The Fabricator - June 2010

Custom car shop speeds fabrication

By Tim Heston, Senior Editor

eed a metal part? Just call Mad Mike. Complex contours? Multiple interior holes or cutouts?

No problem. Just a picture of what you want will do. In less than an hour, the plasma table torch will light and start cutting, and soon Mad Mike will return— with his metallic creation in hand.

He’s the guru of “Galpinization,” the art of car customization at Galpin Auto Sports, Van Nuys, Calif.

Is he a CAD jockey, or a highly trained programmer? Nope. He’s just a creative guy who found his own way to get the job done right—and quickly. Mad Mike doesn’t use phrases like takt time, work-in-process, inventory control, and the like. And why would he? He’s not working for Toy-ota. He’s working at a place that made a Ford Pinto® fly.

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Mad Scientist Meets Metal Fab

The MTV generation knows Mad Mike from “Pimp My Ride,” a reality show that turns sorry excuses for moving vehicles into dream machines. Mad Mike, aka Mike Martin, joined the famed Galpin custom auto shop in 2005 after a stint at another Southern California motor shop and, before that, as a radar specialist for the U.S. Air Force during Desert Storm.

GAS is part of an organization that began as a small Ford dealership in 1946 and evolved into a mini empire that grew up with Southern California’s love affair with the automobile. Galpin Ford has sold more vehicles than any other Ford dealer in the world for two decades; it held the top spot even through 2009, the roughest year for the auto industry in a generation.

Over the years Galpin dealerships kept opening, from Honda and Mazda to Aston Martin. The company became so renowned, not only for its growth but also for its community support, that in 2003 Gov. Gray Davis declared

July 24 as Bert Boeckmann Day, after Galpin’s longtime owner—a man who continues to lead the organization after an eye-popping 50-plus years.

And throughout the expansion, the folks at GAS kept on Galpinizing (see Figures 1-3).

“Growing up here in Southern California, I of course
knew everything about Galpin,” Martin said, “but to join
the team, it’s just been incredible.” A Compton native,
Martin recalled traveling north of L.A. to Van Nuys to get
a glimpse of “the cool, crazy stuff. They made a Pinto fly.
They put aquariums in vans. They were an encyclopedia
of customization.”
Yes, the Pinto story is true, and it represents an ex-
treme of what folks at GAS call “Galpinizing.” In the early
1970s an inventor approached the company with the idea
and proposed design, and customizers (or Galpinizers)
built the creation to suit. The car actually connected to
the wings of a Cessna airplane, and the wizards at GAS
added pedals and a special wheel to control the vehicle
during flight. The project had a tragic end—the inventor
died in a crash during a test flight—and since then GAS
customizers have kept cars firmly (and safely) planted on
the road.

But the incident continues to serve as a reminder of an idea that has made GAS so famous among motor junkies the world over. As long as ideas do not compromise safety in any way, and the customer is willing to pay for it, well then, there is no such thing as going too far.

Martin has worked in automobile customization fol-
lowing this mantra, so much so that others started to call
him mad, hence the nickname. “I’m Mad Mike because
I’m like a mad scientist. I’ve been this way since the sec-
ond grade. I love building things, and coming up with all
kinds of cool, crazy stuff.”
It seems he was born to work at Galpin.

Figure 1 This metallic interior is for a “Galpinized” Mustang® convertible.

Cool Car, Quick Plasma Cutting

You can’t get much cooler than Spyker cars. Now known as the savior of Saab (Spyker bought the brand in February), the small Dutch maker of high-end, hand-built sports cars opened its first L.A. dealership with Galpin earlier this year. An hour before the opening gala, a Galpin manager came to Martin with a thought: Wouldn’t it be cool if they could put a large Spyker logo on the front of the building? Martin looked at the dealer’s first Spyker sports car, which had arrived in the showroom only minutes before, and said no problem; he’d have a logo ready before the event.