I spent Friday night and a good portion of Saturday working on a Macan GTS belonging to friends. It is such a beautiful SUV. Here's a video that showcases the project. I hope to see this amazing Porsche back in the future. 

Tyson Hugie put a neat little video together showcasing his recent visit to my garage and a few other aspects of his recent stay in Calgary. The video features some questions he asked me about the garage. If you are interested in watching, I have posted it below. 

In 1986, I was 14 years old and completely obsessed with cars, mostly Porsches. As I explained in an earlier blog post, my parents had purchased an electric typewriter and I spent hours on that thing churning out sophisticated sounding letters to car companies requesting "literature". One day, a delivery guy showed up on the doorstep asking for my father. My dad signed for the big package and then said it was from Porsche. It was three black boxes, each with a die cast of the 1986 model lineup and a fancy brochure. It was sent from Porsche headquarters somewhere out East. I have held on to them all this time, but unfortunately, the 911 model is long gone. That was a great day and it shows how mighty the pen can be (or electric typewriter in this case(!

As I was rifling through this old brochure collection of mine, I came upon a folder I have had for well over 30 years. It was given to me by Gary Cooke, who owned the original Porsche dealership in Calgary. My dad and Gary had a mutual acquaintance so we always received the royal treatment when we visited the Cooke Motors showroom on Centre Street. In fact, I remember Gary and his wife visiting us and he parked his black 928S4 on our driveway for all the neighborhood kids to admire. I am curious if anyone else remembers Cooke Motors. The building is now a Shoppers/Tim Hortons.

With a quick Internet search, I tracked down Gary Cooke. He is the lease portfolio manager at Hyatt Infiniti. He remembered my dad and said the folder brought back good memories for him as well. Very cool. 

In 1984, my parents purchased an electric typewriter. I would spend hours at that thing knocking out letters to every car dealership on the continent. I was quite proud of how sophisticated my letters sounded and I did get a decent amount of responses. What I was after was brochures.

​Recently, I was going through my collection of over 300 brochures and I came across this handwritten note from a sales person named Ken Lust, who worked for a local Mercedes dealer in Calgary. I have been trying to track him down via the Internet with no luck. I called an Audi dealership in Edmonton as well as two Mercedes-Benz dealers, but can't find him. I wanted to personally thank him for taking the time to send me a brochure as well as for the kind note. The fact that he addressed me as "Mr." when it would have been quite obvious from my writing style that I was a kid is pure class in my opinion.  

I have been holding on to a pile of brochures from the 80's, 90's and beyond. I'm not sure what I want to do with them. They are all quite special to me, so today I took some time to take a photo of each cover. I think I'll hold on to the very special ones and let the others go. Either to a collector or maybe even the recycling bin - I'm not sure yet. At any rate, here's a little video along with a photo gallery of the 300+ brochures I have collected over the years. Let me know if any stick out to you.

Here's a gallery of the collection:

I've followed Tyson for a long time. He has a crazy collection of Acura's and he converted his Arizona double garage into a triple tandem to house six of his cars. I was honored to have him visit me and check out the garage over the weekend. We spent a few hours chatting and asking each other questions, and I captured some of that conversation on camera. Here's a video that gives you a good taste of what our visit was like. I hope to one day make it down to Arizona to visit his garage. It's crazy how many cool people I have met through this garage/car/detailing world. 

I had a lot of fun putting my touch on this little Golf R finished in Indium Grey. The owner reached out via my website to see if I could perform a detail on this well-maintained hot hatch. I have never detailed a Golf, so I accepted the challenge. A friend from Saskatchewan was in town so he joined me for the exterior wash and assisted me in capturing some great video footage using my new DJI Osmo Mobile gimbal. The final results on the car were highly satisfying as was the video. I hope to see this car back in the RAD environment at some point because I would like to give it a full detail including a polish and coating. 

My buddies at QuickJack sent me these cool wall hangers recently. I used to store my QJ frame units horizontally under my Thule roof box, but now I have them hanging vertically on the opposite side of that big wall. I took the opportunity to repaint a large portion of the wall and install some shelves I had in the basement. Things worked out great. Here's a video as well as some photos showing the progress and final result.