Legendary Engine Shop Scheduled for Demolition: Ed Pink's Hallowed Ground (Full Tour)

multiple generations and completely different phases of motorsports. It's all lived through this building. Back in the day, these were for the drag racers. Our dome had a shop in the end. Gurnie Eagle engine. There's there's an off. We did some offies, but basically we did the Cossworth DFX engines. Those pictures have been up here since probably 1970. Well, when the day comes that this is nothing but a bus stop. So, we're standing here in Vanise, California with Ed Pink, Lake Speed Jr. Ed is about to show us his historic engine shop, which won't be here for that much longer. What's about to happen to everything here? Well, uh, the city is going to take over all this property here, and it goes from Vanise Boulevard to Sabova. The Olympics are coming here in 2028. So, they're going to turn this all this property into bus terminals. We were given notice that uh we're going to have to move. So far, they haven't given us a date yet. We're looking for a building uh where all this is going to go into. But right now, we're still at the original place. How long have you been in this building? Since 1965. Wow. 65. Yeah. So, all the Top Fuel stuff, all the indie car stuff, all the sprint car stuff, all the road racing Porsche stuff, all that was built here. Yep. There's a lot of history here. Want to go see it? Yeah. Yeah. Let's go. I want to see it. Are all these cars on the wall things that you've had involvement in? All the pictures on the wall are cars that that this company has built engines for over the years. Wins. Yeah, I know. That's too funny, right? And Jimmy's in here. He's the general manager of the company. You got the modern office. He's got my office, which I don't want anymore. This is Tom. He's the parts man. He's the one that handles he handles all the parts. There's more pictures in here. Who's the picture frame manager? There's a lot of those. Originally, it was my wife that did did it, but now it's up to Tom and his group to take care of it. This picture right here is the second SEMA show at the convention center. Oh, yeah. That we had a booth in the show. And that's a picture of our booth. The second SEMA ever. Yes. The first one was at Dodger Stadium and then the next one was at the Anaheim Convention Center and that's where that's at. Is this you in these pictures up here? Oh yeah, that's me. Yeah, that's that was our first dino that Vic Elrock lent me. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn't Vic senior. Vic senior. We like to throw in old pictures along with the new stuff to kind of show you what it was like. I don't think we're gonna have to do much of that here because everything looks kind of like it's a time capsule. It's really cool. This is our engineering room. When anything gets to be drawn or designed, it's done in here in the computer. 3D printer in an office with vintage paneling. That is awesome. It's about as good as it gets, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. We're We're pushing for this paneling to make a comeback. I like it. Where are we going now? We're going in the engine department. This is this department and over here is the assembly and all these carts. Hi, Bill. How's it going? Good, thanks. All these carts represent a engine. These Porsche engines. Mhm. Yeah, there's some of them. Yeah, that's a Porsche. That's going to the Singer company. The company does all the rebuilding of all the Porsche engines for a singer. Here's one of our Toyota engines. So, this is a current race engine. Yeah, that is the current. These like the Chili Bowl car engines could be. Mhm. Are these the same engine stands from the second SEMA show picture? This is historic stuff right here and it's still being used. These are various engines that are done or wait to be done. Here's here There's the office. What era is this from? This would be from uh the 60s 50s and 60s. So is this the ' 50s60s indie car engine? Is that what this is? Could be. Yeah. This is our QC room where every part we get goes through this department. Any part we make goes through this department. It's all coordinate. Uh this is a CMN machine which measures every dimension of the part and then we have a granite table with height gauges and so forth for measuring. Was this a QC room before there was equipment like this to do QC with? It was a it was a QC room to start with and most of the measuring devices we had were hand devices where as uh our business got better and the and the technology got better we were able to get machines like this to do it where when we when we measure a part every measurement of that part goes into a computer so we can look at it a week from now a month from now a year from now. Then this room is our catalog room. Uh when parts come in, they end up here and then from here they go into the QC room to be measured and checked. When we first started when I first started this business, this was my office. Okay. That's that's that paneling there was on this wall, too. This this was my office. Where was your desk at? Right where you're standing. Right here. This is where you did all your No, my chair was here and the desk was here, but I looked that way. So, this is where the magic happened right here. All your phone calls and letters and everything. