The Vw Heritage Series now has a title sponsor brought to you by Rancho Transaxles. As many of you know Sam and his crew have been involved in the aircooled Vw Transmission business for countless years and have serviced thousands of transmissions both for Street, Strip, Sand & Dirt.
Rancho Performance Transaxles. based in Fullerton California is the largest transaxle remanufacturing and custom transaxle building facility of its type. Today the company is headquartered in a16,000 sq ft facility and employs 15 full time staff members. On site you’ll find no less than 9 full time work stations, a specialty high performance transmission shop, full machine shop and welding facility, teardown and inspection area with magnuflux capability, new and used parts department and the most knowledgeable transaxle specialists in the industry.
Rancho’s roots date back to the mid 80’s when owner Sam Shackelford and fellow racer Rick Stanchfield, founded the Gear Box Shop in Santa Ana, California. In the late 80’s with business snowballing Rick went racing full time and in 1988 Sam moved the shop to Rancho Cucamonga where he partnered with VW powered dragster builder and pilot, Lyle Berniklau. This shop was a full VW performance facility. In 1993 the transaxle segment of Rancho VW took on a life of its own and the decision was made to split the company into Rancho VW and Rancho Performance Transaxles, the later specializing solely in VW, Porsche transaxle repair and refurbishing along with high end racing and sport transaxles from major manufacturers like PBS, Mendeola, Weddle and Fortin. This second company was located in Anaheim.
In 2004 Lyle retired and the company’s phenomenal growth and reputation world-wide as the number 1 source for transaxle work forced Sam to move into Rancho’s current location in Fullerton, California, just a stone’s through from Disneyland and smack in the middle of the SoCal VW culture.
Today Rancho processes in excess of 3,000 transaxles per year shipping units all over Europe, Canada the Middle East, Asia, Australia, central and south America and just about everywhere in between. Additionally their veteran specialty shop builds sophisticated automatic racing transmissions for a number of the fastest Pro race trucks competing in the Lucas Off Road Racing Series.
When it comes to the media Rancho is the source of choice providing transaxles for use in numerous magazine and television projects, the most recent of which can be found in the legendary Dung Beetle seen on Discovery Channel’s Street Outlaws.
URL: www.ranchotransaxles.com
Phone: 714-680-6737
Email: ranchopartsguy@gmail.com