Not long. I started with three employees. It was a different guy when he mentioned his name. He seen how much money I was going to make and he was like he told the guy that I didn’t know what I was doing and then he ended up stealing the job. 26 years, over 300 custom builds, 11 seasons of Bitchin’ Rides.
Dave Kindig has built one of the most respected custom car shops on the planet and one of the most watched. But here’s what the cameras don’t always show you. Behind every jaw-dropping reveal, behind every perfect panel gap and flawless paint job, there were people who didn’t make the cut.
People who quietly disappeared from the shop floor between one season and the next. People the internet started asking about. People Dave himself had to address or pointedly refused to. Today, we’re pulling back the curtain on the workers at Kindig-it Design who, for one reason or another, just didn’t belong in that shop. Buckle up. This one gets spicy.
The Kindig Standard. Before we get into the names, and oh we are getting into the names, you have to understand what it actually means to work at Kindig-it Design. Because this isn’t just any garage. This isn’t your uncle’s body shop where close enough is good enough. Kindig-it Design is a 27,000 square foot state-of-the-art custom car facility in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Dave Kindig started the whole thing back in 1999, literally out of his home alongside his wife Charity. The demand for Dave’s designs was so immediate, so overwhelming that they had to lease a proper space almost right away and it’s been growing ever since. By the time MotorTrend’s Bitchin’ Rides premiered in 2014, it wasn’t just a shop.
It was a destination. A place where car enthusiasts from around the world sent their most prized possessions and their most eye-watering checks. We’re talking build budgets that reportedly started a quarter of a million dollars, lead times of 3 to 4 years, clients who wait in line and consider themselves lucky to get a slot.
Now, think about what that means for the people who work there. Dave Kindig is famously, almost legendarily, obsessed with perfection. Greg Hebard, a metal fabricator at the shop, once told industry publication The Fabricator that Dave demands perfection on everything. The door gaps, the trim, every single tolerance, every single one.
So, when you walk into that shop as an employee, you are not walking into a laid-back, do your best environment. You are walking into what some fans of the show have compared to playing for the New York Yankees. Your resume will be forever marked by what you do or don’t do under that roof. And that’s exactly why some people crash and burn there.
But, before we get to the drama, have you ever wondered why so many faces on Bitchin’ Rides just vanish? One season, they’re front and center. The next, they’re gone without a single explanation. Well, there’s a reason for that, and it starts with what happened behind the scenes in the very earliest days of the shop’s TV run. The pattern nobody talks about, the revolving door.
Here is something that the casual viewer of Bitchin’ Rides misses completely, but that the hardcore fans noticed almost immediately. The roster at Kindig-It Design has been quietly, but consistently, reshuffled across the show’s 11 seasons. And we’re not talking about small changes, we’re talking about painters, body shop managers, fabricators, key people, people with screen time and dedicated fan followings, who are simply no longer there the next time cameras roll.
Now, to be fair, some shows manufacture drama. Fast N’ Loud had Richard Rawlings’ over-the-top personality cranked to 11. American Chopper had actual father and son screaming matches that made for must-watch television. Kindig’s show is different. As one industry observer put it in a detailed breakdown of the Kindig Customs cast, Dave’s leadership style is demanding, but it’s not the shouty, table-flipping kind.
The conflicts on Bitchin’ Rides tend to be quieter, more professional, more Utah. But, quiet doesn’t mean harmless, and professional departure doesn’t always mean things ended on good terms. The truth is this, Kindig-It Design has gone through multiple painters since the show began. Multiple body shop figures have come and gone, and several of the most recognizable faces from the early seasons are long since departed.
Some by choice, some by necessity, some under circumstances the shop has never fully explained publicly. One former employee, in a review posted to Indeed, described the shop’s ownership as cutthroat and said the turnover rate was like a rolling ball. Kindig-It’s management responded to that review publicly, pushing back firmly on the characterization, but they did acknowledge, in their own words, that they had, unfortunately, had to part ways with team members that are not a good fit.
Their words, had to part ways multiple times with multiple people. So, who were those people, and what exactly happened? Let’s start with arguably the most talked about departure in the shop’s history, a man who arrived not just as an employee, but as a made-for-TV triumph. So, what went wrong? Frank Finelli, the competition winner who couldn’t stay.
