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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Custom cars take specialized talent


Extreme hot rod builders Chris Ledgerwood and Paul Freund are partners at Extreme Customs in Otis Orchards. 
 (J. BART RAYNIAK / The Spokesman-Review)
Paul Delaney Correspondent

For a business that has had its roots in Spokane Valley backyards, Extreme Customs has come a long way. A really long way.

The Otis Orchards-based hot rod and custom car shop emerged from unlikely beginnings to taking the lead role in building two creations that would command the highest selling price in the history of street rodding.

Over a two-year period in 2004 and 2005 cars built by Extreme founders Russ Freund and Chris Ledgerwood sold for nearly a combined $1 million at the prestigious Barrett-Jackson auction in Tucson.

Local ad executive Jack White’s Chrysler Airflow was the creation that put Extreme Customs on the map in 2005 as the car fetched a record $550,000. That followed the Zypher in 2004 that sold for the previous high $430,000.

“It was really funny to watch it. The previous year with the Zypher setting the bar,” Freund said. “It was interesting to watch the Airflow go through the next year and watch the hype and watch it go crazy.

“Here we got a car where the quality and design work is over and above anything else down there,” Freund said. “And it’s selling over and above a charity car that was built on TV by Boyd Coddington,” who is one of the world’s most renown custom car builders.

“The Airflow and Zypher … people are really lucky to get one of those in a lifetime and we got two,” Freund said.

Freund laughed at the idea that two guys from places with hometown names like Otis Orchards and Greenacres can beat out builders from Cailfornia.

“A couple of northern boys from Spokane, Washington, come in there with a car, and take it to the California boys,” Freund said. He explains that they were competing against people who are “the lifeblood of the hot rod industry.”

Five years ago, 29-year-old Freund and Ledgerwood, 39, combined their years of expertise to form Extreme Customs and right from the get-go they made headlines.

“Chris was working out behind his house. I was working at my dad’s place,” said Freund, an Eastern Washington University graduate with a marketing degree.

Ledgerwood was working on the Zypher and needed some help, Freund recalled.

After the Zypher project, Freund said asked Ledgerwood if he “wanted to go start something, make it legit and get out from behind our houses? We had nothing to lose.”

Freund was immersed in cars and hot rods for as long as he can remember. He attended East Valley schools and said, “I’ve never, ever had a choice but to love cars. Literally every afternoon after school I went to an auto parts store” that his dad, Claude, owned in Post Falls.

“We always had a hot rod,” Freund said. “That was usually the most reliable piece of transportation we owned.”

Like Freund, cars have been at the center of much of Ledgerwood’s life, too. After high school in Pomeroy, it was off to Spokane to work for Bayliner, where he started working with fiberglass.

Current projects in the shop include a couple of rebuilds. One is car that was wrecked on the way to last year’s River City Rod Run in Post Falls.

Fate brought in the “wreck,” Freund noted. “The throttle stuck going onto the on ramp at Liberty Lake,” Freund said of the ‘32 Ford Roadster. “He just happened to have an accident and just happened to be about two miles from the shop,” Freund said.

Harry and Marsha Mielke, founders of the Arbor Crest Winery, had a rare 1931 Cadillac V-16. Or was it?

“When we got the car, it was a basket case,” Freund said. “Lots of things (were) wrong with it.” The car turned out to be two cars mixed together, according to Freund. “It was a bad late ‘60s or early ‘70s restoration.”

Meilke said “make it as close as we can to a Phaeton,” Freund said. That meant a tedious task of tracking down real parts, taking photos and working to build a body as close as possible to a real ‘31 Cadillac. How did Extreme do? Mielke recently won his class at a Sandpoint show.

“Everybody wants to work at the hot rod shop,” Freund said. But not everyone can. It takes special talent to “to take a 1931 Cadillac fender and make it perfect. It’s not the soccer mom’s mini-van fender.”

“We try to do every car, have the same level of quality with every project we do,” Freund said. “We want the person who spends $200,000 with us, or the person who spends $2,000 with us, to have the same level of quality of product when it’s done,” Freund said.