Auto Conversions: Boosts for the Ego : Automotive: A Rolls-Royce can be turned into a convertible. And for every car, the huge auto-specialties market has a product to make it stand out in a crowd.

Richard Straman and his crew in Costa Mesa carve sports coupes into convertibles that sell worldwide. Straman will turn a 1991 Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit into a convertible for $75,000--that’s after the owner pays a dealer $152,000 for the car.

For the masses, Straman will convert a $35,000 Nissan 300ZX to a ragtop for a mere $9,500.

Welcome to the world of the automotive specialties market, Orange County style, where for every car there is a product to make it stand out in the crowd.

“It is a huge market,” said Dick Wells, a vice president of SEMA, the Specialty Equipment Market Assn. The Diamond Bar trade group represents manufacturers of automotive specialty items--what used to be called customizing equipment.

“About $7 billion was spent in the retail market in 1989 on specialty items,” Wells said. “And about 25% of that was spent in Southern California.”

The auto specialty market is big here because Southern California is where it began, said David Hillburn, an industry consultant whose Los Angeles-based company specializes in market planning and automotive product introduction studies.

“It all circles around the aggressive nature of our economy in California,” said Steven Fry, founder of Team Tricks companies in Orange and inventor of the now-ubiquitous tailgate net for pickup trucks. “It makes the car an extension of our egos, so a customized, stylized car or truck is an ego-gratifier and ego booster.”

Since the first days of the automobile in this country, Americans have had a love affair with the car and car owners have tried from the start to put a personal stamp on their vehicles.

By the 1960s, automation and the entrepreneurial spirit that pervades the Southland made customizing items available to anyone with a few dollars and a little imagination.

Molded plastics and mass marketing have broadened the market even more since then.

And Orange County, in the heart of the Southland, is a major player in the auto-specialty market.

“All of the car-design studios that are in the forefront on the industry . . . are in Southern California and many of them are in Orange County,” Fry said. Mazda, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Hyundai, Subaru, Isuzu and Daihatsu all have design facilities in Orange County.

“They are all feeding off Southern California’s creative thinking about autos,” he said. “We literally love our cars.”

And as the following profiles indicate, there is a lot to love.

R. Straman Co.: Richard Straman, an avid restorer of exotic European cars, moved his 2-year-old business from Chicago to Costa Mesa in 1971, figuring that California was a bigger market.

He has never looked back.

The company is respected worldwide--originally for high-quality restorations and, since the early 1980s, for the convertible conversions that now make up the bulk of its business.

Straman, who studied auto design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1970s, did his first conversion in 1980, said Mike Musson, Straman’s production supervisor. For that job, he turned a Ferrari Daytona coupe into a ragtop.

But the market for soft-top Ferraris, while lucrative, isn’t large, so Straman turned to General Motors’ popular Camaro and Firebird. By the end of 1983, Straman had done about 100 conversions, which he sold to Chevrolet and Pontiac dealers in Orange and Los Angeles counties--who had no trouble selling the cars for a nearly 50% markup over retail.

Today, Straman’s best-selling convertibles include the Mercedes-Benz 300 and 560 coupes--at $18,500 above the cars’ retail price; the Nissan 300ZX and 300ZX 2+2, at $9,500.

Pacific Auto Accessories Inc.: Bob Richards left Mazda Motor of America in 1978 and started a small business making T-top conversions for the sporty Toyota Celica. The removable metal roof system was a hit, and soon Pacific T-tops, as the Huntington Beach-based company then was called, was churning out conversion kits for a number of popular hardtops.

But Richards, a longtime auto-marketing specialist with an unfulfilled drive to design, wasn’t satisfied just making and installing the removable hardtops.

So in 1979, he turned to Mazda’s revolutionary RX-7 sports coupe, which had been introduced the year before, and designed a so-called ground-effects kit to make the car look like he thought it should.

