As car lovers, all of us have spent our childhood years learning and working on stuff with someone. That person could be our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, or whoever. It doesn't matter where the knowledge and passion come from as long as the passion is there. “Viral” a 1981 Trans Am Pro Touring build from Miller and Son Collision is a physical embodiment of the power of a father (James Sr) and son (James Jr) team who share a tremendous passion for cars. The first steps toward this build took place years before James Jr could even take his first steps. Now, the car, as well as James Jr, are much older, it has become a rolling time capsule and memory box bringing father and son closer than ever.

James Sr bought the car in 1994 a year after he got married. How he found and bought the car is a good story in itself. “I found out about the car when a guy at work told me there was a 1981 Trans Am for sale in town. I got home and told my wife we were going to take a cruise down by the water for a night out. That seemed like a great idea to her as she had no idea why we were going for a cruise down by the water, but I definitely knew why we were going haha. We took the car for a little test drive around the block and the rest is history.” The car started life with a 301 automatic and a hardtop. When James Sr did the first version of the car, he did a simple paint job that was a crisp brown with gold stripes. He drove it like that for a while until one day he got rear-ended while out for a drive. Even though the accident was fairly minor, he had the car down to just a shell within a week to begin on version two of the car. Looking back version two was the first brick in a long road of customization for this Trans Am. James Sr did some serious work at the time getting rid of the hardtop and replacing it with a T-top. Some great '90s touches were added to the interior of the car which included a few TV screens and a PS2 for the kids. What kid wouldn’t love driving around in a T-top Trans am with a PS2 in it? James Sr said “That version of the car was what the kids remember as they were growing up. I had that version of the car finished before the kids were even born so that is all they remember. I was working all day coming home than working in the garage at night. I would spend whatever time I could with the kids so they wouldn't miss me then I would go back to the garage when they went to sleep. When they woke up, I would be there to send them off to school. It's kind of neat that this is the same car the kids always loved and grew up with.” 

The family took that version of the car on my long drives and to many shows for years. One day a throwaway comment made by James Jr would completely change the trajectory of the car's life. The story goes a little something like this. “About four years ago my son said to me ‘maybe at some point we should think about re-doing your car.’ My son will say something and I will just run with it. So, he woke up one Saturday and asked my wife ‘where is dad?’ My son came out to the garage and I already had the car half apart. My son says, ‘well what are you doing?’ I answered him by saying - Well you said we should redo it! He blurts back ‘Well I didn’t think you would be this serious.’ I look at him and say - Ya I am serious. The next thing my son says is ‘But the paint is still perfect.’ And he was right we were still winning with the car at shows. So, I took a screwdriver and gouged the side of my car. I looked back at him and said - well there is no going back now.” James Sr told me at the start of the build they really didn’t know what direction they wanted to take the build in. They originally thought of using a junkyard LS motor and changing the car from a four-speed to a five or six-speed. They even had the junkyard motor picked out with a corvette transmission hanging off the back of it. Both of them were happy with what they had so far, but they knew there was more they wanted to do. To make it easier on themselves and the project more appealing to others they reached out to Tavish Highlander to get a rendering done. Travis recommended the 79-anniversary edition style paint job but instead of the two-tone silver and gray, it would be yellow and black. Once the renderings were done James Sr and his whole family got boots on the ground and started sending the images around to see if they could drum up some sponsors.

