DAMON JONES

b500 magazine

Engineered by Damon

English-born, Damon Jones is an experienced manufacturing operations professional with a celebrated history of working successfully at a senior level for numerous prestigious brands in the automotive industry. Not your typical shirt wearing engineer, Damon wears his personality on his sleeve, quite literally! This tattooed, bearded Porsche enthusiast is mad for mid century architecture and when you meet him you’ll quickly realise how keen an eye for detail he has.

Ifounded my company ‘Engineered by Damon’ (EBD) with the vision to support, grow, and develop companies utilising my expertise and experience which I have accumulated over the last twenty years working for some of the world’s leading companies in the automotive industry. I work with a range of companies from fresh new startups, to established companies by helping them to develop their individual strategies required to support and ramp up their vehicle production and in turn support their introduction of class leading and quality products to the marketplace in a timely manner. We are exploring the field of high quality, bespoke limited run projects in collaboration with other companies in our industry as well as our own stand-alone ventures. Leading my own company has certainly removed any shackles and given me the freedom to finally explore my artistic flair and entrepreneurial side.

I look forward to using my space in b500 magazine to showcase projects I am working on. Whilst I wait for the embargos to be lifted on some of these ‘skunkwerks’ projects, I can talk about a personal passion project in this issue:

I’m a hard man to please but ironically I’d like to introduce you to ‘pleaseyesplease’s’ Creative Director Lee Schulz. I originally reached out to Lee with a proposal to build a famous mid century home for me in Los Angeles...in Lego! A project that I quickly learnt is not an easy undertaking. Whilst that project comes to fruition behind closed doors via plenty of zoom design reviews, I’d like to share another Lego project Lee and I have been working on together in the meantime. Say hello to ‘Project Black Brick’ which Lee first introduced to me as the ‘Mr Jones version’ The project outline I gave Lee was pretty simple - please build me an all black Lego classic Porsche 911 which would look like something I’d build and drive personally in real life.

Behind this project is a deep love for the 911 silhouette. The design was prototyped and refined through several iterations to deliver a well-balanced and beautiful scale model take on a classic Porsche 911 perfect for display. ‘Project Black Brick’ is loaded with authentic scale details like front amber indicator lenses and chrome detailed headlights (we even mixed a bespoke paint with one of our automotive paint suppliers), chrome centre filler cap, side mirrors, door handles, rear tail lights with chrome accents, rear engine intake grille and a dual exhaust. This model seats a mini-figure comfortably in a finished interior and includes black BBS style wheels with the perfect stance. This model is sure to bring big smiles to the faces of Porsche fans of all ages!

This model is set apart by the high level of refinement and attention to detail brought to the brick-based medium resulting in a unique collector’s piece you can build with your own hands. This is a bespoke build which utilises a handful of different suppliers and unique parts and for me has strong nuances to building a real car but on a much smaller scale, which I really enjoyed - The sourcing of vendors, regular project meetings, a prototype build, design changes, generation of process instructions and a build sequence. We didn’t need a final road test of course but each individual part is inspected by the EBD Quality department prior to joining a kit. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, building Lego kits is great training for manufacturing.

You’ll be pleased to know that ‘Project Black Brick’ will be available to purchase through the EBD website store at www.engineeredbydamon.com in the coming weeks.