These passionate riders turn out production buggies while attracting a following with their savvy social media.

 

It was about 11 years ago when an off-roader from Georgia brought his tube-chassis buggy to Jake Burkey for fabrication work.

Burkey, a mechanical engineer who had a day job as a project manager at a nuclear plant, was tinkering with off-road vehicle fabrication and repairs on the side.

Although he had worked on many off-road vehicles since he was a teenager and had beaten his own Jeep Wrangler into submission on the trails of the Southeastern US, this buggy changed his life.

“I’ll never forget,” Burkey said. “When that thing dropped off the trailer, I said, ‘I’m dedicating my life to this.’”

He recalled the story with a laugh, but he wasn’t kidding.

By 2018 Burkey’s commitment to building full-size off-road buggies would lead to his partnership with Busted Knuckle Films founder Matt Myrick. Together, they launched Busted Knuckle Off Road. Myrick, who has a degree in construction management, and Burkey have offices side-by-side in their 26,000-square-foot shop in Cullman, Alabama.

A unique combination of engineering innovation and social media savvy has them producing $100,000-plus production volume buggies and attracting online followers by the hundreds of thousands.

Appropriately, the two 38-year-olds met through off-road events where Myrick had filmed Burkey’s “big wrecks.”

“I think I can do the technical side and you could do the marketing side,” Burkey recalled telling Myrick. “We could really build something.”

That’s exactly what they’ve done. After just five years from building the first custom buggies, Busted Knuckle Off Road is knocking out a turnkey production buggy about every three to four weeks while also creating a parts inventory—much of it designed and manufactured in-house—of around 4,000 products.

The company’s “rock bouncers,” a handful built for racing, have sold across the United States and beyond. Busted Knuckle parts also sell worldwide to off-roaders who retrofit their own rides.

“We’ve been able to have 22 employees and grow to where we’re at in a very short period of time,” Burkey said. “We’ve built buggies and took them all over the world.”

While Myrick had established the Busted Knuckle brand—so named for the willing sacrifice of he and his friends in college while feverishly wrenching on their off-road rigs to get back to the trail—it went to a new level when Burkey started doing tech videos. He believes it added to the notoriety from his daredevil off-roading videos and buggy racing success.

“It positioned me as a professional in the industry,” he said. “We’ve grown the business around that.”

 

Parts Drive Revenue

Buggy building once meant welding one-off creations in a basement or garage, but the market has changed.

“Polaris and some other companies started doing the four-wheeler thing and really hit the nail on the head when they started doing the side-by-sides. That really exploded,” Burkey said. “Being able to make it simple for people to own and get into the hobby is why Polaris is so successful.”

He says Busted Knuckle is doing the same, though at a higher price point and with larger vehicles.

“We’re bringing a market to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to be in that market,” he said. “Not everybody has fabrication skills. Not everybody has a welder and a torch. But everybody thinks off-roading is a blast.”

Busted Knuckle generates some $5 million in manufacturing and retail sales annually. While the buggies rightly get most of the attention—who can look away from a 700-horsepower, powder-coated beast, available with a supercharger and rear steering, with 43-inch tires?—it is the retail components that produce some 80% of the revenue.

“Building a widget, putting it in a box, and shipping it out is much more profitable than building these buggies, because I just have so much manpower that goes into them,” Burkey said. “We’re more of a manufacturer than anything.”

He said most of the parts are designed and manufactured with the goal of retailing them. Current hot sellers include a lightweight brake rotor package, weatherproof relay/fuse center, and a ball joint eliminator kit.

Automation became critical when Busted Knuckle switched from custom to production building. Burkey studied how to “scale” the work, “and that’s where the automation came in,” he said.

He trained himself in Solidworks and CAD and began to meld design and manufacturing. Busted Knuckle’s body mount tabs are a good example.

“I can send a file to the laser and have it cut 1,000 of those…and you have a product you can retail, and a product you can train an employee to build,” he said.

Busted Knuckle has a Haas VF-4 Series vertical machining center that produces yokes, sway bar arms, brake hats, transmission adapters, and other parts; and an Okuma four-axis mill-turn lathe with a large bed used to spline its own axle shafts and cut and turn link bars and handles for their rear steering mechanism.

A Dragon Tube and Pipe Plasma Cutter from Bend-Tech uses software that automatically creates bending patterns and notches in tubing, and a plasma head that cuts and engraves the tubing.

“Our entire structure is built out of tubing, and the body panels are attached to the tubing, so it makes the assembly extremely rigid,” Burkey said. “It’s just a lot stronger way to build. Our entire chassis is built off of that machine.”

Busted Knuckle’s latest machine purchase is a 2022 Bodor laser cutter, a 6,000-watt machine with a “fiber” laser, known to cut faster and finer than CO2 lasers.

It’s economical for cutting and engraving, but it’s especially valuable for cutting thick metal, such as the 3/8 plate used for Busted Knuckle’s Ultra Light rotor brake package, at extremely tight tolerances.

The laser cuts the holes where body panels bolt to the chassis, and laser engraves the bend borders and bend locations right onto the part. “So I can take that plate and go straight over to the CNC press brake, and it will have a line going across the part and it will say bend here, up 25 degrees,” he said.

