Limited so act fast. Well, i did it. I quit my full-time job of 10 years to become a full-time automotive youtuber, and my last shift was just a few hours ago. I work really odd hours or i worked odd hours.

So this is all very, very fresh to me. I feel scared, i feel nervous i feel excited, but mostly i'm anxious just to start this new adventure. So in this video i'm going to finally reveal to you what my full-time job was. I kept that a secret out of respect for my former employer and i'm going to talk to you guys about the logistics of running a full-time automotive youtube channel at the age of 36 and with a big family, so in typical legit streetcars fashion.

I'm going to talk to you guys while i build my v12 engine, so let's get started now. If you haven't already subscribed to my channel i'd appreciate it now more than ever, you have no idea, as i install the wrong length head bolts into my engine. This is not a good start uh, but before i tell you about the amazing job that i just quit to do this full time, just a quick recap of what has brought me to this point. So as a kid i was obsessed with cars.

My mom told me as a toddler i'd sit by the window and just watch the cars drive by all day long and i had no real car influence. My dad definitely wasn't into cars. My mom, my sister, no one was into cars. It just kind of like came natural to me and when this really kicked into high gear was ironically, when my dad left us.

So my dad left us when i was a kid and i just remembered like thinking back now. I just really always wanted a car dad, so i was obsessed with cars because i was trying to make up for something i think not really sure but uh when my dad left it's just that's when it happened. That was the turning point. I remember it like it was yesterday.

I would even make up fake car stories to my friends that had car dads about cars, my dad didn't have just because i wanted just to be involved and at a young age you can't have a car. Your dad has a car, so that's kind of how some of my friends lived is through their dad's cars, which i didn't have, and i knew from that point in time. That's what i wanted. So you know i couldn't have it so i became obsessed with cars.

I tried to learn everything i could about cars at a very young age, and i just zoned in i was focused. It brought me joy and i concentrated on that more than the fact that my dad wasn't around now. My mom was a huge influence in all of this car obsession and it wasn't her plan. She wanted me to be a doctor.

My mom is a super hard-working person. She is the american dream. She came to the united states at age 31. She didn't speak any english.

She wanted to be a teacher um, so she learned english and there were no italian classes in schools back then. So she learned spanish. She straight up learned spanish, so well that she got a job at one of the biggest high schools. In chicago taught spanish there and then started the italian program, so i'm going off a little bit, but my mom is what put the work ethic in me, which you guys are going to find out soon.

I have been working 80 90 hours a week to do my full-time job and and youtube so uh. My mom's super hard-working lady and she realized pretty early on that i wasn't gon na be a doctor. I was probably gon na be a mechanic and she was okay with that she would go to junkyards with me. I worked at burger king for a year and a half uh starting at age 15.

To save up for my very first car, a pile of crap 1988 trans am gta and she was the one that would go to the junkyard with me. Get all dirty in the mud with big boots on picking parts and helping me out and helping me kind of develop my passion so right out of high school two weeks out of high school, i went to a tech school in laramie, wyoming called wyotech and uh. I didn't really care to make any friends i got out of chicago on purpose, and i went to the most secluded area ever, which is wyoming, and i just wanted to stay there for one year, learn as much as i could um and then get a job And when i got there i didn't know much. I had ripped apart my second firebird in high school and i blew it up literally just trying to learn how the engine worked, but my first car when i popped the hood, i didn't even know where the oil went.

I had no idea what it did. I knew absolutely nothing. I knew nothing about. Cars went to wyotech soaked, it all up um, and i got a job with mercedes-benz of chicago three months before i even graduated.

I got the best grades ever they nicknamed me the oa, the overachiever, which was a flip of my initials. At the time i had a different last name that started with o, and then i changed it to paul mary before we had our first son, because i didn't want to pass down my dad's last name but um anyway, so they nicknamed me over achiever. I got really good grades. I got a great job at mercedes-benz of chicago and i was a master tech there for 10 years before i got the big call hang on.

Let me zip these guys down and the big call was from there. We go the city of chicago, so i was hired after about 10 years at mercedes by the city of chicago to be a machinist, which i don't understand, the intricacies of the union contract. But decades ago it went from just being a mechanic to a machinist which we were just mechanics. No one was really a machinist.

We didn't have lathes and stuff like that. So i was a mechanic. I was a heavy duty. Diesel mechanic for the city for about 18 months before i was promoted to shop foreman.

Now i took this job not because i didn't like mercedes but kind of like i always do i burned myself out so at mercedes. I got my real estate license at age. 21 on my 21st birthday i studied for the test. When i was 20., you have to be 21..

I got on my 21st birthday and i was selling houses to fund my turbo trans am project. So every time i sold a house i'd get a new car part for my turbo trans am, and i built that at mercedes. That was a dream car gift to myself when i was 18 years old, when i graduated wyo tech and i started with mercedes, i bought that immediately it was a dream car of mine, it still is - and i still own it, but anyway i did that, and I also did roadside service at mercedes seven days out of the month, 24 7 plus working 50 hours at the dealer, so the city job was 40 hours a week. It had a great pension and phenomenal benefits, and i'm like i need to.

