We were lucky to catch up with JOE Sulpy recently and have shared our conversation below.

JOE, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

I am 48 years old and I have been making a full time living creating custom cars for myself since the age of 21. The profession I’m in has changed and morphed since it’s conception in the early 1940’s and mine has also. When custom cars started in the late 30’ early 40’s most of them were done by taking parts off of modern cars of the time and installing them on earlier cars. The body modifications were mild to speak of usually consisting of swapping taillights or headlights from different types of cars to make a new look. By the 1950’s people like George Barris and Gene Winfield were chopping tops to lower the roofline. The metal work in those early days were crude to say the least but still cutting edge. Over the decades the precision in custom cars has multiplied 100 fold. Now metal men, like myself, when we want to change up a particular panel on a car we often actually create an entirely new panel from scratch. Our goal is to make the new panel in one piece or at least in as few pieces as possible. I learned from the legends of the industry, the originators of cool. These were the guys who were building custom cars in the 50’s and 60’s. That being said the style that was taught to me was more of cut and weld pieces together to achieve the look you desired. But around 2000 I built my own English wheel so I could create larger more complicated shapes in one piece. This was against everything I was taught and some of my mentors scoffed at me and said it’s faster and easier to do it the old school way. The English wheel is what airplane manufacturers would use to shape the aluminum bodies on airplanes in WWII. I wasn’t the first to switch over to the aviation methods but when I did there was very little information available and people who were doing it were very tight with sharing information. If you didn’t learn it by yourself you would be hard pressed to find someone to teach you. I earned my respect by doing. Many older customizers would see my work and were surprised what I was doing at my age but the same couldn’t be said about my customers. Most of my customers were in there 50’ and 60’s and not every one of them was happy to have a 24 year old kid building their custom car. I really had to prove myself with photographs of my work. That was really how I learned how to document the work I did, it was purely out of necessity to prove that I could do it and I wasn’t going to mess up their pride and joy.

JOE, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a third generation custom car and motorcycle builder and metal shaper. I grew up in New Jersey in the late 70’s early 80’s at my fathers custom car shop. I started working on cars at 8 years old and learned how to weld at 11 from there I chopped my first top on a 1940 Willys at 13. I’ve always had a passion for custom cars. At 16 I built a’57 Chevy to drive to high school at 17. My discipline has always been my strong point. I would work excessive hours even at a young age. Once I graduated high school I would work 16-18 hours a day, 8 hours on customers cars and 8-10 on my own.
At 21 I opened up my own shop in New Jersey with 5 guys working in the shop and 2 secretaries. We were very busy building custom cars and motorcycles for over a decade, as well as traveling up and down the east coast displaying cars we built at large outdoor shows and indoor coliseums. In 2008 I made the decision to move to phoenix Arizonia and work strictly by myself, no employees. At this time I also decided to start teaching metal shaping classes because of all the requests I had received from people that had a full time job but wanted to learn how to restore their own cars.
I currently have a shop in Goodyear Arizonia where I build ground up pre 1972 hot rods and customs and I work on many cars from other hot rod shops completing all the metal work for them and teaching metal shaping classes on the weekends.
When it comes to the cars I build, I feel, you must have a creative mind to create rolling works of art. Many people say that they can look at a car at a show and they are able to tell, by the style of the build, that it came out of my shop. I take ideas from a customer and incorporate my building style into their project. No two custom cars are the same and my goal is to make the ones I build stand out of a crowd. I pride myself in incorporating as many hand made parts into the build as the budget allows. This makes sure nobody has what your vehicle has. Nobody wants to go to the prom and find someone else in the same dress.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I would definitely say that my goal is to leave something behind when I’m gone. When I build a car for a customer I actually try to over engineer everything for longevity. Weather it’s the strength of the parts, the safety aspect of the car and all the way down to what materials are used in the painting process and the preparation before paint. When a custom vehicle comes out of my shop I want that customer to be able to pass this vehicle down to their children, kinda like an air loom. These cars aren’t cheap in any way and I want you to get what you pay for. When you pay $20,000 for a new car you can expect it to last 5-7 years. When you pay $100,000 for a car that car should last 30 years or more. I’m proud to say I have cars I built 30 years ago that are still on the road, still look the same from when they left my shop, and are still winning car shows. I want to leave rolling works of art behind when I’m gone.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think what most people struggle to realize is the excessive amount of hours you need to put in when your creative. Some days it flows like water and some days you have obstacles. I will push and push myself on those days I’m having mental obstructions. Sometimes it can take 2 days to figure out how I want something to look and one day to complete it. In my earlier years I could spend 4 hours on making a panel for a car only to throw it in the dumpster because I realized what I was doing wrong. Thank God the older I get the less and less that happens. I am a perfectionist, in my mind I believe the customer would be happy with “good” but I know that the customer will be aesthetic with “great” so I always want to give them “great”.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @joesulpyscustomcars
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/joseph.sulpy
• Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/joe-sulpy-525a9a52