The shop has a deadline now, the end of June, which is coming in hot. There’s a hard stop and everything needs to be functional before it arrives. But functional doesn’t have to mean boring. My vision, if I’m honest, is something like Jekyll and Hyde. A space that is usable for my maintenance and repair goals with tool accessibility and multiple car filming camera angles available, but that also lets my personality bleed into it a little (or a lot). It won’t be a showroom or a dream man cave. Just something with a little personality and a little grime. It needs to take itself just seriously enough. That’s the goal and the end of June is the deadline. Let’s see how close I can get.

The problem is that the shop was just a shop. It was built to do work, and then I decided that I also wanted to film in it. These two things are not naturally compatible and I’ve been navigating that conflict for months.

A working shop is organized around access to the car, to the tools, to the lift points, and movement around the workspace. A filming space is organized around sight lines, backgrounds, and light. Right now mine is organized around neither. It’s just accumulated stuff with a car in the middle of it. The chaos is fine when you’re just wrenching, but becomes a problem the second a camera comes out.

The Golf Alltrack is the current casualty of this. Started pulling the rear wheel bearing and needed to buy a different tool mid job. Car had to move before I could finish. It’s now sitting outside, not functional, while I play musical cars trying to sequence what goes where. If the shop wasn’t in the state it’s in I could have just moved the camera, finished the job, and had an episode. Instead I have an incomplete repair and a car in the driveway.

So the real project right now isn’t the wheel bearing and it isn’t the aesthetics. It’s getting the space organized enough that working and filming can coexist. Everything else is blocked behind that.

I’ve been thinking about how private I am by default and whether I want or need to relax that.

This channel is growing slowly and the comments have been genuinely positive and enthusiastic, people seem to connect with the ownership angle, the honesty about costs and failures, the fact that I’m not pretending these cars are perfect. But YouTube is one format and it has limits. There’s a version of my lifestyle that lets more people in, my shop, my life around the cars, the thinking behind the decisions, balancing it all with a day job and a family and I’ve been wrestling with whether I want to do that.

The honest reason I’m considering it: I’ve been that person on the other end. Someone I’ve never met makes a decision to buy a weird car, move somewhere unusual, build something they probably shouldn’t and it quietly gives me permission to do the same. I don’t think you need a large audience to have that effect on people. You just need to be honest about what you’re actually doing and why.

I’m normally very private. I’m still figuring out what the right level of openness looks like. But some version of letting people into the world around the channel, not just the cars, is where this is going. Instagram is probably where that starts.

Somebody at AMG decided the SLK, a small and stylish roadster largely associated with hairdressers, needed a hand-built 5.4-litre V8 pushing 355 horsepower into a car weighing 3,100 pounds. They were a little crazy, but also absolutely right.

Because it was always dismissed as a cute car with an engine transplant, it never got the reputation it deserved. That’s now your opportunity. Decent R171s (2005–2011) are sitting in the $15–20k range. The people who wrote it off evaluated the packaging and ignored what was inside it. If you want a V8 roadster that feels genuinely quick, sounds correct, and doesn’t require explanation then this is the one nobody is talking about yet.