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Ken Jansen is one of those guys in the trades without whom the world would simply come to a stop. And in fact, as they retire and die off, the world kind of is coming to a stop. Have you ever found yourself wailing into the void, “Why does nothing work anymore?!” It turns out that for stuff to work, you need people on hand who know things.
Not people who know how to Google it, or AI-prompt it, but who have a web of knowledge in their heads that is vast and detailed and synoptic, and who are able to synthesize it on the fly to arrive at some practical solution. This kind of knowledge accumulates over the course of a lifetime, slowly ripening and finding its way into their bones, to the point they probably couldn’t tell you how they know what they know.
Jansen is the go-to machinist for the performance air-cooled Volkswagen cadres of Northern California. For the drag racers, in particular. Full-bodied Bugs powered by his motors have made it well into the 10s in the quarter-mile. That’s all motor (no boost, no bottle). With boost, he has one customer who is currently in the 8s.
Ken Jansen (left) and the author with one of the hopped-up, air-cooled confections Jansen is known for building.Henri Boulanger
Jansen’s shop, Jansen Enterprise, is in Belmont, which is perhaps the least glamorous of those unglamorous towns that dot the northern peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area. It may come as a surprise that there could remain anything like a town in this sprawling metropolis, which attracts the sleekly credentialed from every corner of the globe. But in places such as Belmont and Redwood City, one finds pockets of residents who grew up and still work in the place where they were born. There remains an industrial ecosystem of little shops tucked away, often with no storefront, where mechanics and machinists continue to hang on by a thread under the shadow of Big Tech. They represent the area’s last vestige of a certain middle-class type, defined not by income so much as by disposition: tradespeople who are self-employed, have no truck with computerized bureaucracy, and whose attitude to the surrounding powers is proud rather than servile. These survivors are the ones who had the wisdom and the means to buy their buildings 30 or 40 years ago.
I found my way to Jansen initially because I wanted to get the bearing journals on a crankshaft polished. I cut my teeth on Volkswagens as a teenager growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s. After an extended foray into motorcycle repair and fabrication in Virginia, I returned to my VW roots in my late 40s. I returned to the Bay Area in 2019, too. Asking around for a machinist, I was told by other shops to call Jansen.
Jansen inspects a street motor with a 911-style fan.Henri Boulanger
Looking up his location, I got an uncanny feeling. This is going to require an autobiographical digression before we get back to Jansen—a brief story about remembrance and the transmission of some tiny, meaningful corner of the world from one generation to the next. I suspect such stewardship is what keeps the world as a whole from petering out.
The year is 1982 or thereabouts. Charles Martin (Chas to his friends) was a machinist by training. He worked the parts counter at Donsco, a VW speed shop in Belmont. He also built race motors for them and pitted for their off-road racing campaigns. Once a classical guitar-playing Buddhist vegetarian, he was now a gun freak and brilliant misanthropist. He had long hair, but it was rarely released from the bun under his tweed cap. His orange, split-window VW bus, with wheel wells cut away to accommodate large off-road tires in the back, was a chaotic treasure trove of superb American handguns, Snap-on tools, and VW parts. The darkness behind the cab carried a sharp note of Berryman B-12 Chemtool on top of a more subtle smell that is generic to mechanics—a mixed-up aroma of various petroleum distillates that had been oxidized by combustion, thickened with road grime, and ripened on a substrate of shop rags to the point of acquiring substance. He kept a large tank of CO2 in his bus for running an air impact wrench, indispensable for swapping out a broken transaxle on a race car in the desert. This bus was his only personal space, and at this time cellphones were something you saw only in the movies. Outside Donsco business hours, you reached Chas by calling the Lyon’s restaurant in San Mateo, where he ran a certain stool at one end of the coffee counter.
Oppressed in my 17-year-old way by the liberal pieties of the time, I had recently taken to wearing combat boots to Berkeley High and reading Soldier of Fortune magazine. But Chas was something different, the first genuine reactionary I ever met. Deeply cynical and deeply witty, he loosened up these angry tendencies of mine with his corrosive humor. By that I mean he both lubricated them and dissolved them, like penetrating oil. He also initiated me into a certain positive possibility opened up by alienation from all things respectable: the pleasures of metal.
Rocker arms getting shimmed for proper end play (too much and they make noise; too little and they can bind).Henri Boulanger
Cylinder head cores.Henri Boulanger
You can quadruple the amount of horsepower a VW engine makes, or even more, if you are willing to spend absurd amounts of time and money building it. I was reminded of this by Chas when we first discussed what was to be done about the engine situation in my 1963 Bug. Its 1200-cc motor had once boasted 40 horsepower (boasting is relative) but was now down on compression in the number three cylinder.