The resulting set of add-on components--front air dam, rear spoiler and side skirts, all designed to increase the car’s aerodynamics and improve both its sporty look and its handling--started Pacific on a new road.

Today the company, with 140 employees and $10 million in annual sales, makes T-tops only for the Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird. But it has become one of the premier ground-effects kit manufacturers in the country, installing its own products in shops in Huntington Beach and San Diego and shipping kits to body shops across the nation.

Team Tricks Companies Inc.: Steven Fry was one of the early entrepreneurs to spot the potential of the mini-pickup truck market.

He set up shop in Orange in 1979 and introduced his first product the next year: a safety seating system for the bed of small pickups. The state-approved design used a nylon sling similar to the sling in which hang-glider pilots are suspended.

Sales went so well that Fry soon had a slew of competitors. That and growing concerns over product liability persuaded Fry to abandon the seat business, but before he did, he designed a nylon net tailgate replacement.

Fry’s Pro-Net and Pre-Runner nets were a hit with pickup owners--Nissan even contracts with Fry’s company to produce models emblazoned with the Nissan name and logo that it sells through its dealers’ parts departments. By the late 1980s, Pickup Tricks--as the company then was called--was selling 10,000 nets a month.

But like most entrepreneurs, Fry is happiest when creating something new.

To augment the tailgate nets, the company soon made and marketed an entire system of complementary components: from plastic clips to keep the nets’ fastening straps from flapping to molded end caps to cover ugly raw sheet metal left when a truck’s tailgate is replaced.

Boyds Wheels: Boyd Coddington was always a car nut. After moving to Orange County from Idaho in the early 1960s, he began building custom hot rods as a hobby.

The hobby turned into Hot Rods by Boyd in 1977, and Coddington’s showroom-garage-design studio in Stanton gained national renown for its custom street rods.

But Coddington was never quite satisfied. He couldn’t find a set of wheels that did justice to his visions.

So in 1987 he began designing and making his own custom wheels.

Boyds Wheels won’t keep executives at American Racing or Cragar awake nights, but Coddington isn’t aiming to compete with those mainstream custom wheel firms.

His product is for the upper end of the market, the car enthusiast who wants great looking wheels and doesn’t much care about cost.

At the low end, a set of four Boyds Wheels will run $800. At the high end, the two-piece wheels, milled from solid aluminum, run $800 each . That’s $3,200 for a set of four--$4,000 if you want a matching wheel on your spare tire.

Coddington said he didn’t intend at first to sell the wheels retail. “They were for the hot rods I made, but people would see ‘em on the cars and call and ask where they could get a set, so we started making a few for sale.”

Last year, Boyds Wheels employed 77 people, grossed $5 million and sold 72,000 wheels.

Dashshield Inc.: Those ugly, sun-split plastic dashboards always bothered Mark Oyler, who saw a lot of them in the 1970s as proprietor of an auto paint and body shop in Orange.

So the Southern California native, who says he grew up steeped in the region’s car culture, decided to do something about it.

Thus was born the form-fitted velour dashboard cover.

In 1981, with $5,000 borrowed from a friend, Oyler bought a few sewing machines, some tightly woven carpet material and sewed his first covers.

He peddled them to area auto-parts stores the first year. In 1982 his display at the SEMA trade show in Las Vegas caught the eye of an auto enthusiasts’ magazine, which featured the dash cover in a spread on new products.

“People say it and the phones went wild,” Oyler recalls. “I felt like I had gone to Vegas and won a $1-million jackpot.”

By 1984, he had moved the dash-cover business into an 11,000-square-foot building next to his body shop and was employing 75 workers.

Over the years at least 10 workers have left to start their own companies manufacturing cloth-dashboard covers, Oyler said.

Oyler also started over in 1988 after a breakup with his partners in the original company--Dashguard Inc., also in Orange.

He left with about half the company’s $1 million in annual sales and started Dashshield, which currently employs 15 people and has sales of about $500,000 a year.