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it was letters cuz there were no emails back then. No, there was no emails. No, that's for sure. This This is when we did the Infiniti Indie Engine. And this is the pan we designed for it. And this is a water pump with the oil filter assembly. And this is a dry sump pump. And y'all manufactured all of this here, right? We made every piece here. Yeah. Everything was made here. And we had this as a display so that uh we could show people. That's crazy. I feel like I say the same five things every time we see something neat. But like I I don't know what else to say. Should I just say nothing and then you think I don't care or should I I don't know. People watching this stuff are like, "You say wow" a lot. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff to say wow about. There's a lot of wow moment. Exactly. Yeah. No doubt. Well, I I do know this is a true story, right? That I remember one day Ed called me when I was still working at Gibbs, and we had the oil thing. You ordered some XP1, which is a 520. You ordered some XP3, which was a 1030, and you ordered some XP6, which was the 1550. And I was like, "All right, what what you doing with all the different of those?" And he's like, "Well, I have three different types of customers. I've got the guys like the Steve Lewis's of the world with the nine racing that would preheat everything and do everything right." So, you could build the engines with tighter clearances and you could run the thinner oil to make more power, right? But then you had some other guys who were they would do that some of the time, but not all the time. So, you had to make those engines a little bit looser. So, you had to run the 10W30 for those guys. But then you had other guys like, I don't know who these people are. They're new to it. They're probably not going to do anything right. I got to build in safety margin. So, you got to make everything looser. So, you got to run the thicker oil. And that's the kind of stuff that this guy taught me is that you you got to think about the customer and the environment you're going in and just not think about, well, what's the trickst piece? You got to think about it as a system, not individual components. Yeah. Back in the drag racing days, we built our own superchargers. And here, this is a rotor out that uh and we machine the groove to put Teflon strips in to help it seal. Do you have to change these strips out every now and then? Yeah, usually about every 10, 12 run, you got to change the strips. Huh. And they just peel out and new ones slide in cuz the groove is a dovetail groove. I mean, I don't know if you can see it. Yeah. Yeah, that the for anybody watching the dovetail means that the the top part it goes is wider as it goes in. That way it doesn't come off the top. Yeah. And on the leading edge we have a nanotron strip. That's what that's what seals it. So this seals to the case and this seals to the other rotors, right? Okay. You really did everything in here. Yes. through multiple generations and completely different phases of motorsports. It's all lived through this building. That's a parts room. There's another parts room. It's locked. I don't I don't know why, but And then this is a parts room. And we have a skin packing machine. Did you build this building or did you buy it and move into it? I bought it and moved into it. It was it was uh it was uh vacant and uh a good friend of mine my name Harry Hibler who's also a racing person was a building contractor and he built all the rooms. Huh. So the floor plan the way it is now is how it was for you since day one. Yep. Yep. Do you know what this place was before you moved into it? Yeah. It uh was a hot rod shop. Really? Yeah. On this side was a hot rod shop and on the other side was a moving company. Do you know when it was originally built? 1961. 61. So it was only a few years old when you moved in. Yeah. In ' 65 and it was built in ' 61. When did you start getting into CNC stuff? Uh like the first machine you ever had is out in the back. I'll show you. Just think about all the all the things these workbenches have seen. Yeah. Oh god. Lots of work. Yeah. We we built these workbenches. Jaguar V12. Yep. You only never know what you're going to see in here. Well, we do a lot of machinery for other other builders, other companies, not just our own. This Bridgeport Mill is the is the first one that I bought. This one right here. Right here from the first Bridgeport. First bridgeport. Yeah. Did you retrofit the CNC stuff on afterwards? I didn't have CNC stuff. It didn't have that to start with. It was just a basic mill. It like 1968 or before 1970, 68,69. Well, I think it's cool