Scrawled above the dingy parts counter at Donsco was a slogan: “Speed costs. How fast do you want to spend?” It represented a kind of anti-salesmanship: This s*** is going to add up in a hurry, so don’t even start. Sure, if you want chromed “bolt-on” baubles that claim to give you power, go to a chain auto parts store to indulge your shallow fantasies. Then put the sticker on your rear window. While you’re at it, get yourself a “cold air intake,” if you want to make sure your engine has a good supply of extra-hot air. If, on the other hand, you want to go deep and have your crank journals nitrided, you’ve come to the right place. Just tear down your motor and bring us the crank. This Olympian stance can have a powerful effect on the customer. It hints at the existence of an exclusive club that one might aspire to be a member of (those who have held a bare crankshaft in their hands). But you can’t buy entry to this world—you have to earn it. There is no sticker.
Volkswagen’s humble air-cooled engines, produced in their millions, can make major power—if you’re willing to build them right.Henri Boulanger
Chas was a good man, and he didn’t want to be responsible for starting me down this path. Though he tried to warn me against the speed mentality, his whole life was a repudiation of such sobriety. The sheer perversity of making a VW go fast attracts a different human type than the type who is attracted to cars that are supposed to go fast. Chas clearly had a kink in his soul, and suddenly the world was a less lonely place for me.
We decided he would build a motor that was within my meager budget but still lit up Chas’s eyes. He said it would be “a screamer.” Further, he would let me “help” him build it. Meaning, I would stand around and get in the way, asking questions. It was a formative experience.
It turns out that for stuff to work, you need people on hand who know things.
Henri Boulanger
Fast-forward to 2022. I called Jansen and asked if he could polish my crank journals. On a lark, I asked if he remembered a speed shop named Donsco from the 1980s. He chuckled and said his business was in the old Donsco building. Like me, he had been a customer there as a teenager. And yes, he remembered Chas living in his split-window bus behind the place, with an extension cord run out to it.
To encounter a stranger who can confirm some distant memory that you thought was yours alone is to discover a hidden coherence in the world. Talking to Jansen, the intervening four decades felt like a long chord progression in a minor key, fraught with tension, that resolves finally in a familiar tune ideal for whistling.
Since that call, I have been a regular at Jansen Enterprise, bringing him machine work sometimes (I admit) as a pretext for getting engine-building advice, because I never want to treat that advice as free.
Original VW blocks are made of magnesium. This aftermarket unit is aluminum, which is heavier but stronger and thus ideal for high-hp builds.Henri Boulanger
Jansen is one of those guys who is at the pinnacle of his trade, always slammed with work, yet happy to chew the fat and dispense advice to anyone who walks in. Over the past few years, he has line-bored and decked a couple of engine cases for me, honed some barrels, done some head work, and offered countless tips on the finer points of engine building, unhesitatingly. He generally doesn’t bother with the telephone, so I just show up with some parts. When I asked his judgment on some oiling modifications popular in the online forums, he seemed not to be aware that there are such forums. The dude is old-school.
If you want to go deep and have your crank journals nitrided, you’ve come to the right place.
Henri Boulanger
His daily driver, always parked behind the shop, is a Karmann Ghia with mismatched body panels of white and blue. One of Jansen’s customers, who also has a Ghia, once found himself dueling a late-model Mustang (one of the more extreme variants) on Interstate 280, our local autobahn, at about 155 mph. Neither of them could lose the other, and the Mustang driver appeared to be really mad about this. Said customer is the opposite of a bulls*****r, so I don’t doubt the story. Unless, dear reader, you happen to be a member of our esteemed law-enforcement community, in which case it all seems quite implausible.
One day, there was a little yappy dog in the shop. Bruno belongs to a guy named Joe, a retired firefighter who lives in a nearby trailer park and is slowly dying. Bruno is not in the best shape either and tends to piss wherever. When Joe is in a bad way, Jansen or one of the other nearby workers will take in Bruno for a few days. “He’s the community dog.”
When I stopped by the shop in mid-September last year, Jansen was shooting the breeze with a big blond guy who looks a bit like Gary Busey, circa Big Wednesday. The big guy jumped right in to help me unload a stash of parts I was getting rid of in preparation for a move, another installment of the informal barter that has developed between Jansen and me.
