Rusty Wallace Shows Us His Personal Office & Custom Motorcycle Shop! (Southern Country Customs)

they'll say okay dad all the powder coating's done bolt it on i grab it i grab a tube of loctite and we lock tight everything and i start bolting everything on it's minimalistic but i i i can get it done pretty good back here you know yeah you know come out blue purple whatever i'm doing but it's a that's like this bike this is my bike and so i wanted the blue to match some of the the blue and the body work we did so have you ever wondered what is rusty wallace doing now we're going to find out right now we're at rusty wallace incorporated this is where we've got our motorcycle company southern country customs and my office is in here and this is kind of where i show up every day and kind of hang out all right let's check it out it's kind of my deal right here i'll sit sit at the office and field phone calls and talk to the guys at the car dealerships a little bit and i don't spend much time here i'll go in the back of the shop and i'll take you back there in a little bit and we'll tell you what i'm really doing right now but everybody's been asking a lot of questions about the motorcycle stuff we're doing so i'll show you in a little bit but kind of hang my hat right in here and got a bunch of our trophies that i've wanted to pass that i'm pretty proud of uh is that the real 89 yeah actually it is that's the that's the real 1989 winston cup championship trophy wow i've got two of them uh a replica and the real one that's the real one that's crazy and that helmet is pretty cool i remember when uh penske wanted to know if i wanted to go to daytona and test brad keselowski's car for the daytona 500. i said yeah that'd be cool i'd get back in the seat so i tested the car i wore that helmet on the right that day testing and then the one on the left brad keselowski asked he brought brought that to him he gave it to me as a gift down there daytona was pretty cool i was pretty excited about it got to drive in the ferrari challenge in daytona i was actually uh the first time we ran i finished third in one of the races then it was all said and done we had like 125 cars showed up i remember and uh i finished 10th so i was pretty proud of that coca-cola 600 victory in charlotte that's when i won the bud shootout in daytona over there this is a pretty cool one down here that was the last trophy that i won at riverside california that was the last race ever run i won the winston 500 riverside california and that was the trophy that's pretty cool that is cool place got a lot of history on that road course but you know i was telling you a couple days ago i think that all the trophies i got all my bristol trophies all my grandfather clocks and stuff when i sold my bill my buildings up the street i had no room for everything and the hall of fame got a hold of us down in charlotte winston kelly and the guys and all my trophies everything i got right now is in the basement of the hall of fame in charlotte it's pretty cool you go down and you'll see all these uniforms and all this stuff but general public doesn't get to see it i mean i guess they could if they asked but uh you go down there and the hall of fame guys are going to grab pieces and parts they'll grab trophies that have one and they'll take them upstairs and display them to different people and so it's they're constantly down there grabbing things and kind of redisplaying them which is kind of cool but that's about it let's go in the back i'll show you the bikes that's like the cleanest office i've ever seen it doesn't look like you do any work in there you know you got to learn that stuff from somebody right yeah i got to learn how to do that mine's a mess my desk is terrible that's my son greg hey how's it going pretty good he's in there building all the display boards for the uh rusty wallace charity ride in sturgis this year we're gonna go out there and uh do this ride for charity and he's getting all the stuff put together for that right now that's cool all right you getting ready to enter motorcycle world right now here we go this is uh southern country customs it's a new company we started it's so much fun it's unreal and stephen my son my youngest son pretty well runs the whole thing he's the lead master fabricator and him and i own the business 50 50 and i get back here and build bikes and he builds them too so here's some of the new ones we just finished and uh right behind you that's the one i'm really proud of this is the brand new charity bike going to sturgis south dakota for the rusty wallace ride 2022 road glide st special they call it it's got the big engine big everything it's going to get auction off to the highest bidder and all the money goes to the nascar foundation and the rapid city special olympics flame it's called so it's all for children's charities and pretty neat that's really cool i mean i i don't know anything about motorcycles but i know about building stuff and putting stuff together and just check general mechanical craftsmanship and when i first saw these things at sturgis a couple years ago i was like man that is really nice like everything is just it doesn't look like anything is not thought about on these things at all people ask me all the time so man you like what turned you on about these bikes i said well i've been going for 19 years in a row nascar's president mike helton was the first one that took us to sturgis they took me dale jr tony stewart they took a ton of people out there as guests and so i got excited about it but then the thing i get so much excited about is you put all this work in something this beautiful right i mean it's just pristine all these bikes were pristine and you generally bring them back without a scratch on them that's one thing about nascar man i got so sick of going to daytona and watching my guys build the most beautiful cars you've ever seen in your life and fifty percent of the time they'd come back in a big pile they're all destroyed and wiped out you're like oh man you're kidding me now you can just shine something up and be proud of it for a long time but there's steve over there steve's building all the bikes now what's up guys we want to find out how you do this so like what the where the process starts so the process it's it's pretty wild because people see these bikes in this stage and they're like wow that's a lot smaller a lot then different than what you think it would but basically uh we start with brand new motorcycles uh they're complete they come from the dealership and then we uh highly you know as you can see highly alter them uh you know do