Kendrick Automotive

Established in 1976 by Tommy & Patricia Kendrick.  Our business was started mainly to relieve problems of getting quality work in a timely manner to maintain our personal and customer race cars.

Chassis construction, Engine Swaps, and Engine building was our original goals.  Keep in mind that at this period of time there was very little mail order business.  If you needed anything special you were in for a long wait.  This quickly led us into the hard core racing parts business.

The success of our drag race cars in 1969-1979 era led a part time engine building hobby into a full time business.

Chassis construction and engine swaps were gradually phased out due to problems of recruiting qualified personnel at this period of time in South Texas.  The right personnel is the key to any business, young or old.

We started our engine building business sending out machine work to local machine shops.   As business grew we purchased equipment to enable us to do  machine work in house.  This led us to where we are at today with a complete in house machine shop, Dyno Service, and flow bench to support our engine building business.

In 1985 Bill Hallberg joined us and handles customer service and manages most of the day to day service operations.

We also do a lot of business recurving and modifying distributors which produces major performance and economy gains in non computer controlled engines.  We have a full line of performance and hard to find parts distributors.  We have numerous parts available for GM  HEI ignitions along with complete units in stock or custom built to your application.

In 1997 we filed 6 patents on machine shop tooling and distributor parts.  All the design work and manufacturing of these products is done in house.  Laser cutting of some parts is the only thing we have to send out to have done.