Detroit Motorama was on the horizon and James Sr knew Ridetech and a lot of other big companies would be there. The show would have been a great place to meet sponsors until he realized that it was just a Garage Giveaway and no one was actually at the event. For the Garage Giveaway, the event was selling raffle tickets for some pretty big prizes. James Jr told his dad “they should buy some raffle tickets because you never know what might happen.” One of the raffles was for a Magnuson Supercharger so they thought “hey let’s throw five bucks worth of tickets in for that.” About a month goes past and they get a phone call saying “Hey! Congratulations you have won a $2,500 gift card to Magnuson Superchargers. Both Sr and Jr were pumped about their win but now the junkyard motor they had wouldn’t accept the horsepower the supercharger would ram down its throat. This moment was equivalent to when one person jumps off a seesaw, the whole build was thrown off balance and pushed in a new direction. The junkyard was no longer a viable option. A crate engine from GM performance was purchased that could support the boost from a supercharger. At this point, they knew they were getting a Magnuson Supercharger. They just didn’t know how they would pay for the rest of it. Luckily, James Sr’s daughter was a great marketer and talked Magnuson into covering the full amount for the supercharger. Once they were on board other companies such as Ridetech and Wilwood joined in on the build and it continued to snowball from there. James and his son said “we got to the point we were thinking to ourselves well we can't stop now. Every corner of the car has the best of the best now. We have been able to work with some amazing companies. This car has always been a passion of mine ever since I saw Smokey and the Bandit. After watching it, I knew I had to have one. Working in the family shop with my son has been great. It's so cool that he did most of the metal fab on the car he grew up with.” 

At this point in the conversation, James Jr began breaking down every major modification they did on the car as well as the finer details many people may not catch. James Jr started by talking about an interesting door modification they made to the car. “While on Instagram I saw a post of an early second-gen Trans Am. There was something different about it. I didn't even know if it was a real car or a rendering but there was something strange looking at it from the side. I ended up figuring out that the top edge of each door was pulled up ever so slightly. I thought okay well what if we could pick the back edge of the door up two and a half inches and nothing at the front. This would make the moldings, as well as the weather stripping, fit as if the doors were stock. We went for it by using pieces from a full set of other doors. This way it sort of looks like it has been chopped when looking at it from the side. It is very minimal so only the hardcore Trans-Am guys will notice. Everything about the car is more in line now which I think is really cool. We then made it so the rear spoiler has a small dip in the middle. It is an exact copy of the front chin we made for the car. We also took the back edge of the spoiler and pulled it back three and three-quarter inches then down three and a half. It is similar to how the wing for a drag car is designed and made. To me, the car now looks like what I think it should have looked like when it came out of the factory.”

The backstory behind the spoiler modifications is a funny side tangent. I think the back and forth between James Sr and James Jr hits home for all father and son teams working together.

James Sr

The way we came up with the spoiler was I was watching Goblin Garage and they were doing a Riviera with a spoiler on it. They had a bunch of wire tacked to the car and they were slip wheeling and English wheeling some metal on it. So, I bought some steel and said let's make the spoiler for our car. He was like where did you get the idea and I said I just saw it on TV. If they can do it there's no reason we can't. 

James Jr

He tried to show me the episode and we could not find it anywhere. We checked everything on Motor Trend, Discovery, basically anywhere with car shows. We could not find it between both of us to save our lives.

James Sr

By putting our heads together, we were able to create a really sick spoiler that took a very long time to do but it was worth it.

James Jr

Little did we know after we got most of the metalwork done, he goes oh I remember what that show was called. So that's one of my favorite parts of the car is that back spoiler.  

For the exhaust, they knew the car needed to have quad tips, but the routing would be a challenge. If the exhaust was routed in a typical way the exhaust tips would just be hanging out in the middle of nowhere. The final exhaust design was decided on a week before the duo took their car to SEMA. The paint was still wet when they put the car in the trailer to leave. The exhaust fiasco will be touched on in more detail later in the article. The next major fabrication was the new hood to accommodate the supercharger. To make one custom hood that gave room to the supercharger two hoods were molded together. The understructure of the one hood as well as a middle section was cut out to create a small pocket for the supercharger. The underhood bracing was then redesigned and fabricated to be symmetrical. As James Jr says, “we made them symmetrical from one side to another so it didn't suck anymore.”

