For longtime friends Joe Dean and Mike Libardi, the opening of 2Guys Auto Restoration and Repair in North Adams, MA, is a return to their roots restoring the cars they love from the past.
Dean and Libardi share a passion bordering on obsession with classic cars.
Before opening the shop, the duo always had a "project" and 2Guys is really a formalization of what the two have been doing in garages and driveways for years before.
For more than 40 years, Dean ran Dean's Quality Auto &Truck Repair, a business started by his late father, Jimmy, in the 1960s. But in the spring of 2021, he decided to sell.
While Dean was getting the sale of the business in order, Libardi was at the new garage on Hodges Cross Road getting things ready. Dean joined him later that summer.
This June will already be two years in business.
The concept really started percolating in 2013, when Libardi returned to the area from the state of Florida, where he owned a body shop and worked for NASCAR on a pit crew.
"My dad got sick, and I came home to take care of him and kind of never went back. I learned how much racing takes away from your life," Libardi said. "You are home two days a week and then you are back on a plane again going to the next race."
Dean himself was getting tired of overseeing his truck repair, plowing and wrecking business that had him out at all hours.
"I went through all of that, and I went through all-of-the-night working … I would start plowing at 2 in the morning, go all the way around, then go back to the shop and work," he said. "…You get to the point where you want breakfast for supper and supper for breakfast. I could do that as a young guy but once I turned 60, I knew I had to get out."
When the opportunity to purchase the former Rick's Auto came around, Dean felt it was time to seriously start thinking about making some changes.
But the move down the street was not turnkey. In Dean's words: "The place was a dump."
"I knew it was nice once upon a time … so we went down to take a look," he said. "You couldn't get 5 feet inside the door. It was just filled with junk."
He said pipes had burst, turning two motorcycles, one brand new, into something you would be more apt to see at the bottom of a dredged lake.
But after sifting through the junk, rust and parts, the duo found a canvas on which to build their dream shop. Not too small, not too big, with just room enough to handle the number of cars they want to work on at a time.
Dean and Libardi completely gutted the current structure and put on an addition to accommodate a temperature-controlled state-of-the-art spray booth.
You can't bring your Honda Civic down to 2Guys or your dinged-up minivan. Maybe they will take a look at your Firebird from the mid-'80s. Otherwise, Dean and Libardi aren't interested.
The determining factor: computers.
"Once you start getting into computers and fuel injection, it is not fun anymore," Dean said. "I want to turn screws on that little mixture on the carburetor. I want to make that respond."
And there is a need for this specialization and, according to Dean, there are few who can work on these old cars.
"The young guys don't understand these cars, and you can't look it up on a laptop. You have to touch it, feel it, turn the screw, wrench the bolt," Dean said. "We know all of that. We grew up doing it. I grew up in my grandfather's shop. I learned how to set up a rear end … I did my first bearing job on a motor when I was 14."
Libardi agreed and shared that his own origin story almost mirrored Dean's, adding being steeped in these old car parts gave them an education that seemed to be a thing of the past.
"I was always into cars and grew up around it with my uncle," he said. "I was doing mechanical stuff and changing oil when I was 12 years old. In eighth grade, I was pumping gas. I would check the oil and wipe the windshield. I couldn't reach the middle."
They did see the irony when complaining about a 1914 pickup truck they worked on that had kerosene lights and no electrical system. They had to use the old hand crank and magneto method to get it started.
2Guys is busy. Dean kept glancing out the window at parked cars that have yet to enter the garage but have entered his mind. Mid-interview he would run through mental lists of parts he needed for these projects taunting him in the parking lot. Parts he was pretty sure he had stored at home in his 40-year-old collection.
"People find out we are working on old cars and suddenly we have a waiting list," Dean said. "We have five in motion now and there are probably eight, 10 more out there. We have four coming out of Florida this summer."
Abby Andrews