Chris Runge spent five days teaching a young metalshaper in his shop and never once saw the kid's phone. He noticed the way you notice a sound after it stops. "I didn't see Vince on his phone one time in the last five days," Runge says. "I have not seen the kid pick up his phone."
Vince is Vincent Ramirez, from Afton, Minnesota. He came to Runge Cars for a week of metalshaping training sponsored through the Piston Foundation, the nonprofit helping put him through Worcester Polytechnic Institute out in Massachusetts. Runge builds cars from the ground up, bespoke aluminum coachwork hammered out of flat sheet in a workshop he raised with friends and family on 13 acres of Minnesota farmland. Ramirez fit in fast. "I grew up in a metal fabrication shop where I had free range on any sort of metal tool, wood tool," he says. "From a pretty young age, I've been building things. Coming from Minnesota, there's not too many people that do metal shaping, so I've known about Chris Runge's cars for a while now."
Vince is Vincent Ramirez, from Afton, Minnesota. He came to Runge Cars for a week of metalshaping training sponsored through the Piston Foundation, the nonprofit helping put him through Worcester Polytechnic Institute out in Massachusetts. Runge builds cars from the ground up, bespoke aluminum coachwork hammered out of flat sheet in a workshop he raised with friends and family on 13 acres of Minnesota farmland. Ramirez fit in fast. "I grew up in a metal fabrication shop where I had free range on any sort of metal tool, wood tool," he says. "From a pretty young age, I've been building things. Coming from Minnesota, there's not too many people that do metal shaping, so I've known about Chris Runge's cars for a while now."
The week Runge just gave is one he sort of sojourned for himself once. When he was nine or ten, a little yellow 914 came into his family's barn for winter storage and stayed for years, half forgotten. He would sneak out and drive it nowhere. Through his teens he flipped Volkswagens until he could afford a 1978 911 SC, back when a 911 was still working-kid money. "I got into air-cooled cars when I turned 16, and that became a fascination and almost an obsession for me," he says.
Years and a handful of 911s later, the obsession found its shape at Amelia Island, where Runge saw the raw aluminum tool room racers of the early 1950s in person, cars like the Kurtis 500X, wearing every mark of the tools that made them. From the books he'd studied as a teenager he already knew the story of Walter Glöckler, the Frankfurt VW dealer who built his own mid-engined special from Volkswagen running gear after the war, skinned by coachbuilder C.H. Weidenhausen, and started outrunning 356s with it. Porsche noticed, offered parts, and the badge on the nose changed from VW Eigenbau to Porsche. When the factory wanted a spyder of its own, it went to the same coachbuilder Glöckler used. "What was so beautiful about the cars to me was how raw they were, and they had so much character, imperfections, that they just put these things together to make them go as fast as they could, and I wanted to experience that, and I wanted to hammer out my own aluminum body," Runge says. "I just had this, like, spark, like, man, maybe I could build my own."
In 2010, in rural Minnesota, there was still no one to show him how. The closest thing he found was a dead man's tools. A classified ad for a 1967 912 in South Dakota led to a widow whose late husband had obsessed over a tool called the English wheel. Her barns were full and she wanted all of it to go to a good home. Runge made three trips with an enclosed trailer and hauled home the car, the wheel, and as many tools as he could afford, setting up shop in the same barn where the 914 had spent its winters. The wheel wasn't the beautiful cast piece he'd imagined, just something homemade welded up out of I-beam. It didn't matter. On December 11, 2011 he made the first cuts on the buck for his first car, and seven months of trial and error later he rolled a monoposto aluminum flyer out of the barn, riding on a Formula Vee chassis, and went for a drive.
Somewhere in those early years the questions started, people from all over the world asking how he learned it and whether they could too, most already talked out of it by their own fear before ever picking up a hammer. "I've wanted to have kind of a hub that we could work with as a nonprofit that could connect kids or young people, old people too, wanting to learn this craft, and the Piston Foundation was the perfect resource for that," he says. "They have a passion to get young people the skills they need and the placement to pursue careers in this. And when I learned about that, we jumped on board to sponsor this and offer the week of training."
The learning didn't all run one direction, either. Ramirez brought his schooling with him. "I think as a young person, I'm able to connect more of the modern ways of thinking that I learned in school, the CAD 3D modeling side of it, the rapid prototyping, machining, into the more traditional ways that Chris used to build his cars," he says. "The Piston Foundation is doing fantastic things for keeping our car culture alive in the younger generation, and helping me to go to school without worrying about the financial burden of it. Connecting me to opportunities like this, which I would otherwise never have."
The English wheel was new to him. "I came in with a fair amount of generic metal experience, but nothing too related to body shaping or coach building," Ramirez says. "Practicing up on my welding, TIG welding, learning gas welding, more traditional ways of doing things." By the end of the week he was talking about building one of his own. "I'm more prepared than I ever have been to build my own car." Runge noticed. "Vince has a lot of that shop-minded intuition that carries over into his workmanship," he says. "There's certain things that you can't really teach or take a long time to establish."
Which brings it back to the phone. Runge doesn't think it was discipline. "I think a lot of young people, whether they know it or not, the desire to sit and stare at a screen doesn't come naturally," he says. "My mom used to tell us go outside and play. That was so important. Going outside and playing meant building, digging holes, finding creatures in the earth. That stuff is so important, and that plays into the desire to create and build and all the things that we do here."
In the shop, going outside and playing looks like an English wheel and a flat sheet of aluminum. "The satisfaction that you get from working so hard from a piece of paper, and then seeing this machine come to life, the other part of that satisfaction that you find in it is the senses," Runge says. "It appeals to sight, touch, taste, sound. It's a living, breathing thing, and then it can move you through time. It's a time machine, literally. So there's not a lot of other things in the world that compare to building a car."
A bare car body waited in the corner all week. "The single most interesting thing is seeing that stack of sheet metal over there and seeing this bare car body and what it's gonna become in three months," Ramirez says. By Friday there was one finished panel gleaming on the bench, and somebody asked how many the whole body would take. Probably 16, Runge figured. Maybe 18. Nobody reached for a phone to check the math.
The Piston Foundation put Vincent in the room and is helping put him through school. $5,000 funds a scholarship for one school year, and they're trying to fund 60 of them for 2026. If you want there to be more weeks like this one for Vincent and others, donations live at pistonfoundation.org.