Oh, this one has all the ingredients of a perfect reality TV story. A soldier, a dream, a competition, a trophy job, and then, silence. Meet Frank Finelli, Long Island native, muscle car obsessive, self-described hot rod builder and pinstriper, and a man who, at the time of his entry into the Kindigit universe, was also a captain in the United States Army Reserve.
Frank wasn’t recruited to Kindigit in the usual way. He competed for the job in a MotorTrend TV special called Bitchin’ Boot Camp. A group of contestants put their fabrication and build skills to the test in a series of elimination challenges, all set against the backdrop of Kindigit Design itself. Frank won.
He legitimately, on camera, in front of America, earned a position at the most famous custom car shop in the country. The story got even better when the US Army Reserves own public affairs office covered it. They ran a full feature on Frank, the soldier who loved Bitchin’ Rides so much he used to watch it as a form of education, and who just never dreamed he’d work there.
He was quoted saying it was kind of surreal. His IMDb bio says he moved his muscle car fleet across the country to take the job. He appeared in four episodes of Bitchin’ Rides across 2020 and 2021. He was nicknamed the Finelli Finesse. He had a brand, a following, a lane, and then he was gone. No tearful farewell episode or a send-off post.
No explanation on the Kindigit’s social pages about where Frank went or why. His wife Alex, who documented their relationship and life together on social media, later described Frank working on Finelli Restorations, their own automotive business, as a side project while he was at Kindigit. “Their dream,” she said in a 2022 profile, “was for that side business to become their full-time gig.
” And it seems like that dream won out. Now, here’s where the exposé glasses go on. Four episodes for a man who won a nationally televised competition specifically designed to land him a permanent spot at that shop. Four episodes across roughly two seasons of coverage and then the finale finesse disappears from the Kindig-it timeline entirely.
Did he leave on his own terms to pursue Finnegan restorations? Almost certainly. That trajectory is pretty clear from his and Alex’s own public statements. But the question that nobody in the fan community has ever gotten a clean answer to is why didn’t it work out as the long-term arrangement it was sold as. You don’t build a whole TV special around hiring someone and then feature them in four episodes if everything goes perfectly to plan.
Sometimes the fit just isn’t there even when the competition says it should be. But Frank’s story at least has a relatively clean ending. He went off to chase his own dream. What about the people whose departures were a little more murky, a little more whispered about? Like the man who was once called the craftsman and then vanished so completely that the internet declared him dead.
Manuel Balderazatin, the ghost painter. Okay, we need to talk about Manuel. If you were watching Bitchin’ Rides in its earliest seasons, you know this name. Manuel Balderazatin was the painter, the man whose work on those custom builds was so precise, so jaw-droppingly skilled that fans of the show regularly called him one of the best they had ever seen on automotive television, full stop.
He earned the nickname the craftsman and anyone who saw his finish work understood why. Manuel had been working at Kindig-it Design since 2008, well before the cameras arrived. He was part of the original crew that built the shop’s reputation. When Bitchin’ Rides launched in 2014, Manuel was right there, a familiar, trusted face in the paint booth. And then, he was gone.
At some point, the community largely pins it around 2017, based on when he stopped appearing on screen, Manuel departed from Kindig-it Design. No announcement, no explanation, no farewell post. Dave Kindig, when asked about Manuel on social media, reportedly responded in a way that was interpreted by many fans as confirming he had passed away, which sent the forums into an absolute spiral.
The Yellow Bullet forums, one of the most active communities of hardcore car enthusiasts online, lit up with threads asking what had happened to Manuel. People were posting condolences, others were posting tributes, but here’s the twist, Manuel Bella Zetan was very much alive. A close relative of Manuel’s eventually confirmed publicly that the obituary people had found online was for his 80-year-old father, who shared his name.
Manuel himself, according to that same relative, wanted everyone to know he was alive and doing well. And more than that, he had quietly set up his own independent body shop in Murray, Utah, where he was working with local customers on his own terms. So, what actually happened between him and Kindig-it? Why did the craftsman, a man who had been part of the shop since before the TV fame, whose work was part of the DNA of what made those builds legendary, walk away without a word? The shop never explained it, the fan community never got closure, and Manuel
himself, from what can be found publicly, never gave a tell-all interview about the circumstances of his departure. What we do know is this, Kindig-it Design went through at least three painters across the run of Bitchin’ Rides. Three, in a shop where every single paint job is a six-figure investment for the client.
