Sometimes social media does some good, instead of using it to get “roasted” anonymously by some new trendy app, to swipe left or right on a cute single in your area, or to post photos of your food constantly – sometimes it does some good. That’s how this entire shoot ended up happening, no…not by swiping left, come on guys- I happened to be at a car show in Harlingen months ago snapping some photos for myself, posted them up a few days later on Facebok, and the owner of this car was doing the same thing. I noticed he owned a Mustang and realized I haven’t put up a really all out built domestic V8 in a while – so the wheels got turning, and it just so happened that I got lucky, this wasn’t some car that got tossed in a shop and built- most of this went down in his own garage.

You know, one of these days I’m REALLY going to try and get one of these features written out and finalized at least a day before it goes up instead of just hours before. If you were to look at my calendar from this past month, yes an actual physical calendar because I still haven’t gotten used to doing any of that on my iPhone, you’d see that some of these days had two- hell even three shoots booked in one day…I’m dumb. I’m seriously lucky I’ve been busy lately, but that will typically come with a downside; aside from your social life being a joke and contact with your friends is limited to a group chat (which gets muted sometimes- sorry guys), or seeing one of them every now and then which whom I work with from time to time – this usually means other fun things take the back burner, which in this case was this shoot. I’m pretty sure the conversation I had with Mando about getting his car put up here happened months back, and finally this happened less than two weeks ago.

It sure has been a while since I have sat here and written on Gear-Trends. But it also been a while since I’ve had the chance to kick it with my buddy Ivan. Last time I saw his Raptor, it was simply his daily. But after we both went off to the the oil and gas industry, I hadn’t gotten the chance to see what he had created.