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You may be reading this website from a place far away from our homestead of Plainfield, Illinois. If you’ve never been by the shop and given a tour, this post is for you. Welcome to the inner workings of Fluid.
We begin with the point where many visitors and callers to our shop begin - the main office. Here, Marilynn and Sean perform superhuman tricks in order to keep us running at full capacity. If you’ve ever had service done here, or called in and talked to Marilynn, this is where it all goes down. Also pictured is Mark, a man who can do just about anything with a computer, and Diesel, one of the several resident shop pups. Don’t let his small size fool you; he’s got some serious barking skills. The same goes for Diesel.
From the main office, we’ll walk down two steps into the secondary set of offices, where Andrew (your humble narrator) and Mike Marzano spend a good chunk of their days. AJ and Eastway are also staples of this room, coming in to do some work on SolidWorks or just design work in general — sometimes, a desk is a better place to design than a shop is. For that reason, we’ve got plenty of desk space.
Walking outside the offices, we enter the service side of the garage. This is the larger portion of the service section, with two lifts and plenty of space for tires, balancers, and just about everything else you’ll encounter in a typical service bay. The one thing we’re lucky enough to have over every other service joint, though, is the talent. OJ, Zach and Keller put in some serious time and serious effort to make things leave this garage much better than when they arrived. For that, they deserve plenty of kudos.
And here’s a shot of our secondary service bay, with another two lifts.
From there, we’ll take a quick trip through the pass-through, and onto…
Luci’s garage. Yes, the man has his own corner to himself, but for a superhero it’s the least we can do. Since he’s in charge of all the painting, his corner also comes with the paint room. Luci has two lifts just for himself, which sometimes seems like it’s not enough for a man with a work ethic that just won’t quit. As for what’s currently inside the paint room, if you’ve been following the blog, you’ll certainly know what we’re up to. We won’t say any more on that subject.
Now, we have to take a quick trip outside and across the parking lot, where we reach the fabrication garage. What originally started as car storage has since been transformed into a fully-fledged fabrication station with just about everything we need to build just about anything. Most things that are built in fabrication start in Eastway’s corner, with his CNC mill, manual lathe and vibratory finisher, among other industrial equipment. We also received a plasma cutter just today, which has been the object of much affection since its arrival; sadly, it arrived just after the pictures were taken.
Moving up the ramp from Eastway’s cutting corner, we arrive at the dyno (in the room on the right) and the main event itself, the location where all our fabrication work takes place. All the gorgeous welds you’ll encounter on this website are done in this very room. Next to the dyno you will see our very first project car to receive international renown, Gold Wheels.
Further into the garage, you’ll encounter most of our other current project vehicles, including AJ’s Fluid Racing Honda CBR1000RR. It looks much better on display here than it does in his garage, that’s for sure. It was apparently quite the tricky piece of maneuvering to ride it from his house to here, but the man is all chutzpah, so everything went off without a hitch. You’ll notice our project SL in the background, as well; more news on that build should be arriving shortly.
Finally, we reach the last destination at Fluid - the Dyno Lounge. This is our most recent project, and when your narrator says “our,” he really means AJ’s project. What was once again more storage was envisioned by AJ as a place to come and hang out, watch your car get worked on, check out the progress on the dyno, and just relax in general in a building filled with fellow gearheads. The decorations on the wall, some provided by AJ, tell a story about the history of Fluid, parts we’ve made, and generally just help to describe our mantra with building cars and the mindset we all share. If you could have seen what this looked like when it was storage, you’d be rushing up to AJ, shaking his hand and buying him a drink. He’s seriously put an incredible amount of effort into transforming the fab garage (not just the Dyno Lounge, but the entire garage in general) into something we can be proud of, something that everybody can enjoy. Again, kudos to him and to all the Fluid crew for putting in 150% day in and day out. Your humble, anonymous narrator is a mouse amongst men in this company, and once you witness Fluid for yourself and see this dedication firsthand, you’ll truly understand why it sucks to roll hard (but we still do it anyway).
