Chris Rünge's 5,000 Hour Handmade Masterpiece

foreign yeah you know what I thought was so deep like the challenge it was is it possible to change the personality of the car by just putting a new body on it you change the experience right no you feel like a big V8 powered Maserati from the mid 60s you know yeah you think so that's I I kind of felt like a fighter plane almost like that yeah garage something very special here there's a car called The Runge valeno we will find out what that means you know it's interesting in the late 1800s or the early 1900s America had Craftsmen there are people who built one-off things you know if you came from a a small town there might be a gun maker and he would make one or two or maybe three or four guns a year because he was a Craftsman when Precision Parts came in when assembly lines came in all those people kind of got put out of work because they couldn't compete so the Craftsman disappeared and the assembly environment worker came in and kind of took his place but in the last few years we've seen a lot of craftsmanship coming back people want something special they want something handmade and that's what this is young man Chris Runge he's been on our show before you've seen some of his Porsches he's got his own YouTube channel this is a handmade car built entirely by hat you know it's interesting when the watch industry in Switzerland was going full boy suddenly the Swatch came in all these electronic watches came in and they were in a dilemma because they were losing their shirts because Precision time keeping pieces although not handmade but mostly electronic and it almost killed the Swiss Watch industry until they decided to really go handmade and make beautiful watches where everything was exposed and you saw how it worked and then the industry popped back because people wanted something unique something different and that's what this is this is a car that someone commissioned it's the only one that there is it's the only one like it there must be 5 000 hours worth of work into this thing let's find out exactly what it is bringing the CEO designer the head Chief bottle washer guy everything at the Runge car Chris come on in good to see you my friend you too Jay uh yeah this is very impressive it really is it's just nice to see handmade stuff being appreciated because I was saying in the intro there this is like one of those bar bets you said if what has more Precision Parts a Model T or Rolls-Royce but oh Rolls-Royce no it's the Model T because they turn out 100 of them an hour and boom boom every part had to be exactly Rolls-Royce will go and take a little more off and that they would hand fettle everything on the car until it was perfect which is which is what you do here you know and it's good to see this kind of craftsmanship being appreciated again because I know you've got a lot of people come to you now you're the young guy you know Marcel the wonderful uh he he did my Duesenberg the one over there that uh that Coupe he hand made that whole body for me and he's gone now and it it's it's a lost art so the fact that you and you're the old guy now which I find funny yeah yeah we were like a kid when I first met now you got now how old's your son now he's 18. all right so you've got an 18 year old and you got young hey Mr Monkey can we tell you that you're like the old guy I know you're like Marcel you're the new Marcel so that's that's exciting so tell us what do we have here exactly so this started as a 2004 Dodge Viper SRT-10 Roadster and we landed on that initially my client was kind of interested in using a Corvette basis but when we started to consider the electronics and and then the underpinnings that we'd have to chop away to get this body on it we landed on the Viper and we found a 4 000 mile uh 2004 Viper Immaculate condition and that was the donor car that's more in keeping with Carol Shelby's original intent yeah big V10 manual transmission you couldn't even well you still can't get a uh an automatic with a Viper yeah in the the beauty of the Viper you know when they first slated to introduce the Viper their inspiration was was the you know great sports cars of the 60s right Shelby the uh pizzerinis and you know these really raw sports cars so is this all done on the English wheel so what I start with you know flat sheets of aluminum and I have a leather bag filled with lead bird shot and that sits on top of a tree stump so I'll make my patterns and then take you know the mallets and Hammers and pound the shape into the aluminum and then smooth it on an English wheel for finishing yeah and for people who don't really understand this how hard it is if this was steel or other people if they were going to paint it you'd fill this in with body filler yeah in place and you get it all smoothed out yeah and it's it's very smooth now but if you wanted to fill in this little and that's what you do and then you have those then the first cold day it all pops out again and the paint cracks everything else so that's what's amazing about this you're seeing it in its rawest form and it looks incredibly smooth to me I mean I like thank you the