Sobre nosotros

BILLETE DE TIC - HECHO EN AMÉRICA

Take A Look Behind The Scenes

American Made

Watch Here

Donde todo empezó

I had a 1985 Chevy C10. Primer and blue. SBC with a TH350. The kind of truck most guys would leave alone.

I didn't.

I decided to drop in an LS1. That's when everything went sideways. The mounts didn't fit. I cut and rewelded just to get the engine in. Then the flexplate didn't match the torque converter. Wrong bolt pattern entirely.

It was late on a Saturday night. What was supposed to be a weekend project was already bleeding into its third week. I remember standing alone in my garage under the dim fluorescent lights, holding the converter, marking it by hand, redrilling it myself just to make it work. Grease on my hands. Tools everywhere. The truck that was supposed to be done by Sunday still sitting there in pieces.

At one point I said it out loud.

"I'm never doing this again."

The swap took weeks. Not a weekend. Not even close.

But then the LS1 fired to life.

I lined up against my buddy's '98 Z28. Same LS1, stock setup, a car that was supposed to win. It didn't. I put car lengths on him. Every run got worse for him and better for me. My beat up squarebody was walking a Camaro.

I sat in that truck after the last run and just stared at the steering wheel for a second. It wasn't just that I won. It was that I knew what it cost to get there. The late nights. The frustration. The moments where I genuinely didn't know if it was going to work. And here I was, faster than a car that should have beaten me by default. That feeling was something I'd never had before. And I knew right then that other guys deserved to feel it too.

Not just because it was fast and fun as hell. But because I knew exactly how hard it was to get there. Nothing fit. Nothing was designed for guys doing real swaps in real garages. Nobody had built the parts or offered the support that should have existed.

So I decided to fill that void.

I dumped out my 401k on a gamble for my future and drove five hours to buy a 1987 Fadal CNC mill that was too big for my car trailer. White knuckle drive up the interstate. Unloaded it in a snowstorm and set it up in a 30x40 garage I built onto my tiny one bedroom house. The machine broke constantly. I was learning Mastercam on a borrowed copy, figuring it out as I went with the help of friends.

My first part was a basis of the swap. The engine mounts. I spent hours measuring where the SBC and LS engine mounts, crankshaft, and bellhousing were to get their exact locations, doing everything by hand. No scanners. No CAD models. Just math and obsession. It had to be right. Because I knew exactly what it felt like when it wasn't.

I grew up watching my grandpa and dad build everything themselves. Not because they wanted to. Because they had to. That mindset never left me. But this was different. This wasn't about making something just work. This was about making it easy for the next guy.

No cutting. No guessing. No redrilling flexplates in your driveway at midnight.

Just bolt it on and drive.

That's why ICT Billet exists. Because nobody should have to spend weeks fighting parts that should have been engineered right the first time. You should spend that time on the part that matters. Building something better than anyone expected.