Twenty Years of Kartboy and Turn In Concepts

If you've shopped for Subaru shifter parts in the last two decades, you've seen Kartboy parts on the Turn In Concepts site and TiC parts bundled alongside Kartboy's. People sometimes get confused or assume one is copying the other. The actual case is a different story. It is a twenty-year handshake deal that started with a backpack, two hundred dollars, and a guy who didn't feel like filling out customs forms.

Join us as we chat with Tom (founder of Kartboy) and with Clint and Daniel from Turn In Concepts to give us a history lesson on this longstanding friendship.

The Backpack of Bushings

The story starts in December 2004, before Turn In Concepts was technically a company. Clint and his business partner Tony had made a set of shift linkage bushings for the STI, and they took them out to the JGTC race in Los Angeles in a backpack.

"We sold them to anybody that had a Subaru STI at the time, which was pretty funny," Clint says. "Just sell them out of a backpack. And there were guys that were thrilled to buy them."

They sold enough to make it worth doing properly. Turn In Concepts opened officially in January 2005, operating out of Clint's dining room. Which he didn't move down to the basement until Christmas came around and the table was needed for wrapping presents.

Priorities folks. Priorities. 

Kartboy had a five-year head start. Tom had filed the paperwork in early 1999, machining shifters by hand on a lathe at the aerospace company where he worked. By 2005 he had a small catalog of urethane bushings, shifters, knobs, endlinks, and a handful of dealers.  

And then Clint found him on NASIOC.

"Tony and I had started autocrossing my '04 STI more and more, and we were getting really frustrated because every time we went to grab a gear, going from second up to third, we'd hang up the shifter," Clint says. They tried Tom's front shifter stay bushing. Which helped, but it wasn't built for the problem they had. So they made their own part and then noticed that Tom's bushing sat right next to where theirs went.

Tom’s $200 Dollar Buy-In

The pitch was simple: if a customer is already installing a TiC bushing, they should have Tom's bushing in the same box.

Kartboy had a minimum buy-in for dealers. Two hundred dollars.

"I took all of the cash that Turn In Concepts had from selling bushings for thirty dollars and talked to Tom," Clint says. 

"I said, hey, this is what we want to do.” so Clint scraped together $193, Tom waived the difference and sent him some STI front stay bushings.

They bundled the two parts together. The bundles sold. Then they ordered more. Those sold too. By spring of 2005 the operation had gotten way bigger than the dining room. The next TiC product — rear diff mount bushings for the GD chassis got the same treatment, which ended up bundled with Tom's T-bar and outrigger bushings in soft and hard.

That became the pattern, and it never really changed. "Basically, anytime that we brought out a product, we looked at what was nearby. And if Tom made something that went nearby, we made a bundle."

The Agreement

Underneath the bundling is an agreement neither of them ever wrote down: Kartboy and TiC don't make the same part.

"We've always had a gentleman's agreement not to do the same parts. There's no reason," Tom said. "He does fantastic work. We did fantastic work. Why not combine a lot of those parts instead of making the same part over and over and over again?"

Both of them trace the agreement to one specific part. Tom had posted a prototype photo of a rear shifter stay bushing on the Kartboy site,  his brother had hand-machined the first ones, and the original still exists somewhere in a box at Kartboy HQ, chunky and boxy and cast out of whatever was lying around the shop. 

"I was like, hey, if you're not going to make these, I'd like to," Clint says. "And he was like, okay, I'll make them."

Tom's version is shorter: "It was the kick in the pants to actually do something."

Clint bought most of the first batch.

Kartboy International

The other half of the relationship had nothing to do with bundles. Somewhere in the mid-2000s, Kartboy wasn’t shipping internationally. And it was not for any strategic reason.

"I was too lazy to do all the paperwork on that," Tom laughed.

So he started forwarding international orders to Cincinnati. For years afterward, anyone outside the US who tried to order Kartboy parts direct got pointed at Turn In Concepts.

"Deal with TiC," Tom says.

The Tall Boy

The collaboration also produced parts that wouldn't exist otherwise. About ten years ago, an employee at TiC named Eric kept pestering Clint about the shift lever.

"He's like, man, I really want a Kartboy lever, but I don't want to reach so far for the knob. Can Tom make me one that's taller?"

Tom made one. Eric put it in his car. TiC called it the Tall Boy, because why not, and it turned out to be a preference for a lot of drivers. They ordered more, put it in a bundle, and started selling it.

The height wasn't arbitrary, either — it's about an inch over stock, and that's the ceiling. Any taller and the shifter lockout cable runs out of travel. "Unless we made a custom cable," Tom says, "and nobody's going to spend another two hundred bucks for a custom cable."

What it looks like now

Tom has handed the day-to-day over to the Kartboy crew, which mostly means he's back doing the part of the job he actually likes. He just finished a 360-square-foot workshop in his backyard in San Diego, which nobody outside this call has seen yet. He's using it to build the stuff that doesn't fit a production run. One-off trophies. Engine plates. Whatever the Kartboy guys need prototyped. Halfway through the conversation Daniel was already lining up the next job, sending him a file to cut a batch of engine tags, and Tom's still putting hours into Bucky Lasek's GC projects on the side.

"Just give me a shop, give me a hammer, let me make some noise and beat some metal around, and I'm happy as can be," Tom says. "I'll admit I hated all that back-end stuff." 

On the TiC side, Daniel came on full time about two years ago to run the sales and website side of things, after nearly a decade of selling both brands parts from a shop in Toronto. 

"The TiC x KB shifter kits were by far the most popular we sold, and I had them on both my 5spd and 6spd setups on my personal car. Many got sold because customers could literally feel the shifter in the parking lot. They sold themselves."

Daniel always found it easy to showcase a product he believed in.

The orders still go out the same way. "I just dropped a PO to the Kartboy kids today," Clint mentioned on the call.

Which brings us back to the thing that prompted this whole conversation. When you see Kartboy parts on the Turn In Concepts site, or a TiC bundle with a Kartboy shifter in it, there's no mystery about it. 

"We're not knocking them off," Clint says. "Where do you think we buy them from?"

So whether you're shopping with our friends at Turn In Concepts, or right here at home with Kartboy - you can find the kit you need for your Subaru. Build it piece by piece with our Shift Kit Builder or check out the various kit combos the TiC guys put together.  

And there you have it, the history of the Turn In Concepts x Kartboy friendliness.