OurWork

“I’ve worked on McLaren F1s, one off Ferraris, championship Pro Stock cars, Off shore ocean racing boats, hot rods and custom motorcycles – what can I build for you?”

You want to know who I am. You need to know that you are doing business with an honest, capable, experienced man. My 40 years of experience and versatility can be seen in the projects, products and services listed in the navigation bar. My work speaks for itself – but if you have any questions please contact me.

Build and Tune is essentially a build to order shop for Pro Stock cylinder heads, sheet metal intake manifolds and custom exhaust systems. I have been building aluminum cylinder heads from raw castings for 25 years – all of them custom and unique.

For several years in the late 1980’s, half of all the NHRA Pro Stock cars had my intake manifolds.
There were 100 McLaren F1’s manufactured – I have done extensive mechanical work on 10 of them.

I designed and built a complete aftermarket turbocharger for a 308 Ferrari, performing all the prototype work and overseeing all the manufacturing of the production systems. I built custom prototype exhaust systems, built the bending fixtures, then secured bids for production bending of batch lots of 25. I personally assembled all of the production systems and sometimes installed the finished exhaust system on the Ferraris they were built for.

The sheet metal intake manifolds I’ve built were the best “built to print” manifolds on the market. Look at the headers. The art of the header is in the lack of unnecessary welds, and how equal the lengths of the tubes are. No one has come close to making the same quality 355 Ferrari headers as I did – period.

I build my own tools when the right tool isn’t available. The computer controlled electric element furnace I built is a good example – 27 years later it will still hold mil. Spec. tolerances for aluminum cylinder head heat treating. I built my own bending brakes so I could build custom intake manifolds. These tools were so good that the competition had to build CNC runners to get the same tolerances as my hand made runners.

I am a 5-axis digitizing machinist and mil spec certifiable T.I.G. Welder. I learned gas welding from Joe Rivers, (1882- 1968) who missed getting the credit for inventing gas welding by 6 weeks. One of the few welders whose work rests on the moon – taught me T.I.G. welding. Kurt Gorensen, a 4th generation tool & die maker whose grandfather worked on the original Norden bomb site, is only a phone call away for me.

Today, my machine shop contains a 40-year accumulation of machining and tooling equipment – much of it custom-built and specifically designed for the demanding work and specifications of high-performance racing cars.