patina I like the way it looks this way as opposed to filling in all the slots and the ribbons and screws and all that stuff that's really that's what I fell in love with when I first saw the raw aluminum coachwork post-war cars at Amelia Island and the Bodywork told the story of you know the history of metal shaping and at that time you know the Italians were using certain tools the Germans were using certain tools and to kind of relive that journey through my work it's just it's what I love about this whole thing and what gauge thickness is aluminum it's 63 thousands okay oh that's pretty good that's really it's pretty thick isn't it yeah I know when the mirrors when they did the first mirrors they were so thin you can put your thumb I mean your thumb would leave an imprint if you press down and be like well that's not good and then plus they go like this down the road they'd Flex so yeah when they went to the later mirrors they used a heavier gauge but not even that heavy probably maybe two-thirds of that wow so this is so this is pretty yeah it's pretty robust right right yeah very nice so how much savings over the fiberglass body and the fiberglass body is not light on there no it's pretty heavy I couldn't believe how heavy the hood was when we replaced it right um I think we probably shaved off 250 pounds yeah so that puts it I think the original car was 3 400 pounds so we're you know down to 3200 31.50 is this the Viper windshield that is the original windshield so you keep that right yeah we tried to make everything Viper disappear on it but the windshield was one of the things that we kept yeah no it looks fine it doesn't look out of proportion or hey why is it straight up when it should be I mean it all looks fine to build the car we actually I initially was going to have the underpinnings 3D scanned and you know everybody's saying you got to use technology it'll make it so much faster right so I had a guy come in and skip and the underpinnings had the scan sent to a designer in the UK they just weren't any good he couldn't use the scans so then I went as far as to trying to basically Loft the car do you know the what lofting is go ahead it's it's uh in boat building when they'd actually climb up in the Loft look down at the boat and lay out the grid of the body shapes so I did that manually taking measurements off of every key point to manually give him the dimensions he needed to make uh to digitize the the body design that I had come up with and it still didn't work so we ended up I finally said okay I'm just going to do it the old-fashioned way and I made a two buck an aluminum tube Buck I shaped this half of the car and I made notes on every tube and told my son go ahead and copy him and he built the other half the driver's half yeah of the two bucks well that's the way that my Bugatti normally sits over there it was built when they made that Recreation body for it it was started with it with a wooden buck and did the whole thing yeah yeah Marcel did that too on the uh the Duesenberg I mean that's what's great about craftsmanship it really you can't assembly line it you you know no and it took us about a total of two and a half three weeks to do that process yeah yeah that's why you ever see the movie quickly down under with Tom Selleck I don't think well he plays a guy in the old west but he's got a rifle a long rifle it was uh an actual rifle building period it's just beautifully made and he hits something like 780 yards I'm just including that there's a wet Society you know to just hold something that's hand built and handmade really gives you a sense of Pride and a sense of ownership because they there used to be guilds all across America of woodworking guilds and they would be the best Craftsmen but they they did one at a time when it's done it's done maybe it takes a year when it's done it's done you know the English two are great at that that's why I think it's the English wheel yeah same thing okay let's see what else do we have so I imagine brakes are all stock Viper stock Viper breaks custom wheels we designed them they're based off of campanolo style right we use the stock Viper wheel and tire size the headlight lenses you know we thermal form those out of uh perspex right oh you got covers on the lenses yeah okay yeah and you've got it open here purposely to get to keep condensation out of there yes let a little bit of air breathe through and the hood scoop is functional yeah absolutely this you know this engine needs a lot of air so that that mouth on the front and the hood scoop uh pretty much Supply Air to the factory designated spots well it looks very Italian from the front and I love the Gated shifter which the which the real car never had yeah yeah that was pretty trick to come up with that and stock exhaust yep stock exhaust now we do have full flow cats right and uh Stainless Headers on it so it breathes a little bit better can we open the hood absolutely oh boy this looks great look at this very nice yeah so we cleaned up the engine um the intake originally had that kind of textured finish right um so we polished the intake polished the valve covers and