is that, you know, we were at Comp for the tour over there and Billy showed us all the machines, all those Akumas that are using to grind cams. Mhm. Same cam, same company. I did not know Okuma made the big old school manual ones like this either. I had no idea either. I've every Okum I've ever seen has been a new white CNC machine. Now, these uh I think that one I bought it in uh probably 1980, 79 or 80. I bought that one. And then that this mill that Johnny's working on now is the second mill I bought. And then uh we were doing a lot of drag race stuff, so we were having to machine the blocks. Mhm. So, we bought that spacer. Ah, those two spacers. Huh. So, we could we could take a V8 block and stand it on its end to machine the front or the back of it. Oh, nice. Okay. This is our Magnaflux room. Every every part of an engine that we work on goes through this room. This Magnaflux machine will check cracks on steel parts and this one is for movement or magnesium. The different machines use a different compound to cling to the cracks. Yes. I just like these stairs. Nice good lowprofile stairs. Have to take note. Harry built the stairs. He built all all these rooms. You see, this friend of mine built them all. This is our grinding room for anything dirty that goes on. All the various grinding machines. And this is the cylinder head get ready room. This is where all the jobs are here that that are done getting done or in the works to get done. How long did the gray paint last in here before it got worn out? Oh, that's probably been worn out for 20 years at least. Old school shield decal. This is more fabrication with a glass beater, the saw, even our band saw. [Music] How old is this welder? Uh probably uh I think we got that welder 1970 or earlier, man. Yeah. Think of all the cylinder guys that already been welded up with that thing. Yeah. Well, back in that day, uh I had a full-time fabricator work for me. Uh Pat Foster was one of them. Mhm. He was really good. He was he was a drag race driver. Okay. He was a good driver. He built cars, but he was a tremendous fabricator. And he worked for me for quite a few years here to build whatever oil pans. Okay. Yeah. Anything we needed to be fabricated he would do to all that same welder. How often does that thing break down and have to get fixed? I think it's only been fixed two or three times that I know him. Wow. Yeah. Old school quality to last. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of built the last stuff in this building. It might be the size of a I don't I don't even know a refrigerator. But if it doesn't break, maybe it's worth it. But it happened. [Music] This This is dyn is going through a configuration stage right now with all the new fuel cell pumps and lines and all that. It should be ready to operate probably within within the next 2 or 3 weeks. Is this the room where the dyno that Vic Edel Brock loaned you was? No. No. I I'll show you that room. This this is the room that uh Edel Brock lent me the dino. It fit right in here. The office went right out there. The first dino we had when he lent me was quaint. Okay. which was basically a dyno built for Ford Motor Company to test the big truck engines that only turned 92,000 RPM. How did you modify it to We put a gearbox in it. Huh. So we could reduce the speed. I think there may be some pictures of it here, but this has all been modernized now. He's got all the latest software and so forth. But back back in the day, uh, the end of this wall right here, there was a wall that came out here to about this this distance. And on this wall were two flow meters. And then in between were various gauges. And when we'd run an engine on a dyno in those days, I'd have three guys in here reading the gauges. So when we get done with the run, I look at them and they tell me what they read and I write it down. That's And now you have this thing. Then then we went that from that stage uh we went and up on that wall from that end all the way down to the end of the window was a panel box up there with all the gauges in it. And uh the gauges were all dig digital gauges and uh my engineer that I had working for me uh he figured out how to lock them. So, what we we had a button on our We did none of this was here and we had a console here and we had a button on it and you run the engine and when you're ready to record, you push the button and it locks all the instruments. How cool. And then you said you you write them all down. And then when you get them all written down, you push the button and it releases them and then they're floating again. And then when you run the engine at full throttle and you you say you're going to hold it for 20 seconds, you count 20. the end of 20, you push the button, it unlocks everything. Huh. So that's like the evolution of data acquisition. That was the start of it. Yeah. Yeah. And then then finally we ended up today we ended up with this where you know we got cameras in on the engine so we don't have to have somebody in there watching to