Bless you Mike. As a builder myself, the "Goodbye" and no further communication I can completely understand. I hope you never even see this message because you turned your back so far on this business.
The amount of yourself you put into and engine is hard to understand unless you have experienced it. And the more you learn the more you realize how far you have to go to get really good at what you are doing. So you try to get better with every engine and most (not all) of the public wants it to be less and less expensive.
It's like giving birth to a child and someone saying, "Damn! That kid is ugly!"
I do have some really nice builds to do and I'm greatful.
But my son keeps telling me, "Dad, taking it in the shorts like that on some of these engines is painful. We're going to need another tube of 'Analeze'!"
We fought and fought to do something special with a 5.9 Cummins and probably lost $3,000 on that build. Saw the Cummins owner at the funeral yesterday for the T/A owner. He really likes his 5.9 but we didn't see another $3,000 from him. Need to keep a 'tube' in the glovebox for emergency.
So I no longer even try to compete on price. This is how much it costs. Take it or leave it. I want to have fun doing this and it's no fun for me to buy an engine build so I have something to do.
My son is ready to do other things and the only reasons we can keep the door open is I have Social Security, his wife has good insurance for the family and we have no shop overhead other than electricity and insurance.
I really hope Cody's art show in July gets him some financial recognition.