The “very popular” automatic self-centering rear-steer kit controlled by a joystick is another recent engineering feat for Busted Knuckle. “You grab the joystick and turn it left or right, the rear tires turn left or right. As soon as you stop turning with the rear joystick, the tires automatically come back to straight and stay there,” Burkey said. “It increases the maneuverability of the vehicle 10-fold. It allows you to dodge obstacles, it allows you to climb at different angles, it allows you to show off to your friends and be the coolest person at the Christmas parade.”

Burkey said Busted Knuckle’s latest accomplishment is the release of its T4 model four-seat buggy. “We are most excited to reach a larger audience by allowing families to off-road together,” he said.

The T4 can actually accommodate five people if the passengers are children, he added.

 

Parts On the Shelf

All Busted Knuckle buggies, available in Ride, Vision, and T4 models, have a 17-digit VIN number, allowing customers to order replacement parts with ease.

Todd Ryon of Oneida, Tennessee, bought his Ride unit in December 2021 after having witnessed the durability of a Busted Knuckle buggy at King of the Hammers.

“That terrain is so demanding; it’s brutal,” he said. “To keep a buggy together for six to seven days and not break an axle, not break a driveshaft…it’s something that is built well.”

Not having to locate and then replace parts while on a trip is valued for those who trailer their buggies across the country to ride. “You can go out there and have peace of mind,” he said. “When I get there, I’m riding!”

When he does need parts, often “self-induced,” Busted Knuckle’s customer service is “second to none.

“Everything that’s on my buggy they can pull it up and send you the exact replacement part. The parts are on the shelf,” Ryon said.

A smooth ride is what convinced Jerry Hoover and his wife, Marsha, of Monterey, Tennessee, to purchase a Ride unit in July 2022.

In a test ride at the Busted Knuckle property, they launched off a jump about 5 feet into the air (Burkey went twice that high in his demonstration) with the rough landings of past buggies as a reference point. In the Busted Knuckle unit, “it was like landing on a pillow,” said Hoover.

“You notice what you pay for,” he said, crediting Busted Knuckle’s use of shock bypasses.

Like Ryon, Hoover values the durability of Busted Knuckle parts. “Going out with other guys with Busted Knuckle buggies, and watching them beat on these things, I had a much higher appreciation about how damn solid they are,” he said, “and I’ve become much more aggressive in my driving.”

 

Social Media

Burkey said the tight-knit off-road industry in the Southeast has been following him on social media since he was a teen working on Jeeps “in the rocks” of his driveway. Combined with Myrick’s spectacular filming, they’ve been “really successful in creating the brand” and attracting followers.

There are the buggies, of course, and their wild rides up boulder-filled creeks and seemingly impossible rock faces, but there are also plugs for parts sales, merchandise, and sponsors. An ESAB welder, a can of WD-40, or a Baileigh Industrial machine might be integrated into videos for these valued sponsors, subliminally or quite obviously.

It has resulted in Busted Knuckle Films having more than 833,000 YouTube subscribers.

Myrick stressed that fancy equipment is not required for filming. “It can all be done on your phone,” he said. “Always focus on the story you are trying to tell, and make sure it is something you are passionate about.”

Yet social media success is not as simple as merely having content. “You have to be different. You have to be unique,” Burkey said. “You have to have a niche that’s something that’s better than everybody else or more intriguing than everybody else.”

Posting frequency alone isn’t enough. “People say you’ve got to post twice a day. Well, if it’s about something nobody cares about, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’ve got to post twice a day and have content that people find amusing, informative, and also intriguing.”

Burkey believes Busted Knuckle has become successful because it is an industry leader that is effecting change. “We come out with products and we test them, and then it filters to the market. People want our products because of the brand and our success,” he said.

It doesn’t hurt, he acknowledged, that “we’re always doing something crazy.

“We built a 1,600-hp off-road buggy with a big block running on alcohol with 35 pounds of boost,” he rattled off. “I mean, it’s a Pro Mod, five-second drag car motor in an off-road buggy.”

That particular ride was so popular it inspired the creation of a toy RC car, the Axial Ryft, that is sold worldwide in retail stores.

A vehicle that bold speaks to Busted Knuckle’s drive to break boundaries. But for those seeking success in a high-performance business, Burkey’s advice is much more controlled. He relates it to his switch from custom to production buggy building.

“The number-one thing I would always suggest to somebody in business is don’t let people drive your vision for success,” he said. “You get a young guy who’s starting a business and has this vision…and thinks that he has to say ‘yes’ to every single client and every idea they come up with no matter how absurd it is. If you don’t think it’s going to work, don’t do it,” he said.

“You have to trust your gut. And doublecheck your gut with your mind,” Burkey concluded.

Trail Responsibility

Busted Knuckle Off Road sells a range of gear designed to help build its brand.

It includes the typical—hats, shirts, and hoodies—but also neoprene magnetic coozies, Croc charms, and trail trash sacks. The latter builds the brand not only through the product, but by how it’s used.

“You’ve got a place to put trash—yours or that found along the trail,” said Jake Burkey. “It helps the image of off-roading people. We’re also cleaning the trails up because it’s the right thing to do.”

The bags are very popular. “It sounds weird saying it, but they want to be like us,” he said about customers. “We’re out there acting like fools; they’re going to act like fools. We’re out there picking up trash, they pick up trash, too.” —Andy Heintzelman