Model Mentor – Full Circle
Cabe Sipes overcame countless obstacles, joining the cast of MTV’s Pimp My Ride. Today, he’s driven by a love of car audio and a passion for teaching as he shares his knowledge with the industry.
Words by Jamie Sorcher
Cabe Sipes, owner of Custom Audio Reimagined in Rossville, Ind., shared a story full of lessons, twists and turns, beginning in his hometown and leading all the way back to where he first started. Sipes has been in the industry for almost three decades. According to him, the best days of his installing career took place at Best Buy due to the comradery he found with other installers. This led him to become a regular on the dB drag competition circuit. Then he stepped onto the television screen on OLN’s Rock the Boat, followed by joining the cast of MTV’s Pimp My Ride.
None of it, he said, was for money or fame. He did it because it was fun and exciting. Without his wife and kids, he added, he never would’ve reached the point where he is today. “They’re the reason I stay sober and constantly push to be the best,” he said.
In 2023, Sipes accepted the Mobile Electronics Career Achievement Award along with his Pimp My Ride co-stars, Jason Ewing and Michael “Mad Mike” Martin.
At this past KnowledgeFest Atlantic City, Sipes presented along with a panel on “Gorilla Fabrication: Making Magic Without the Machines.” This, he said, is what he loves to do the most: “It’s one of the only times I leave my shop.”
Pimp My Ride.jpg – During the 2023 Industry Awards at KnowledgeFest, Jason Ewing, Michael “Mad Mike” Martin and Cabe Sipes were given the Career Achievement Award. To any installer who wishes to grow, Sipes said, “You have to love learning.”
Seize the Opportunity to Grow
At 15 years old in the early 90s, Sipes went to a shop where his friend was having an amplifier installed in his car. When the friend got the bill for $150, Sipes balked. “I made a comment under my breath that it was a rip-off,” he said. “Well, the guy ringing him out was the installer and he was very offended, so he went out to the parking lot, yanked out the amp, threw it on the seat and said put it in yourself.”
Sipes went ahead and did it. “I wired it up and put it back right there in the parking lot. I had the installer wondering how I knew how to do it. When he asked, I said it was self-explanatory. We started talking at that point. I found out that this installer, Ed Yoder, was from the same town as me.”
This surprised Sipes because Rossville—15 miles east of Lafayette, where Purdue University is located—was a town of 1,200 at the time. “It’s where my shop is today. In every interview I’ve ever given, I want to mention Ed and give him credit because I was a juvenile delinquent and a troublemaker. When he heard my name, he knew exactly who I was, and he could have very easily blown me off.”
Instead, Yoder gave him an opportunity. “He invited me to his house because he did side installs in his garage.” At the time, Sipes said, Yoder was working on installing four eight-inch Crunch subwoofers and amplifiers into a Monte Carlo. “He asked me if what he was doing made sense to me. It did,” Sipes recalled. “That’s when I realized I knew how electronics worked without having had any education.”
Sipes knew how everything should be wired, he said. “It just clicked. If he’d dismissed me and never showed me that Monte Carlo, I probably wouldn’t be doing car audio and I never would’ve been exposed to it. I have no idea what I’d be doing now if things had gone differently.”
Evolve into the Best Version of Yourself
Sipes didn’t graduate high school. He was arrested at 17. “Three kids broke into the high school, robbed it and lit it on fire,” he said. “I used to break into cars and steal stuff, then take it to the next city over and sell it.” Despite this, his goal was to join the military. At 16, he enlisted in the National Guard and at 17, promised himself he was done with his past. “I didn’t want to screw it up. I stopped doing illegal and stupid things. But the kids who broke into the high school stole computer parts, drove around town and came to my place because they knew I knew how to sell it.”
When the kids took the stuff out of the trunk, Sipes said, “I told them to take it and leave. They did, but then they got picked up.”
When asked, the kids told the police where they’d gone, Sipes said, so “they came and questioned me.” Then, they discovered a CD-ROM the kids had dropped in the yard when they’d taken the stolen property out of the trunk.
“They arrested me for possession.” Although his parents bailed him out, Sipes said there were additional charges such as arson and conspiracy. “I went to trial and was found not guilty of everything except for receiving stolen property because of the CD-ROM they found in the yard. I was expelled from high school. I went and got my GED. The military dropped me.”
Although he’d hoped for probation because it was his first offense, Sipes went to prison for three years. “I got out when I was 21, went to a bar and became an alcoholic,” he said. But then, he got a job as an installer at the Lafayette Best Buy. “I still loved car audio. I worked there for five years and became a district manager, a regional trainer and an MECP proctor. I started doing custom fiberglass work. But I was still an alcoholic.”
After another arrest, Sipes chose to turn things around for his young daughter. After he quit drinking, he approached the manager at Best Buy and told him he wanted to be in the store from open to close. “I wanted to work non-stop,” he said. “I didn’t want to start drinking again.” Best Buy became a place where Sipes felt comfortable enough to grow and free enough to be creative. It opened the door for the next opportunity and gave him the chance to mentor other installers. In 2004, he went for Top 12 Installer.
“I was still at Best Buy and being among the Top 12 was unheard of at that time for someone working at a big box store,” he said.
But because he was making so much money for the company, Best Buy corporate approached him, giving him his own fabrication area so he could do even more. His store became the test location for the only custom install bay for Best Buy in the entire country. It also gave him more opportunities to share his knowledge, which is something he said he’s always enjoyed.
