In this episode of FireTalk we interview Morgan Evans about the fire she had in her Nissan Titan swapped S13, growing up in a car family, future projects, and why she chose H3R Performance to protect all her builds. She had some great advice and we were grateful she took the time to share with us!
Teresa:
Welcome everyone to firetalk. I am very excited to have Morgan Evans here with us today. Hello, how are you doing?
Morgan:
Good, how are you?
Teresa:
Great great, we're super excited to interview you today, so let's just start by you telling us a little bit about yourself where you're from, how you got into doing these builds, and what you got going on behind you there.
Morgan:
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a Florida native, born and raised here. I have three cars at the moment, one of them right behind me. It is a 1993 Nissan Titan swapped 240SX. I also have a 2018 Mustang GT that's more of like my daily driver. And then I have the newly acquired 2005 Turbo Infiniti G35. 
As far as how I got into cars. I was really lucky to kind of grow up surrounded by it. My mom and Dad built cars, they raced cars, they've built more cars than I can even count. My mom is actually the one that taught me how to drive stick, so it's pretty cool. What's funny though, is they were always building American cars, and I kind of got into the import side obviously, so…
Teresa:
I wanted to interview today because aside from the fact that you have a lot of cool projects going on and you do carry our products on there, you have had the experience of having a fire and I wanted to ask you, what happened and what that was like for you?
Morgan:
Yeah, absolutely! It was terrifying. So actually it was this car right behind me. We were on our way to the track, and our closest track is about 45 minutes away from here, and you kind of have to drive down this highway that's in the middle of nowhere. It's kind of like farmland. So we're driving down there, and all of a sudden we see smoke coming out of like the shift boot. We didn't really think anything of it, it was my boyfriend and I, and we just thought you know, maybe we hurt the motor, and whatever it is what it is. So then more smoke started coming and I started to feel the heat at my feet, and I just remember thinking “Oh God, it's on fire, it's on fire!” and then just this wave of smoke came in the car, it was a pretty bad one. So I flung it off on the side of the road had the hood popped, and fire put out pretty quickly. But the scary part was we just had this tiny little fire extinguisher that was thrown in the car. We weren't actually prepared for it. Luckily we were able to put it out, but it was a fuel fire. So one of my fuel lines had burst and it had been leaking down the whole bottom of the car as we were driving. Obviously, we didn't know we didn't smell anything, but as soon as some of it must have hit the exhaust it just I mean the whole car went up. So we were really lucky to be able to get that put out again 'cause we were in the middle of nowhere. So it was pretty scary. 
Teresa:
Do you recall what kind of extinguisher it was? Was it like a dry chemical?
Morgan:
It was the dry chemical yeah.
Teresa:
OK, and what was it like?
Morgan:
And that was an absolute pain to try and clean up. You know fires are messy.
Teresa:
Yeah, I was going to ask you what it was like to clean it up. Sounds like it was a hassle.
Morgan:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean there was some stuff that we just had to throw away. Not only because of the fire, but because it was just so corroded with all of the dry chemical that was used to put it out.
Teresa:
That's scary. I'm glad you guys had something. It's amazing how many people contact us with the exact same issue. It's often a fuel line leak, it’s very common. And how many times people either don't have an extinguisher or they have a dry chemical and then realized once they use it like that was no fun.
Morgan:
No, it was not fun at all. The cleanup was not fun. We were lucky to have something. I mean, I was grateful that we had anything at all, but I would not want to do that again. It was just kind of thrown in the car. Fire was not something that had even crossed my mind. Prior to this, obviously, now I am much more aware, but before then it just wasn't something that I thought could happen.
Teresa:
Yeah, it's something a lot of people don't, and that's kind of why we thought we would start doing FireTalk. We though “Let's talk to real people who've had fires so it feels more real.” And there's also always some kind of learning experience from it as well that people can take away.
