About Us
Greg Henderson
We can go all the way back to the early 80s when I was still picking boogers and playing with matchbox cars and GI Joe's. This is the time I was first introduced to the wonderful world of jeeps and automobiles.
My father was a world class hot rod builder who had a shop in our backyard. He did amazing things, even competing for the Riddler award. At a young age I had a deep fascination for automobiles, but I wasn't allowed in the shop to work on things with my dad because he wanted a better life for me than wrenching. I didn't spend any time in his garage working on cars with him, but I listened to the knowledge that flowed out of him and saw the amazing things he did, this lit a fire under me to fall in love with everything automobile at a super young age.
Fast forward through the teenage years and into my early twenties. I started tinkering more and more with automobiles in the driveway. Mostly small stuff, minor repairs, and learning how to do things on my own because I couldn't afford to pay someone else to do it. It was at this time when I attempted my first big project. I was going to school during the day and waiting tables at night when I found a 1977 Ford F-350 highboy pickup truck. Several months were spent using all of my free time to build it into an off-road beast of a machine sporting no lift and 38 inch mud boggers. The problem was, by the time it was completed it averaged 3 miles to the gallon, so I had to start looking for a new daily driver. This was the year that changed my life, not only did I get married, but I also bought my very first Jeep Wrangler. It was a nearly stock 1998 flame red sport, straight six automatic with full doors and a soft top. I was no longer waiting tables, I had moved on and was now a union bricklayer/stonemason. Due to my love of the off-road industry, and my subscriptions to off-road magazines, I continually kept modifying that jeep (shown above). The interesting part of this Jeep is that I did about 20% of the modifications myself and paid local shops to do the rest. Even though I would pay someone else to do the major work on my Jeep, I read every off-road magazine from cover to cover, and watched all of the car building TV shows like extreme 4X4 and the Power Block, and just kept learning as much as I could from the experts that were available to me. Due to my ever-increasing knowledge, I slowly transitioned from allowing others to work on my vehicle to doing everything myself. At this time not only did I start working for AEV (American Expedition Vehicles) as the lead fabricator and technician, I also met some very amazing people through my father. He worked for jeep, and had made very good friends with some of the members of a little-known organization within Jeep called "The Lunatic Fringe". Gentleman like David Yegge, Phil Toney, Dave Thompson, Lowell Babcock, Steve Schluter, Jim Repp, Jim Frenz became my mentors. Every time these gentlemen spoke I absorbed every new amount of information that I could. Jeeps, fabrication, and building had turned into an obsession for me. When you mix all those things together, magazines, TV shows, and being inundated with an amazing group of individuals to learn from for over 10 years, I slowly turned into a different breed of builder.
My personal builds started to get some major recognition. Even though I worked within the industry, to have my very first personal build end up in a magazine not only blew me away, but also encouraged me to do even more. My incessant need to consume as much information as possible continued to shape who I was becoming as a builder.
Then tragedy struck my life. My youngest son Liam became a victim of shaken baby syndrome at the hands of his daycare. My life was immediately flipped upside down and put on pause. For months I didn't go into the office, or work on vehicles at all. When I finally did start going back to work, it was a slow transition due to the amount of attention that my son needed. In fact after his injury it was nearly two years before I started working on vehicles again. The first big build was actually a way to help my son and myself. I designed and built a Jeep known as the Frankenbrute to raise awareness for shaken baby syndrome and raffle it off as a way to help with my son's medical expenses. Hundreds of hours went into building the Jeep, and thousands more hours went into taking it around and sharing my son's story with the world. Not only was this therapeutic for my healing, but also put my son's story in front of millions of people which hopefully prevented at least one infant from going through what my son did.
In the beginning months of 2014 I stopped working with AEV, and concentrated on my family and building a few Vehicles out of my at home shop. I did a very small amount of bouncing around the industry before finally taking the advice of some of my peers and starting my own business. To the help and support of my wife, and my peers Unofficial Use Only was born. Up until now it has remained a small shop in Middle Michigan that turns out monster projects.
