Tell me if you can see a problem here. These lights are supposed to be on a sema car tonight. These tail lights are sick, but there's a big problem. I set up this temporary wire harness, so i could check everything out and when i went to turn on brakes, we have an issue.

This is not lighting up, wait a minute. Why does everybody make such a big deal about sema in the first place? What actually is sema? Well, it's a get together of all the brands, all the companies and all the people that are involved in the automotive industry. They all come together in las vegas once a year for a few days, and it's like acres, it's like 26 acres of nothing but show parts and go parts. Electronics, the tires the wheels everything you can think about that has to do with cars.

Even the people that make the cars are there at sema and there's no higher honor of all things than to have your car in a booth at sema, which actually takes me back 10 years ago, when hyundai reached out to me and said they were building a Booth car for the president of hyundai and they wanted it to be presented at sema 2011.. That was dope. So i was thinking that everything was gon na take off and it was just gon na be amazing, because i got this super high honor of having my name in the hyundai booth and my parts up on the wall and all this cool stuff. But the reality is this: video is not about that.

It's about the real reason that i'll be staying up till 2 30 tonight delivering these taillights working with my buddies so that they can get their car to sema. So again the hyundai thing was dope and i got to see like a professional commercial shot of the vehicle. I got to see it there. I got to put it on my youtube channel, but the reality was, i didn't really get much out of it.

I think they gave me a headlight and like a thank you and - and that was that, so why do a last minute sema build people. Tell me hey my car's going to sema my truck's going to sema. Do this free work for me, i asked all the top builders in the custom lighting industry what they think about that and they're like. I almost never do anything rush rush because seymour they're, like you know when sema is, i was like.

Do you ever do free work, they're like almost never, unless it's something that i really want to be part of? That brings me to the next time i had a car at sema, which was a couple years later, when i found a guy on instagram. That was doing awesome stuff with his gtr and that's how i found paul garcia, aka air force gtr i reached out to this dude. He actually came by when i was still living with my parents before i bought my house rolled up in their driveway in this bright wrapped orange gtr. I did some headlights for them.

We turned them on, they started smoking. There was problems i had to redo them and then, after the car actually sat in a booth at sema in 2013, and it had my bright glowing angel eye headlights on the gtr which looked super dope. The car was all wrapped paul told me later that that car was going to get a giant overhaul. He wanted to do something really big for sema 2014, and that was because this brand new wave of parts was coming to america, the wide body the liberty walks.

The rocket bunnies, all the stuff was happening that year for the first time and paul was the first white liberty walk gtr in the country and that was going to be debuting at sema 2014.. Now, around the same time, another guy had reached out to me to do his gtr, because paul had opened that door. I did some free stuff for paul. Then he started telling his friends.

One of his friends is an amazing photographer named ryan and ryan came by with some carbon fiber parts. I put them in its headlights and was just another great example of why you would invest into a relationship with somebody, as opposed to invest into an opportunity like the thing that i did with hyundai. Meanwhile. So while i do think those taillights are super cool, we have a big issue because i sealed them up and they're super old tail lights.

These are for a datsun 280z and they have some really special things going on, including the special white faces that i put on these circuit boards, so that they would match the clear lenses even better. So i had to look inside of the tail lights check out. The circuit boards and see if i could find anything different and i found that the yellow wire was installed in a different location on one light than it was on the other. So at least i knew i could try to fix this thing so seven years ago i found myself in about the same position i'm at right.

Now, where it was late. I had to stay up, pull an all-nighter. I built some super crazy, gtr headlights and taillights and the next day paul cruises up in front of my house kind of blew away. The neighborhood with this completely showed out gtr and we did the cool stuff to it.

We put all the parts on there and it was sick and then ryan goes and takes the thing to an airstrip with paul because paul's in the air force and we get the most amazing photo shoot ever and it showed off my lights like the coolest way. I could have possibly hoped for now already that's worth it, my investment that i did for ryan and for paul. I already got something so much more valuable than if i would have just been paid from some random dude which, by the way i did get a bunch of paying jobs after that, because paul's car crushed sema 2014., he won an award. Everybody was talking about it.

It was a pretty dope event. We ended up out in the middle of the desert in las vegas and multiple cars rolled up out of nowhere things. I've never even heard of before, like the legendary hakosuka and then an r34 v spec rolls up and another r34 rolls up and ryan breaks out this rope that he has soaked in kerosene lights it on fire and starts walking around the hakosuka and recording with super Slow shutter speed got these amazing photographs in the desert in the middle of the night at sema 2014 epic, i mean it was just such a dope story and again that goes back to the relationship as opposed to just the opportunity. Speaking of opportunity, let's go back.

I got to do a little bit more work on these tail lights and then we'll resume the story of my sema adventures over the years so for the fix. I actually chopped out a section of this tail light, so i didn't have to open them back up. Soldered the wire in there - and i don't even know if it fixed it. One thing i didn't mention before was one of the relationships that was opened up to me was martin at r1 concepts in sema 2014 we debuted a set of headlights, the 2015 gtr headlights, which were brand new.

They weren't really out yet and martin got a set of those things to me and he was a paying customer years ago so that year, that we did the desert shoot and all that i also got to have a booth car at r1 concepts because that wide Body gtr was there, it was just an overall super sick event, but because of that, we got more paying customers that wanted me to do jobs for future sema. So sema 2016. I had a bunch of gtrs that were there so walking around somewhere as giant as sema and then randomly looking over and seeing your own work in different booths or whatever was awesome. I got to bump into kato's song from liberty, walk and tell him a bunch of stuff, even though he didn't understand me, because he didn't speak english, but it was cool.

I mean sema is just one of those crazy events where you see different people, you get to meet them and when you get to see your own work there, while it does feel really cool the reality, is it's not necessarily some big life-changing event? It's just a cool thing to experience and sema 2017 was no different. I had just met some new people because of the whole youtube thing we had booth cars left and right: jay, garcia dan burkett, with his rad industry, supra martin's gtr was in the spider booth. We had spec d with the mustang that we did work for and again i did work for spec d on a mustang and it looked awesome and nothing came of it. There was no relationship there, and so i invested in an opportunity again, while i had other things that i had invested into and a lot of that goes back to when i initially started working with paul garcia back in the day, which brings me up till present Day when he told me he was getting a midnight purple r34 and it was going to sema 2021.

all right, i'm here at society with oscar. You said: how long have you had the car now uh honestly, we've had this since 2014.: crazy 2014.. We're out i mean it was running for what two years, but since 2016 has been down ever since, just one thing led to the other, i get to be part of it. I'm stoked man cool chris pull up.

I need you, so that's why i stay up till 2 30 in the morning working on a car, because this is a relationship that i'm investing in it's oscar at society and a whole crew of people out there that are doing cool things and i like to Be part of that, so i'm gon na go jump in the car drive 45 minutes and i'll show you a little bit more about the r34 project as well. Finally got them on the car. This is the 2s performance halo kit for the r34. I've seen them only in the ukraine, but this is in southern california, on paul's awesome midnight, purple skyline.

That scared me now. If there's anybody that knows about the last minute, hustle that goes into sema, it's my boy will down at concept three, and that is where the r34 has been kept. So huge shout out to him as well as my guy indy, who helped pull the headlights off the r34 to get them to me so that i can install the super custom special parts, all the way sent to me from ukraine. So shout out to all of these guys that make it possible to put this stuff together and get it to an event.

So i'm super excited to see what happens at sema 2021. I don't know if there's gon na be fiery desert photo shoots or crazy stories of shenanigans like years past, but i do know that it's worth it because i've invested into relationships this time and i got ta, be honest. I think it's working out just fine.