then as I said did the Stainless Headers you know it's interesting because body guys are not chassis engineers and vice versa so you got something you know that works that handles it's fast and you're just changing the physical appearance of it to give it a make it a little lighter a little faster a little racer without sacrificing because I see that a lot a lot of see people they design something but it doesn't drive that well it drives great it looks kind of clunky basically all of the service points on the car we did a full service on it before we brought it out here and it's so easy to service this yeah all the panels still come off the bottom like Factory right right the the wheel Arch covers all drop down to access what you need to get to in there so we were able to do what you see Here Without Really sacrificing any of the functionality very nice let's see and let's take a look at the dash obviously yeah let's bring this down again all right so you've still got all the factory air and all that stuff yeah I like the steering wheel yeah so the steering wheel I designed and a friend of mine Kevin fitzke he's a master boat builder he took the design and he built the steering wheel and the uh shifter oh that's so that's black walnut it's it's the same Walnut that I used to build my shop we had extra leftovers that's funny yeah yeah Council the dash all the HVAC system has been rerouted to the new vent placement you know from defrost Dash vents we even retained the original stereo system uh with the exception of using a bluetooth head unit that's hidden now this is now this does not open from the back right not from here there's a trunk on the very back oh I see it opens that way okay that's it I kind of like these slats though that looks cool well a friend of mine was telling me you know when you use this is another Plexi window and at high speeds well you know this they have a tendency to blow out right yeah so we did the slats to help retain and then kind of a leather parcel shelf here yeah all you know I see and then you open through there is that correct yes right here and we can get a Wendy single Patty hamburger yeah yeah then the battery is still located gotcha in its original spot we have a battery cut off back here I like valeno it's got my name in it so that's very cool and that means uh poison in Italian or Venom oh Venom yeah Venom is better because it's a Viper yeah poisonous when you're going to be dead yeah I love the taillights it looks very Ferrari gto-ish yeah those are what are those tail lights off of they are I believe they're from a GT40 oh okay yeah the 904 and the GT40 had similar tail lights there's slight differences and these are right in that same line I think that's what Gordon Murray did with the f-180 I love the GT40 I think I think everybody loved the GT40 tail light now is Defender with the same as the stock Viper or is it a little it's a little narrower it's an hour on this body I mean they're you know they've got so much shape that it looks wider but yeah yeah the original Viper body hung out over the wheels a good bit because it does it does look like it would be wider but that's just an illusion isn't it yeah yeah I don't think people have any idea how hard this is to do I guess if you wanted to get an idea take a pad get a pad and a pencil and sketch it it'll never look anything like this yeah it was a huge undertaking and then I mean proportioning you know when people build custom cars do a full body the wheel arches are always something when you look at it's like no something's off yeah you know what I'm talking when you look at the the shape of the wheel arches so that's really something to me that proportions the whole body and makes everything fit that was the one thing I hated about the 66 charger but the wheels are always and and the uh Hillsville tornado the wheel's always too inboard a little bit it looked it looked lost in the wheel well yes you know to getting all those proportions right is really hard and you've done it here it really is a beautiful job thank you because it's just sometimes you get too wide here or or something but it it just fills out the Wheel World perfectly you know I see a little bit of kind of Ferrari Daytona I see you I don't see any sort of Viper maybe there's a little vapor in it but more Italian and the front end and the grill looks very Italian and this is nicely done here even this piece this is so hard to do to come up with a shape that looks right yeah and flows with you know right right the spears over the fenders see I'm one of those people that cuts first and then measures oh that's wrong I think this is okay oh that sucks I gotta start again yeah how how much waste do you come up with I mean when you have sheets of aluminum you're pounding Ah that's wrong can you when you pounded something into shape can you reuse it again or do you have to just sort of put that aside and start with a clean flat sheet again in some cases you can reuse it so what happens I you know when I get my metal it has a certain hardness right and it's the hardness is h14 so it's right at the mid-range from being fully hardened to