To make the supercharger line up with the new hood as well as create some extra room to work the engine was moved down four inches and then back four inches. The movement of the engine then created a zoo of new problems filled with headache-inducing birds and wallet stealing monkeys. With the engine in its new zoo enclosure, the oil pan was close to hitting the center of the subframe. This led to the subframe being cut out, moved down, and modified. They both agreed “At this point, we probably should have just bought a new subframe, but it was basically brand new at this point anyways. We welded all around the subframe so it is as rigid as all can be now.” A new problem then poked its ugly head out after the supercharger was installed. No company makes a pipe to relocate the throttle body to the location they wanted it. So, James Jr took some stainless steel pipe to the workbench. After some cutting, welding, and bodywork a factory-looking pipe was painted and installed. The way the pipe looks now you would swear you could go online and just buy that pipe. I think you know some serious work has been done when the two of them say “There is just so much custom stuff on the car it is hard to explain all of it. We have just done so many big things to the car we forget some of the key details of the work.” Logically, the next step was to create a new firewall now that the engine was where it would live. They wanted to make the firewall themselves from scratch which would turn out to be a learning lesson for the both of them. “We bought a bead roller to make the firewall. We had never used a bead roller before making the firewall. This was in the early stages of metalwork so we had lasers and all kinds of stuff set up so we could find the exact center of stuff. Starting off we thought we are going to make these abstract shapes and they will come out nice on our first try. We finished our first attempt and it came out looking like absolute balls! We were like what in the world are we doing? What the frick is that we can’t put this on the car! It was just terrible; we threw that in the garbage as fast as we could. The one that is in the car now we did in half the time and it looks a million times better. This made us think to ourselves simple is better, so we did it simple and it came out better.”

After learning some valuable lessons, the next thing to cross off the long list of to-do items was installing the wiper motor. They both agreed they didn't want an ugly bulky wiper motor being an eyesore under the hood. James Jr had the idea to take a Jeep Wrangler motor and mount it in the cowl in a hidden custom pocket. The wiper motor would then work vertically instead of horizontally but still use the stock linkage. If you look ever so closely at the car you will see a hidden trap door to access the wiper motor where there would typically be a small mesh pocket on a stock Trans Am. One of the things they wanted to stress with this build was a car that is as clean as possible but that is still functional. Nothing is buried under other stuff; everything is still easily accessible if you ever had to service something on the side of the road. For example, they took functionality and cleanliness to an extreme with the wheel wells in the car. In order to make boost lines, wiring, and other things near or in the wheel wells more accessible the pair again did some ingenious fabrication. In this style of Trans Am, you have to take the whole fender off to get at the wheel wells and you don't want to have to do that as transports fly past on a highway. The solution to the problem was to cut away at a set of wheel wells just enough so you could bend them easily. Then they took the second set of wheel wells to blend into the first set just to make them look stock and clean. A ton of work was done to the wheel wells to make them resemble stock but be a lot more functional than a factory set. Now they are easily removable to get at coils and anything else in or around them. Even something as simple as the wiring going to the coil packs had to be perfect for this duo to be satisfied. One of the coil packs is mounted inside essentially on the A-pillar. This coil was relocated here as the firewall in the cab of the car was getting too cluttered. The coil pack is hidden, all you can see is the plug wires going through the covers then they disappear. When looking at the car you would just assume they go into the car like the other set of wires. In reality, this set of wires is routed down inside the kick panel. Little details like that are what sets this father and son team as well as the car apart from many other builders/builds. Many hours were put into small details that many people may never see or even notice but the combination of these small changes takes this car from another custom Trans Am to THE custom Trans Am.

