Background of how it started and where it's going.

Good day everyone, so I figured I would pop in and give a little history of me and my start into automotive and the Mazda Community.

I've been a Mazda enthusiast ever since the first Fast and the Furious and seeing the first Yellow Protege5 commercial with the iconic Zoom Zoom kid. It wasn't until a handful of years later I got my first Mazda in 2009.

My dive into electronics started in 2009 also while serving in the USMC as an Avionics Technician for F/A-18 jets. Working with diagnostics/troubleshooting, repair, and calibration of displays, communication, navigation, weapon encoder systems, and roll pitch yaw computers.
Upon leaving the USMC I attended Southern Utah University for the Rotary Wing Pilot Program where I got to move from fixing aircraft to flying them. Between flying and school I spent my time studying the Mazda Protege and Speed 3/6 electrical systems.

I would say this is where the seed was planted to start this business. This is because in 2016 AEM stopped offering the ECU patch harness and I figured I could step in and keep that product going for the protege community since it was widely used for aftermarket ECU installs or with piggyback controllers such as Split Seconds. I come to find out later that the reason they stopped offering this product was due to the PCB header and the Ford EEC-V wedgelock pins were discontinued and molds destroyed.

Changing gears and moving states after starting a family I moved out to Iowa and began attending online school for obtaining my Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering Technology for Renewable Energy Generation.
During this time is where I got a little more involved in the wiring for the protege. I began to offer what I would say really kicked off as a successful product. The Mazda Protege Headlight conversion kit which was a way for the Protege5 owners could now use the Sedan style Headlight assemblies. I continued with this product for sometime until I started getting requests for other products.

Customer requests were one of the greatest thing to happen as far as success for my little wiring service. It is what launched my Coil on Plug conversion, repair and reloom services, the speed 3/6 harness tucks, VTCS relay Kits, etc.

It was sometime during 2021 COVID when I started working with Eric at MSWT after he saw my first wire tuck. I would say we developed a good friendship and got to bounce things back and forth off of each other and keeping each other motivated to service the community. Over the next couple years I got to experiment with the business and see how viable things could be on if I could teach, how I was with managing others, my own time management, shipping internationally, taxes and book keeping, etc.
I learned a lot and realized that where I'm at and where I would like to be requires expansion. During this time I was doing all my wiring in about 120sqft space. I quickly started to outgrow this with inventory, different projects and work orders, shipping station, and library management (I hand draw 90% of my designs and diagrams).

In Fall of 2023 things got a bit too hectic for me between the wiring, my normal job, and trying to spend time with the family. So I decided to make an announcement of retirement so that I could take a step back, spend some time with the family and evaluate the next steps of the business as I knew I wasn't going to permanently kill it.

Starting in January 2024 I decided to start renovating a 900sqft space into the new workshop. Over the next couple months I started networking with other people in the business to see what things worked and didn't work for them. I even finally managed to making it out to EWPTE Electrical Wire Processing Technology Expo that happens once a year in Milwaukee. There I got to meet up with vendors/suppliers, tool reps, and other people who do what I do but for different platforms. It was shortly after that where I saw myself in a spot to announce a return 1 year after my retirement post.

So come this fall (2024) the website listings for all my speed 3/6 products will be live, the workshop will be done and setup, and I will be working to fulfill orders for the community again. My new shop space will be able to accommodate 3-4 people and accept even drop off service when I'm ready to tackle full harness tucks, or directly installing systems.

I appreciate all the support the community has given me, and the amazing customers I have had. I look forward to providing you all a quality product.
-Matthew

 

glad to have you back and with a full web store that's fantastic looking forward to seeing this take off I know people were sad to you see go.

With your airframe avionics background it's perfect, I know one of our guys from the H model Herc (yes Canada is still flying those) and man I'd let him near any wiring, his home lab is arguably better than that work set-up.

 

How's it going Matthew. I appreciate you continuing to be an innovator on our platform. Are you still selling products at this time? If yes, I need that VVT Extension ASAP...lol

 

Thank you GC. So the answer is yes but also no. I have been working to appease the demands of the Protege community for my plug and play AC fix kits which are a hot item during the summer months(See attached batch work), but I have not restarted orders yet for the Speed 3/6 members.
Listings are up on my website for preview for most items, however they will all show out of stock until I have adequately setup my new build areas and tackle my ever growing inventory.
But I promise to keep working hard to finish the workspace and start offering Speed3/6 services again.



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Sound good

 

The 28th? Is pre-ordering available?