soft right and I can anneal the metal so that I heat it up and that brings it down to h0 so it's dead soft again and then I can reshape it okay so I may like the panels with a lot of compound curve I may anneal those you know four or five times in the shaping process and how do you heat it what do you use to heat it I just just use a map gas torch typically a lot of guys will use like a rosebud torch with oxyacetylene but you don't get the metal red do you just get it no aluminum won't turn red right aluminum it'll almost look like sugar right and then it's done right then you can't use it again so it'll just fall it's almost like a heat gun almost more than a flame it you just want it soft enough okay yeah and the way that you can tell when it's annealed it's kind of funny if you put magic marker on the panel and when the magic marker Burns off that's really close to being h0 oh that's interesting okay and with the oxyacetylene you would actually use a soot so you cover the whole panel in black soot that's the old school way and then you would burn the soot off and that would be dead zero and how big a panel do you like to make this Fender this is all one piece with the exception of this of course but it's just two pieces so it's made in three pieces okay this is one piece two two and three and then the nose goes into another section so you've joined metal here right yep there's a weld right down the middle oh I see okay no I I see it now that you mention it yeah and then there's one right here okay look at that but it's so infinitesimally small but wow that's pretty amazing I mean can you ever get a dent in it you can't get out when you go you got to make a whole new piece again or you can almost work with it it depends if if it gets creased when it puts a hard crease in it that's when it gets difficult to repair the dent if it's you know just kind of a pushed in you can usually push it back out and massage it and bring it back to where it needed to be and you made these these wiper covers yours no those are the original wipers and we stripped the original finishing off of it I see and kind of patina them to look more period correct well you have a painted car well oh you'll always always be well that's what's interesting so I've kind of painted myself into a corner with having all the polished cars right my son is a very talented painter and he's interested in this so I think it might be fitting for him to do a series right and paint his cars well it just looks great are these functional as well yeah those pull air out of the cockpit yeah and these pull air off the engine right and that's brake duct area right out of that way well just beautifully done can we take it for a ride absolutely let's give it a shot this is exciting let's go foreign [Music] did a great job on that you know we're actually building a boat together now too Kevin and I oh is that so yeah yeah it'll be do you know the Howard Hughes speed boat that was wood bait it had the wood lower and then the polished aluminum deck that's what we're doing [Music] so we took the original you know a lot of the original control system the ECU and um rewired it so you can see the odometer is not in there yeah so the odometer and all the readout is hidden down underneath the dash so you know I'm trying to make it look uh vintage get rid of all the modern uh items in there so how does it feel compared to your other vipers is it pretty similar the power is the same you know it feels no it's very nice but I like the look I like the feel of this wheel uh-huh I'm not sure if it's still a little bit lower maybe you do well I had to take a total of three inches out of that seat yeah because the Headroom is so tight in these cars so I'm sure you're feeling a lot lower than the stock nobody like it though I don't feel like I have to I'm Looking Over The Wheel you know what I mean sure no it's fine yeah [Music] thank you so good yeah you know what I thought was that was neat like the challenge to me was is it possible to change the personality of the car by just putting a new body on it yeah I shouldn't say just you know it doesn't change the experience right oh you feel like a big V8 powered Maserati from the mid-60s you know yeah you think so that's I I kind of felt like a fighter plane almost like that yeah [Music] see I haven't really got to feel it like this yet because we've been testing it in the snow in Minnesota 75 horsepower pw's a 356 engines yeah this is a totally different Beast you know this is my first front engine design that I've ever done or is that right yeah you know front mid I guess they call it yeah it could take a long trip in this thing it'd be great yeah absolutely we're testing at Minnesota you know it's 5-10 degrees out right the tires are like hockey pucks and uh I mean I was able to get it up to 110 and do a Two Mile Stretch right right and of course we've got frost teams this time of year so uh it did well though I'm I'm really happy with it oh it's great feels very solid no cow Shake away in any gear in this thing stainless steelhead is going through the factory exhaust or in a different exhaust uh no it's an