Again, another just incredible detail of the car most people would never even spend time thinking about is the antenna. Smokey and the Bandit had the big CB antenna wagging around on the car. The two of them didn’t want to necessarily hide items like the antenna as they wanted to pay homage to Smokey and the Bandit. They just wanted to put a more modern spin on certain components that added something unique to the car. It would have been much easier to just stick an old antenna on or even hide the antenna in the glass. This was not the meaning of this car though. The intent behind the build was to answer the question: If this car rolled out of the factory today what would it look like? An antenna from a Cadillac was scavenged and then gutted to get the look they wanted. A new GPS for the radio was inserted into the base of the shark fin-style antenna. It snapped back together like any modern antenna would on any new GM. A ton of more modern touches that still suited the build were added. The long list includes: LED headlights, Vintage Air air conditioning, 19-inch rims in the front and 20s in the back, deeper dish rims, a modern motor, a modern antenna, a more aggressive spoiler in the back, a diffuser in the back and a splitter in the front, and gigantic Wilwood brakes front and back. If GM were to make this car today this is what it would be. As many custom car builders can relate when one thing is changed six other things need to be changed too. For a car like this, you are willing to change as much as you have to because you want that one specific thing to be that way for a reason. An example of this was the gauge cluster in the car. New Vintage USA makes a complete set of gauges for a Trans Am. However, both James’s wanted more gauges than a stock dash we have. What do you do when you want more gauges? Well, you make a new bezel to fit as many as you want and reconfigure the spacing, so they look balanced on the dash. Even the steering wheel compliments the dash and adds another hint of modern styling that elevates the vintage look of the car. The inspiration for the steering wheel came from a newer Corvette that a customer brought into their shop. The steering wheel had a flat bottom much like the steering wheels found in modern race cars. James Sr took some measurements and took those measurements to a local machine shop. He told them he needed the same center of the wheel and it had to be made out of billet aluminum with a flat bottom and the spokes needed to be twice as thick as stock. The steering wheel is now wrapped in leather with exposed billet aluminum spokes. 

After getting to learn about all the immaculate labor-intensive changes they made I wanted to hear what each of their favorite parts of the build was. Many guys may answer I am proud of the exhaust system, or the engine, or any number of things. Not these two, to them the car is a car but a special one at that. In the end, though the pure enjoyment of being able to work as a father-son team is what these two enjoyed most about the build. “To be able to put your head together with your son is something special. All these ideas we had for the car we came up with together. And my son has a lot of whacked-out ideas. We build a lot of cool cars together at work but spending nights and weekends with him building our car it kind of felt like still to this day it's not my car. We would go out there and look at it and think man, that is ours; it's not a customer's car. I think that is the coolest part. We want to go on a power tour maybe next year with it. We built it to drive it. You know if it gets a stone chip here and there it is what it is. We are going to enjoy it and have a lot of fun with it.” James Jr added to the sentiment by saying “There were many times I would look at my dad and be like, ``Listen, I don't know how or what it would take to make this work or even if we can do it. But we have to try because this would look so good and sleek. Of course, there was a lot of stuff we tried like the first try at the firewall we mentioned and it was just terrible. But we would put our heads together and keep trying until we figured it out.”

Much like many of us car guys, a lot of people couldn't understand why a father and son team would want to take on a project like this together.

James Jr

“There were a lot of my friends who just couldn't understand me doing the car with my dad. You are working on one small aspect of the car and you are working on it until it is perfect. It is taking you fifty hours to do one thing. For the fuel lines, they come up beside the subframe. So, I put them in an electrical conduit so I could bend them and put a tab and the front and back so they aren't like telephone poles with a hanger than sag than a hanger. The lines follow the curve of the frame rail and we did the same thing with the air lines for the suspension. I probably have fifty hours just routing lines for the car and nobody is going to see that. That's what a lot of people didn't understand is you are spending so much time on one thing that people will probably never see. Like oh my gosh, the exhaust took so long. There were a lot of challenges along the way like I don't even know how many hours we have in the exhaust, probably with the welding done on it like 120 hours. Plus we had to do the whole exhaust system twice. One of my friends had just gotten out of school for welding so we thought we would get him to do it. We gave it to him and just said ‘Just weld these pieces up the way we have them mocked up and call me when you are done.’ He calls me up like three days later ‘hey, your exhaust is all done you can come to get it whenever.’ I knew the kid pretty well and he literally just graduated from a school for tig welding. But when I looked at the exhaust the welding looked like a bad fly by from some seagulls. 