That kind of turnover in a single specialized role, the most visible, most glamorous, most scrutinized role on the show, doesn’t happen by accident. Whether Manuel left because of creative differences, compensation, personal reasons, or something else entirely, the truth remains locked behind Salt Lake City discretion.
But, his disappearance from that shop left a hole that took seasons to fill. Now, Manuel’s story is one of quiet mystery, but our next case, this one involves ambition, television-sized promises, and two brothers who showed up at Kindig-it with fire in their eyes and ended up finding that fire burned the bridge behind them. The Finnegan Factor, Part Two: Alex and the Aftermath.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. We already covered Frank Finnegan, and we did. But, the story of the Finnegan family at Kindig-it isn’t just Frank’s story, and there’s a second chapter that deserves its own spotlight. When Frank moved to Salt Lake City to take his prize at Kindig-it, his then-girlfriend and now-wife, Alex, made the move with him.
Alex Finnegan, who later documented the whole journey in a feature for Voyage Memphis magazine, described the Bitchin’ Boot Camp win as a fairytale moment. Frank, she said, had been running Finnegan Restorations on the side while still on active Army duty. The dream was always to make that their full-time life.
And here’s where the relationship between the Finnegans and Kindig-it gets interesting. Because, in Alex’s own telling, the destination was never really Kindig-it Design long-term. It was Finnegan Restorations. The Kindig-it job was, in some respects, a launchpad, a credential, a career stamp. Now, here’s the thing about that.
Dave Kindig runs a world-class shop. He’s not in the business of being a stepping stone. The people who thrive at Kindigit are the ones who pour everything into that shop, not the ones who arrive with one eye already on the exit, on the next venture, on their own Instagram brand. And when the Finnegan’s public persona, the social media presence, the Finnegan Restorations branding, the side hustle narrative became more prominent than Frank’s identity as a Kindigit employee, that tension, while never spelled out in a press release, becomes pretty easy to
read between the lines. Four episodes, a competition-winning hire, gone. The gracious version of this story is that Frank outgrew the opportunity and went on to pursue his own dream. The less gracious version, the one that keeps the gossip alive in the car community, is that a shop as serious as Kindigit has no patience for employees whose loyalty is divided, even when those employees are talented, even when they won the right to be there on national television.
Whether the shop parted ways with Frank or Frank chose to walk, both are consistent with what’s publicly known. What’s not consistent with the fairy tale framing is the fact that the happy ending happened somewhere other than 164 E. Hill Avenue. Okay, we’ve had the mystery painter and the competition winner who didn’t stick.
But what about the people who left, not because of ambition or personal goals, but because the shop itself was under pressure, because the cameras changed everything, because the real story of turnover at Kindigit goes deeper than any single person. Bryce Green and the body shop exodus. Here’s a name that long-time Bitchin’ Rides watchers remember well.
Bryce Green, body shop manager, a fixture of the early seasons, a guy who worked his way up, starting as a painter’s helper, then climbing to run the body shop, then becoming a recognizable face on the show. And then, in a pattern that should feel very familiar by now, he wasn’t there anymore.
According to community discussions that tracked his departure, Bryce left Kindig-it alongside another colleague after the two of them developed a product together, a custom sanding block for body shop use, marketed under the name Big Kid Blocks. Whether the development of that side product was the cause of the departure or just something that happened in the wake of it is not fully documented, but the trajectory is clear.
Bryce went from body shop manager at one of America’s most famous custom car shops to running his own operation. Now, here’s the uncomfortable question the fan community has been asking for years. When talented, experienced people keep leaving Kindig-it, people who have been there long enough to develop their own products, their own brands, their own reputations, is that a coincidence or is there something structural about the shop environment that, despite being world-class on the build side, makes long-term retention of key talent
genuinely difficult? The Indeed review we mentioned earlier described the ownership as cutthroat, a word that stings and one that Kindig-it’s management firmly pushed back on. But even in their own response, they acknowledged a pattern of parting ways with people who weren’t a fit. And when multiple body shop figures, multiple painters, multiple visible team members cycle through the same revolving door across 11 seasons of television, that word fit starts to carry a lot of weight.
Dave Kindig is, by every credible account, deeply talented and genuinely passionate about what he does. The shop he built from his home garage to a 27,000 square foot facility is a testament to what vision and hard work can achieve. Kevin Sheila, the shop foreman known as Kevdog, has been with Kindig since 2004 and is still there. Will Lockwood has been part of the team since 2003.
