I thought I would add this page for those who want to know who I am, and how I got started in VWs, and working on things in general. If you don’t really care you can always just hit the back button on the browser.

Some people meet me at shows and are amazed. They expect some 50+ year old seasoned veteran that doesn’t meet my definition at all. They think that since I appear to know as much about the VW/ Porsche engine that I have to be at least 40 years old. When they show up looking for “Mr. Raby” and I shake their hand they look amazed. In the paragraphs following this I will attempt to share with you my evolution. As of this writing I am a mere 32 years old, but have 20 years of engine building experience, and almost 25 years of tinkering under my belt. I have grown up with a wrench in my hand and no one ever tried to remove it. I have broken a lot of things and have no formal education in engines other than Turbo-shaft Jet engines that I worked on during my tour in the U.S. Marines. Some may consider this lack of credentials but when you look at Thomas Edison and see that he had only 3 months of formal education yet went on to create 1093 patented inventions it is pretty plain that it all is centered around a mans desire to learn, more than how he learns it.

I owe my success and innovation to my youth and dedication. I do not doubt new ideas, nor am I complacent with my job. Some of my most successful engine builds have came to me from builders with more years experience than I have been alive. They have become complacent and have quit trying their best. They no longer belong in this business, because it’s no longer in their heart. I have 30 more years of trial and error and new product development before I’ll stop doing what I love to do and that’s an edge that I have over all the rest.  

Jake at "lookout Mountain" Tennessee in 2004

On with the story:

I was born late in October 1975, the VW beetle was on its last leg of being the worlds most sold vehicle and my parents had no idea just how much of a challenge it would be to raise me. I came home from the hospital in a “Pumpkin Orange” 1973 VW Thing and I suppose from that day on I was destined to have a love affair with the VW. Of course growing up as a little guy I didn’t do anything except wreak havoc around the house and pretty soon my Mom and Dad realized that I had a pretty good knack at both breaking things as well as trying to put them back together. (Usually so I could try to break them again)

I suppose that my mechanical abilities come a bit from both sides of my family. On my Moms side my Grandpa was a mountaineer that was called upon by the University of Georgia in the late 60s to help them develop a methanol (maybe it was ethanol) still, this of course was due to his extreme knowledge in the fermentation process that he had gained from a complete life of brewing fine North Georgia peach brandy and straight corn liquor! My Grandpa could fix anything with a piece of rubber hose and bailing wire, he was just like all the old timers in the mountains that didn’t get something done unless they did it themselves. He taught me how to do everything from building “Rabbit boxes” to teaching me how to clean those Rabbits and fry them up. He also taught me how to slap an old Farmall tractor back together and even how to build a barn. This man was crude and very “Blue collar” but he could make some fine 200 proof and all the way up till his death he took pride in saying that he never had a job, and made his own money from the time he was 12 years old. I suppose I get my versatility from him, because he sure wasn’t about precision workings!

Before I get started on my Dad’s side of the family I’ll share with you a link to our family’s castle located in England. Go visit www.rabycastle.com to see where my family originated from and you’ll see that the name goes back very, very far in history, all the way to medieval times. I was able to visit this Castle in 2006 and was astonished with it's authenticity.

On my Dad's side I never got the chance to meet my Grandpa. He was born in 1860 and died shortly after my Dad's 10^th birthday in 1940. My Grandpa came from Germany to the US and settled in Ohio prior to moving to Ft. Myers Florida. My Grandpa was Tax assessor of Lee county Florida for about 28 years as an elected official and never lost an election. Just as my Grandpa on my Mom’s side he was also a very versatile person who never completed any type of formal school. He owned and operated a large machine shop that was blown away in the “Storm of 1929” and was never able to rebuild it due to the depression. My Grandpa was personal friends with Both Henry Ford as well as Thomas Edison and rumor has it that he helped Mr. Edison create some updates to the Telegraph at some point in time, but that’s all hearsay from years ago. This was made possible by both Mr. Edison and Mr. Ford having winter homes just down the street from where my Dad grew up and where my Grandpa lived for most of his time in Florida. My Dad said he remembers as a little boy something being broken and the locals saying “Take it to Charlie Raby, he can fix it, he can fix anything." 