James Sr

“So, I call up Stainless Headers and say ‘hey we have bought a ton of pipe from you. Would you be interested in sponsoring our second attempt? I am just not happy with our setup right now and I think we can do a much better job the second time.’ We ended up changing the design slightly the second time. We had Josh Newton, who also entered the SEMA Battle of the builders last year. We had him tig weld the exhaust the second time and he did an awesome job. I can't say enough good things about the kid, he has mad skills. We then had the exhaust powder coated all black just to make it a little different than other exhaust systems.”

All in all, the body has been completely gone over, modified, and modernized. It has a new floor, new firewall, new spoiler, and mini tubs. Just about everything that is metal on the car was redone so it was as straight as an arrow and as clean as an army general's boots. The only thing that stayed from the original build of the car that was done over twenty years ago was the fenders. One other small piece that moved over from the original build is the bumper. If you look closer at the bumper, you will see the word Pontiac stamped into the bumper on the right side. Back when James Sr built the car the first time, he cut that piece out of a different bumper and fused it into the one for the Trans Am.  He says “barely anyone noticed that for the 18 years I drove the original build. Nowadays everyone is noticing it, which is hilarious. It’s crazy little details like that that people are still discovering on the car. It's really neat to spend time with guys who know everything about F-body cars and watch them look at the car and discover all the little changes we did.” 

After hearing about the meat of the car I wanted to hear a little about the team's SEMA experience. Going into the call I knew they tried to make it to the 2020 SEMA show which did not work out for obvious reasons. Even making it to the 2021 show was a roller coaster of a journey. If you are a car builder and want to take your build to SEMA, let’s just say learn how to work on little to no sleep.

James Sr

“So, with the 2020 show, we are kind of glad it didn't happen because as people say the last 10% of the build takes 90% of the time. That couldn't be any more true. We definitely underestimated the amount of work we had left. If you could push a button and every part you are waiting on would be delivered by the end of the week it probably would have been able to be done in time had they still had the show. With the slowdown of everything across the world, there was just no way we were making SEMA 2020 anyways. The most important part I would stress about going to SEMA to anyone is number one you need someone who is diligent about pounding the pavement and sending detailed emails about your build, you have to have that perfect story. Number two which is probably more important than number one is that your wife has to be behind you. If she isn't behind you the whole way, you aren't doing the build or you’ll be divorced. Luckily, I'm not divorced. My wife was behind me the entire time, but she is definitely happy we are done now.”

James Jr

“Even for 2021, we weren't sure how we would get to the show because of flights and everything. We weren't going to take a chance with flying and somebody else hauling the car. In the end, we loaded the car into our trailer which quickly became a rodeo. We left Buffalo one day and made it to somewhere in Oklahoma the next day. We didn't have to stop because we had so many people in the truck that at least two people were always awake and we could just keep swapping out. But as soon as we hit Oklahoma a Tornado was going through Oklahoma into Texas. It seems like every time we take something in our trailer some crazy weather comes out of nowhere. We stopped for the night to see what would shakedown and try again in the morning. We ended up deciding since it was right there anyways, we would take scenic route 66 to avoid some of the weather and traffic. Let me tell you though that sucked too. It was just out in the middle of the boonies, it's not even like there was old cool stuff next to an old gas station. There was nothing cool or old, it was just trailer parks with 98’ Ford Rangers with no bedsides. So, we are like you know what we are just going to pretend we aren't on Route 66. I am sure it is very cool in other places because I know it goes a long way, but it was not scenic for us. We ended up just getting back on the interstate despite the winds just so we didn't have to keep being disappointed by route 66. Along the way, we ended up meeting up with some guys from Tremec and they were just great guys. In the end, it was a good and interesting time just getting the show.”

Once at the show, the journey just kept getting crazier and crazier.