different powder coat on them different style wheels and you know necks and whatnot so like like this bike here is about halfway through its stage we get all the paint work back on friday for it so it uh it's it's kind of on the finish line to be honest with you you both work on these things what what parts of the build process is like your thing or what do you avoid i avoid that's a great question i totally if i avoid the wiring he understands that i do too to a point but man the wiring on these things are the most complicated i think it's not that it's complicated it's just the computers that are in them right now that come from harley you know i don't like all that stuff but i'm a good bolt-on guy like i'm always bolting on like the dirty air this is the brand called dirty air these air shocks i'll put that on these things called floorboards i'll install all the floorboards the pedals the air cleaner systems you know all the bolt-on stuff that steven would go in the back and powder coat they'll say okay down all the powder coating's done bolt it on and i i grab it i grab a tube of loctite and we lock tied everything and i start bolting everything on and it's like he said hey the paintwork could be back on friday well what he means is that the bodywork the the gas tank the rear fender the sides all that's called body work in fact we'll show you something we got some on the other side of this wall over here a lot of this stuff we've honestly had to learn the hard way we've tore a lot of stuff up but we've learned what we constantly learn we're there now we've been really good about understanding how to work with each other for you know about two years now so we uh man we're having a lot of fun uh we built a bunch of them we got a new bike here this is my new one for sturges it's kind of a you know race kind of a race themed bike it's all chain driven it's got 139 cubic inch motor we're putting in it solid carbon fiber body all billet swing arms every bolt on this whole entire motorcycle's 12 point arp bolts everywhere on it so i i think the cool thing for me since i don't drive anymore is i mean i've always fabricated i've always built stuff the whole life and these these this style of bike's really important because it's like i'm assembling and i'm building my race car uh so everything is just trick and light nice and zip ties are perfectly clocked and the wiring's as short as it could be and that's the fun stuff that we really enjoy you know so how did you did you like tinker with harleys and stuff before doing this how did that how did this evolve into it happened this whole thing started 19 years ago when mike helton with nascar who's our main guy over there right now he used to be the president and now he's uh the chairman you know and mike took us all out there after the nascar races that we we'd run a race i'm trying to think which one we would leave at from i think it was new hampshire maybe uh pocono or new hampshire i think it's pocono now and he said i'm gonna take you guys out to stuart just sort of motorcycle rally so it's like a handful of us out there well man i got hooked on it i mean i got hooked big time so much so that every time i came back i was building a new bike to take out there the following year now build a new bike meant just accessorizing it you know putting trick headers on or a lot of chrome or whatever and then we started building a couple of cool bikes and people started saying man that thing is those are bad that a bone i could have one of those and then about that same time stephen was just getting tired of his short track racing he said dad i love these bikes you know and we're racers we're yeah we're addicts to stuff so if you get something we go nuts on it and that's what it's coming out to be you know we had a really good friend a great friend of ours named brian wade and brian on myself and stephen got together and started a motorcycle company and so then brian uh he's actually a movie star and he does quite well so he decided to move back to california and when that happened steve and i bought them out and so now stephen and i are we own the company 100 and we've been just going crazy with it right now because you know i like building really cool quality stuff and i think i told you earlier that one of the coolest things about this is the people you get to meet i mean i love my nascar people but when you do 36 races and you see the same people week after week after week after week okay that's okay but when you go to a motorcycle rally or you beat the motorcycle people you might only see them one time a year and you just you get to see so many different people and that's what we're experiencing right now but not only we get to do that but we're building i know we're probably the top five builder in the united states right now for these custom harley street glide road glide touring style motorcycles and we're real proud of what we're building i'm getting a lot of a lot of good reviews where do you do the power coating and all that stuff like where's the show them that body kit whatever so as you can see the big thing for us is keeping stuff in stock to where we can build these bikes you know you know quick and on time and all that so these are all uh these are all body sets let's say a person calls and they want to build a bike uh i i keep everything in stock so there's no real waiting uh we've gotten to the extent of you know all our you know some of our some of our bodies are 100 carbon fiber um back here is you know calling the paint sets so this is a streetlight paint set that just came back uh that that i'll build a bike with you know it's it's got a lot of really really cool gold mentality in it that's intense man the paints just paints everything and uh we've been real fortunate to have some really really good painters the paint the powder coat and you know this you know all the little fine details and everything so it's really kind of you know making our stuff really nice the fit and finish that that's that's that's what we're all about to fit and finish like you know these are all our headers we build in-house or you know all made out of you know true stainless steel and all you make those welded uh my brother-in-law colby makes them yeah yeah so uh he he's an excellent welder as you can see but then back in here this is kind of our very area this is kind of the fast shop of you know where we uh you know cut a lot of the necks on the bike spin a lot of the body panels uh like this bike here this is tony stewart's new bike that i'm building for him this will be a 30 inch 30 inch street by bike big audio big motor this is just this