A History of Fluid MotorUnion

12 Nov A History of Fluid MotorUnion

Many of you have seen our site before and know a bit about us, but for those loyal readers who are a bit unfamiliar with how we got here, we’ll give you a brief history.

The main brain behind the operation is OJ Lopez. He got into cars at what he considered a “late” period in life, about a year past earning his driver’s license. Having grown up building Lego toys, he had a fleeting interest in breaking things down and building them back up, but it really remained fleeting. What he was passionate about, though, was one day opening his own business. As a result, OJ went to the University of Illinois at Chicago for a Business degree. While attending school at UIC, his love affair with working on cars continued to grow. After some brief discussions with his mother, Marilynn, he went to Wyoming Tech’s automotive program.

Wyoming, as OJ put it, “didn’t have a whole lot going on,” so he and several of his friends from school began working on their own cars after school, in their spare time. One of these friends would turn out to be the other owner of Fluid, Craig Hegland. After Wyotech, OJ wanted to open a garage and bring his friends along, all of who were quite talented in their field. Craig wanted in, so he and OJ went off to start in dealership programs. OJ studied in BMW’s STEP OS program, and Craig studied under Audi, in order to expand their thorough knowledge from one car brand to two. After the programs were finished, OJ started working as a technician at Perillo BMW, and Craig ended up working for an Infiniti dealership. After some time, Perillo also hired Craig, and by the time they were both 23, they’d managed to become in charge of Perillo’s entire inventory. During this time, OJ and Craig would leave their day jobs and return to the suburbs, where they continued their budding business, working on their cars and cars of family members.

Eventually, Fluid became less a side job and more of a full-time endeavor, so OJ put his mother Marilynn in charge of the books and phones, and they hired their first full-time employee, Luci, who remains here to this day. OJ and Craig would still work at the dealership for financial reasons, returning at night to do diagnostic and fabrication work. They continued to devote their entire outside life to building and expanding Fluid MotorUnion, and they eventually took their first project car to Hot Import Nights, a very popular car show. It gathered some interest, but Fluid wanted to be bigger and better.

At this point, business was still growing, so they moved to their penultimate location on Clow Creek Rd. in Plainfield in July of 2008.

Having the necessary resources, they were able to pull Craig from Perillo to work at Fluid full time. By December, the 3-man team of Craig, Luci and Marilynn had grown to seven. In January, OJ left Perillo to focus on Fluid full time, as well. Their next step was to bring their revised project car to MFest (a large BMW-oriented festival) in Las Vegas in April 2009. With just 18 days left until MFest, they scrapped the original idea and took their BMW 7-series in a brand new direction. During those 18 days, they managed to rework the brakes, fabricate a new exhaust, replace the engine with one from a BMW M5, create a ground-hugging suspension setup and paint the entire car a matte black. Their first test drive was hours before they left for Nevada.

Everything went off without a hitch, and the exposure they received at MFest was incredible. The things they had done to this 7-series (named Gold Wheels) were unlike anything seen in the aftermarket BMW scene before. Their goal with Gold Wheels was to think outside the box of typical modifications, and that helped kick start the following that still goes with Fluid to this day.

Between now and then, they’ve started more project cars, both for research and development of parts and for more exposure in magazines (Fluid has been published in both Performance BMW and European Car more than once), all the while hiring a couple more hands, expanding their service department and expanding the business in general. Growth and exposure and number one and two priorities for everybody at Fluid, and everybody certainly puts in the hours necessary to achieve these goals. Growth continues to happen, as they’ve moved locations once more, to a larger campus of garages in Plainfield off Aero Drive. They have even begun stepping foot into the auto-loving Middle East, thanks to some family connections. Their goal is to do out there what they’ve already begun doing out here, and it is definitely looking positive, as they believe they are close to starting a small Fluid outpost out there.

The next major step for Fluid’s growth, though, is in mass production of custom aftermarket parts, the planning and execution of which are happening as we speak. Their service side of the garage also continues to grow, pulling in profit consistently, all of which is recycled into the business to buy more machines and keep the train moving. Service is important to OJ, because he believes that once a technician knows a car inside and out, it becomes easier and much more natural to make improvements on the original design: “At the end of the day, we want the cars leaving here to be better than when they came in, plain and simple.”