James Sr

Once we got to the show, they parked us on the sidewalk right beside a loop they were unveiling for Tesla. This gave us a ton of attention because it was in the best spot possible. There was so much traffic that had to go past our spot. Hemmings came to us like a day before the end of the show and gave us their best restomod award which was an absolute honor, to say the least. Afterward, my son and I hugged each other and celebrated with each other. I called a friend of mine who was the person who got us into SEMA. I told her about us winning the award. She told me she was at Dave’s trailer from Kindig and we need to come over to show Dave the award. We went over there with the award and she was like; “just wait in his trailer we are going to tell everyone he is done signing”. So, they start rolling down the sides of their trailer for an after-party. So, Kev dog is in the trailer and then she pops in and says ‘Dave will be in in a minute he just has an emergency meeting with Barret Jackson.’ I am thinking to myself, is this real life?? Then in walks Dave and he goes ‘man, I love the car. Congratulations! Let's go take some pictures.’ It was just frickin awesome to be able to spend the time down there with your kid and just meet so many amazing people. Guys were coming up to me who had their car on the cover of some big magazines telling me how much they liked what we did to the car. It is crazy to think we did something that people into all different types of cars like. Today with everything going on in the world trying to find guys that have the same passion and ability to work on these cars and put their heart and soul into the car it's almost like they don't exist at least where we are. At the shop, it is myself, my son, and two other 19-year-olds who build these cool cars which is kind of unheard of these days. Whereas some shops have 10-12 guys with all different types of degrees and backgrounds doing the same thing. We are just a small family-owned business and we just love what we do. We can't wait to work with our customers to combine our vision with theirs and create something that is different from the rest.”

While talking about how the shop is made up of mostly younger people we began talking about how to get the younger generation back into the trades or any manual labor job. This conversation was unexpected but one of the more important things to take away from this article.

James Sr

“I would say number one college isn't for everybody. My daughter went to college and that's all she did. She lived and breathed school, now she is a doctor. Whereas my son didn't want anything to do with school. He still did well at school but if he could just roll around in the grease and take anything apart that's all he would do. A Lot of the kids today will come in and try to work when they come out of career schools. You either have it or you don't. If you have the passion to work hard, take stuff apart, fix things, and get with the right shop where the veteran guys will take the time to mentor you, you will get more out of that than any school out there. Painting, bodywork, and metal finishing are a lot of learning by practicing and feeling. You just have to want to learn and put in the work. 

James Jr

I think the big thing is with the actual building of a car. With everything being so hands-on you can't just read a book and do it. You have to be able to fail, see what you did wrong, and then tackle it again. I see all these guys on different shows using a bead roller and their piece comes out as a work of art. Little did I know there is a lot more that goes into wheeling around a five-foot-long piece of a firewall. You have to be able to try, fall on your face, pick yourself up, and just get after it again. I think that's the biggest thing that stops people from building cars. They try to do something and it gives them a hard time and they just completely lose their steam.

James Sr

For example, we have something going on right now that was us trying to reinvent the wheel and it is a failure. We put hidden marker lights on the four corners of the car. We have had the car done for two years and we entered it into the Buffalo Motorama. When we got home there was still snow in our driveway, so I didn't want to unload it. I left it in the trailer for a few nights and it got pretty cold. The acrylic we put into the four corners didn't want to play nice with the temperature change. The cold cracked and deglazed the acrylic on all four corners. We are literally loading the car back up tonight when we are done with this call, bringing it back to work, and taking all four corners apart. Now we are taking the 2019 Dodge Challenger marker lights which were in the bumper on those cars. They have no steel pocket. After all, they never needed a steel pocket because they were in rubber bumpers. So now we are designing steel pockets that we can weld into the four corners to remove all of the acrylic. And we have to do this all before May 22nd when we have to be in Pittsburgh for another show. Sometimes you try to do things and they do turn out wicked cool and you are thinking to yourself it looks great I just hope it lasts. This is just one of those things that didn't work out and that is okay. I think these new marker lights will look even better. It is one of those things we tried and we were thinking outside of the box, but I would do it differently next time.