thing's a real delicate stage right now uh it's just real bare bones i've we've got the neck uh and all the hardcore fabrication stuff already done to it so uh body's out of paint uh and when all that stuff comes back this bike will transform a monster it has really cool cylinders on it big power real wild looking stuff on it so how much horsepower does one of these things make in there well so our kind of average builds right at about 129 foot-pounds of torque about 120 horsepower the bike we're building for sturges is should be around 180 horsepower uh so it's it's a big variance on how fast you want to go you know so but back here you see you know we've got our nails delays and whatnot we've built a lot of do a lot of spacers and always you know shimming on stuff on these bikes because every one of them you know you know different so it's kind of hard to you know stock stuff because they're custom bikes you know so we built a lot of stuff so my shop's really cool so the back of the shop these are container trailers so really so it's just kind of more use of uh you know space so this here's our parts room kind of with just some you know minimalistic stuff we've got another parts room up up there that's all the good stuff but like i said i do all the powder coating sometimes i come out of this room this is neat purple blue yeah that's that's awesome so you build like an addition to do the powder coating out of trailers that's a creative deal that's cool yeah so you come through the walkway here into the other trailer and yeah man so those are the charge lines that there's my oven uh it's minimalistic but i i i can get it done pretty good back here you know yeah you know come out blue purple whatever i'm doing but it's it's uh that's but i mean you gotta have it with what we do you know so you ever get somebody important showing up and you gotta run out of here like all blue all the time but i tell them because i'm pretty hands on everybody knows that so when i come flying around the corner i'm like hey man i've been powder cooking oh okay so that's kind of our notorious shop this is hauler that's impressive because i saw the powder on that i'm like man i want to find out who does that because we can find a good powder place around here yeah it's not easy to do that really well no so i've got a lot of practice that i'll say this but this is our trailer uh so in all honesty the bike stuff we're uh really serious about it and uh these big motor brights you know sometimes we'll you know break a clutch or uh transmission and you know stuff like that so we carry all all kinds of spare parts and pieces something you know spare motors transmissions i know that sounds weird but believe it or not but we will occasionally go through that stuff but this lift here will hold uh it'll hold uh four bikes here and then two up top so the whole you know uh the whole uh lift will go up it'll hold six bikes up top and then you know four down low so i'm gonna typically take ten you know big custom bikes everywhere we go and like this year at sturgis when we go to sturgis we'll have probably 15 of our customers that we built bikes for they all want to go to sturgis a lot of them want to come hang with us out there and so we got all the spare parts for everything even we've got spare transmissions we've got spare engines a lot of them get having a lot of fun you know what i mean and for the first time we're actually taking our motorcycle one of the motorcycle lifts out there and setting it up in the rv park where we're at down there elkhorn rv park and well we'll have a ton of people out there and so if anything goes wrong with them we can fix the stuff right for them you know so they can stay having fun that's cool it's wild shaman but that's the truth of it you know i know why everything's so clean now you just you walked in there and moved that gas can over the corner because it was crooked on the countertop we're pretty ocd too i'm not gonna lie we like to have stuff real clean but uh what's our buddy mike skinner's motorcycle mike's got an indian and uh he's a good friend of ours and said i said send that thing down here we'll take it out there for you so we're gonna he's on a big rv trip right now somewhere halfway between here and montana i think and when he shows up at sturgis we'll have his bike for himself this bike here actually is the next build this is a brand new road glide limited it's called uh that this is what they start as they're brand new bikes literally three miles on it so we'll completely tear it apart all the way down to basically the drive line in it you know the engine and start from there on it customer will buy a brand new motorcycle like this and bring it to us and we turn it into their dreams you know make it make a real cool high rod out of it huh with all these dealerships you got why don't you have a harley dealership because i'm passionate about the motorcycles i'm not i've always taught that unless you really understand something you shouldn't really get into it we really understand how to build these bikes but i really don't understand how to run a harley dealership so let's promise to do that right that's the reason i got really good partners at our dealerships up in tennessee we got i got eight car dealerships in tennessee i've been in a business for 30 some years and one of my best friends and partners is a guy named ray huffaker and ray is like our father of the car business he teaches everybody everything and i talked to him one time i said you ever thought about getting a motorcycle business no no i think we're okay with what we got i said okay so you bring the bike to us we'll build your new bikes and we'll make them absolutely beautiful we know what we're doing when it comes to that it's a good life advice is that saying know your lane you know what i mean stay in your own way man big part of our you know years is is for surges so we we've got roughly right at about i don't know about i think six to finish and have done so we're uh they're all out of paint like i said the bikes are here and parts are all here so we're just keep building the wrong car kind of the same feel going into daytona though wasn't it yeah i'm going to daytona daytona's like the second biggest bike week in the world in march and so i remember sitting back here bikes were lined up everywhere we had people helping us getting this stuff done and we made it we got everything to daytona and we took uh see seven or eight new brand new ones we build every one of them sold every bike we're set up that broken spoke the one of the biggest bars in daytona we had the trailer and we're 20…