aftermarket exhaust right okay yep the whole thing from the headers back yeah oh okay yeah and like I said they say they claim it adds 50 horsepower and it very well could I'm not for sure it seems like a lot yeah it does and then the factory torque spec is 525 foot-pounds yeah it's a lot it is that's what I love about this thing yeah the torque is just incredible yeah any I mean we've never really been above third gear I know hey Steve this is probably a lot of people comment on the Polish finish and the glare right but I don't really I mean occasionally you might get a little flash but because all the panels are compound I don't really get a lot of you know blinding glare off of it right in Minnesota we've got all these stainless steel Dairy tanks Dairy trucks yeah you know what I mean they're every day they're on the roads and we don't have problems with them you got to do more of this uh re-platforming you know newer cars um I think I may yep I you know this was a huge undertaking like I said 5 000 hours and you know when I started this is worth 85 cents right and by the time I finished them they were what at one point almost 4.85 so to try to figure that into my pricing right right who would have ever imagined right I think that I would be up for the challenge with another more modern drive train like this um I'm I'm really happy with how this came out and uh you know having you see it and the customers happy that that kind of puts icing on the cake oh it's really it's really terrific the driving business excuse when people modify the driving position it just seems off somehow but yeah very nice I love the wheel I love like it I mean psychology got to be comfortable in the car you know definitely well the first time I went to mount the seat in and my head was up in the headliner and I was crooked neck I thought oh we've got a problem [Music] um but you know cutting the removing the seat slider from underneath the seat frame added about an inch and a half and then um cutting the foam down I was able to cut about an inch and a half out of the seat foam right and the seats they're the original seats but they're completely reshaped right yeah it's very comfortable I don't feel like I'm sitting sitting on a thinner pad or anything oh good so do you have any cars that are re-bodied like modern drivetrain in your shop better bring your collection no uh the re-body the Marcel Duesenberg okay that Bugatti type 57 is a reebot gotcha on a Bugatti chest yeah my previous cars have been either like one-off custom chassis that I had made right or uh the first two builds I did on formula V chasms just because the formula V is so usable it's so simple to work on yeah and you know I really didn't intend to start building cars for other people I just wanted to build one for myself right that was the quickest way to be able to get the thing going and on a shoestring budget you know you can get a nice formula V for four thousand dollars yeah yeah have you heard from Chrysler yet or from from I guess Dodge or solantis whoever I have it with my older builds I've had people at Porsche contact me and um you know they're always cheering me on yeah it's really fun but this you're you know you're the only other person that's driven this outside of me my customer hasn't even driven it yet well it's very nice so the world really hasn't even seen this yet yeah I would hope that if the guys at Chrysler who had dreamed up the Viper saw this that they would be given the thumbs up that would be pretty cool what'd you do all the old Viper Parts you sell them off I did yep I put them on Craigslist and the guy showed up who races vipers and he was gonna find a erect one to to rebuild right for a track car he was pretty excited about that well it's kind of see the coach building crafts still alive and well in America you know without you and a few other guys this whole thing could have died out so it's great you keep it alive and by the time you're my age you probably have 20 or 30. guys like yourself and learn their trade View yeah thank you Jay that's an honor oh yeah that'd be that's cool yeah and you know since you featured my first cars on your show what's really neat is I've had more and more young people reaching out that are interested in this so I have to thank you for that too because oh no well that's great I mean I you know people just well how do you learn this stuff that's kind of the question I always get like people go how do you find a secondhand Bugatti how do you find well you get in with a crowd that knows people who know people you know sure yeah I think it's encouraging to a young person I see another person doing it as well absolutely I think every kid's dream you sit there at school or whatever and you're drawing cars and then for me when I realized I could actually build this thing and figure out how to do it I mean that just takes into a whole new level it you know you feel so empowered and you learn new techniques did you ever see an Apollo yes yeah I mean that's back in the 60s I mean that was a a college kid who built a car he sent it to Italy to have the coach work built oh really the bodies were