Henri Boulanger
Derek was his name. In the three-way conversation that ensued, it emerged that Jansen got his start working for Derek’s father, Eddie Grauf, at European Car Service in San Bruno when he was about 16. Jansen had already left home at that age and was renting a place next to Grauf’s shop. He had started getting into Volkswagens and would sometimes bring something next door to Grauf to have him check his work.
Describing this period of his life, Jansen told me that the first time he saw a VW motor, he had no idea what he was looking at and didn’t even know where the spark plugs were. But quickly, everything fell into place, and he felt like he was remembering knowledge from a past life. He contrasted this with the way he looks at an American V-8: They are completely alien to him. What a strange thing, that something mechanical can call to a person with a deep murmur of kinship, or not.
One day, when Jansen was working at European Car Service as a young man, two armed robbers came in. They were on their way up the peninsula on a spree of hitting auto shops. They forced everyone into the bathroom and took their wallets. Then they took everyone and put them by twos in cars that were on the lifts, including a woman customer who had just walked in. They then raised the lifts up to the ceiling, the better to ransack the place without being interrupted. One of the robbers was wearing a mask; the other wasn’t. Eventually, they were caught. In court, Jansen was asked to identify the robbers and indicated the one who had not been wearing a mask. That was all that was required or wanted of him, but he kept going at the defendant, in defiance of the judge, because he was pissed off. Later, a clerk of the court told him, sotto voce, “You’re not supposed to do that. But also, that was really great.” Chas would have been proud, I think. There is a certain spiritedness that isn’t well accommodated in our institutions, but seems to express to the self-respect of the citizen. I wonder if being in the trades somehow cultivates that.
Jansen’s mentor, Eddie Grauf, as a young man in a Manx buggy outside his shop, which is still in the same location but is now called European Car Service.Henri Boulanger
Once Jansen started working for Grauf as a teenager, Grauf quickly realized Jansen’s talent, and within a couple of years declared that the student had surpassed the master. This was saying a fair bit, as Grauf is a German who trained at the VW factory in Wolfsburg after the war. Being mechanically conservative, in that German way, Grauf never dabbled in performance mods. When Jansen did something obviously “speed,” such as installing dual carburetors, Grauf would make him lower his bay door so nobody could see it.
Intrigued, I asked Derek if I could talk to his father, the guru’s guru. He called his dad and made an appointment for that afternoon, then counseled me to bring an offering. Specifically, a six-pack of Coors in the squat little “grenade” bottles. After lunch, I drove another 20 miles up the peninsula to San Bruno, with the A/C directed at said six-pack.
The old man showed up right on schedule. I produced the six-pack, which he received as though he were expecting it. He then offered me a seat in the tiny office. An hour later, the six-pack was gone and I had a new friend.
Grauf’s father was a pilot in the Luftwaffe during WWII. My father was a radio operator and waist gunner in a B-17 bomber over German-controlled territory. It is possible, just barely, that they exchanged fire at some point. Today we exchanged stories of the war, stories of cars, and our own histories of learning under mentors. I have learned from Jansen, who learned from Grauf, who learned from particular men in Wolfsburg who are unknown to me. Jansen’s own son Joe works at the shop. Maybe civilization is made up of a million such lines of descent and transmission, invisible to all but those who live them.
There is a quality one can detect in the presence of genuine competence, an aroma of integrity. It is just this that seems in danger of dying off, if we are unable to cultivate the next generation of excellent tradespeople.
Jansen is one of those guys who is at the pinnacle of his trade.
Jansen mainly does machine work but will service your car, too—so long as it’s a VW. This Beetle is an early one, as evidenced by the turn signal on its fender.Henri Boulanger
As this essay goes to press, I am beating my head against the wall trying to diagnose a lean misfire on the number two cylinder of my 1970 Karmann Ghia. The idle circuit on a Weber IDF carburetor is a byzantine thing, and the standard advice to check for a clogged idle jet is about as helpful as the advice to “check the fuse” when some electrical component is misbehaving: wishful thinking. So I come sputtering into Jansen Enterprise one more time, hoping Jansen is there on a Saturday. It’s embarrassing. His ear attuned to mechanical distress, he comes out to investigate before I have shut off the car. Everything is going to be OK.
Jansen Enterprise (Belmont, CA)
Open Since: 1996
Crew Size: 3
Blocks Seen Yearly: Lots
Shop Vibe: Under the radar, old-school VW speed shop. Friendly!
Sweet Spot: Air-cooled sleepers and quarter-milers.
***
Matt Crawford is the New York Times bestselling author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and, most recently, Why We Drive.
This story appeared in print in the July/August issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.