Classic American People – Dave Kindig
Steve Havelock meets Dave Kindig of Bitchin’ Rides TV show fame…
Fans of American car shows aired on British Freeview TV will no doubt be familiar with Kindig Customs or, as it’s titled in the US, Bitchin’ Rides. The star of the show is multi award-winning custom car builder Dave Kindig. He founded his company Kindig-it Design 20 years ago, based in Salt Lake City, an hour and a bit drive from the Bonneville Salt Flats.
In this good-natured TV show, he comes across as a calm, likeable, easy-going man. There’s no histrionics, and the show focuses on the creation of the glorious cars that he and his loyal crew, some of whom have been with him since the very early days, produce. His meticulously detailed cars, which can take up to two years to build, are usually a mix of old and new. Classic bodies mated to new chassis with powerful new crate engines and drivetrains and all the luxuries of modern motoring, including air conditioning and power steering, brakes and windows. They are expensive cars for discerning clients with extremely deep pockets. He operates out of a large, modern, well-equipped facility backdropped by snow-capped mountains. His wife of some 30 years, Charity, and his daughter, Baylee, help run the business.
Dave wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, far from it, nor did he go to college to learn his craft. He’s got where he is today through sheer hard work, determination, vision and talent. He told me: “I was born in 1971 and raised in Salt Lake City. I’m 49 now. Growing up as a kid, I loved drawing cars and playing with Hot Wheels and Lego. I liked figuring things out and how they went together. Later on, I got into building plastic model cars. My real dad was gone by the time I was five and I didn’t have a great deal of luck with dads around. But I had a wonderful mom and great grandparents who were very encouraging. They let me do my own thing. They realised pretty early that I was kinda car nutty, whether it was plastic models or looking at car magazines like Motor Trend, Car and Driver and Hot Rod. My grandparents lived across the street from an elementary school and on the corner of the school was a library. I’d go in there and check out the magazines but, more importantly, I was looking at automotive encyclopaedias. I’d get familiar with car body lines and things about those cars. I read up a bit on designers like Bertone and Pininfarina.”
As a teenager about to enter his last year at high school, things weren’t going well at home between Dave and his mother’s boyfriend. He says: “I got the boot and moved out on my own. I just started working, so I never went to college. My first job at 16 was working in a shoe shop selling shoes. I saved up, and my first car was a 1977 Toyota Celica GT Coupe and I loved it. I thought it was really cool. Being a two-door hardtop, it had sort of the same body lines as a Camaro. Of course, I couldn’t afford a Camaro. I remember it took me three months to save for a set of tyres and another month to be able to afford to have them fitted and balanced. I traded that for my first VW (Beetle) which was a 1959. It was a coral salmon colour which was pretty cool. It was a nice vintage one. I played around with that and lowered it. I had multiple VWs after that. I was never happy with a stock car. I always had to have my mark on it. ❯❯
“Because I never grew up with anybody who was building cars in their garage or went to school to learn how to do it, or worked in a body shop, I started to surround myself with people who knew how to do stuff. I’d watch them and then have a go myself. I couldn’t afford to pay for people to chop the top off my VW, so I watched how others did it and then had a go myself. I also learned to paint. It was all self-taught. I was having fun with my cars and brighter colours were in style at the time. I was pretty hip. I’d go to car shows and people started noticing that I was building these cars as a hobby and pretty soon they were asking me if I’d work on theirs.”
Dave then met and married Charity. He recalls: “She’s a car girl. She told me to bug off a couple of times, but finally I caught her on a day off and we finally hit it off. We dated for three or four months and then moved in together and have been together ever since. Her dad, Richard, was an avid car collector and was building stuff in his big garage out in the back yard. He was pretty cool. He kinda showed me the ropes. He let me work on my cars in his garage, but he wouldn’t let me use any power tools. Everything had to be turn-of-the-century old crappy tools. I think he was trying to get me to respect tools, and it worked. But it sure made for some long days. Charity made me take my GED (General Educational Development) so basically I got my diploma, but I just kept working.”
In 1991, Dave landed a job with exhaust specialists, High Performance Coatings. He says: “We used to do the ceramic coatings on exhaust systems for everything from Indy cars and drag racing to street rods and muscle cars. Charity and I struggled a bit at first. When we had our first apartment we didn’t have a lot of money. At weekends, a lot of our friends would rent a movie and sit around the house, but I would draw cars, full colour, off the top of my head, things that were inspiring to me. I hung some of those drawings in my office at work. The boss had a customised Chevrolet Suburban that he would pull a race car trailer with. It had a 10-colour paint job on it. All colours. Somebody did some engine work on it, took it out to test and crashed it. I ended up repainting that. It was one of the first ones I did. I got everything straightened out on it. I sanded it and prepped it. I drew up the graphics and showed my boss the colours I was going to do and he said ‘go for it’. I painted it in the warehouse and it turned out killer.
“As I was making a bit more money, I bought a 1991 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser Station Wagon. Those were quite big. I did a full graphic on it, air ride suspension, big stereo system, it was really a cool car. That car set me apart. I was taking it to shows and winning Best of Show. It seemed like every time I’d go to a show somebody would want me to do some stuff for them. I was getting more and more backed up with work. I’d been bugging my wife for years to let me quit my job and start my own business. I’m all ‘go, go, go’. I’m the dreamer and the go-getter, but she’s ‘whoa, whoa, whoa’. Let’s make sure you’ve got somewhere to land if you’re going to jump. So it’s been the perfect marriage. I was at HPC for eight-and-a-half years, and it allowed me to travel and meet a lot of people in the car industry, whether they be suppliers of parts, shop owners or designers.”
