Stories so big we need two episodes to tell them! Jason Bunch of Tri-Couty Gear has a storied history and he shares it with us. Rockcrawler, racer, business man, enthusiast, Jason’s been part of the OG crowd. Be sure to listen on your favorite podcast app.
4:47 – We’d take about everything trying to make them faster, we’d grind the rod on a lawn mower and hold it wide open to see if we could make it blow up
16:08 – A cop rolls up and goes, “this brings new meaning to shade tree mechanic!”
21:04 – my Flat Fender had a healthy 350 in it and a 300 shot of nitrous oxide in it. It was fast.
30:59 – One night we clocked ourselves going through Sledge Hammer, did the whole trail in 51 minutes and one beer stop included.
36:25 – I watched Steve work with people and I thought, I need that guy for something, but I don’t know what.
46:34 –I used all of my knowledge of Jeeps and the things I’ve done to build that Jeep, no blueprint, just all in my mind.
Special thanks to Maxxis Tires for support and sponsorship of this podcast.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:01:12.920] – Big Rich Klein
This interview with Jason Bunch on Conversations with Big Rich has been split up into two equal episodes. Please catch part two next week on Conversations with Big Rich. My guest this week is an off-road enthusiast, a business owner, an O. G. Rock Crawler and rock racing competitor, and a friend, Jason Bunch. Good morning, Jason Bunch. It’s so good to have you on the podcast and talk about old times, and we haven’t talked in quite a while, so it’ll be good to get caught up. So how are you doing today?
[00:01:51.010] – Jason Bunch
I am great. How about yourself?
[00:01:53.080] – Big Rich Klein
Doing fantastic. So let’s jump right in. And first question I’m going to ask you is, where were you born How did you get raised?
[00:02:00.950] – Jason Bunch
I was born in Columbus, Ohio, and I lived there till I was about 10 years old. We basically moved to Southern California because my dad got a job at Douglas. My whole family actually started out in California when my dad came back from the war and basically worked here in California, and then he went back to Ohio to work for North America and Rockwell. Are you an only child? I am not. Okay. I basically have five siblings, three sisters, one brother. Unfortunately, my brother just passed away. Sorry to hear that.
[00:02:47.550] – Big Rich Klein
Yeah, my younger brother, anyways.
[00:02:50.000] – Jason Bunch
Basically, we came to California, and I feel like I’m just a Southern California kid, like a native, because I grew up riding my bicycle to the beach every day, surfing, just enjoying the weather that we have here, and grew up working on lawn mowers to motor cycles. That’s really my first love, motorcycles. Okay, let’s talk about that. You said you rode your to the beach to surf.
[00:03:24.820] – Big Rich Klein
So you were living close to the beach then? We were seven miles from the beach. Okay. That’s a nice ride.
[00:03:35.120] – Jason Bunch
Yeah.
[00:03:35.610] – Big Rich Klein
So every day during the summer, surf board in your arm, you’re lucky to have swim trunks on, bare feet, pedal to the beach.
[00:03:47.380] – Jason Bunch
I had this collie mix dog, Mick Duff, that would follow me to the beach the beach. While I’d be out there surfing, he’d be biting at the waves. This is long before you had to have leashes on dogs and stuff like that. He would just follow me all the way to the beach. He was incredibly strong.
[00:04:16.320] – Big Rich Klein
Wow. Those early years, school-wise, would you consider yourself a good student, or average, or one of those kids that was always looking out the window to go do something else?
[00:04:29.390] – Jason Bunch
I was definitely the kid looking out the window, dreaming about flying airplanes, being an astronaut. And I really had no care about academics.
[00:04:43.290] – Big Rich Klein
So it’s hard to become an astronaut without the academics.
[00:04:47.590] – Jason Bunch
Yes, it is. But later on in life, where I didn’t do much math, and then all of a sudden, geometry played a big part in rock crawling, I really needed that. Which is amazing. I would say that, but it just is. Today, you need to know all those basic things to run a business, just everything in numbers, right? True. But anyways, we grew up in Southern California. I basically worked odd jobs of working on cars and and motorcycles. Like I said, motorcycles was by first love. We take apart, we’d port and polish everything, trying to make them faster. We would do stupid stuff, like grind all the I beam off a rod in a lawn mower and put it back together and hold it wide open and see if we could make it blow up. We were just dumb kids, right? But we had fun doing it. I always had a group of guys at my garage, and we’d take something apart and fix it. It’s some of the stupid stuff we would do. Going through junior high, I got to be I’d say an okay machinist going through the program there and basically always trying to build cooling vins for my shocks on the bike. READ MORE