 

Story part 2.
Rewinding a bit again, like 80% of Autosport wiring businesses I started my operation at a kitchen table and a soldering iron with an old crippled harness. It never really was intended to become what it has developed into today but that's just how it goes. So Me, my table, and my POS iron would continue on for a couple years from 2016-2018 as i made simple little patch harnesses for the protege, recycling old ecus for the header and salvaging cheap harnesses for the mating connector. In a quest to try and figure out where to source this stuff new, i started trying to learn about connector sourcing. Turns out it was quite the gatekept industry. I started to join countless forums and read through thousands and thousands of threads of different makes and models. At one point in time i was pretty sure I had read all of Mazda24/7 as a professional lurker going by FuelCut. Eventually I started to understand the different manufactures and how to identify family connectors (example being econoseal, DL090 series, SSC vs SSD, etc).

In 2018 is when I bought a house that had some good potential for me to actually have a dedicated workspace. I decided to take a section of the basement and develop it into a wiring area where I could tinker. I now had space to start making some products for the protege such as the headlight conversions and try my hand at the Coil on Plug conversion harness that I had been wanting to make. Still at this time I didnt really have it in my mind to call this a business, just a random dude on facebook selling simple wiring solutions to people who would probably have burnt their car down attempting to do it themselves. (Dohni if you are on here im talking about )
The Idea was that I could create some disposable income that any money I made from doing this I could put towards finishing my own car. Problem was, as I kept going, I kept learning about better tooling, new suppliers, training etc and decided to re-invest all profit earned from this back into the business to improve quality, reduce headaches, buy stuff for R&D (Honda S2000 Cluster Conversion being my favorite project).

So began the cycle of built and buy that lead me into 2021 where things got a bit more serious.

 

In 2021 is when Covid was in full swing, and with the country on lockdown I pretty much just spent my free time building. Couldn’t go out to see friends because they were all too scared to have face to face interactions anymore. So I decided to turn this from a hobby into a full on side business. Didn’t know what to call myself as simple catchy stuff like WireWorx had already been taken. I didn’t want to brand myself to a certain platform because at this time I had already worked on some Dodge and GM repairs as well. So chatting with some car friends online we kinda brainstormed until “Harnessed” had been thrown out and I was like fuck it, that’s a word I think. Lets roll with that. Thus Harnessed Performance started to take root.
So now I started posting under that brand on my for sale posts and try to get my name out there in the Mazda Protégé Community. Things were going well.

Then one day I get a message from someone who partook in both Speed 3 and Proteges and wanted some work. Now at this time I had stepped away from the Speed3 platform. I had a Silver 2012 Tech Package Speed3 that I bought new off the lot in November of 2012 and sold it in March of 2016 after my only two friends with Speeds local to me had got caught racing and were court ordered to sell their cars. One went FRS and the other I believe stepped over to mopar. Anywho, this person was trying to get a speed3 coil tuck harness from Eric over at MazdaSpeed Wire Tuck, but he was booked up for months. Now I had seen his work before but had never talked to Eric at this point and I didn’t want to step on toes, but at the same time this was a new challenge that got me all excited. So I said I will give it a shot. I had the person send me in the OEM coil and injection harness and me and my trusting multimeter went to work verifying pinouts. Using a picture of Erics harness and just visually reverse engineering I was able to see estimated lengths I needed to replicate and decided to give myself a little room for error. I went online, found the supplier I needed for the connectors I saw on the oem harness, and went to work. I think it took me a couple weeks as I kicked around how to start my process of termination and looming.

But once I was done, just as a self pat on the back I wanted to share a picture of it with the speed3 community and the customer was happy. At this point I was just kinda thirsty for a couple facebook likes, but then my inbox went off and it was none other than Eric Himself at MSWT. I was like “ahh dammit… I fucked up”, I didn’t want to cause fights or anything as I had already had a couple fights with protégé vendors saying I was taking money from them.

But I was wrong on this occasion, Eric complimented my work and wanted to see if I was interested in more work seeing as how he was backed up for months and wanted to lighten the load on inbox requests and be able to refer people to another builder. From here Eric and I would start to collaborate and remotely work with each other for the next couple years as things started to take a new direction.

Eric and I would bounce ideas off each other and share what we knew on this or that, suppliers, what tools to use for what part of the process. And Eric if you are reading this, I’m not sorry for getting to you drop countless dollars on the automated wire cutter and god knows how many Rennsteigs. We have developed quite a good friendship over the years all because I decided to see if I could make his product.

