Tony Kizer, a self-proclaimed “grease monkey” at Happy’s Stillwater Automotive, was rolling up a timing chain a couple of years ago when he looked down and envisioned the shell of a turtle.
Kizer put the chain on his workbench and went back to fixing cars.
But the vision stuck with him. He spent part of his lunch hour that day welding spare parts and tools onto the greasy chain. He used an old spark plug to make the turtle’s tail; a ratchet — found on the side of the road during one of his test drives — became the head.
“The feet are lifters from an old Ford F-150,” he said. “Lifters open the valves to make the engine quiet. Before they were hydraulic, they were solid and they’d get all rattle-y, and you had to adjust them all the time.”
After the turtle, Kizer moved on to fish, pigs, birds and cows. He’s made a lizard, a ladybug, an owl and a rooster.
All the animals are given as gifts — to close friends or family members. He has no plans to sell them.
“Then it would be no fun — then it would be like work, and who wants to work?” he said. “Because I’m such a cheapskate, I make them for gifts.”
Kizer, 43, who lives in Stillwater, made a rooster out of wrenches, screwdrivers, brake lines, roller bearings and a pulley off an alternator for “Gramma” Elaine Thomsen — the grandmother of Happy’s owners, Happy Thomsen Jr. and Tanya McConaughey — to add to her rooster collection.
“He’s got a ball-joint head and a wrench for the crown,” Kizer said, pointing out the parts during a recent tour of his work at the shop. “I used bearings out of an air-conditioner compressor for the eyes. The beak is the front of a small pair of channel-lock pliers that I broke, so I just cut the teeth out of them.”
Many of the parts came from Happy Thomsen Sr., former owner of the shop and father of the current owners.
“Happy Sr. brought in a bucket of old tools a couple of years ago that he was going to throw in the scrap pile, and I said, ‘No, I’ll take those,’ ” Kizer said. “We have a lot of leftover parts, but I’m actually running low on wrenches.”
Remember those vintage oil can spouts? Kizer looked at one and saw the neck of a bird.
The head of a hammer became the bird’s head, and he welded on a couple of old wrenches as feet. The bird’s body is an electrical motor that he pulled out of an old power-window motor.
“I just tore it open and took out the electrical because it’s shiny,” he said. “The butt was a pulley off of one of the hoists that went bad, and the tail feather is just a big, giant wing nut.”
THE BOSSES’ BLESSING
Kizer’s co-workers keep an eye out for unusual parts.
“All the guys, they bring me things, and they’ll say, ‘This looks like it could be a head for something,’ and they’ll put it on my bench.”
Kizer’s noontime artwork sessions are done with his bosses’ blessing.
“It’s just a fun thing,” Thomsen Jr. said. “When we have slow times, he digs through everything — whether it’s tools or parts — or takes things apart to get to the internal parts. He just finds whatever he can, and lets his imagination take it from there.”
Kizer’s imagination was in full force when he designed and built an owl out of washers, a hoist clamp, brake lines, peg holders and a drive-shaft yoke.
“We ordered a differential … and it came in with the drive-shaft yoke on it, and I said, ‘That looks like bird feet,’ ” he said. “I had it lying around forever, and then I went and bought a whole bunch of washers from Menards, and it started coming together.”
The owl’s eyes proved problematic, however, until inspiration struck one day as Kizer was cleaning up his workbench.
“I found these gauges — a fuel gauge and a water-temperature gauge — in my box, and I thought, ‘Oh, these would be cool for eyes,’ ” he said.
The owl was meant to be a gift for his wife, Patricia, who displays his sculptures in a bookcase in the family’s living room. But she saw it on his workbench one day while he was still working on it and insisted it be a birthday gift for their 16-year-old son, Patrick, who loves owls; the couple also has son Tony, who is 20.
Kizer grew up in New Richmond, Wis., and has worked as an auto mechanic in the Stillwater area for 25 years. He has an associate’s degree in auto mechanics from Century College in White Bear Lake.
He works on all makes and models of cars, but especially enjoys working on classic cars such as the purple 1939 Chevy with gray interior that was in the shop last week. Kizer was in charge of replacing the car’s instrument cluster.
“I like the variety, especially this stuff,” he said, pointing to the classic Chevy. “This is all custom-made. You can’t buy it. You have to either make it or change it so it works, which is fun.”
Kizer, who drives a white 1998 Subaru Forester, said he has simple tastes. “I like it if it’s easy to drive,” he said. “I don’t like manuals. I’m lazy.”
ONE SATISFIED CUSTOMER
Stillwater novelist Chuck Logan is a longtime client of Happy’s; the auto-repair shop is mentioned in at least two of Logan’s books. Kizer made a fish for Logan as a thank-you gift when Logan made a special trip to Happy’s to sign a book as a birthday present for Kizer’s stepfather.
Logan said the fish, which features a wheel-bearing body and a wrench tail, has become a favorite conversation piece in his office.
“I’m not sure if it’s a 12-gauge-wrench-tail sunny or a piranha,” Logan said. “Naturally, it’s a treat to do business with mechanics who read your books, and we’ve been customers at Happy’s going on 20 years. During that time, Happy has been my go-to guy on all things automotive for research purposes, as well as tidbits about Stillwater history.”
Kizer’s latest creation is a cow. He’s welded together two mufflers to create the body and head.
“This (muffler) was from a Jeep that (a co-worker) did the exhaust on,” he said. “The Honda muffler came from the huge scrap Dumpster back there. I just went diving in there digging around. It was going to be a pig, but I couldn’t figure out how to do the face. When I put horns on — Hap Sr. brought these in from some farm implement he had at home, I think they are corn-stalk grabbers from a big combine — it was a cow.”
Kizer said he is drawn to creating silly animals.
“I kind of look at the part and see what it looks like,” he said. “You get to a certain point it doesn’t look like anything, then you put a crown on it, and it’s, like, ‘OK, now it looks like a rooster.’ The eyes are key. When you put eyes on it, it automatically has a personality.”
If the sculpture is starting to become too realistic, Kizer will turn to the Internet, he said.
“If I go on and Google ‘animated cow,’ then it’s easy because everything is exaggerated,” he said. “But if you’re trying to make it look like a real cow, no, it would be too hard.”
He then turned back to his workbench.
“This is where the magic happens,” he said. “See how I tipped his head slightly? So he’s not monotone, looking forward. If I tip his head slightly and google his eyes slightly, he’ll be good to go.”
Mary Divine can be reached at 651-228-5443. Follow her at twitter.com/MaryEDivine.
