Sorry for the length of this and all the posts but I thought you guys would enjoy..
It is funny because I do not have a ton of stuff or assets (most of my stuff is beat up but functional) and I live fairly modestly, but I do have a fairly awesome shop...
I have renting a shop for several years now mostly to feed the cruiser habit
I occupied the shop seen in the first photo for several years (with the wrecked 80 series) and built my first 55 entirely there, among many too many other heavy mechanical jobs. I was also making some money here and there working on people's junk.
It was basically a very large single bay shop for a whopping $125 a month
My friend Damon, who is also really into cruisers and owns a BJ42 factory diesel 40 series (and the 100 series also seen below), would work on the BJ42 regularly at my shop mostly doing little things (as it needs very little) and eventually convinced me to allow him to move in... Which was also a nice perk as he has some decent tools but also made the room fairly cramped...
One day, I was recycling and finally met the owner of the center. It turned out I had been talking to for years on the phone because all his recycling trucks (at the time) run the Cummins 4BT engines and we would run things be each other and some friends have even bought some of his old trucks for various projects...
We started talking and he is an environmentalist like who is also into old cars (he doesn't know much about them though, but has built up a bunch of cool old motorcycles). He takes me on a tour of the property there and has an old Model A (I believe) in perfect condition, the beatup '29 Ford pickup seen in the photos that he is planning to turn into a rat rod, and a '58 Chevy Apache pickup, all in a shop out back of one of the buildings. He is just a couple years older than me in his mid 30's, awesome guy, originally from Belguim (but you'd never know it as he grew up in California and is So. Californian), and is also a skateboarder
After some BSing he said that he would be psyched to possibly rent out the rear section of the facility, to simply have people working on their stuff regularly, and to hopefully entice him to work on the '29 Ford (which hasn't happened yet)...
But as a result we now have a sweet shop. Damon also had a good friend moving to Utah (they are both originally from Kentucky), who I had met a few times, and is also a die hard cruiserhead, and he figured he would want to share the space... So 2 then became 3.
And finally my friend Bill, who I brew biodiesel with, started expressing interest in the shop and possibly doing a diesel swap. He is not a "full partner" but has paid the rent a few times and did his conversion there as well. He has a gorgeous clean Oregon FJ62. We just did the diesel swap, an Isuzu 4BD1T turbo diesel. So there are really about 3 of us full time.
I actually spent most of the day today cleaning the bajeezus out of it and doing other errands (such as changing the spark plugs and light tuneup on the Saab) as it looked like a bomb went off post the engine swap...
Anyway, the shop is in the gorgeous Heber Valley in Utah, about 7000 feet and the pics show the valley and surrounding mountains. One which is the massive and gorgeous Mount Timpanogos (the large looking set of peaks) which Robert Redford's ski area Sundance sits at the base of, and is about 20 minutes away.
Park City (where we all live) is about 20 minutes north of here... Pretty funny because the sun finally showed up today for about the first time in 3 weeks or so, and I found myself taking pics today...
Photos in order, L to R:
The old shop and the 80 series I am putting under a FJ55.
The new shop from the outside.
Damon's 100, Carrie & I's '77 Ford Van that I bought this year down in Moab, "Brown Sugar" which is an awesome and sweet running camper van with shag carpet roofing... And my '92 Saab 9000 Turbo, my daily driver.. Great car, great mileage, hauls ***, built like a tank, lots of typical finicky things that have gone wrong with it but keeps on truckin' and runs great still with a whopping 174K miles on it already...
And the views....