This is the restoration shop that's building my Kama Kaase project.
Here's an interesting artical that was in their paper and explains their restoration busniess.MLC,hope you don't mind if I attach the artical.If not I'll remove it.
CHISHOLM – The cars often come in the door as junk – dented, rusted, neglected, left to rot away in an abandoned barn somewhere.
But there is a sexiness lurking beneath the rust of those ’67 Mustangs and ’69 Chargers, and that’s what the employees at Memory Lane Classics in Chisholm will spend the next year or so building back into the car.
Today, owner Scott Verdung, his son, Edwin, and the dozen or so other employees are building for a global market. The cars they restore in their downtown Chisholm shop are destined for customers in Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, as well as across the United States.
In the four years since Memory Lane Classics relocated to Chisholm, the company has quietly grown, one word-of-mouth build at a time, into one of the largest custom car shops in the Upper Midwest, said Scott Verdung.
Verdung moved the business north from its origins in West Palm Beach, Fla. in the 1990s. Verdung knew the area from past fishing trips to Crane Lake, and he was tired of worrying about crime in the Florida area. Father and son first set up shop in a pole barn in Embarrass, though they quickly outgrew that space and started looking around for more room.
Chisholm’s main street had it. Verdung took over a vacant building at the crest of Lake Street that had once housed a Ford dealership. Today, the company occupies about 35,000 square feet of shop and storage space in town – and they have big plans to grow.
If all goes according to plan, Verdung said, by early summer his business will grow to fill about 80,000 square feet of shop space in Chisholm, with an additional dozen or so employees to catch up on all the work. New employees from all over the country have already started to move to the area.
“Right now, I need qualified people to get our clients’ cars out,” Verdung said. The recession hasn’t dinged business much – two clients lost a bundle in the stock market, but most “are solid,” Verdung said. The shop has more than 35 custom builds in progress, with more waiting to start.
The shop is usually bustling seven days a week, as workers running on cigarettes and Mountain Dew usher the cars from one stage of restoration to the next. On a recent day, the air was tinged with a mixture of paint fumes and exhaust, and the floor was dribbled here and there with oil. Workers were busy crawling inside and outside the vehicles as they went over every inch of steel.
Joe Anderson of Duluth was busy smoothing the body of a ’68 Camero with fine sandpaper in one area, while engine experts were fine-tuning the new $35,000 engine nestled in a ’67 Mustang body in another. Parts from one of the two remaining ’58 Plymouth Furys used in the movie “Christine” were drying in the paint room, and in another building, fabricators cleaned up new arrivals.
TOP CENTER: Memory Lane Classics owners (from left) Edwin Verdung, Scott Verdung, and employee Jason Kilduff And Verdung, wearing a warm flannel shirt and a pair of rumpled blue jeans, was watching over it all. Though he is surrounded by cars that would make most enthusiasts drool, Verdung said he’s not really in awe of the machines.
“Cars don’t enthuse me,” Verdung said. But delivering the cars – that’s another matter. Verdung said he loves seeing the look on clients’ faces as their long-awaited car rolls off the enclosed trailer. It’s all about making that customer happy, he said.
“We can’t re-live our memories,” Verdung said. “We can’t bring back those times. But we can supply a little touch of memory” when they deliver a client’s dream car.
The shop gained local fame when they worked on both of the remaining “Christine” cars, and today Memory Lane Classics builds customized Christine “clones.” But now a newer movie is inspiring custom car buyers.
A fleet of stripped-down Mustangs are lined up at Memory Lane Classics, their owners lusting after the sleek GT500 made popular by the 2000 remake movie “Gone in Sixty Seconds,” about a master car thief. Each Mustang body that comes through the shop is stripped down to the bare steel frame in preparation for its custom treatment.
The original Mustangs were massproduced to appeal to younger drivers that wanted fast cars, said Memory Lane Classics employee Jim Greski of Hibbing.
Joe Anderson Modifying those original frames to handle an 800 horsepower engine – as opposed to the original 250 horsepower – takes some work, Greski said, because the factory-made frame isn’t strong enough to handle the extra power.
“You put any muscle under the hood, and the car would tear itself apart,” Greski said. So one of the first steps in restoring an old Mustang is to literally chop the entire front end off and build a new one. From there, shop workers smooth the car’s lines, taking out the factory seams and making way for the customers’ specifications.
Even in their stripped-down, scoured-metal state, the Mustangs look sexy. And by the time Verdung’s employees are done with their year-long restoration, the cars’ 850-plus horsepower engines look and sound fierce. Each one is an original, Verdung said, made exactly to a customer’s wishes.
“They have style,” said Clay Nenadich, who manages the company’s fabrication shop. Building a custom clone from a rusted hull can take 1,000 to 2,000 hours of labor, Verdung said. Add in a $35,000 engine, such as the 850 horsepower model that fits in the ‘67 Mustang Snake Killer convertible, and you have a very expensive car.
Steve Alley of Denver found Memory Lane Classics on the Internet. Alley, now 50, had worked in the insurance industry all his life and was finally able to buy one of his dream cars: One of those ’67 Mustang GT500’s. “I had always been into Mustangs,” Alley said. He contacted Memory Lane Classics in the fall of 2007, and, after securing some references and having an attorney check out the company, they started building him one of those ’67 GT500 Snake Killers, just like in the movies.
Jason Kilduff “My apprehension up-front was tremendous,” given that he lives 1,600 miles away and was agreeing to hand over a big chunk of money, Alley said. “But as time went by, that apprehension went away.”
Alley was so happy with his car that the Verdungs are now building him another – a ’69 Mustang Mach 1 Pro Touring model. This dream dates back to 1975, when Alley was working at an auto dealership and a ’70 Mustang Mach 1 showed up as a trade-in. Alley became enamored of the car, enough so that he is willing to spend about $100,000 for the Verdungs to build his own custom version, complete with a 1,000 horsepower engine.
And Alley, in turn, has referred several friends who want their own custom cars to Memory Lane Classics – including one fellow who claims “13” as his lucky number. The Verdungs have incorporated fabricated “13”s into the design of his customized Mustang.
Dan Sawyer Memory Lane Classics employees are adamant that, although the cars are expensive, they are meant to be driven. Unlike some custom builds that spend the rest of their sheltered lives being delivered from car show to car show – Verdung calls them “trailer queens” – Memory Lane Classics cars are built for the road.
The cars come from dead end roads and abandoned buildings. Verdung keeps a pair of binoculars in his own vehicle – “just a work truck, nothing fancy” – to keep an eye out for a gem that might be rusting away in an empty field. People don’t like you just driving up to their front door and asking about that old Belvedere out back, Verdung said. But it helps to know what’s there.
The company buys most of their body work material from Village Glass and Supply in Virginia, and supply store owner Clayton Zeidler said Memory Lane Classics has become one of his biggest customers. Zeidler said he has been impressed with the quality of Memory Lane’s work.
“They are starting with a raw [vehicle] shell that’s 40 years old, and making it look like new,” Zeidler said.
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This is one one our custom built mustang "Blue Thunder" it's a 1967 Mustang Fastback That has been custom frame work, custom interior, 4.6 superchaged engine with 700HP+ 6 speed transmission Independent rear suspension and more..
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