The shop
Our story
I was seventeen when I started INR.
I had dropped out of high school. No grades worth mentioning, no backup plan, nothing on paper that said I would amount to much. By every normal measure, I wasn’t supposed to make it this far.
What I had was a gravel driveway, a set of tools, and an obsession I couldn’t shake.
The obsession started years earlier. When we were kids, our uncle moved back up from Florida in a BMW M3, an E46 in Carbon Black. My two older brothers and I stood in front of that car, and something in all three of us changed for good. That was the day BMW got into our blood. Flavius, the oldest, bought one first. Brandon and I followed. We’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.
In 2019 I started wrenching on my own car in our driveway. Then my friends’ cars. Then friends of friends. One thing led to another, and by mid-2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, I took every dollar I had and put it into my first shop.
Calling it a shop is generous. It was a shed. Four hundred and fifty square feet, barely big enough to fit half a car. Literally. Cars sat with the back half inside and the front half hanging out the door, exposed to whatever Vancouver, WA decided to do that day. On rainy days the roof leaked, dripping onto the floor and soaking through my shirt while I worked underneath the car. It was not glamorous. But that shed is where the craft started becoming what it is now.
People ask what INR stands for. It’s my name: Isaiah Nicklas Rusnak. When your own name is on the door, there is nowhere to hide.
Every weld, every fitment, every finish either honors it or it doesn’t. That standard was born in the shed, and it has never left.
I never built this alone. Our dad spent more than eighteen years around autobody work, and his guidance kept me pointed in the right direction. My brothers were there from the beginning too, lending hands after their own jobs, on late nights and weekends whenever the work piled up.
The three of us grew up racing together on the simulator, lapping the Nürburgring for hours. That’s why a Nürburgring decal hung on the shop wall, and it’s coming with us to the next one. It isn’t decoration. It’s a root.
As word spread, we grew. The shed became a two-thousand-square-foot shop that could finally fit two cars at once. Then another shop. Then another. Every move was made possible by the trust our customers placed in us.
In March of 2024, a Lamborghini Gallardo rolled through our doors. It was the first exotic we were trusted to build a full custom exhaust for. That build proved something we had believed all along: the same care we brought to a friend’s BMW in a gravel driveway could stand next to any car in the world.
In June 2024, Flavius left his career in construction behind and joined INR as co-owner. He’ll be the first to admit he didn’t see the vision in the early days. What won him over was watching me chase this dream relentlessly, year after year, until believing in it was the only option left. It was never going to be one brother working for the other. We joined forces as equals.
Today he handles the technical backbone of the shop: CAD work, precision engineering, exhaust flow decisions, and the digital side of everything we do. In 2026, Brandon left his role as general manager at a high-end dealership and came aboard to create our content, manage our advertising, and work alongside me in the shop.
Today, INR FAB operates out of Portland, serving enthusiasts, businesses, and performance shops across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. We’ve outgrown every space we have ever occupied, and as we write this, we’re securing the next long-term home INR deserves.
Thousands of people follow our journey now, but the number we care about most is one: the next customer who trusts us with their car. We’re not interested in building the most exhaust systems. We’re focused on building the best ones.
This is more than fabrication. It’s a legacy we’re building for the next generation of our family, with cousins already lining up to join. A company started by a seventeen-year-old dropout in a gravel driveway, founded on quality, driven by passion, and committed to building exhausts that look incredible, perform flawlessly, and sound unforgettable.
Welcome to INR Fabrication.
Isaiah Nicklas Rusnak
Founder, INR FAB LLC