Living on the edge has been pretty good for Tim Divers.
Where else but the edge would someone come up with the idea to put a Ferrari motor in a 1960 Rambler station wagon?
Or to do it with such precision and craftsmanship that the resulting vehicle, named Ferrambo, would win the prestigious Ridler Award at the 2008 Autorama show last March in Detroit?
“Tim really has a fresh outlook on life,” said Ferrambo owner Mike Warn, a friend for more than 20 years. “I guess to call someone as young as he is a visionary would be stretching it a bit, but he’s not willing to sit and do the status quo.”
Taking nearly four years to build at a cost between $1 million and $5 million — Warn and Divers have agreed to keep the final price secret — Ferrambo was the first station wagon and first foreign-powered car to win in the 46 years that the Ridler has been awarded.
But don’t expect such success to change the 48-year-old Divers, or the way he does business.
Although a longer and more expensive project than most he has taken on, Ferrambo was very much in keeping with one of Divers’ guiding principles for life: If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room.
LIVING ON THE EDGE
Located in rural Startup, Divers Street Rods consists of the house where the Divers — Tim; wife Diny, 43; son Justin, 22 and daughter Andrea, 19 — live and some buildings that look like every other farm along the road, complete with chickens.
The lack of signage and choice of location are deliberate: Divers Street Rods does not accept off-the-street business.
“It’s better that we’re not in a place where it’s really easy to get to,” Tim Divers said. “If we were cutting a Ferrari apart in an industrial park and somebody saw that, just like my brother and I, they’d be telling each other ‘Hey come down here these guys are cutting a Ferrari apart.’”
The office/showroom smells like paint — the paint shop is in the same building — and Led Zeppelin plays softly on the radio. A huge English Mastiff named Rue and a tiny Chihuahua named Traitor Joe lounge in the office.
Ferrambo is on display, flanked by two other hot rods Divers has built. Ferrambo’s Ridler Award, a massive hunk of polished chrome, and Divers’ accompanying Ridler Builder’s Award are behind the cars on a work bench littered with photo books of previous projects.
Anyone whose knowledge of custom car building is limited to reality TV shows like “Trick my Truck” or “Pimp my Ride,” where projects are completed in a weekend or a week, often with tempers flaring and tools flying, would be disappointed.
“People say ‘How come you don’t do TV stuff?’” Divers said with a laugh. “It’s not that exciting for people to watch what we do because we’re slow and meticulous. To hand-build a part for two or three days, there’s not a lot of excitement.
“It’s hard to be creative if everyone’s mad and throwing things,” he added.
Divers specializes in what he called “turn-key” cars — complete start-to-finish builds — and he prefers to do everything on-site, where he can ensure the quality and workmanship meet his own high standards.
The main shop is a gear-head’s dream, with three welders, metal fabrication and machining equipment, spare parts in bins, and various metal pieces and piping sticking out of containers.
There is a complete paint shop and Divers’ older brother Scott Divers, 50 — owner of S Divers Industrial Design in Snohomish — comes in to do any sewing and upholstery work.
In addition to “Uncle” Russ Divers — actually a cousin — the core shop crew consists of Shawn McNally, Jim Lykken and Nick Lampert. Part-time help is added when the workload requires it.
Diny Divers is the self-described “den mother” and office manager, and Justin Divers attends Cascadia Community College and takes care of the computers. Andrea Divers just graduated with a degree in psychology from Wells College in Upstate New York — she jokingly offered to “explain” her father to a visitor.
“I always say just how fortunate we are that in America you can go for something you enjoy and actually make a living at it,” Tim Divers said. “The reality is I wouldn’t be able to experience these cars without the customers, because I can’t afford the cars.”
NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER
Growing up in Fall City, just east of Sammamish, Scott and Tim Divers’ first foray into car building was a go-kart with no brakes. Later on they discovered a mutual love of the kind of cars — hot rods — that their wallets couldn’t afford.
To make their cars cooler than those of their better-off friends, the brothers realized they would have to figure out how to do it themselves.
“If you wanted a paint job, you had to learn to do the paint job yourself, to save money,” Tim Divers said. “Scott bought a used sewing machine and taught himself how to sew.”
Eventually Scott Divers got a job at Rich’s Street Rods in Snohomish, and Tim Divers began to spend time there, too, working on cars and continuing his hot rod education.
While working at Rich’s, Tim Divers developed another of his guiding principles: Why follow the pack when you can be the leader?
“It got to the point where I said, ‘Gosh if I’m going to be creative I have to have my own shop, where I can make the decisions, good and bad, and learn from them,’” Divers said.
Divers Street Rods opened in 1986, with most of the early business provided by friends and a few customers from Rich’s Street Rods — more came over when that business later closed.
Custom-car building is a niche industry, and times were tough in the beginning: the money Diny Divers raised selling chicken eggs was used to take Justin and Andrea on camping vacations in the nearby Cascades.
