for us huh well that's neat this is the bathroom watch your step though there's a lot of people eat it on there everyone uh so this is william byron's so that'll probably be raced um not daytona but the next race but we still have to get them all done because they'll do photo shoots and stuff like that and uh anything that fox wants to do for you know leading up to the races or anything like that you'll have to have all your stuff done uh a couple weeks prior just to get all that media stuff for social media and whatever they need so that one's almost done um this is our paint bank a million colors literally we can mix whatever color you'd like people love our man colors a lot of the stuff we use the most of we keep on hand and then we do all of our spraying clear coating everything else you'll notice how it's just big enough to fit helmets in here and nothing else because uh you always have that friend that's like oh can i come paint my hood or my car or whatever and i'm like no there's you can't put through the door i can't get painted in you can't here guilty if you can't put it in here did you guys build this thing yourself uh yeah we had a company like stamp it all out for us but then we had to build it all ourselves when we got it in here so and you can see how bad the filters are that's literally we changed all the filters like right after phoenix which was just a month or so ago and this is already how dirty it's been just for how many helmets we painted already wow so we'll have to change them out again and then we'll change the raptor daytona that's crazy yeah so it gets dirty but just wait keep waiting on the floor and keep the dust down i guess huh he's like learning stuff that's a venta right outside yeah so it goes right outside sucks in here it's a cross draft booth it doesn't have uh heat or anything in here we have an oven if we do need to bake stuff if it's like a quick turnaround and we need to get something shipped uh we can throw in the oven it's not a not a big deal but most of our clear dries pretty quick so it's not a not a huge household but uh yeah we put in this extra event that way if you're airbrushing in here you need a little extra ventilation or whatever you just pop the door open turn on the fan and it's uh it's a hurricane in here so do you do like the really detailed art kind of like the portrait stuff in here yeah the bigger spray goes on in there so noel uses all those guns right there that's null set up um all iwata guns it's kind of what we started out with you know we were 14 15 years old and uh now we're lucky enough to have him as a sponsor of the shop so we've we've pretty much have never had to change guns or anything like that so we use all i want airbrushes and then we use the all iwata clear coat guns base coat guns anything else big uh we can use any other guns and they keep the stock with you know nozzles needles anything we possibly need so they're super easy to work with i just noticed this is a pinion for arena on it is not the company that designs ferraris oh i don't know maybe yeah and they got those those cool fancy vending machines that are five guys it feels like a ferrari in your hand so i i would assume so what's your favorite part of this thing in here i don't know probably the paint bank because we've always grown up being a little like having little bottles of paint and like never really having a variety of stuff just using whatever we could use because we weren't you know didn't grow up just having whatever we needed at our fingertips like we didn't have a body shop so having uh this rack and we just got a new rack there um that's pretty cool because they can literally choose any color m m's yellow or you know william byron red or whatever and that thing will mix it for us and tell us exactly how to make it every year so when they do have like eight years of helmets uh every color is exactly the same so i think that's when i play my favorite part so how does this thing work everything's got a straw yeah in it what is how does this okay i've never seen anything like this before so sorry so uh yeah it's kind of like a picture it opens up so this thing is a like a mixer blender inside so it goes on this and it has like a pulley system that grabs on each one of them [Music] it mixes all the paint that is really cool twice a day for 15 minutes so all your paint always stays fresh it's never like in the bottom of the can getting uh gross and old wow yeah pretty sick huh so how do you actually mix it um so our computer program out there will tell us off the like the card basically of the color code we keep a lot of them in this book this is kind of like i don't know our main colors i guess we'll use m m's yellow as i keep saying so like this is the yellow this is the sample we use for for kyle and then this will uh this will tell us which can to grab and then how many uh ounces of each thing to pour into this and the scale will tell us exactly so um if you do it all right and you grab each can the way it says it'll mix that same yellow every time which is super handy so like i said when you get you know years of helmets and they're all sitting next to each other you all know make sure they look the same and this corporate sponsor is paying millions of dollars to have all their stuff look the best on tv you want the car to match with the fire suit to match you want that one to match so um it's it's just kind of working with all the different