But with all of a sudden all these new orders coming in things were getting hectic, but money was going well. The thing about the Speed3/6 guys vs the protégé guys, is that there are about 10 people in the protégé community who will throw money at the car understanding things will cost quite a bit. The rest of the community would be considered not big spenders and I have actually had people try to hurt my business because they think the products I sell were overpriced. The Speed 3/6 community on the otherhand was not afraid to pony up the cost for the harness work. So thanks to the speed3/6 guys I was able to continue to grow instead of sustain. I had actually managed to hire an employee to help me out, which is something I would not have been able to do if just supporting the protégé community.

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Well Things stayed busy and got crazy. My normal job had become more intense and duties and roles at the plant had increase in responsibility and time required to perform them. Me and my assistant in the wiring were struggling for space. The area I was working in was about 120Sqft which is fine for 1 person, but 2 people and needing a third it would have never worked.


So in 2023 I decided I needed to expand my work space. My garage was about 800 sqft and could serve as an excellent area for the expansion. I figured maybe I could delay orders for a handful of months and put foot to ass and try to remodel my garage to what I needed it to be. But I was being very un-realistic with that thinking that it could be done in a few months. Only so many hours in a day. I reached out to people who were currently on my list and began cancelling orders and explaining that Ill be back.


The original goal was to just dedicate all my free time to doing work. Lucky an old Marine Corps buddy lived nearby and started volunteering his weekends to helping me out with the process. We had a lot to do if this garage was going to be my next work center for this business. I lied to myself and said, hey I can have this done by Christmas.
Well as some may remember on the Facebook that last year in November I made the announcement that I was shutting down. I had made some good progress on the area but quickly realized that this was going to take a lot longer than I had hoped and kind of fell into depression. I stepped away from wiring, I slowed down on the remodel, and tried to work myself out of the slump by doing other stuff with my free time.


Retirement post was made with the idea that I would be back, but told myself it might be a few years. Maybe once the kids are older or something. Leading into 2024 I realized that this year things actually lined up where I could finally attend something I had been trying to get to for several years. EWPTE Electronics Wire Processing Technology Expo hosted in Milwaukee each year in May. Even though I was “retired” at his point from wiring, I was not going to live with the regret of not going. That expo rekindled the drive.


May came and I went to Milwaukee to attend this Expo for all things wiring. Now to be understood this is wire processing and not strictly automotive wiring shenanigans. But while I was there I met up with an internet buddy Jacob Kinnett who owns and runs Kinnettic Kreations where they got their start doing wiring for Dodge Neons. Him and I talked shop for hours and business models and do and don’ts of the industry and really this sparked everything back to life. I was coming back. I just needed to finish the workshop.

Before pictures attached.


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Well with my drive re-ignited by friends and coming back with a new perspective on how to optimize the business it was time to put foot to ass on remodeling. I made the facebook post that I was coming back to hold myself to this commitment and starting planning out the next steps. I had some work to do between demolition, redoing portions of the structure and updating everything that I could.


I knew that the electrical was all going to coming out, I had started working on rewiring the house with upgrading main panel, service disconnect, wiring subpanels and removing old degraded wiring. This was step one before anything.


Next I knew that this wall in the middle had to go. In my town we are on the Mississippi River and many houses have drive through garages for people to park their boats out behind the house. Well this was a converted drive through garage to workshop area. We took out the wall and put in beams and support to open up the area.
Went ahead and tore out all the windows to replaced with triple pane, new steel doors and started working on insulating with rockwool once all the electrical was laid out and getting things ready for the Mini Splits. The goal is to have a comfy and awesome environment that is professional enough for any help that gets hired.


There were some portions on this that were just me being insane on, but that’s just me wanting to do things once. I had a large portion of the pad tore out and had an 18in slab poured for the lift. Yes this is only a half lift in here, but I go for overkill when I can.
The lighting is another good example of I have problems with overkill.


Anywho there were soo many little changes here and there in the process and design plan that I could go over but I am just going to say that functionally the shop is ready. Aesthetically I still have to work on things such as window casement and door trim, etc.
But Monday I open up orders on the website and start putting this shop to use with crafting wiring solutions for the mazda community again and hope to be able to get some employees working for me if I can stay consistent.

Leading up to this post here I am incredibly blessed to have such patient supporters of the journey so far. So thank you everyone for waiting and putting up with my delays.



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That doesn't look like the same garage.

I enjoy that the wire tuck guy didn't tuck the wires on his wall mounted tv!

 

Haha trust me it drive me nuts. I have about 300 feet of cable tracks still being painted to match the walls so that I can hide/tuck the cables.

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I hear you I swapped the wall tv in our bedroom and the power cable won't stay up. I need to zip tie it but I only really notice when I'm getting into bed or getting ready for work