Company History - Going Back To 1958!
If you can imagine a type of manifold, Prairie Auto Porcelain has probably coated it at one time or another. The marques that the company has built it's foundation on include such storied companies as Duesenberg, Packard, Pierce Arrow, Cadillac, Lincoln, Auburn, Cord, Jaguars, Stearns Knight, Aston Martin, MG, Austin-Healy, Triumph, Ferrari, Masserati, Dupont, Durrant, Chrysler, are just a few. Cleveland, Indian, and Harley Davidson motorcycles, just to name a few of the two wheeled variety. Too many to name and thousands of jobs later, our work speaks for itself.
The beginnings of our company take root in the late 1950s with our founder, Mike Mikkelsen. Growing up in the 1940s on a ranch near Lewistown Montana, it was said that Mike owned his first car, a 1927 Model T, by the age of 9. From that early point on, automobiles with a "personality" were a passion. He graduated high school in Lewistown in 1951, and afterward pursued undergraduate stufies at Colorado A&M and a masters of arts from Montana State University, and a masters of fine arts degree in ceramics at the University of Minnesota.
It was around this time that Mike began to use his school experience to experiment with coating cast iron with porcelain. Many of the large opulent automobiles of the 1920s, 1930s, and beyond, had porcelain coated manifolds. By the 1950s, and with many of those early autos now being collected, shown, and toured, there arose a need for the porcelain to be redone. Mike saw the need for a service in the form of refurbishing old porcelain coated manifolds, and coupled with a business surrounding automobile restoration, Prairie Auto Restoration was born and rooted in Southern Minnesota.
The process is an old one, but improved with 21st century technology. To quote Mike, "We pursue the technique of porcelain as an art, and take great care and pride in the finished product." Current managing partner, Nathan Sparrow, joined the Prairie Auto Porcelain team in 1993, learning the process from the founder himself, spending 7 or so years with him on the manifold coating side of the business. The business was eventually sold, and later on after another party had owned and operated the porcelain coating business, Nathan and his father Tom Sparrow bought the business in 2005 with the intent to continue the legacy started with Nate's early years with Mike. The company is now based out of Dennison Minnesota, and the process remains the same from Mike Mikkelsen's early formulation and experimentation going back to 1958.