East Vancouver, British Columbia – His hands are holey, gloves scorched and torn. Fingers spin a fragment against the belt sander, shooting little trails of sparks. It’s an icebox in here, breath hanging in the air, but the black-clad figure doesn’t seem bothered by the cold. He moves with economy from place to place, shaping, welding, drilling, assembling, creating.
There are things in this world that can be taught, and there are things that are learned by doing. Metalwork is mostly the latter. While the basics are fairly straightforward, there’s a difference between following a set of instructions and the ability to see something in the metal that isn’t there yet. Adam Trinder has that skill.
“You have to be able to see a few steps ahead to the finished project,” he says, “I never want to have to go back and change something. Get it right from the start, and build it so that you can service it later.”
Today, the project is simple. A first-gen Ford Escort, flared and belly-plated, needs a custom lightbar for four huge Hellas. It’s headed for the Cochrane winter rally at the foot of Alberta’s Rockies, where it’ll be facing dark stages and heavy snow.
The owner, Warwick Patterson, has just returned from filming the Monte Carlo rally for John Buffam, and has covered WRC and national North American rally and rallycross events for years. He grew up with an ex-Dan Gurney Eagle in the family garage. That this is where he brings his personal car carries some weight.
Patterson is expecting to leave the car over the weekend; he’ll be loading the car back in the trailer before lunch.
Trinder never appears rushed, but he works fast. His workshop is relatively small—two lifts, drill-press, lathe, a couple of workbenches—and he never seems to look twice for tools or hardware. He pops the hood on the Escort, spots a cracked alternator support and worn bushing, removes the assembly and begins working. The sharp, oily smell of scorched and sliced metal fills the air.
I first met Tinder in the late 1990s, when he had cracked the ECU for the Mazda MX-6 GT to remove boost limits.At the time, I remember briefly helping him lift a Honda D16 motor into place on a Mini Cooper he was engine swapping at his shop.
Since then, I’ve continually come across examples of his work in Vancouver’s close-knit enthusiast community. He’s reworked a Honda S2000 engine swapped into a Ford Cortina, fabricated parts for a pre-war low-body Invicta, constructed dozens of rear braces for the Toyota Corolla GT-S during the height of the Initial-D craze, made long swing-arm Honda Ruckus choppers and created any amount of custom hardware for rally, race or drifting cars. Last week there was a Ferrari 488 in the shop getting one-off seat brackets. A few years ago, he built a trike with a motorcycle engine, working with the local transportation authority to make it street legal and inadvertently creating BC’s three-wheeler laws along the way. This last is currently headed to Qatar, and he’s had requests to sell the schematics.
“Plans?” Trinder laughs, “I didn’t have any plans—I just made the thing!”
His current personal project car is a JDM Mini Cooper with a Kawasaki 1300cc engine in the back and rear-wheel-drive. It screams like Satan in the dentist’s chair. Sometimes he takes his kid for a ride in it. They wear ear protection.
If the stuff he builds is generally ridiculously loud, the man himself is quiet, laconic. He doesn’t have a partner or apprentice, and is used to working alone, solving problems.
Currently, Trinder is working on three larger projects: an Austin Mini being fitted with an Integra Type-R engine, a Datsun 280Z with a Skyline GT-R RB26 twin-turbo straight-six and full 240SX/Silvia suspension swap, and a 1945 Rolls-Royce speed-tail/Brooklands build.
Each build presents its own challenges, particularly the mechanical brakes on the custom Rolls, which has taken a nine-month gestation period to build up from a bare and rusty frame. There’s no road-map here, only the roughest of sketches to outline the general idea. But both owners trust Trinder to figure things out and present a completed solution. It’s what he’s known for.
About 20 minutes in, Trinder has a new bushing milled and smoothed and is welding reinforcements for the alternator bracket. His older brother Scott has arrived and is chatting race strategy with Patterson. Rally veteran advice: “If you’re going to crash, try to crash on the inside of the corner.”
An experienced hot shoe, Scott Trinder has stood on the podium at dozens of rally, autocross and hill-climb events, and behind a lot of that success is his brother quietly wrenching on something that’s broken—and probably making fun of Scott for bending the car.
Rallying is a good way to develop mechanical sympathy, but Trinder’s affinity began earlier. His father, Robert, trained as an engineer in the U.K., and was an accomplished racer, mostly in Minis. Some of that uniquely British ability to tinker, machine and create seems to have been passed along genetically.
“It reminds me of the kind of shop you’d find in a shed in England,” Patterson says.
With paint drying on the reinforced bracket, Trinder moves on to the light bracket. He cuts pieces from tube and bar stock, seemingly without measuring, smooths them with a grinder, begins to weld.
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