Behind the Build Ep. 3 | HOT ROD Shop Tour with JMS Racing Engines | MotorTrend

Located in El Monte, California, JMS Racing Engines is a family-owned machine shop that has been in business for more than 50 years. Don Johnson started the company in 1973 and his son Mike started working for him when he was 16. Mike now runs the business with his son Jeff, who is showing us around today. How has JMS survived all these years while so many other machine shops have gone out of business? Experience, quality work, and the ability to work on just about anything a customer brings them. What does that look like on a typical day? Let's go behind the build to find out. Well Jeff, this is the teardown section, right? This is where when an engine gets dropped off, this is where the process for you guys start here and it's the typical cleaning and disassembly. Yeah, disassemble here and clean all the parts depending on whether they are needed for hot tank or just a scrub down or a steel abrader, which is basically starting from scratch. So if a person wants to start working for you guys, this is kind of where they start, right? If they don't have any experience. Yeah, because you got to get a handle on the shop and the way the parts move through it. That's mostly the back room's responsibility as far as separating to each area of the shop. That's key. Losing parts is not part of what we want to do. How long did you have to work here? I was back here for almost two years. You actually learn the most back here. Most of the time you're watching what everyone else does and I think that's the key. So then from here, we make our way up to the head department. This is going to be the head department where basically we're going to surface cylinder heads. Most of them get surfaced either way because they get damaged in the process of repair or just from naturally running. We have to decide whether or not the weld needs to be added to the water jackets. So we'll decide the weld or not and then surfacer fixes the rest of that. Everything we do here is with a three angle valve job basically, like as if it's a race car. So this is the rotating assembly area where we do rods and crankshafts. We use an old school balancer, which is not the preferable way that other manufacturers would prefer it, but I prefer it because you're more accountable for this balance job than you would be on a machine that does it for you and is wrong. And believe me, they are wrong sometimes. Really? Oh yeah. You can't always believe all the hype that comes around with some of the newer equipment. It makes you think you're doing it right. Interesting. We see it with cylinders when they're getting honed where they'll be out of round or out of a different shape. They'll actually be coned is what we see more often than anything and people don't check it because they're like, oh I believe in this machine. I spent three hundred and eighty thousand dollars on it. Okay. Yeah and then they don't check it and then the customer's here two weeks later saying why doesn't this thing turn over? Well it got seized. Wow. Happens often actually, seeing it every month now. Wow that's crazy. Every engine builder I've ever talked to prefers the old yeah the old balancers, the old tools, the old machines. Yeah I mean I love the lathe being not modern but I wouldn't mind having a newer one too. So a CNC would be nice. At the same time we do everything here custom, really custom, by hand. You know when it isn't a purchasable item. Yeah like this one right here is a weird job. This was a Cadillac that actually came in and if you see. Oh yeah is that the end of the crank or the camshaft? Yep that's the end of the cam that started to hit the timing cover from getting from wearing out the plate cam plate that was in for no good reason. Interesting. It was a rebuild someone had done. Yeah. So we're not sure if maybe the camshaft wasn't ground correct. Yeah. Sometimes that's the case with the aftermarket cams you don't always know. Yeah. This is where we'll size the big end of the rod to the rod journal or the wrist pin side of the rod. Yeah. How old is this machine you think? Probably 50 maybe 40 years old. Yeah. You guys use it just about every day right? Every day. Yeah. That's an everyday user. Yeah. Because even the new rods we'll check them and make sure they're to spec and they're not always to the size we want. Some guys want to run a thinner oil we don't prefer that. Right. So we have to give more clearance for certain things. Yeah. Yeah. You guys get a lot of like things that got messed up by. Other shops. Different places. Happens a lot. Yeah. You know nowadays there's less of that problem because those shops have been weeded out. That's good. Yeah. Poor economies will weed out bad business which is always a good thing about a bad economy but not always a good thing as far as people suffer from it. Sure. You know and that's that's a shame. Sure. It really is but most of the time when you see problems happens in the block department. Okay. That's where that's where people screw things up the worst and a lot of times it's from backyard shops you know or just guys that don't take the time. Yeah. To do it right and that's why we got Sal. He may not be the fastest guy in the world but he's never a screw up. He don't make a lot of mistakes and that's a good thing. Yeah. That's good. I definitely prefer that. This is all customer work that we just got to get through here and into the assembly area. Yeah. Because you guys have a lot of business right now don't you? Yeah. Like more business than you can. Yeah way more than we can take because of the loss of other shops everywhere which you know people call them all competitors but they were our friends also. Sure. And it sucks you know the way the industry has been shifting out of California. Mm-hmm. For good reason anyway. Yeah. So you said this was a Mazda? Mm-hmm. We do everything from little tiny Mazdas all the way up to LS motors. Six liter right here. To your big giant double A funny car Hemis. Yeah. And everything in between. You still is mostly V8s that you get from customers or is it? We do a lot of four cylinders, six cylinders but mostly V8s. Yeah. Big block Chevy, small block Chevy and LS are the king. The bread and butter of the business. To be honest we've been doing a lot of odd motors too as far as AMCs go. Yeah. Because there's not a lot of options for them. Yeah. Coming here is definitely the way to go because you don't have a crate motor to buy. That's the truth. That's true. Yeah. No one's making an AMC 401 right? That's right. I saw the block over there we can check that out in a minute. Yeah. You know all about those. A little bit. Yeah. So Cadillacs and AMCs and Pontiacs. You're never going to find a crate motor for those. So those guys become our base. We can always tell when the car values go up. Yeah. Because people start to work on the motors. They want to get them back on the road because they're selling. So this would be from like a 240. Gatson's 240 280s now are going for about 30 