I need a job like this and i took a little bit of a pay cut, but not much, and it was a wonderful wonderful job, but my goal with this job was to work for the police department. That's what i'd always wanted. I wanted to work on american cars and i was a foreman at this point and about five years into my 10-year career with the city. They said: hey, do you want to move to police and it was way on the south side of chicago on an oddball shift.

Of course, i've been either on midnight, which is horrible. If you guys watch my first few videos when i started the channel, i was on midnights and i look pretty beat up, but i was on midnight and then i'd been on afternoons, which is what i just left. Yesterday. I've been in afternoons, the vast majority.

3, 30 to 11 30 at night, so i'm at a police garage on the south side of chicago getting off late at night and then i'd get up in the morning and film youtube videos. But that was truly my dream. My goal with the city of chicago was to work on american cars, because that's that's why i started my channel, i'm obsessed with american cars, and that may seem weird, as i sit here, putting together a mercedes v12 and behind the camera is my e55 station wagon And a lot of you guys know me from my european car content, but i love american cars and speaking of american cars, actually american trucks. This is my first pickup truck a 2002 svt ford lightning.

I just came out with a video on this thing. It's amazing and the reason it looks so good is because i ceramic coated the entire truck in that video. It's quite the transformation, i'll leave a link down below and i'll also leave a link to a longtime channel sponsor some of these companies have been around since i started, and they are really the reason i'm able to do this, and in this case it is avalon. King ceramic coating and i wanted to bring this up now because it's time sensitive, you guys are car guys.

So i know you're gon na appreciate this, but they are having a blowout fourth of july sale, it's at least 30 percent off and you get 32 worth of free shampoo if you buy two or more of their kits. So the truck didn't always look this good and the armor shield, 9 ceramic coating gives any painted surface a deep glossy shine. It's very, very easy to apply any one of you guys can do this at home. It's a complete diy kit.

You basically just wipe it on wait, a minute, wipe it off. That's it. I did this entire truck in maybe two hours. What's great is once your car is coated.

Water and dirt will just bead right off keeping your cars cleaner for longer, and this lasts for years, not months like wax. So all you got to do is click on my link in the video description box and the sales automatically going to be applied so anyway, a big thanks to evalon king for being with the channel for so long. I hope you guys enjoy the kit. The sale runs from july 1st to july.

4Th 2021. supplies are limited, an airplane is coming to ruin my scene, so don't delay, and now let me tell you about the pay, benefits and pension that i just gave up. So i've realized it's kind of hard to tell a story and put an engine together at the same time. Okay, all right! I did five now, okay good, so i have my little map of torquing the heads down, if you guys saw the last v12 engine when i torqued this one down, it's very important to follow the sequence to properly seat ahead, especially in aluminum head.

So that is number five now we're moving on to number six so anyway, working at the police garage was basically my ultimate goal: uh for working for the city of chicago, i thought i'd be working on the cars originally, but once i got the foreman job - and I was on the heavy duty side. I knew i'd be transferring over as a foreman of course, and it was great, i got my own office, i got a crew of like between eight and ten guys. It changed every once in a while and they were the best crew. These guys were awesome.

We just stayed up all night from 3 30 to 11 30 at night fixing police cars. It was great. Sometimes we would grill out for lunch. We did a really good job.

We got a lot of cars done left. Definitely on a high note, uh. We were grilling up steaks and chicken and stuff last night to kind of say goodbye and i left early because my kids were staying up to kind of congratulate me um, but yeah. It was a good job, as you can imagine.

We worked on crown victoria's, tahoes and explorers, i'm forgetting the most common, the explorer that's the most common uh chicago police, car and um. I hate to say this, but i'm solely responsible for the destruction or the auctioning. Not the destruction necessarily of crown victoria, so i was fully in charge of the inspection of the crown victoria. My guys would inspect it.

Bring me the estimate, i'd, compare it to auction prices and pretty much all of them needed way more than they were worth. So we would have to send them away to the auction, and this happened around 140 000 miles. That's about the life of a city of chicago police, car weather. It was an explorer, a crown vic or a tahoe, just the rust, the potholes just they beat them up.

I mean some of them literally had bullet holes in them accidents so about 140 000 miles. That was it, but anyway, i'm going off on the job. I love the job, it was a great job and it paid well. I made a hundred thousand dollars a year at the police garage.

I actually made more when i was in the heavy duty side, because we had a lot of overtime during the winter um and the biggest thing with this job, though, was the pension and had a pretty decent pension. I paid about 800 bucks a month into the pension, but if i retired at age 67, which it used to be 55, i was in tier 2. It's a long, stupid story, but at age 67 i'd get a lifetime pension benefit. Now i did pay into this pension.