James Jr

Along those lines, one thing I learned throughout the entire build is sometimes you have to stop and ask yourself “okay, I can't be the first person to think of this so why does it seem like I am the only one doing it. Is there a reason other people aren't doing it?” Sometimes you may actually be the first person to think of that specific thing but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. Like these marker lights did turn out sweet they blend right in with the rest of the car you don't even know they are there. Yes, we did do it but looking back at it we probably shouldn't have done it. But again, you have to fail to figure stuff out and then just get back at it. We probably have 60 hours in each corner of the car to make those lights work perfectly but look invisible. It was such a lesson learned, now we know more about each material, the properties, and how temperature affects them and even that specific knowledge can be applied to all of our builds from now on. 

Finally, the last few statements made by James Sr and James Jr have made a lasting impact on me and my thoughts on the hobby. This hobby goes far beyond the car and is much more important than the physical car. We need to enjoy the memories we make with our rides and not take those times for granted. 

James Sr

One of the crazy things about the build is we were working like 18-hour days to get the car done for SEMA. We would shut the shop and that is all anyone would work on is our car. Like the interior wasn't even done until a week before we left. We were burning the candle at both ends. We went to SEMA and we came back and I wasn't feeling the best. We drove forty hours door to door without shutting the truck off which is probably kind of stupid. And we were all worn out from that then I ended up getting covid for about a week. But then mine and my wife’s turned into pneumonia and I ended up losing thirty-eight pounds and my oxygen dropped to life-threatening levels multiple times in one week. I was so sick I almost died, which was only a few weeks after the best time of my life at SEMA. Now my son has to go to work for ten weeks while I am too sick to work. Plus, my daughter was about to get married. It was just crazy the ups and downs we had within ten weeks. My son was a true trooper. He went to work and did everything from a to z while I was at home getting healthy. That whole experience was a huge eye-opener. All I can explain is it had to be God because there is no way I should be able to sit here and talk to you today. We have been truly blessed to be able to share our story and have all these experiences. We stuck through it as a family and now everything is just about enjoying life. 

James Jr

Being able to do this with my dad has been one of the best things I have done in my life. This whole journey is one of those things I will never forget. At the end of the day, building the car with him was one of the best things ever. But at the end of the day, you have to remember it is a material item. It can be very easy to idolize the car. You can start putting it in front of family time and other things. You can let it ruin your life financially, personally, etc. You wake up in the middle of the night thinking oh I need to tighten those bolts. It controls your mind. So, you just have to keep putting that in perspective and pulling back. Thinking to yourself at the end of the day the garage could go up in flames but at the end of the day, you still have family and the love for each other. Which at the end of the day is all that matters. That is the only thing that no one can take away. As much as you enjoy it in the end it is still just a car. Unfortunately, at some point it will turn into a pile of rust, nothing lasts forever. So just being able to build it with my dad was amazing. The memories are what are priceless to me, not the car. I can't wait to do this same thing with my kids.

I was honored the whole Miller family took the time to share their story with me. You can truly tell that this car and the Miller's passion goes far beyond the ordinary level. This passion has become ingrained in the family. It is a part of their family. The connection shared between this family is a special one that many of us aim to have with our own families. Many people only hear about builds that come out of big-name shops. A lot of people don't expect small family-owned shops like Miller and Son Collison to build cars that guys like Dave Kindig admire. The majority of people overlook these small shops that are building cars just as good if not better than some of the well-known shops. Without shops like Miller and Son Collision doing what they love every day the passion and knowledge for this hobby would disappear. Take a page from the Miller's book and do something you enjoy with the people you love. Push yourself together to create memories that will last for generations. The car may be sold or totaled but those memories will be passed down through the generations.

Link Garage

Follow Miller and Son Collision:

Company Website: Millersoncollision.com

Instagram: MillerSonCollision

Facebook: MillerSonCollision

Others Included In The Article

Rendering: Tavish Highlander

Exhaust: Josh Newton

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