Shop Talk: Gateway Bronco Restores the Luster

Seth Burgett’s infatuation with cars started long before he could drive. He remembers first being fascinated by vehicle mechanics as a kid, sitting on an engine piston in his neighbor’s woodshed in central Illinois. By the age of 10, he was installing trailer brakes on a pickup truck.

“It was wired in me from the very beginning,” he says. No surprise, then, he studied engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, with stints at Stanford and MIT and business school at Washington University in St. Louis. He worked for aerospace icon McDonnell Douglas, and later in the medical robotics field, inventing a system for performing heart surgery with a joystick. All the while, cars remained on his mind.

One of Gateway Bronco’s latest rides gets ready to roll home. (Photo Credit: Bryan Birks)

That passion finally became a career after a 5,000-mile road trip across the country in an old Ford Bronco with his then-17-year-old daughter. Burgett launched Gateway Bronco, which transforms vintage Broncos into custom vehicles with an emphasis on modern performance. As CEO and president, Burgett now leads a team of 40 employees who have restored around 200 vehicles over the past nine years.

Using the original frame of a Ford Bronco, Gateway essentially brings the vehicle down to its foundation and rebuilds everything, customizing for collectors and aficionados around the world. We visited with Burgett in the Gateway factory in Hamel, Illinois, a hamlet 32 miles northeast of St. Louis.

Waiting Broncos (Photo Credit: Bryan Birks)

Q: When did you first realize that restoring Broncos could be a business?

A; I took a year sabbatical after selling my last company. I started collecting 1967 Shelbys and Broncos. The Bronco’s popularity was growing, and I had some data showing that it was going to become something collectible—a hot market. I had the means and was able to buy 15 original-paint vehicles. In 2016, our oldest daughter wanted to do a road trip from our home in Illinois to Walden Pond in one of my old Broncos with a camper trailer. She said, “Maybe when we get there, we can just turn around and go to California.” It was life-changing. Along that journey, I put up a Facebook page about the trip and 33,000 people started following us. We knew there was something there. I got back from the trip and rented this building with first right of refusal to buy it, and sold my first truck in January 2017.

Q: What attracted you to the Bronco, specifically, given all the other classic cars out there?

A: My parents were schoolteachers and didn’t have any money. They couldn’t afford a four-wheel-drive vehicle. We got a lot of snow back then. We would continually get stuck in these two-wheel drive cars, so I always wanted a four-wheel drive. My daughter wanted a vintage Bronco for her first car, but it’s not super-safe for a 17-year-old girl. It became a challenge to make it a safer vehicle that was easier to drive. It’s a unique vehicle that has a cult following, and our cross-country trip proved that.

Q: How does your build process work?

A: It’s like restoring a house. Instead of taking it down to the studs, we take it down to the foundation. We build everything brand new. If we start with the original chassis, we’ll take it down to the raw metal, we’ll powder-coat it, fix any of the problems on it and make it like new. Everything else on the vehicle is brand new. We’re specializing in creating fully custom vehicles, so customers can add things like jewel-laced fobs if they want. In one, we’re building a locker for a champagne bottle and glasses. Anything people want, we can do it.

Welder Johnny
Boneau, on break.(Photo Credit: Bryan Birks)

Q: What are some of the most important details in your builds?

A: The most important details are the safety components and getting the best drive. Our mission is to create the best drive and the safest vintage Bronco in the world. We were the world’s first to have anti-lock brakes in a restored Bronco, the first to have rack-and-pinion electric steering and electronic stability controls. Making it drive the way people expect to drive a vehicle is our number one priority—always.

Q: If you could hunt down any vintage Bronco in particular, which would it be?

A; The one I’d be looking for is the 1971 Stroppe. The Stroppe Bronco is the Baja Bronco built by Bill Stroppe. He won the Baja 500 and the Baja 1000 off-road races with it, and then created a street version for the public. It’s orange and blue and white and just has such a cool look. Very few were made.

Archival photos capture the heritage. (Photo Credit: Bryan Birks)

Light It Up

For a cool $465,000, customers can get into a LUXE-GT EV, Gateway’s top-of-the-line offering, which pairs high-end interior features with
rugged suspension and a powerful electric motor. Ford Broncos historically didn’t go zero to 60 in under six seconds. They do now.

Building Your Own

Using a 3D configurator, Gateway customers can fully design their own Broncos online—allowing them to customize everything from the fender flares to the roll cage, wheels and dashboard. Build projects typically take about 18 months, though customers can expedite the process for a fee.

This article originally appeared in Wildsam magazine. For more Wildsam content, sign up for our newsletter.

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