It wasn't a freebie um, but also the healthcare insurance was out of this world, the best healthcare insurance ever uh for about 400 a month for a family of five. That's really unheard of at mercedes. That would have been like a thousand dollars a month, so this was, of course, a union shop, so the benefits uh were really really good, and that has really been the main reason. Well, all three of them: the pay, the pension and the benefits.

Those have all been the reasons why and the crew and just everything it was a great job of why i have been doing this and that at the same time - and i am literally or i was up until yesterday - working about 80-90 hours a week here - are Some clips from my earlier videos, but basically i had to pick one or the other job it got to that point and i couldn't throw away what i built here from the ground up, and so i had to decide to quit the city job. So it was tough to do that, but i'm happy with my decision, i'm at peace with my decision. Uh, it's been a long time coming and here we are, and these early videos are proof that anyone can get comfortable behind a camera, because i was so nervous and i'm sure some of you remember my wife from the escalade videos and if it wasn't for her Literally, none of this would have been possible. She's always been really understanding, especially in the beginning, because for the first two years i didn't make a dime.

I was spending 40 hours a week doing this for literally nothing. I was losing money buying all the parts for the cars buying, these cars, insurance and all sorts of craziness and shia stood by my side, and this just simply wouldn't be possible without her, so uh with travel and the amount of time i was at the city. Job was about 50 hours a week, it's 22 miles away from my house one way, and this is 50 hours a week. Also i mean it's a lot, especially with editing and everything, so i have now hired an editor.

I have now quit the city job. My goal here is to put out better videos for you guys, which is why i bought legit street quarters, and this is all kind of coming to fruition. So it's been about a year since i decided to quit the city job and do youtube full-time, but everything had to fall into place. I hit my 10-year mark with the city, so now i'm vested with the pension, so i'll have a small little baby pension worth of 10 years at age 67.

So at least i won't starve to death later. Also, my goal was to have a shop and to have it mostly completed by the time i quit the lifts are being installed next week, so it's almost done and at the same time a couple of my kids will now be in full-time school next year and That was another big thing i wanted to wait for, because, while they're in school i'll be working at the shop and then i'll finally be able to come home and have dinner with the family monday through friday and be with them uh the last probably almost three Years really at this point has been i get up at like six o'clock in the morning and i don't get home till midnight from the job, so i'm filming all day. I leave at two get to the south side and come home at midnight. It's been absolutely insane, but, as you guys can probably tell in the videos uh, this is really important to me.

Youtube is a dream. Come true, big motivation for me, starting this channel was this saturday and sunday. You know car horsepower tv. All those shows i'm like.

I can do that. I can do that. So my first video was of a fox body mustang, and my second video was right here in this garage. Putting brembo brakes on my turbo trans am go back and watch some of those videos, i'll link them down below.

So you can kind of see the evolution of alex on youtube, but uh. I started with the gopro three. I now film on my cell phone. I have two mics a little 50 shotgun mic and a 300 wireless mic i'll leave them linked down below.

If you guys want to start channels, but that's all you need in a tripod, i click record. I run on the other side and i'm filming and i've been editing every single video uh really up until the lightning video that is uh. My first video with the new editor - i think he did a great job and i'm really excited to have him, so i can focus more on bringing you guys more content, so i want to be able to put out two videos a week. Normally i just do one every saturday morning, that's the most.

I've been able to do and i've been sprinkling in thursday videos every once in a while, just to kind of get used to this. I've been working like triple time, so i'm hoping to come out with better content, for you guys be able to make a living at this which, with the sponsors and with the views you guys, have been killing it with the views. It's amazing um. I can do this and i have a lot of good friends and mentors in the youtube community that have helped me along the way.

So am i missing anything for this video? I don't think so. You guys know how much i made at the last job. You know what it was you guys pretty much know everything about my life uh. So with that, i guess i didn't get too much done on this engine um, but that is the next video.

So if you guys have been following the v12 series and have been asking me alex what happened to this part of it three months of it was waiting for heads and parts, but the last month and a half has been me trying to get the shop done. Wrapping things up properly at my old job and just a lot of stuff in between getting the pickup truck for the shop and and whatever so this is going back together soon, uh the next, i think, the next video yeah it's on this i'm just gon na Put the whole thing the whole thing back together so anyway, with that guys, i hope this video is an inspiration to someone out there, even if it's just one guy, eventually, you can do what you really really want to do and be happy with your work. I hope you guys really enjoyed this video if you did as always hit the thumbs up button share the video subscribe if you're new. I need subscribers at this point.

Thank you so much for all of the support i have like 550 000 subscribers and a lot of them have come and gone due to certain projects i'm in, but there are like a consistent, like i don't know, maybe two three hundred 000 people that will tune In on pretty much all my videos - and i know who you guys are - i see the same people commenting and i try to comment back right away. So, just a huge huge thank you to all of you guys, i hope to grow with you for many many years to come. Otherwise, i'm just i'm gon na have to go back and become a mechanic somewhere anyway, with that guys have a great day i'll catch. All of you in the next video you.