make sure something don't go on. See, we got cameras so when the engine's running, we can somebody can physically watch it. If something all of a sudden there's an oil leak or water leak or smoke starts coming, you can't see from here. When did you eventually get a a whole digital setup like this that would allow you to play back the pole and see every parameter? When did that actually happen? This happened probably uh say probably 2002 2003. Right in there is when we started getting all the fancy stuff. Interesting. In fact, all this all the v variations of the stuff that we had, they still have here. They're up in a balcony someplace. Nobody wants it because once we're done with it, we're going to the next step. So, who's wants, you know, who wants the first step? Here's here's the picture. It's cool. Yeah, it is. Here's a picture of a dyno with the only supercharged engine we ran on. The only one? Yeah. We had We had a customer that ran a bone alcohol car. Mhm. And we built the engine for it and we decided we're going to run it on a dyno. This just the supercharged alcohol 426 Chrysler. And that thing it made at 5,000 RPM it made 1,000 horsepower. it when you ran it, the room shook. So I no way am I going to run anymore. I don't want to blow my dyno up. Yeah. Yeah. So we ran the one and that was it. So even the old days with the funny cars and stuff, you never dynoed those things. No. No. I would cuz those even back then. Yeah. Cuz those engines even then I'm sure they were around 2500 3,000 horsepower. Yeah. There was no dyno in the world that could do it back then. No. It would never hold it. Yeah. Hm. That's quite interesting. Do you ever have any catastrophic explosions in here? It sent parts into the wall or anything like that? No, we've had a couple couple failures, but nothing of major consequence. I mean, it required taking the engine off the dyno and fixing it, but never parts bouncing off the wall. Huh. I guess that speaks to the quality of the builder. Extremely successful to never have that in all the time of being here. All righty. This is the tear down room. And unfortunately, the fell that works here is sick, so he's home today. But, uh, any engines that come through here, they get taken apart and all I dug and, uh, all the parts get washed and then they go into the Magnaflex department. They get crack checked. And then these shelves here are shelves of parts. Most of the parts are parts for bygone days. Vintage stuff like unopened uh some of them could be, you know, they're just parts that we've, you know, up there is a fuel injection manifold for a Chevrolet. You don't want to throw them away because sure the part you throw away somebody can live with an engine doesn't need that part. What is this? Is this a flat 12cylinder? Oh yeah, that's a port I think that's a uh 918 engine. No, I think it's a 917. 917. Wow. Yeah, some of them were turbocharged. So they they made a 1000 horsepower. Yeah, back then. back then. Back in the day, I never knew that existed. So, they basically just made a block that stuffed two of their boxer engines together to have a 12cylinder pretty much. Yeah. It's a Lama car, right? They did that for Lam 24 hours. Yep. Yep. And it's just sitting here. It's the car that looks like Racer X's car from Speed Racers. Okay. Yeah. That's That's the one. It's like the big swoopy looking thing. Yeah. Yeah. With the engine in the back and it's got the They actually go straight air goes straight down into it. Huh. Yeah. That's crazy. Must have been difficult to air cool a 12cylinder, man. I think Mark Donahue, it was a Synokco was one of the ones that sponsored. Did Mark Donahue drive that car? I think Ed. Yeah, he did. Oh, it was a Coswork engine. There's more parts plenum up on top from the Indie Car day. Wow. Indie car stuff's cool. I'd like to mess with an Indie engine someday. What is this here? What era is the cause from? That's a uh DFX that's from uh uh my era probably 78 to 80 77 to 80. Your era is hard to discern cuz you're you're kind of your era is all of it. I know indie car that Indie car that Cossworth engine that's my era. How much power did these make? Uh, well, it depends on the boost, but basically they were about 700 horsepower. But see, the thing is that when they first started running them, they were running uh un unlimited boost. So, they'd make 1,000 horsepower. And as things go on, they keep trying to slow it down. And they always pick on the engine to slow the car down. And the best way to pick on it is to lower the boost. See, at one time they they could run unlimited boost, which means they could run 100 in of boost. And then they started dropping it down. Uh when I got involved with it, they were running about 80 in and then it dropped it to 70. Then they dropped it to 50. And when I left, they were at 40 in of boost because the engine the cars were so good and the engines were getting better and better. They didn't need that much boost. Went to 12,000 RPM with the engine. I want to see some more of that…