“I would go to other stores to do trainings, observe their bays and see if I could find other installers who could do what I was doing, or people I could teach. I taught how to do A-pillars with tweeters using CA glue so there was no mixing of resin.” He also taught installers how to make their own custom speaker adapters, and how to make plates. “We didn’t have 3D printers at that time,” he added.
Today, Sipes loves teaching and mentoring. “If I could teach full-time, I would,” he said, adding that he enjoys getting someone to think in a different way. “If I can introduce some new tool or new material to an installer, but not tell them what to do with it—just give them that opportunity and let them learn something new—that’s special to me.”
At that point, he added, he’s not even teaching, “it’s rewiring their brain. They’re teaching themselves how to use something new or try something different. That’s so much better than someone just telling them how.”
From SEMA to Pimp My Ride and Right Back Home Again
Sipes found direction and inspiration in Car Audio & Electronics magazine. The work of well-known installers stood out to him, among them Dave “Fishman” Rivera and Gary Biggs. This led him to experimenting with fiberglass. “I looked at images in the magazine and tried to decipher what had been done and how. I was amazed. That’s how I found Select Products.” According to Sipes, this was the first company to sell anything for custom installations, and that’s where custom shops purchased their fiberglass resin and mold fabric. Sipes still owns the full set of Rob Garza’s recordings on how to carbon fiber and work with custom acrylic, lighting and motorization.
“He was ahead of his time,” Sipes said, adding that Garza set him on an unexpected adventure. “He’d heard about me and found out I was at Best Buy with a custom bay and I was buying his stuff.” Garza went out of his way, he said, to elevate Sipes’s name in the industry. “He even helped me get some of my cars featured in Mobile Electronics magazine.”
In 2005, he invited Sipes to be on Team East Coast for an installer challenge in Las Vegas at SEMA—his first major opportunity. The build took place over 48 hours in the parking lot at SEMA with five installers from the east coast and five from the west coast. At first, his fellow teammates didn’t like him because he came from a big box store, he said. But by the middle of the day, they were impressed, “and asking me how I did it,” Sipes said, adding, “I wound up becoming friends with all of them and we’re still friends to this day.”
During the challenge, Sipes met John West, who owned a company called Ultra Custom Boats. “These boats were on Fear Factor, giant half-million-dollar cigarette-style speed boats with custom, lavish designs.” West saw Sipes’s fiberglass work, he said, and told him he wanted him to do the same thing to his boats. “He wanted to know if I would relocate to California. I was stuck in this black hole in Indiana, but this could be a big break, so I told him I would do it. I talked Jason Ewing into coming with me even though I’d only just met him and knew him for a total of 48 hours.”
When they worked on a boat for Jesse James, host of Monster Garage, another door opened. “A production crew showed up at the shop and said they were there to shoot a pilot. OLN bought the pilot, which was called Rock the Boat, and gave us TV contracts. Me and Jason were the sound boys. Before the end of the season, I got a call from Viacom. They needed a fabricator for Pimp My Ride. I went to Los Angeles to meet with the producers.” Once a contract was agreed upon, Sipes and Ewing moved to Los Angeles and Sipes was on the show for two years.
Afterward, he returned to Indiana where his family owns a farm that’s been in the family since the 1840s. “I built a house there, right behind my mom and dad’s place. My sister lives across the field from me.” The big barn where he first began his installation work—where he built cars as a teenager—is where his shop is now. “I’m right back where I started 33 years ago,” he said.
Emulate Those You Respect, and Learn to Love Learning
Sipes named two people he respects and admires: Loyd Ivey and Alma Gates. He hopes to carry on their tradition of treating people with kindness, he said, adding that he went to SEMA as a nobody. “But there was a guy in a wheelchair at the MTX booth who started talking to me, and I found out later it was Loyd Ivey, the owner of MiTek. I had no idea who I was talking to. I thought he was another attendee. When I introduced myself, he realized I was the guy he heard about from Best Buy. He was really nice.”
When Sipes saw him again a year later, he said, “‘Hey, Cabe,’ and the fact that he remembered my name and went out of his way to talk to me meant so much to me. At any event after that, he always went out of his way to talk to me. He was the first bigwig in the industry who was kind to me. He was just a nice guy who was genuinely interested in what I thought of his equipment and what I thought about the industry.”
That’s exactly who Alma Gates was, too, Sipes said. “She was the grandmother of car audio. Ask anybody in the industry and they’ll tell you that.”
Her Bronco, dubbed “The Beast,” shattered many SPL records before she retired from competition in 2006. At 70 years old, she was a respected competitor in sound off contests. When Sipes met her, he said, “she was so kind to me. Those two people showed me that car audio is like a family. It made me want to go to shows even more.”
This is how Sipes intends to mentor others whenever he has the opportunity. “Now, I’m on the other side of that fence,” he said, adding that when he’s on the show floor, installers don’t always want to approach him. “Maybe they think I won’t acknowledge them. But if an installer comes up to me, I will go out of my way to talk to them for 20 or 30 minutes. I will have a real conversation. If I see them again at another show, I will go up to them and talk to them. I want to do the same thing for them that others did for me.”
According to Sipes, car audio was amazing in the 90s and early 2000s. For those coming up in the industry today—those who want to find a mentor, advance their career or start their own venture—he offered some advice. Cars, he said, have become smarter than the installers. “As soon as CAN-BUS hit the scene, that was it. As soon as cars had a networking system and required installers to flash modules, understand laptops and understand programming, that’s when things changed.”
If you want to be an installer, he said, “You have to love learning. You must love being a nerd. You can’t just know DC voltage. That’s nothing new. You need to have some kind of drive to want to know how things work, instead of just doing something to get paid. If you’re in it for the money, this will never work for you.”
