Chip Foose, best known for his TV show “Overhaulin’,” started drawing cars when he was just 3 years old.
Born and raised in Santa Barbara, he spent his early years watching his dad, Sam Foose, design custom cars before he started building them himself.
The 53-year-old Tustin resident runs Huntington Beach-based Foose Design. The company has 11 employees. “It’s 100 percent unnecessary, but it’s 100 percent passion-driven,” Foose said of the custom-car industry.
Foose’s shop is full of shape-shifting cars. On a busy day, the bays ring with the clang of tools, and sparks fly as metal is bent to create custom looks.
While he doesn’t see the hot rod trade going away, Foose does see a future where technology brings customized cars to anyone with a computer.
This year Foose is celebrating 30 years in the business. In that time he’s worked on thousands of cars and shipped them as far as Japan.
“I feel so blessed and lucky to get to do something that I love doing,” Foose said. “And I get paid for it.
“The greatest thing for me is that when I’m at a show, and I don’t know that one of my customers is going to be there, and I walk around the corner and see one of the cars that we built just sitting there.”
Foose sat down with the Register to discuss hot rodding and how television shows have changed the industry. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Q. What have been the biggest changes in the industry in the last 30 years?
A. Now you can order pretty much any part you need over the phone. When I first started with my father, if we needed a motor or pieces to put something together, we went to the wrecking yards and got pieces off of old cars and made them work. It’s so much easier to build a car now.
Q. Is your dad the person that sparked your interest in hot rodding?
A. My father started his own shop when he was 14 years old. So when I was a kid I started sitting next to my father at the age of three and I would draw. When he would do a drawing I would sit next to him and copy it. When he was done he would leave it on the table and I would draw it over and over again because I wanted to be as good as my dad. At the age of seven I started going to the shop and I would like to say that I was helping him but I think I destroyed more than I actually helped.
At the age of 7, I also met another designer, Alex Tremulis who was the head of the Ford Thunderbird studio through the 60s. When I saw Alex’s drawings, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Alex told me about Art Center College of Design. So at the age of seven I knew I wanted to go to Art Center.
Q. How long was your dad in the industry for?
A. My father just retired about a year ago. He’s 83 years old now. As a kid he worked for a company called AMT which was in Phoenix. He was building a lot of cars for television. He built the shuttle from Star Trek. The cars that he was building, AMT is the plastic model kit, so plastic model kits would become available to them after they had built the cars and then Hot Wheels was build the little diecast toys of them. So at the age of three years old, I had Hot Wheels of the cars that my dad had built and I had plastic model kits that I could build like my dad, so today I consider my career to be just an extension of my father’s.
Q. Do you have family you are hoping to pass the business on to one day?
A. I have a son, Rob, who’s 17 years old. He doesn’t like cars but he also loves the movie industry. So who knows what he’ll end up doing. Right now he’s focusing on school and homework so he’s not currently working the shop but during the summer he usually comes in and helps.
Q. Is knowing what you wanted to do from such a young age what made you so successful?
A. There are two completely different worlds: automotive design for the manufacturers and the aftermarket hot rodding and custom-car industry. One is a career and one is a lifestyle. I’ve been lucky enough to do both types of work. When I do the work for the manufacturers, it’s just a job. My name is not attached to it and I’m not a part of the unveiling. When I do a car in the aftermarket, in the hot rod world, I can go to events today and see cars that I built with my father 30 years ago. To me, that’s more of a lifestyle. I’m still enjoying these cars. And the people I work with, not only do we build a car but we build a friendship.
Q. Cars today have a wide array of features. Are you seeing people wanting to improve these cars even more or mainly older cars?
A. They’re older cars that we’re putting modern technology into for the drivability of the car. I’m not putting screens in with navigation systems; all that’s in your phone. Our focus is trying to create every one of these vehicles to be a rolling piece of drivable art. If you want something that has all modern technology and you’re looking for just the latest in electronics and social media, you can buy a brand-new car to do that.
We’re trying to create things that are timeless- looking. The last thing I want to do is build something that three years from now looks like you need to update it. If you do good design and keep it very tasteful, 20, 30 years from now it’s still a beautiful car.
Q. Have you seen a lot of change in what people are looking for when they come to you?
A. The biggest change that we get is that people are looking for newer cars. It’s muscle cars, the late ’60s and ’70s vehicles where it used to be that what we were building was mostly in the ’30s. The ’50s are still popular, but it’s the ’60s and into the ’70s that are becoming more popular.
Q. Has that created any new challenges?
A. The biggest challenge is if there’s a part that came on a car that was made out of plastic and maybe that part is no longer in good shape but it’s not reproduced, we’re trying to find it. Where the older cars, if it was sheet metal, you could just bend it and straighten it out. But if it’s broken plastic, we’re having to design and build something new or try to fix that.
The biggest challenge now is finding the pieces that don’t exist.
Q. How has the emergence of shows dedicated to hot rodding affected the industry?
A. It’s bringing it to the attention of a lot of people that never paid attention to this, and they’re getting into it. When you see it on TV, it looks like it happens overnight. People come in and they think they can get something done for next to nothing and then they’re shocked at the prices.
A lot of shops open up because we make it look so easy on television. Once they get into it, they find out how difficult it is. And there’s so many shops that the talented fabricators are going to work everywhere and it’s harder to find talented people to work for us.
Whenever you find someone that is very talented, their goal is to leave and start their own shop. I love the fact that some of my guys have left and started their own shops and are successful. Those are the guys that you really want to work for you. They’re eager to learn and they want to do it and have the passion. If you can harness that energy for the time that you’ve got them, then it’s a great benefit.
Q. Are there any other common misconceptions?
A. The biggest misconception in the industry is how much it costs to actually build these and the fact that these television shows are making it look like you can go buy a car, do some work on it, sell it and make money. That’s not typically the case. This is something you do out of passion. To go buy a car and try to restore it to make money, that’s not going to happen.
Q. What do you see as the future of your industry?
A. One day if you want a complete concept car, you’re going to be able to sit down at your computer at home, draw what you want, punch out a disk or just email it to a hot rod shop and with advanced technology and rapid prototyping, you’ll be able to build a car just through the computer.
Q. What do you see in the next few years?
A. The rapid prototyping allows you to build the parts that are missing. So that’s the biggest change. If you can patch something together you can have a laser scanner and have it printed. More and more of that’s going to happen as well as once you scan a part you can manipulate it in the computer and print something that’s totally different. Other than printing it up and painting it and finishing it, it’s so much easier than having to fabricate from scratch.
Q. How did the business do during the recession?
A. We never slowed down. At the time of the recession we had about four years of backlog, so we stayed busy all the way through it.
Q. What’s the backlog like now?
A. We have about a year’s worth of backlog now. We were much busier before.
Q. Why has that changed?
A. Fewer customers want to spend the type of money that it costs to build these cars.
Q. How much do these cars cost?
A. It’s $100 an hour. (“Overhaulin’” cars took 1,500 to 2,000 hours on average. Some cars take as many as 4,000 hours.)
Contact the writer: hmadans@ocregister.com or Twitter: @HannahMadans
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