Unlike both my Grandpas my Dad had very little mechanical knowledge; he had worked very hard as both a Banker and a Cop before he retired. My parents had me very late in life and all my brothers and sisters were already grown and out of the house by the time I was four years old. I grew up as an only child and I’m quite sure that’s a good thing, especially for the VW in my soul. As a kid I didn’t do normal things and I didn’t really care about cartoons, give me a set of Lincoln logs or some dominos and I would make something. At about the age of 6 my parents realized that I was different and they started taking me to doctors all over the place. The Doctors said that nothing was wrong with me and that I’d be okay and just let me do what I wanted to. At around the age of 7 I got to do work on my very first VW when my Dad was changing the oil in his 73 Thing and due to a bad knee he could not get the sump plate back on the engine easily. He had me install it and I did so happily! That was both a great achievement as well as a disaster because I left a bolt loose and even though I double checked them I did not see it. He trusted me and two weeks later the stud backed out of the engine and it threw a rod. So much for my great achievement!

The next year I found myself hanging out at my Grandparents house where I was able to create havoc in the barnyard as well as play with all sorts of gadgets. One of the gadgets was an old Briggs and Stratton 2.5 HP engine that had been lying in the mud outside the barn for who knows how long. I tore into it and with a tad bit of assistance had it up and going in about a week after I cleaned it up. I then attempted to blow it up, and succeeded. Then I kept doing that for a while till I got accustomed to doing so and was ready to go on to bigger, and of course better things mechanical. My next challenge was to help assemble an old Farmall 4 cylinder tractor engine that my Grandpa had taken apart. His eyes were bad so I ended up being his helper and actually put the whole thing back together with only physical assistance from him. We didn’t use torques or books and didn’t need them. Those old tractors would basically run on any fuel, with half their parts.

After this feat my parents knew that I was definitely not normal and they saw that my teachers were sending home notes about my poor writing ability all the time, and that it was all getting worse instead of better. They ended up taking some mechanical things away from me and when they saw that it made things worse at school they gave it all back. Later that year I was tested by a school psychologist and scored very differently than anyone had ever seen at that time. Anything that involved my hands was no problem at all; anything that involved writing or copying things off a chalkboard absolutely kicked my butt. I could decipher puzzles and build anything but I was slow with writing anything. I would misspell words from the board but when asked verbally I was 4 years ahead of my grade in spelling. I was diagnosed with dys-graphia and it was left at that. No one ever tried to figure out anything else with the situation. They had no clue what the real cause was, but I’ll share that with you later in this writing.

Back to engines, (It’s hard for me to stay on track sometimes). At the age of 8 I was more “formally” introduced to the VW engine when I got my first bug. Earlier in that year my Dad had traded for an old single cab and I was able to find a faulty fuel pump with some help and get it swapped out. I was also introduced to the “Valve adjustment” by a rather crude individual that went by the name of “Dog”. He was the local VW guru at the time and had a whole bunch of rail buggies and etc. To make things even more interesting “Dog” had a bit of a drinking problem and if you didn’t catch him early in the morning he wasn’t much of a mechanic by noon. One day one of the guys from up the road was with Dog and they stopped by the shop to talk to my Dad. Seems Dog and the other intoxicated individual needed a few bucks for some of North Georgia’s finest so I was able to buy a push mower from them for a whopping EIGHT DOLLARS. My Dad was bound and determined to teach me about business so he let me buy the mower myself.

The mower had only one problem and that was the flywheel had rust on it and was killing the spark, with a few bolts the shroud was removed and the rust was sanded away, when it fired up it had a rod knock and I shut it down, and then tore it down. I robbed a rod and piston from a junk engine from my Grandpa's pile of parts and made it run again. I painted the mower up with a dose of Krylon and it looked pretty good. Two weeks later my dad and I were listening to the “swap shop” on the local radio station and found a guy wanting to trade a Snapper riding mower that was broken for a good push mower. We jumped in the old 54 Chevrolet pick up and went looking for a deal! I ended up making the trade and got the Snapper as an even trade for my Push mower that I had a whopping 20 bucks into. (set of rings and a can or two of Krylon)

The Snapper needed transmission work and that was beyond me at the time, so I ended up just buying another junk Snapper for the tranny. I swapped the two out and before you know it I had a good looking Snapper to sell, or trade…. That’s when the VW finally hit my soul and I scored my first one. I traded that Snapper for a 1970 beetle and was able to destroy it’s front end in just one day of plowing through our fields hitting stumps. I beat that beetle, and clogged the fan up with mud and fried the engine. I then was convinced by my Dad that I could put the engine back together and he said that he would buy me the parts, by this time I was 8 years old and had my own full set of craftsman tools! So… I tore into the engine with the aid of the John Muir “Idiot book” (that was version 1of the book) and hit some real snags. The biggest of which was splitting the case. No matter what I tried I could not pry it apart, and I was convinced all the bolts were out. I tried for 3 days to get it apart and finally resorted to the Ford tractor, a chain and the aid of a huge Oak tree to do the job. I thought that it required a special tool to split the case so I figured the tractor would do just as good as long as I could get the chain hooked through each side of it, then I could pull it apart. Well I hooked it up and convinced my Dad to pull it apart for me! When he did I found the bolt that I left in place under some grease and had successfully ruined my first engine case. I rebuilt that engine with another case and kept on fidding with stuff. It took me 4 tries to get the engine to run and when it did, it only ran for about 30 minutes before it seized up.