So you now run our extinguishers on your builds and I'm curious what prompted you to reach out to us?
Morgan:
Yeah, so I saw something on social media. It was one of your guys’ posts and you know you just kind of dig through that rabbit hole looking through everything. And I stumbled across these HalGuards. So I really, really love the idea of it being a clean agent so you know fingers crossed I won't ever have to use one of these again. But in the case that I do, I'm happy that we won't have to deal with the chemical dry mess of the other fire extinguishers. This is going to be much easier to clean up, and I feel a lot more confident that we'll be able to get it put out. Because the last fire, the dry agent really didn't… well, it put it out obviously, but there was still a little bit of fire that we had to do like we had water in the car that we were dumping on it. 
Teresa:
Oh boy, add water to the equation, that's even more fun! So also, I believe you're running our mounts, you have the seat mount?
Morgan:
Yep I have the seat mount (SM01BK) and I have the bracket that holds it into that (ProLock) and the one that goes around the fire extinguishers (Extreme Duty – NB300) and that kind of clicks into it, so I really like having it where it is. 
Teresa:
In terms of projects, you talked a little bit about the one behind you, and I know you have a new project coming up. What's in your future as far as your next build?
Morgan:
So my future. Well as far as the one behind me, 'cause you know they're never done. As soon as I get a new clutch put in it, because the clutch is probably about 10 years old so it is desperately in need of a new one. We plan on doing a nice direct port nitrous kit on it. And we plan to start racing that one, a little bit more. This one has kind of been like my fun, show, street car for a while. But with the new G35 I kind of want to make that one the nicer like fun, street car and I want to start racing this one a little bit. 
So the G35 it's just a turbo stock engine right now, so with those it's really only a matter of time before you need to replace the engine. So we're just going to go ahead and build a forged engine for it, so that should make it a whole lot of fun and a lot more solid. 
Teresa:
Going back to the fire, since you've been through this and now you have kind of a setup. Do you have any advice for people when it comes to dealing with a fire? It sounds like we've covered being prepared, but if you had anything to do differently from what you had before, what's your sort of general advice?
Morgan:
As far as general advice, you obviously covered being prepared, having something that you are confident in, that will save you in the case of needing it. But, one thing that we do on all of our cars now is we have braided steel fuel lines. The fuel line on this car that leaked was just the stock rubber fuel lines that they use coming off from the steel ones that go underneath the car. It was brand new, we had just put the car together a month prior, but you just never know when they're going to fail. So having those steel braided lines with the end fittings and all that tightened connected I mean it’s just a lot better set up.
Teresa:
That is great advice actually. I just talked to someone yesterday who had exactly the same thing. It was his stock fuel line and it somehow got rubbed even and it leaked a little bit. Then I talked to one of my other coworkers and he said the same thing happened in one of his older cars, so yeah, that's a really good tip! Thank you for sharing that.
Morgan:
Yeah, of course we do that on everything now. I mean there's nothing in here that doesn't have steel braided lines on it.
Teresa:
Thanks again for your time. If people wanted to follow you because you do a lot of really cool stuff on social media, where can people find you online?
Morgan:
I am on Instagram. My tag is Mergan Evans m-e-r-g-a-n, my real name is Morgan but that kind of started as a joke and just stuck. So it's merganevans. It's the same thing on Instagram and TikTok. And then we're hoping to start a YouTube channel sometime this year and it'll probably be around the the same username the merganevans.
Teresa:
Well, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today, and best of luck to you and all your future builds. Hope you don't have to use your extinguisher, but if you do, we're really glad you chose us.
Morgan:
Yeah, absolutely thank you guys! You guys make me feel so much more confident in driving and being protected so that is something that I appreciate. Because I really did have a little bit of PTSD after that last fire. I was nervous all the time.
Teresa:
I can imagine. Yeah, I can absolutely imagine. All right well thanks again and have a great weekend!
Morgan:
Thank you so much you too.