grand. Which is crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. I mean we took one over railroad tracks when I was a kid. Launching it like Dukes of Hazzard because it was only a $3,000 car at the time. But yeah you wouldn't do that nowadays. No not at all. I mean Jeff this is your assembly room and this is where I usually see you. Yeah. You're doing like final assembly. This is where I usually spend most of the years at the shop. About 15 years in here. I like this part of the shop. This is my favorite part. It's quiet and you can think in here and you get to see the done projects. So we're looking at a big block customer car. Yeah. Customer Camaro. How big is the engine? This one here is 496 inches I believe. Okay. Yeah this one is a standard build for us but you know nice heads on it. The AFRs are nice. Can't go wrong with those. How much like recommending because I see roller cam and that's kind of the standard these days to put a roller cam. Yeah we build a lot of flat tappet cam motors. It's more risky for us and the customer because of the oils today just causing you know flat cams but not a lot you can do about that except work around it. So this here is a 54 Packard straight eight. There's no crate motor options for these kind of cars so the customers don't have a lot of you know places to go for information. So once they talk to us and we discuss the things with them that they're looking for they naturally come to us and word of mouth is how things work in this business. I don't care how much advertising you do the guys that build Packards don't care. It's all about what the guy that he knows who also owns a Packard told him. Yeah. And that's the most important thing. Yeah. So something like this I mean you don't have a Packard service manual around right? You kind of have to. Actually I probably do. That's what's crazy. But we never pull them out so unless there's an issue we don't pull them out. We just I got an old guy. Yeah. He helps me assemble and that's the guy who you're going to work with. That's who you go to for info because he's like an encyclopedia for cars. Yeah. So what was this engine in here for you? I mean this thing was probably brand new and he was already in his 20s so. So this thing seems like no big deal. Okay. But you know when you're talking about the cords and you know the early 20s and 30s cars you get yourself into a big amount of trouble if you can't find parts. Sure. So you either make them or you find some way to obtain those parts and that is not always the simplest job. I think that's the worst job. That's what I got to do now. You're figuring. I have to find the parts now for the stuff that can't be found. Now you told me a while ago well recently fairly recently that you started to do stockpile stuff just for that reason. I've been hoarding stuff now for the last 10 years but. You kind of see the writing on the wall right? Yeah I see the cars that are not being produced at all and the ones that are starting to go up in value are the ones that are going to be coming in the door. Yeah. So you get a lot of Pontiacs, Buicks today that you wouldn't have gotten 20 years ago. Yeah. The car wasn't worth anything and now they're going for a fortune. Yeah. And that's really the key is trying to keep up with what is about to come. Yeah. That's tough because you can invest wrong. You get yourself really bound up. Yeah. Yeah right a bunch of AMC engines or something. Yeah I mean I had a lot of AMC stuff over the years and it's dwindled down and it's to the point now where you can't find it if you got one and you're in trouble. You know if you don't if you don't find and search out the parts because I'm not going to spend too much time looking for stuff that's insane to find. Yeah. You know it's up to the customer a lot of times and I tell them that when they come through the door. A lot of the project is gathering. Gathering of goods before we even start machining because the machining process will take you a week. The assembly will take you two weeks or a week even. Yeah. And then parts might take you six months. So it's the major chunk of the deal. Yes well like that Packard Cam you were just talking about. Exactly. Try to find something like that. Yeah or 401 stuff like you said that's tough to come across now. 400 Ford is now tough to find. Really? Yeah and that's yep. Wow. And then that would be Mustangs. You can't really find them. So if you guys come in without with a blown up motor and no good crank I tell them good luck. Yeah. You know sorry. 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It's hard to find a good mechanic anymore and when you're dealing with a guy's custom-built hot rod you can't take them to everybody and not a lot of people will even work on them. Yeah. You know understandably. But yeah if you do a full build here the full engine or drive train will usually work on the car if you need it. And then the last thing I wanted to look at here Jeff was this dragster you guys got. Now I've seen you and your dad out here firing up boats with big blocks in them and shooting water out the back but so you guys do a little bit of everything. Yeah this is definitely not your typical grocery getter. No but there's another customer. There's a customer who called me and said we need to get this done by next week and I'm like are you kidding me? We can't do that and then here we are. Here it is. What needs to be done to it? It needed to be serviced really badly. It's running 90 percent nitrous so it's melting things on a regular basis. It blows out gaskets you know they do all that kind of stuff. It's basically a cackle fest car. Okay. So they don't use it for track time they use it for exhibition. Yeah yeah. And they just beat them up even worse you know they get four seconds of track time when they're a race car when they do this stuff they'll run them for five minutes. Yeah I've seen. They are not made for that. No. You know this one here has a Chevy in it normally they have Hemis in them but this is one that the guy wanted to build. The guy actually owns three of them. Okay. Yeah he owns three different ones one has a Hemi one has a Ford and one has a Chevy. It's there so it can antagonize all of those in the crowd to which one is better. Well tell you what there's a crapshoot on that. I prefer a big block Chevy but. I hear you. Give me a Hemi any day in one of these things. Sure. The way they were meant to be. I've worked with JMS Racing many times in my career with Car Craft and Hot Rod and can attest to their work ethic and attention to detail. It's also impressive how long their employees have remained with the company. To me that means it's a great place to work and I'm happy to have known these guys for so long. If you have an engine that needs work check out their website at jmsracingengines.com or just give them a call at the shop. What was the coolest engine you saw today? The AMC 401? The Packard Straight 8? Let us know in the comments and let us know what you'd like to see in the next installment of Behind the Build.