If you ever feel like swinging through Fluid for whims and giggles, feel free. We’d love to have you.
We begin with the point where many visitors and callers to our shop begin - the main office. Here, Marilynn and Sean perform superhuman tricks in order to keep us running at full capacity. If you’ve ever had service done here, or called in and talked to Marilynn, this is where it all goes down. Also pictured is Mark, a man who can do just about anything with a computer, and Diesel, one of the several resident shop pups. Don’t let his small size fool you; he’s got some serious barking skills. The same goes for Diesel.
From the main office, we’ll walk down two steps into the secondary set of offices, where Andrew (your humble narrator) and Mike Marzano spend a good chunk of their days. AJ and Eastway are also staples of this room, coming in to do some work on SolidWorks or just design work in general — sometimes, a desk is a better place to design than a shop is. For that reason, we’ve got plenty of desk space.
Walking outside the offices, we enter the service side of the garage. This is the larger portion of the service section, with two lifts and plenty of space for tires, balancers, and just about everything else you’ll encounter in a typical service bay. The one thing we’re lucky enough to have over every other service joint, though, is the talent. OJ, Zach and Keller put in some serious time and serious effort to make things leave this garage much better than when they arrived. For that, they deserve plenty of kudos.
And here’s a shot of our secondary service bay, with another two lifts.
From there, we’ll take a quick trip through the pass-through, and onto…
Luci’s garage. Yes, the man has his own corner to himself, but for a superhero it’s the least we can do. Since he’s in charge of all the painting, his corner also comes with the paint room. Luci has two lifts just for himself, which sometimes seems like it’s not enough for a man with a work ethic that just won’t quit. As for what’s currently inside the paint room, if you’ve been following the blog, you’ll certainly know what we’re up to. We won’t say any more on that subject.
Now, we have to take a quick trip outside and across the parking lot, where we reach the fabrication garage. What originally started as car storage has since been transformed into a fully-fledged fabrication station with just about everything we need to build just about anything. Most things that are built in fabrication start in Eastway’s corner, with his CNC mill, manual lathe and vibratory finisher, among other industrial equipment. We also received a plasma cutter just today, which has been the object of much affection since its arrival; sadly, it arrived just after the pictures were taken.
Moving up the ramp from Eastway’s cutting corner, we arrive at the dyno (in the room on the right) and the main event itself, the location where all our fabrication work takes place. All the gorgeous welds you’ll encounter on this website are done in this very room. Next to the dyno you will see our very first project car to receive international renown, Gold Wheels.
Further into the garage, you’ll encounter most of our other current project vehicles, including AJ’s Fluid Racing Honda CBR1000RR. It looks much better on display here than it does in his garage, that’s for sure. It was apparently quite the tricky piece of maneuvering to ride it from his house to here, but the man is all chutzpah, so everything went off without a hitch. You’ll notice our project SL in the background, as well; more news on that build should be arriving shortly.
Finally, we reach the last destination at Fluid - the Dyno Lounge. This is our most recent project, and when your narrator says “our,” he really means AJ’s project. What was once again more storage was envisioned by AJ as a place to come and hang out, watch your car get worked on, check out the progress on the dyno, and just relax in general in a building filled with fellow gearheads. The decorations on the wall, some provided by AJ, tell a story about the history of Fluid, parts we’ve made, and generally just help to describe our mantra with building cars and the mindset we all share. If you could have seen what this looked like when it was storage, you’d be rushing up to AJ, shaking his hand and buying him a drink. He’s seriously put an incredible amount of effort into transforming the fab garage (not just the Dyno Lounge, but the entire garage in general) into something we can be proud of, something that everybody can enjoy. Again, kudos to him and to all the Fluid crew for putting in 150% day in and day out. Your humble, anonymous narrator is a mouse amongst men in this company, and once you witness Fluid for yourself and see this dedication firsthand, you’ll truly understand why it sucks to roll hard (but we still do it anyway).
If you ever feel like swinging through Fluid for whims and giggles, feel free. We’d love to have you.
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