This story should sound familiar. Boy shows an early aptitude for machinery, and goes out into the world on his own at an early age, tinkering with any motor his friends or acquaintances will let him touch. He turns drag racer in his teens, starts tuning for his friends for beer or parts, and then later for money. He eventually sees a need for some whizzy part that doesn't exist yet, or dreams of finding some elusive bit of engineering info that he thinks will get him down the 1320 at five-hundredths quicker. When he can't find just the right part or tool, he has to go about making it himself...and he ends up in business doing it for everyone else too.

Spud Miller is an automotive mad scientist and the man behind FIE.

This story is told countless times in our rodding and racing history. In this example though, it didn't start sixty years ago. Substitute 2002 in place of 1960 for the start of the business and part of it is rebirth.

Spud Miller grew up attending Stock Car races at the local 1/4 mile dirt track. He served as a pit crew helper at an age where most kids were focused on Saturday Morning Cartoons instead of wrenching on Saturday Night smashboxes doing battle on a dirt oval. His first business venture was "Spud's Specialties"...changing oil and performing ignition tuneups for family friends at the age of 9.

With summer farm jobs funding his efforts, he began to build his first engine at the ripe old age of twelve. A Chevy man from day one, Spud began by building a 350 for the '57 Chevy given to him by his Dad. By age 15, the motor was running and the white shoebox was terrorizing the back country roads of Monroe, Oregon. Equipped with dual quads, a tunnel ram, fenderwell headers, a "nose-up" attitude, and no grille - it was a throwback way before retro-gassers had been thought of as a street style, and Spud was already waxing nostalgic about what it must have been like back in "those good-'ol days." A friend suggested that the Chevy would be right at home on the strip and introduced Spud to drag racing. In the early Eighties, he took the '57 to Woodburn Dragstrip, and spent countless hours and every nickel he could scrounge racing the high-school bracket class.

Attending school to learn the machinists' trade meant giving up racing. Stints as a tool and die maker, designer, CNC programmer/machinist and a long hitch with Hewlett Packard as a software engineer further interrupted all those racing dreams. Then in 2000, twenty years of pent-up drag lust boiled over into the purchase of a very clapped-out front engine dragster shipped to Oregon from New York. Spud spent the next year rebuilding it into "One Hot Chili Pepper," an alcohol-injected bracket fighter. Little did he know this would start the ball rolling on what would later become Fuel Injection Enterprises (FIE) and eventually taking over the famed Super-Mag and Sprintmag product line from Mallory Ignition.

Bracket racing an injected front-engined digger seemed like an uphill battle at first, but Spud had even bigger plans. The goal was sub-seven second runs with a nitro injected, cast iron, 23 degree, low budget, naturally aspirated mouse motor. But info out there on how to use the "nasty-juice" is more legend in the mist than cold hard repeatable facts. So, when you have the ability to design and make your own parts, and want to learn the tiniest detail about how mechanical fuel injection really works, you do the only logical thing imaginable. You build your own computer-controlled flow bench capable of testing a full fuel system and measuring everything about it.

A wee-bit of careful calculating is required to figure out if that perfectly measured flow will do any good at all. Inputs such as compression ratio, runner length, valve overlap, etc. contribute to accuracy when calculating the amount of fuel that will actually burn and not just pass harmlessly out of the exhaust. Spud's background prepared him well for such tasks.

FIE offers a full line of parts, full fuel system flow testing, pump and tune up service. Customers routinely lay down their fastest runs ever, once their systems come back to them flowed, tested, and tuned by Spud and his crew.

FIE was off and running on fuel systems, but getting it lit perfectly became an obsession for Spud. He went back to the mad scientist's workbench and built a magneto stress tester that would put any decent Frankenstein movie lab to shame, complete with full instrumentation, flashing strobe lights and miniature lightning bolts. He could stress test and measure everything about any mag to 11,500 RPM.

After FIE had tested many marginal mags, Spud began applying that engineering improvement drive to solve the problems that needed fixing. The first step was to retro-fit what he calls Severe-Duty Contacts to the big amp Super-Mags. These can be sprung to handle over 10,000 RPM, have no problems with heat and stay aligned perfectly.

Looking to exit the magneto business, Mallory Ignition approached Spud in 2011. FIE had become their top buying mag shop, making them a natural choice to continue the Super-Mag/Sprintmag legacy. "They wanted to make sure they sold it to someone who was going to keep making the parts and pieces to supply customers for years to come." Mags serviced at FIE first get a pre-test to see where things are as received. After complete tear down, cleaning and reassembly with new hardware, the mag is loaded hard, run-in and post-tested. Individual cylinder timing is checked and adjusted and the customer receives a report showing before and after performance.