In June 1999, just a couple of weeks after the birth of his second child, his son Drew, Dave left HPC and started his own business; setting up in the garage he had built behind his house. He says: “I was doing design work, graphics, custom suspensions and selling parts. As I got more and more busy, I hired a couple of guys, one of whom was Kevin (Schiele), my right-hand man, who is still with me. We had worked together at HPC. We moved into one of the suites in the building where we are now. That was 4500sq ft, but as soon as we moved in, we lost a big job. But we survived by doing some race paint and just about anything that came through the door.
“I BOUGHT A 1991 OLDSMOBILE CUSTOM CRUISER STATION WAGON. THOSE WERE QUITE BIG. I DID A FULL GRAPHIC ON IT, AIR RIDE SUSPENSION, BIG STEREO SYSTEM, IT WAS REALLY A COOL CAR.”
“We soon got busy again and actually outgrew the place in about two-and-a-half years. So then we moved into the other end of the building, which was 9000sq ft, and had to move the spray booth and everything. We ran that for another four years and then took on another 9000sq ft so we were now at 18,000sq ft. Then we took over the whole building which is 27,000sq ft. I bought the building at that point, in 2015. We remodelled it and brought in a load more equipment including CNC machines, power hammers and 3D printers. You name it, we’ve got it. I’ve now got 30 employees and looking for more. We’ve again run out of room, no matter how many mezzanines I’ve built for storage and to keep everything organised and clean. I’ve found another building three blocks from here, another 10,000sq ft and I have bought that one. It’s been busy. It’s been good. We build 16 to 20 cars at a time and we’ve got a six-year backlog. Something is going right. I think people admire what we build and how we build it and how we work with people. It’s a lot of stress, but it’s a good problem to have.”
I asked Dave if much of his success was due to his TV show, to which he replied: “Well, having an ‘infomercial’ re-run all the time in 196 countries doesn’t hurt business at all. We just finished filming Season 6 and we’ve just done a spin-off TV series. This was not my first TV experience. That was many years ago and was My Classic Car with Dennis Gage. He’d seen a car that we had built and he knew it was a serious build and we just hit it off. He asked me if I wanted to film, and the rest is kind of history. We did other episodes with him including Apolo Ohno’s ’64 Cadillac convertible (Olympic goldmedal speed skater − Season 17, Episode 2 in 2013). But I never had my own show until Bitchin’ Rides.” That was first aired in 2014, has now run to 78 episodes and has featured 122 car builds.
Dave continues: “The TV company were very nice by not turning our place into a circus act. I said you can come and record what we are doing, we have a lot of fun doing it, people are either going to love us or they are not. We’ll do our thing and you can capture it. They were very respectful of that. They are more of a fly on the wall. We don’t have scripts. On some other shows, you can tell that it’s just a made-up bunch of crap, throwing stuff around.”
Success now allows Dave to be more selective about the cars he builds and the people he builds them for. He says: “A good car-builder friend of mine says he won’t build cars for celebrities, athletes or people who haven’t had cars built before. I’ve now taken on the same notion. Unfortunately, some people with good amounts of money have the impression that they are the only people with money and everybody should just drop everything and only do their stuff. It is a big commitment to build a car from the ground up. If somebody hasn’t had a car built before or if they are super impatient, they should buy a car that is already done. Both personalities have to be able to get together. I’m not selling you anything you really need and yet it’s really quite expensive. So we need to be able to get past the cost of the project and get down to being creative and building something together. That’s when it works best.”
Dave has carried out some spectacular builds, so which ones stand out for him? He says: “The 1939 Futurliner was one hell of a project. It was quite a challenge to find all of the original parts and restore everything back to original. This is the only one of the three that have been restored to have the correct display in the back. In this case an Allison J35 jet engine cutaway to explain to people how a jet engine works. It was kind of a cool piece. I also love Corvettes. My father-in-law, Richard, has always been there for Charity and myself, so we built him a ’57 Corvette with a Lingenfelter LS motor with eight-stack injection from Borla. It’s black with silver coves and a red interior. It’s got my design wheels on it. It’s just a gorgeous car and it’s got 670 horsepower. ‘Mischief’, the ’52 Pontiac convertible (with a 635bhp supercharged LS3 motor) and the ’55 Mercedes ‘Gullwing’ (a glass fibre replica with a 627bhp Chevy LSX454 crate motor) are also favourites.”
I asked Dave if he had plans for further expansion, to which he replied: “I don’t see the future as including multiple other locations in different states in the US. I think one is enough.
I am the designer. I don’t have a fleet of people rendering up what’s going to get built on the cars. And I don’t have a fleet of people selling the jobs to people. I’ve got a couple of things that we’re working on that are quite exciting. Our patented door handles sell quite well all over the world and we’re developing some other products. We’re building a concept styled ’53 Corvette. It’s a complete turnkey car. We’ll put it together here. Hopefully, it will be debuting at SEMA in November, and I hope that it will be a big seller.”
Finally, I asked him if he was a workaholic and if he enjoys the fame. He says: “I worked very long hours for the first 10 years. I enjoy what I do, but I also enjoy my time off. I get up every morning and I like to think that I’m going to make somebody’s day. I don’t want anybody to feel that they can’t approach me or talk to me. We are all car people and I am so lucky to get to do what I do, and for people to appreciate what I do. I couldn’t ask for better.” ★
“WE ARE ALL CAR PEOPLE AND I AM SO LUCKY TO GET TO DO WHAT I DO, AND FOR PEOPLE TO APPRECIATE WHAT I DO. I COULDN’T ASK FOR BETTER.”