manufacturers like the wrap company the fire suit company and making sure our stuff um looks just as nice as everything else so there's a lot that goes into it more than what people probably think yeah i was wondering how that mixing process goes if it was you know you're looking like a line or something or if it you know the weight that makes a lot of sense it makes a lot of sense yeah so i used to like eyeball it back in the day that have like a like a measuring that you know thing on there whatever and you kind of fill it up to whatever but um that thing will tell if we want four ounces or 16 ounces of whatever paint it'll tell us exactly uh exactly how to mix it and exactly how to do it right hmm well that's cool yeah do you have any observations i'm curious how it works with like the metallics and like flecks and stuff uh how do you manage to keep it clean because i don't see glitter anywhere in here i know when when we do metal flick little girls call it glitter but um if you're a guy race car driver you gotta call it metal flakes oh it's glitter get me under the glitter give me some glitter so yeah that stuff you just mix in the clears or mixing the inner coat clear it just depends on how big the flake is is kind of different ways you do it but yeah we try to keep it clean we try to like throw down something on the booth or something if we are gonna spray the glitter or whatever so um but if you do that like you usually cover the whole helmet and then you'll clear it and then you'll sand it back down so like you just start with like a whole base so same with the chrome like you know to get all those like chrome lines the whole helmet has to be chrome to start out and then you go back and start taping stuff off how do you make a chrome helmet so we have uh cosmo chrome which is another uh partner of our company and we do it all in house now which is super cool and to answer the question i honestly don't know how it works i just know that you mix certain chemicals with certain things and use a certain primer um i mean it's a process it's a it's usually a three-day process to chrome a helmet with all the drying times and everything else but um i have no idea what's in the chemicals i just know it works but it's like magic like the first time i did it i was like oh my god like what did i do like i don't know you do it right and then and it happens and then you fueled up and then you can paint your artwork over it it's pretty cool how many times does the typical helmet come in and out of here before it's done um quite a few so it goes in and out of the paint booth probably four or five times you'll do the base coat you do all your airbrushing tape up stuff and then you'll clear it usually try to go home sleep as many hours as you can come back in the morning sand it down and then you'll do more stuff to it so i don't know you're in and out of here all day just depending on how much the detail is you know it's like this all has blue and you know white and silver and everything underneath there so we taped all that off today and then now he's just doing the red details and then once the red details are done you'll peel it all up like christmas morning basically and see what you got and then do the next color and the you know the next details so it really just depends on how you know crazy complicated the design is but i'm usually like big sponsors like that they like all their logos over solid colors super clean so it's not not too crazy but you get some dirt guys who don't want you know to go wild and stuff and don't really have any obligations they have to do that's a good question she asks about the glitter because she makes stuff with uh glitter all the time and always manages to like get it everywhere and i don't like it because it sticks to me like i don't want glitter stuck to me like containing your glitter she's like how do you contain your glitter that's the back story of that question trying to fix the problem yes you are we have uh tricks for outlaws we don't know we get yelled at by our wives and girlfriends when we go home thinking that we were in other places in the paint booth so okay it just depends you guys can come back more than well like come back and paint a helmet it's very boring process um every time somebody wants to come film it i'm like just buckle up because it's uh it's like 30 to 40 hours of taping and and everything else so it's much better as a time lapse than it is to come in and actually watch it oh i'd love to paint a helmet kind of cool stuff in here it's almost like a little you know museum of are these like uh guys that you paint for that it's like here have a bumper or yeah whatever so most everything has a story um these don't that's william byron's from i think martinsville from a couple years ago but the one on the other side is ryan reeds from his first daytona win um and then the one on the other side of that it's like the first uh truck race at aldora because i try to i try to get something if it's like a big race or historic race i try to grab something you know to kind of commemorate it so most everything on the wall kind of has a pretty cool story to it yeah like the mark martin one that you told us about before we started filming uh yeah so that one has a really cool story actually because mark was one of our you know first big cup guys we painted for but um i worked for a dirt team before i moved out here and uh this one night our driver and other driver…