Santa Rosa, Calif. -- Dimitri Elgin began in the machine shop industry as a generalist, but by the mid-1960s he said he began to develop a specialty in camshafts with the help of an early pioneer in custom camshafts.
Elgin said he began his internship at Young Auto Parts in the machine shop at its store in Redwood City in the late 1950s. Shortly after, he entered the Army and was assigned as supply clerk. "It was actually good," he said, "because I learned to type and keep an inventory."
Elgin said he spent six months on active duty and 4 1/2 years in the reserves. Elgin said he joined Cresta Brothers Auto Parts as a machinist in its San Mateo store around 1960 and after four years decided to start his own machine shop. "What was good about working in a parts store at that time was that you met all the reps and you worked on a percentage, so if you worked hard, you made more money."
Not long after opening his own shop, Elgin said he met Edward A. Winfield, one of the first men to do custom camshaft grinding. Winfield was semi-retired and living nearby, he said. "Every person who has had a successful business has had some sort of mentor," he said, "and he was mine."
"That's when I added a cam-grinding machine, and he taught me how to use it," he said.
Elgin added that in the mid-1970s he was also fortunate to meet and befriend Clifford H. Collins, another early innovator in camshafts and a partner in Harmon & Collins, which manufactured camshafts, ignition systems, and other automotive parts.
Elgin said that while other shops were able to grind a camshaft, they often had little understanding of the science behind it. "People would duplicate a factory style camshaft -- like cutting a key -- without a clue as to the mathematics behind it.
"Harvey Crane of Crane Cams was computerizing some of it and built some software, but if you didn't understand the math, you still couldn't do it."
In 1974, Elgin said he purchased a building in Redwood City for his machine shop, which grew to employ as many as 11 others. But he said he gradually became aware that he was most interested in the camshaft work, so in 1984 he sold the shop to his employees and opened up D. Elgin Cams in about 2,200 square feet of the 12,000-square-foot building.
While the business has focused on cams since then, Elgin said it still changes regularly as new cars and engines gain popularity and racing classes come and go. Among the cams that the shop has had a particular reputation for are BMW, Porsche, and VW, as well as circle-track Ford and Chevy.
Retail business makes up around 10 percent of the shop's business, Elgin said, with the rest from professional machine shops. As the shop's reputation grew, business began to come from across the country and even around the world, he said; about 55 percent of the shop's work is now out of state.
Vintage work and restoration makes up about 10 percent of the shop's volume, Elgin said, ranging from muscle cars to a 1930s Studebaker Indy car. "We've done more flat-head Fords in the last five years than in the previous 20," he added.
Repair work accounts for about 30 percent of the shop's business, Elgin said, including a lot of welding and heat-treating. "A Porsche cam that cost $600 we may be able to fix for $300," he said.
Elgin said custom work makes up the remaining 60 percent and ranges from coming up with a custom camshaft profile to fit a custom engine rebuild or even building a new cam from scratch. "We were building an average of three Rolls Royce Phantom camshafts a year for about 10 years," he said, noting that at the time, there were only 240 of those cars in the world."The custom end is growing, while production work is going away," he said. In addition to automotive, he said the shop also does some work for rebuilders of custom boats such as Chris Craft and Garwood.
To determine just what a customer needs, Elgin said he begins with a questionnaire that includes an inventory of the work that has been done on the engine and what parts were used, as well as how it will be used and what the customer's goals are. "We have an information sheet that we have people fill out and then we give them advice," he said. "Whether they take it or not is up to them.
"After a while, you have a database that is so large that you can start to know what is going to fit without having to spend a lot of time," he said.
Elgin said the shop charges $100 an hour but on many of the jobs the customer wants a bid. He said the shop cleans it, checks centers, straightens, and measures and only then is able to give the customer an estimate.
Elgin said he just retired this past year after 31 years as a part-time instructor at DeAnza College. He said that part of his reason for becoming a teacher was to have recruiting access to the best students. "It was for self-preservation," he said.
Elgin said one of his ongoing sources of information is the Automotive Engine Rebuilders Association (AERA) of which he is a board member and serves as technical editor for the association's newsletter. He said he has member No. 324, having joined as an apprentice. He said the association continues to be valuable to his business by basically serving as a clearinghouse for information for the industry.
In addition to traditional machining, once a year, he said he taught a class on high-performance engine building. During Parts & People's visit, the shop was moving from Redwood City to its new facility in Santa Rosa, which will include a classroom so that Elgin is able to continue teaching the high-performance classes to machine shop employees and local auto enthusiasts, he said.
"The emphasis of the class is that you can't change physics and you can't believe automotive enthusiast performance magazines," Elgin said. "You could study this for years and you still wouldn't know it all, so instead you hire someone who has been doing it for 40 years and you give him $550 to teach you."
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