Eric Larson logged 24 episodes over the show’s run. The core of the shop has remarkable longevity, but around that core it’s been a lot of faces, a lot of goodbyes, a lot of unanswered questions. Bryce Green’s departure is just one chapter in a much longer book about what it costs to maintain perfection and who pays that price.
But none of the stories we’ve covered so far carry quite the weight of our final case because while everyone else on this list left quietly or left to chase something else, this last story involves the closest thing to an actual documented friction point in Kindig-it’s on-screen history. And it’s been sitting in plain sight the whole time.
Arthur Quebec and the confirmed goodbye. Of all the departures in Kindig-it Designs history, Arthur Quebec’s stands out for one specific reason. It’s one of the few that was officially acknowledged by the shop itself. While many of the people who left Kindig-it simply faded from the show and the shop’s social feeds without comment, Kindig-it Design publicly posted a farewell acknowledgement for Arthur Quebec when he moved on.
That in itself tells you something because in a shop that tends to handle personnel changes with the discretion of a Swiss bank, taking the time to formally say goodbye to someone publicly means they mattered. They were part of the fabric of the place. Arthur was a real member of the Kindig-it crew. He worked there. He was seen there.
He was part of builds that went out those shop doors and into the world and then he left. Now, here’s where we have to be honest with you because this is a verified information only zone. The reason for Arthur’s departure has not been publicly detailed. The farewell post acknowledged his time there and wished him well.
The kind of language that is professionally warm but deliberately vague. It doesn’t tell you whether the parting was mutual, whether Arthur chose to go, whether there was a disagreement, or whether the shop simply needed to make a change. What it does tell you is that the depart was significant enough to warrant a statement. That’s not nothing.
In the world of Kindigit, where people cycle through without so much as a social media post to mark their passing, the fact that Arthur got a formal goodbye is actually a clue. Not to what went wrong, but to how much was at stake when he left. The fan community noticed. Questions were asked and like so many of these stories, no deeper public explanation ever came.
In the universe of Kit departures, Arthur Kubex’s exit is both the most officially documented and the most frustratingly incomplete. We know he was there. We know he left. We know the shop thought enough of him to say goodbye out loud. Everything else is silence. And in a world where the cameras roll and the builds gleam and the reveals make people cry happy tears, that silence is louder than anything.
So, what does all of this actually tell us? Five stories, five departures, five people who, for whatever reason, didn’t make the long-term cut at one of America’s most famous car shops. Is there a pattern here? And what does Dave Kindig himself actually think about all of it? The big picture, what the turnover really means.
Let’s zoom out for a second because what we’ve been doing in this video is telling individual stories. Frank, Manuel, Bryce, Arthur. The pattern of faces that appear and then don’t. But the real story isn’t about any one person. It’s about what all of them together tell us about what it’s like inside that shop.
Here’s the honest version of the Kindig-it Design narrative that the cameras don’t give you. Dave Kindig built something extraordinary. The man taught himself to design cars. He has no formal design school education. He built a shop in his home garage that became a nationally televised, internationally recognized institution.
The show that grew out of it, Bitchin’ Rides, ran for 11 seasons and won 67 episodes. Over 320 custom vehicles. That doesn’t happen by accident and it doesn’t happen without a man who refuses to accept second best from himself or anyone around him. But here’s the flip side of that coin. The same relentless perfectionism that makes those builds legendary makes Kindig-it a genuinely demanding place to work.
Not in a dramatic American Chopper way, but in a quiet, uncompromising, this has to be right, no exceptions way that some people thrive under and some people cannot sustain. Legal observers who looked at Kindig-it’s customer disputes in 2026 noted that staff turnover had, in some documented cases, directly impacted build momentum.
That when key fabricators left, projects stalled and clients were left waiting without clear hand-offs or communication. That’s not a character attack on any individual employee. That’s a structural observation about what happens when a shop’s standards require consistency that turnover inherently disrupts. Dave Kindig’s own wife and business partner Charity has been there through all of it.
From the home garage to the 27,000 square foot facility. Kevin Sheila has been there since 2004, Will Lockwood since 2003. Those long tenure relationships tell you that the shop can absolutely produce loyalty and longevity for the right people under the right conditions. What the turnover stories tell you is that finding those right people under those conditions is harder than the gleaming paint jobs on the finished cars make it look.