like 4 500 a piece wow and he built them and he sold I don't know 50 car and said quite a few yeah quite a few and a good looking car Buick little Buick V8 in it yeah I've seen him but I didn't know the story thank you and the cool thing is if you're not a Craftsman and you dream of building a car they can come to you and you they tell you what they want and you can build it more absolutely that's how this came to life you know yeah yeah laid out the loose floor plan and I actually had this sketch I had drawn it three years before he came to me yeah and then we took that sketch and sent it off well we did some refining and then we sent it off to Alberto Hernandez do you know Alberto no great great uh designer and artist and he illustrates it and really brings it to life right right and we Illustrated it over the dimensions of the Viper chest so this was your design right yes so the customer comes to you not sure what he wants you designed something and then they give some input is that how it works yep yep they give enough input to kind of set the trajectory right and then throughout this build my customer you know we stay in close touch and he continually gets updates and and sends ideas and thoughts and yeah that's great yeah it's pretty fun it's a couple of my customers they've been collecting parts for 40 years yeah old Italian stuff so one my number 10 build specifically we had a great time going through his part spins all these old Ferrari Parts Ferrari ignition parts and getting to you know bring these things back to life yeah that's great yeah it's really enjoyable now what do you advise people to polish it with any good metal polish or yeah you know with this I had to look into like the Airstream you know the old campers and then warbirds and the the common polish with those two uh types of of vehicles I guess um is new fight well you know we we have a line of stuff out yeah that's kind of how I got started because I couldn't find a metal polish I like every metal polish that worked I'd look at the rag and I'd have [Music] so we work with some cameras we developed a chemical polish it works using chemicals as opposed to uh having any sort of like sand like material yeah and it's worked really well interests worked really well yeah yeah the stuff that I use has a real grit to it yeah and it cuts the surface yeah you know and then I get asked all the time how to polish aluminum what I found is bringing it up to about a 600 to 800 because I sand it first right 600 to 800 grit and then you go to the Polish right right if you go to a thousand or two thousand it doesn't want to polish as good it gets really cloudy right right yeah yeah so it likes to have almost that abrasive surface that rough surface for the the Polish to come in and really cut well for aluminum that cut but with chrome oh yeah you're totally different you're peeling the Chrome off with the with the pumice yeah you don't want that it's like a lot of a hand soap you know yeah every time I polish this car I take a layer off the aluminum and that's what you want to do right right how long can this sit without polish before it starts to go look dingy as they say yeah it's I would say about two years oh that long yeah it'll it'll hold a decent polish now that's being garged you know in a garage and being used you know maybe every other weekend or even every weekend whatever right because the sun oxidizes it and of course the air oxidizes it you don't ever seal it do you I do I have a sealant that I just found again the Airstream guys turned me on to it to help quite a bit I wonder if our radiant would work on it because that gives a silicone finish to it yep it probably could the thing that I found with these sealants some of them will make it turn blue they'll almost put a blue haze into the aluminum and I don't really like that I like the deep rich reflection right right well Chris thank you very much my friend oh absolutely I'm really proud of you it's great to see you and you got your son in the business and it's great to see a father and son team doing stuff it's really nice oh thank you so much yeah it's terrific terrific congratulations on all your success and like a famous guy now so that's that's cool coming back and talking to us little people we appreciate that and people can go to you but it's what giving your rungecars.com rungecars.com yeah that's my website and that's the same YouTube channel too rungycars.com rangicars.com yeah see you guys next week thanks for checking it out

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 444,957

Keywords: Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage, car reviews, compares cars, classic cars, vintage cars, sports cars, super cars, cars, car gear, jay leno garage, jay lenos garage, car collection, ford, tour, dodge, Chris Runge, Runge Cars, Porsche, metal car, bare metal, aluminum body, bare aluminum, stainless steel, coachwork, coach building, bespoke, luxury, Viper, Dodge Viper, English Wheel, design, designer, handmade, made in America, car designer

Id: 7xpnmQpbCi8

Length: 34min 45sec (2085 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2023