Tim Divers continued to do things his own way — another of his guiding principles: Dare to be Different — and business picked up over time as examples of his work began to circulate.
DIFFERENT IS GOOD
Divers Street Rods does not advertise. Instead, Divers relies on his industry reputation and referrals from previous customers. He prefers to work on just three projects at a time: one car just starting, one about half-way through, and the third one finishing up. Each car normally takes two years to complete and costs in the six-figure range.
Divers often turns away potential clients who can’t wait for an open slot in the rotation, or whose personalities or ideas Divers senses won’t mesh with his own.
“I’d rather say, ‘Gosh, me and you click, it sounds like a great project, sounds like it’s going to be fun … it’s going to be this journey of building a car together,’” Divers said. “You have to click with people.”
Once the project is agreed upon, Divers works with the client to develop a shared vision of what the car will look like when finished. Some cars are designed to look like updated versions of original production models and some merely incorporate parts of the original car.
“There’s something about taking the old parts that were built in 1940 or 1939 and what the technology had back then,” Divers said. “Then morphing it in with our stuff, so it still has part of the original character in it.”
For some projects, Divers finds new uses for original parts that have been replaced. On a 1940 Pontiac, for example, the hood opener was brought inside the passenger compartment and used to open the glove box.
His clients are well off, Divers said. (“They’re not waiting for a paycheck to come in to pay the bills.”) Even so, he provides them with a budget with what Divers called “hard numbers” to prevent surprises.
“A lot of times (artists) won’t take input from the person being their patron,” Ferrambo owner Mike Warn said. “Tim’s very cognizant of the fact that someone’s footing the bill for this, and although he’s creating, in the end the idea is to make the customer happy as well.”
Warn, who met the Divers brothers at Rich’s Street Rods, is no stranger to cars — custom, racing or otherwise. The former CEO of Warn Industries, he is currently president of Grand Prix Imports in Wilsonville, Ore., specializing in the sale of luxury automobiles; and he is the founder of MJ2 Racing, a two-car NASCAR Camping World Series West team based in Aurora, Ore.
FERRAMBO AND BEYOND
Called by Divers “the Super Bowl or Academy Award of hot rods,” the Ridler Award was named for the late Don Ridler.
Ridler was the first professional promoter hired by the Michigan Hot Rod Association in the 1950s, specifically to make the association’s annual Autorama show the top indoor showcase for custom cars and hot rods. He died in 1963, but had done his job so well that the association renamed its Best Vehicle Award in his honor the same year.
The award emphasizes creativity, engineering and workmanship. To be eligible, the first public showing of the vehicle must be at the Detroit Autorama — displaying any part of the entry, the frame, engine or body, prior to Autorama will make it ineligible.
Autorama chairman Dick Forton of the Michigan Hot Rod Association said 30 cars that met the Ridler criteria were part of the hundreds of custom vehicles and hot rods at the 2008 show held March 7-9 in Detroit. Some of those 30 were “immediately discounted,” Forton said, but eight — known at Autorama as the Great Eight — became finalists for the award Ferrambo ended up winning for Divers.
Divers said he always had thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to be part of building a Ridler car?” But he never submitted an entry prior to Ferrambo because the opportunity never presented itself.
Also, Divers said that although the rules for Ridler were deliberately vague, in his opinion the cars that won often mimicked previous winners, making his dare to be different style a longshot contender.
Then Warn, visiting Divers Street Rods to check on the finishing of a 1948 Buick Roadmaster named Lowla, noticed a 1960 Rambler station wagon in the back of the shop.
The original owner had changed his mind about the project, which was to turn the Rambler into a street rod, and was looking to sell. Warn said he “liked the way the body hung over the frame,” so he offered to buy the Rambler.
Knowing Warn had a fondness for foreign cars, Divers jokingly told him they should put a Ferrari engine in it and lower it to the ground.
Two years into building the result of that flip comment, Ferrambo, Divers said he realized his shop was working on a project that was “unique enough, different enough” that it could compete at Autorama.
Although making the Great Eight is considered by many to be an honor, Divers decided if he was going to Autorama he was going with the intention of winning the Ridler. So he carefully explained to Warn the potential ramifications.
“I believe to be a contender at Ridler it takes a million-dollar-plus car,” Divers said. “That’s if you’re going to do hand-built pieces and if you add up the hours you spend on it, and the cost of materials.”
Warn agreed to go for it, and the building, finishing and showing of Ferrambo at Autorama by Divers Street Rods has been documented extensively in magazines such as Street Rod and Hot Rod.
Since winning the Ridler, the services of Divers Street Rods are more in demand than ever. But Divers is wary of being typecast as an elite car builder, saying he doesn’t want to be kicked out of the “regular car guys club.”
“I know that I have to make a living but it’s not the ultimate goal — to make money,” Divers said. “We have a passion and a love for (hot rods).”
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