Preface Anyone in the automotive performance world has to work with machine shops at some point or another. They have been around as long as people have been building engines. Interestingly, with so many performance shops doing tuning, performance upgrades, and engine building, the assumption would be that quality performance oriented machine shops would be equally as prevalent. In my experience, this has been far from reality. But the question I ask is, why? There are some excellent memes on social media related to performance shops that go like the following:   With such a demand for quality work, the...

Shopify for e-commerce websites Shopify is the e-commerce website builder that I use. It allows anyone to create a professional looking e-commerce website even if you have no design skills. It has a bunch of additional apps that can be installed for things like: customer reviews and discount codes. Shopify will take your orders and process credit cards. It can also calculate shipping for your products automatically and integrate with UPS, Fedex, and USPS. Many websites that you use daily are built on the Shopify platform. You can check it out here, I hope this helps!

Imargin margin calculator (Available in the App Store) This is a margin calculator that I use to determine margin as percentage and a dollar amount. What’s cool about Imargin is that it calculates from any two inputs. For example: Tell Imargin a $ amount you want to make, and the % and it spits out the cost and sale price. Or if you know the cost and you need to make 10% to survive, Imargin spits out the sale price and profit in dollars. I use this multiple times per week.

Milas Tools  This is a unit conversion app that I use DAILY! Seriously, I use this app when I’m designing parts, tuning cars, etc. It will convert inches to millimeters, quarts to gallons, etc. So put down your calculator and get the app. It’s a no brainer.

Introduction   Evolution Dynamics is a relatively small shop just outside of Dallas, TX specializing in the Mitsubishi Evo platform.  It has anywhere from 20-30 cars at the shop and between 15-20 engines being built at any given time.  Handling 15-20 engine builds can be a daunting task if you only have 1 person building the engines.  Keeping the parts straight, knowing what each customer wants, and various components going to different machine shops adds to the difficulty of getting every engine exactly right.  To top it off, building race engines isn't just putting parts together using manufacturer supplied specs. ...