The first engine Glenn Cattani ever built.

Glenn Cattani isn’t the son of a gearhead parent, and he did not have any hot rods growing up, but somewhere along the way maybe his DNA was influenced by the 1965 Mustang fastback his father owned ten years prior to Glenn’s birth.

“We live in Canada, so he had studded snow tires and drove it like he stole it during the winter months. What else is there to do in the winter?” says Cattani.

He didn’t pick up his first muscle car until the age of 29, in 2007. “It had a clapped out 350 SBC, holes in all quarters the size of an open hand, and waterlogged shocks all around,” he says.

His second engine build.

Cattani drove this car every day while fixing up what he could in his single car garage at night, and this car proved to be the testbed for some of his first engine rebuilds. Apparently the Z was also a testbed for the relationship with a girl he met while he was driving it – they ended up getting married in it, so she obviously has good taste.

Catani still has his wife, but the original small-block Chevy engine that was in the Z is long gone. Not knowing anything about cars or engines back then, he picked up a “ran when I pulled it” small-block from some guy’s garage floor for the paltry sum of $100. Since then, the engine in the car has been replaced three times. The car that carried the happy couple on their wedding day now has a punched-out 454 big block in it that makes use of a pump-gas-friendly 10.5:1 compression ratio and is backed by a TREMEC TKO-600 5-speed transmission. Glenn has since redone the suspension, the interior, added a cage, and learned how to weld during the process. From the sounds in the background on our phone call he better add a baby seat as well.

He caught our attention at EngineLabs with the fact that he has gone from the naive guy buying an engine from someone’s garage floor to rebuilding and selling engines to customers to fund his own habit – the true definition of Homegrown Horsepower. The customers can hear and physically run their potential purchases on his home built engine stand. This eliminates the ‘ran when I pulled it’ stigma and now a customer can turn the key and slam the throttle to test out their new beast.

The garage-built test stand.

All of his builds come with a picture library as well as all dimensions verified so that everyone is comfortable. D&W Custom Engines in Alberta, Canada does the actual machine work and Glenn does all the dis-assembly, assembly, blueprinting, testing and break-in on all the engines by himself. To assist in the process, he’s outfitted his library with nearly every Car Tech book produced that covers a wide range of topics and engine specifics.

The way he has progressed so far, it might not be too long before Glenn Cattani is a household name in the performance industry. You never know – many businesses in this industry were started in someone’s garage.