As time progressed I was getting better and better. At age 11 I finally saved up enough money from trading with my Dad and allowance to buy all the parts from a local shop to build a brand new engine for the single cab. That was my first successful build and the first time I had used a torque wrench yet. This time I was successful and had built an engine that would serve as my back up engine for many failed engines down the road. It would also be the one that would keep me from giving up when failure had visited me in every other instance before.  

For the next couple of years I stayed in trouble at school. I was never a bad kid, I just didn’t want to be there. Instead of doing work assignments my teachers would bust me drawing sketches of my dream shop or writing a list of things I had to work on when I got home. Once again I was evaluated and they decided to put me in a different type of education plan than the other kids. I would end up being able to do things hands on and soon I found myself in shop classes most of the day, with kids as much as 3 years older than I was. They still had not figured out my issues and they really didn’t care, except for one teacher.

 At the age of 13 is when it all changed! I had a local guy come to me that had heard I could work on VW engines and he wanted me to build him one for his sandrail. I decided to take on the job and with my dads help I made up an agreement and we signed it. At that moment is when I gained my first paying customer and filled out my first bit of paperwork! I built the engine and he was very happy with it, and brought me another, and then another. By that time I could have cared less about school as I knew what I wanted to do and I didn’t think I needed anything else to do so. (yeah right) I had built this first engine in a building that I described earlier on the pages about the shop. It had a dirt floor and two 600 pound hogs in the corner; I worked with a broken lamp hanging from a drop cord over the rafters.

At age 14 I was going wide open. I was in shop classes with High school kids 3 periods a day and man, did I think that was cool (even though I was picked on constantly as being a geek or weirdo) . That year my whole world changed when my Mom was diagnosed with lung Cancer. She would only live another 3 months after that and at that time my whole world was devastated. My Mom was a very loved person in my town and she took very good care of me. She worked hard and spent every ounce of money she had to buy me things and try to help me. When she passed away I had no idea what to do. Not very long after that our entire family fell apart and it ended up just being my Dad and I on our property all alone.

My Dad knew he had a big challenge with me so he quit work and decided to stay with me all the time. My grades were falling and I was confused. At this point I didn’t even want to work on cars any more. My Dad quickly saw that I needed some direction so that year for my birthday I got what I wanted and that was a new concrete floor for the old hog pen, and then we got power and some more tools. I slowly did this transformation from a pig pen to a shop and then gained a job at a local import shop just so I could buy my parts cheaper. This import shop is where I learned about Type IV engines in the beginning because the old mechanics hated them and didn’t want to learn them!

All through my high school years I worked on things. I worked at the import shop, while my Dad and I bought, sold and traded VWs and about anything else. My Dad stood beside me all the time and was there every day when I got off the School Bus and he convinced me to never do drugs or drink and warned me of the consequences if he caught me. He raised me right and taught me how to do business, how to look a man in the eye and how to shake another man’s hand. His favorite phrase was “The only way around trouble is straight through the DAMN middle”. Since he was old school he told me how important it was to do these things and how his Dad had told him the same. My Dad gave me the parts to build my first car when I was 15, and he didn’t buy me one. I built it from scratch and drove it everywhere I went, when it broke I fixed it, when I built it bigger and it exploded I repaired it. When I raced Camaro’s and Mustangs and blew a valve at 7,000 RPM he made me earn the money to repair it and the time to do it between chores.

Right up until I graduated and went to the US Marines my Dad has supported what I have done. He may not have given me the money to do so, but he stood beside me and gave me just enough doubt to be inspirational. He knew that doubt gave me power and desire and he was right. Now that I am grown and can look back at it all I really appreciate what he did and my success is evident of his efforts. It seems that my issues with school went much deeper than anyone ever imagined and I only found this out a few years ago. If you read the pages about my later life I will share with you these findings and how they have enabled me to be just as successful as some others that have accomplished much greater feats than old VW engines.

I hope that you have enjoyed reading these paragraphs. As you can tell I am still grammatically challenged and I’m not a writer. My whole life has been about old engines, and I would not take a million dollars for those days of experience. Please read more in my bio if you would like to know more about the person who can make your engine dreams come true. He is living his life dream everyday creating these machines for others just like you and loves every minute of it.