And before we close, there is one thing that needs to be addressed plainly because the full picture of what Dave Kindig has and hasn’t said publicly is itself a piece of this story, and understanding it changes how you see everything that came before. The truth about what Dave has said. What Dave has actually said over the years is a lot less dramatic and a lot more revealing than the internet rumors make it sound.
Publicly, he’s mostly done three things: offered warm but carefully vague farewells to departing employees, responded to fan questions in ways people sometimes overanalyzed, and allowed the work culture at Kindigit to speak for itself. That’s where stories like Manuel’s became so misunderstood. When Dave once referred to Manuel as “no longer with us,” some fans immediately assumed the worst when he was clearly talking about a professional departure, not a death.
In reality, Manuel quietly moved on and eventually opened his own shop in Murray, Utah. Frank Finelli landed what looked like a dream job at Kindigit, only to later chase a dream of his own. Bryce Green stepped away to build products under his own name. Arthur Kubeck received a respectful public farewell, but no detailed explanation for why he left.
And honestly, that silence tells you something, too. Kindigit has never operated like a reality show built around dramatic exits and public call-outs. Dave and Charity Kindig rarely air internal issues publicly. Even the shop’s response to a critical employee review years ago was restrained, simply acknowledging that some people were not the right fit.
No names, no dirt, no public takedowns. But taken together, pattern says plenty. For more than a decade, Kindig-it has had a steady cycle of people coming and going while a smaller core group stays planted year after year. That alone paints a pretty clear picture. Working there is demanding, high-pressure, and absolutely not for everybody.
And that’s where the second half of this story becomes interesting, because while some employees moved on, others became permanent fixtures. Kevin Schiele, better known to fans as Kevdog, has been the shop foreman since 2004, more than 20 years. He’s not just another employee. By every public account, he’s one of the people who helps enforce the standard that built the shop’s reputation in the first place.
Then there’s Will Lockwood, who joined in 2003 before the TV fame, before Bitchin’ Rides, before any of the celebrity status. He served in the military, came to the shop, and never left. Even when rumors spread in 2023 that he might be moving on, the truth was much simpler. He was still there, still building.
So, what separates the Kevins and Wills from the Manuels, Franks, and Bryces? First, alignment. The people who last at Kindig-it seem fully invested in the shop itself, not building parallel personal brands or quietly preparing exit plans while working there. Their identity is deeply tied to the company. Second, tolerance for pressure. Kindig-it is built around extremely high standards.
The people who survive long-term appear to internalize those expectations before Dave even has to enforce them. Third, longevity over visibility. Some former employees gained public followings through television exposure and eventually used that visibility to branch out independently. The long-term veterans seem less interested in fame and more focused on the work itself. And finally, trust.
Dave and Charity Kindig have spent more than 25 years building the business together. And the people who remain are the ones they trust completely. Not casually, not temporarily, but the kind of trust that only develops after years of consistency under pressure. That doesn’t automatically make the people who left failures, villains, or victims.
In many cases, they simply wanted something different. Their own shop, their own vision, their own pace. But the bigger truth is this. Kindigit appears to demand a level of loyalty, precision, and long-term commitment that very few people can sustain forever. And once you look at the people who stayed versus the people who moved on, the pattern becomes hard to miss.
Five stories, five departures, five different windows into what it actually costs to be part of the Kindigit design machine, and what happens when someone can’t fully meet that cost. None of the people in this story are villains. Frank Fennell is building his own business. Manuel Bal is a tin is alive, doing what he loves on his own terms in Murray, Utah.
Bryce Green walked away with a product and an operation carrying his own name. Arthur Kubecek received a public farewell and has moved forward into whatever comes next. And every single one of them can say they were part of one of the most remarkable custom car operations in American history. But the pattern at Kindigit design is real. The standards are real.
And the quiet trail of people who came close, but couldn’t fully match them. That is real, too. Dave Kindig has never named names. He never will. That is simply not how he has chosen to tell this story. But, the story tells itself if you know where to look, and if you’re willing to sit with the complexity of what it actually reveals.
If this kind of deep dive storytelling is what you’re here for, hit subscribe. And if you have a connection to this story, a face you remember from the show, a chapter you think we missed, something you’ve been wondering about for years, leave it in the comments, because something in all of this suggests we’ve only begun to see the full picture of what went on inside those 27,000 square feet.
Until next time.
