Anyone with drive and talent on the scale of Boyd Coddington reaches considerable success in their chosen field, but for Boyd the chart went where he "couldn't have imagined it in a million years." He was a legendary figure in the hot rod world long before the TV show, but now there are millions of people outside the car hobby who also admire his work. Demand for a Boyd car is high. Where he once produced one car at a time at home during the day while doing machine work at Disneyland on the graveyard shift, his present shop in La Habra, California has some 70 talented employees working in a 50,000 square foot facility with in-house body and paint shop. Of course, you've seen them all on the show. Demand for his one-off billet wheels spawned a huge facility making new wheels that is one of the big names in the custom wheel industry.

What you perhaps don't know is the man himself. He's intense - always thinking, always caring about something. He may seem deadly serious, but in the back of his unvoiced thoughts he's still got a teenager's passion for cars. He generally keeps the whirring content of his active mind to himself, but he has a softer side that he lets show in his works for charity. Whether it's creating a set of custom Boyd '32 Ford pedal cars for charity, employing challenged people in his shop, helping a Make-A-Wish Foundation client build his dream car and auctioning the resultant show-winner off for charity, to the Boyd Coddington Foundation founded by Boyd and his wife Jo. This and more is evidence enough that the bear has a heart bigger than his roar. Big is a description for Boyd Coddington that describes his many aspects, from the physical to his talent, from his design eye to his altruism and the colorful, outsized personality.