Like many in the engine rebuilding industry, Andy Frontzak grew up around it. His dad owned a parts store with a machine shop in the back, and Andy started helping out at the age of 15. Having picked up the passion for engine work, it wasn’t long before Andy owned the store himself.
However, by the mid-1990s, with the growth of retail giants like Pep Boys, Auto Zone and others, the parts business was starting to go away, so Andy made the decision to get out of the parts business and turned his focus to the machine shop.
His decision to do more machine work was aided by an opportunity to purchase a nearby machine shop that went up for sale, and Andy wasted no time in buying it. That shop was Engine Rebuilders & Supply Inc. in Stone Park, IL, just outside the Chicago area.
“Engine Rebuilders has been in business since 1940,” Frontzak says. “I’ve owned it since 1992. My son [Andrew] and myself run the shop, along with several other employees. We specialize in antique, muscle car and restoration work, but we do pretty much everything else too. We do automotive, diesel, motorcycle and marine.”
Now in its third location, Engine Rebuilders & Supply is a full machine shop and the only thing Frontzak doesn’t do in-house is crank grinding. The shop boasts 6,000 square feet and six employees.
Inside the machine shop, Engine Rebuilder’s & Supply (ERS) has a nice mix of both older and newer equipment to help get the various engine work accomplished. On any given day, ERS could be working on Pontiacs, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Chevys, AMCs, Porsches, Subarus, John Deeres, Internationals, Mitsubishi diesels, and so much more.
ERS utilizes equipment such as a Rottler VR7 valve grinder, a Serdi seat and guide machine, a Bridgeport mill, a Sunnen line hone, a Sunnen rod hone, a Sunnen CV-616 hone, a Rottler mill, a Rottler boring machine, a new Rottler H85AX hone, a new Rottler S86A CNC surfacer, two balancers, as well as a glass bead machine, a steel shot machine, a cleaning oven, and a soda blast machine for aluminum parts.
“We recently picked up a new Rottler H85AX that helps us get our shop work done more efficiently as well as helps us hold tighter tolerances,” Frontzak says. “We’ve got the automated feature on this one to switch from cylinder to cylinder. We also picked up a new Rottler mill too. With the amount of work that’s been put on us and the amount of people that are not out there wanting to do our type of work anymore, this new equipment has really helped us.”
ERS regularly has 200 jobs in the shop between cylinder heads, machine work and complete engines. According to Andy, ERS finishes 100-125 complete engines a year. Business has remained strong for the shop, and most jobs are 7-8 months out.
“As you can tell, we’re interested in everything,” Andrew Frontzak says. “It makes it more interesting instead of doing the same thing over and over. We do some carburetor restorations too for the numbers matching engines and certain builds.
“Being third generation here, I’ve obviously been around a machine shop my whole life. Growing up, that’s what I wanted to do was build engines. I started here when I was about 18 years old working for my father, Andy, and it took off from there. Some of the engines that stand out to me are the Buicks, Chevys and Oldsmobiles in the Muscle Car Nationals. We work on everything here from engines from the ‘30s to new engines. It’s a lot of fun seeing these cars get finished and making our customers’ dreams come true.”
ERS has a strong reputation for the various work the shop does, especially when it comes to the vintage, muscle car and restoration work, and the goal is to make customers happy while delivering a reliable engine that makes good power.
“I take pride in every job we do,” Andy says. “Everything that goes out the door has our name on it, so that’s why we have such a good reputation because of the work that we put out.”
The great work ERS puts out, as well as the shop’s longevity and wherewithal to embrace new technology to continue to reach new levels of machining and horsepower for customers of vintage engines is why Engine Rebuilders & Supply is Engine Builder magazine’s America’s Best Vintage Engine Shop for 2024, sponsored by Safety-Kleen, a Clean Harbors Company.
“To get an award like this and have the good work that we do and the work that we put out get acknowledgement like this is an honor,” Frontzak says. “It’s always an honor to get an award for something you do.” EB
