Blue Springs, Mo.—Since opening Hot Rod Express 15 years ago, Co-Owner Mike Winfrey said he has worked on an array of projects ranging from the restoration work on the Ferrari kit car from the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to restoring a horse-drawn manure spreader with a V-8 Chevy engine in the back seat. “Supposedly, the story goes that originally the manure spreader was a gift from Bob Hope to John Wayne,” he said.
By the time it got to Winfrey, he said he was fixing it up for a customer who was selling it through Barrett-Jackson.
“We get new things all the time—it keeps it interesting,” Winfrey said. “I have built some very nice cars for guys, stuff I couldn’t afford myself, but it is fun doing it for somebody else.”
Winfrey, along with Co-Owners Rick Hunter and Lori Burns, started Hot Rod Express in 1995 as a hot rod and restoration shop that could do it all, he said.
Along with the restoration shop, the 9,000-square-foot facility holds a retail parts store, an upholstery shop, a PPG Global mixing bank, and an Air Filtration paint booth, he said.
“We do parts, upholstery, body, paint—we do everything except engine machine work in-house,” he said.
Winfrey said when you start taking a car one place for paint and body work, and another place for interior work, confusion can arise.
“We know that while we are doing the body work, if something needs to be done like welding for the interior, we can coordinate it right there and do it, so when it goes to the trim shop it is already in place,” he said. “It makes a big difference and it helps the overall project.”
For engines and transmissions, Winfrey said he works with Dahmer Powertrain in Lees Summit for Crate motors, and for transmission rebuilds he uses Raytown Transmission in Raytown, Mo.
Typically, Winfrey said he does about three to four complete, ground-up restorations jobs each year, which take anywhere from nine months to a year to complete, and can cost upwards of $80,000.
Winfrey said he keeps his customers updated weekly on the status of their cars.
“We give them a computerized, itemized detail of everything we have done by the minute,” he said. “A guy punches in on a car and works on it two hours, he writes down in the computer what he did, and punches back out, and the customer gets a copy of it. We let them know exactly what we have done.”
Most of the work is made up of smaller tickets however, like paint jobs, adding disc brakes to a classic car, adding air conditioning, and interior work—including most recently, the interior on a 1973 Volkswagen Beetle limousine that will be featured at the World of Wheels Car Show in Kansas City on February 12-14, he said.
One of the struggles of working on such a variety of vehicles from a wide range of years, can make getting parts a challenge, said Winfrey, adding “Sometimes it can be really hard to track some of these oddball parts down, and parts for the street rods that are supposed to fit usually have to be modified.
“If you are working on a common muscle car like a Chevelle or Camaro, they have reproductions, but if it is an oddball car, they don’t make reproductions, so we have to be careful and save everything, even if it is really bad and we think we are going to replace it, because we may not be able to find a replacement, in which case we might have to restore it and make it work,” he said.
Winfrey said the internet has made finding parts a little easier, but he never knows what he’s going to get, he said.
Finding crash parts for everyday vehicles, on the other hand, is typically not a problem, and is something Winfrey has become more accustomed to.
“We have done a little collision work in the shop to kind of fill the gaps this year,” he said. “It has been a little soft this year.”
Winfrey added that he has been taking in some work that he previously would have turned down so he could focus on bigger jobs, but with a dip in the ground-up restoration work, and eight employees, he said he has to take in some random work to keep everybody busy.
“I have been doing this since 1965, and I think it will come back,” he said. “It has been a roller coaster for 40 years, that is just the way it is.”
