RVJ stands for Ray Vallero and Vernon Johnson — two Auburn machine men whose standard still sets the bar on every job that comes through this shop.
Family owned & operated · The J is still on the bench
Most shops are named for a town, a street, or an owner's initials. Ours is named for the standard — and the two men who set it.
Ray Vallero and Vernon Johnson set the bar for machine work in Auburn. The way they cut, measured and finished a part became the benchmark everyone around them worked to — and Vernon still holds that line here, on the bench, today. This is a different shop than the ones they built their names in. Taking those initials wasn't decoration, and it wasn't inheritance — it was a promise to work to that standard on every block, head and rotating assembly that lands in front of us.
Ray raced Volkswagens out of Auburn before the sport had a place for them. In the '60s, while everyone else chased muscle cars down the quarter mile, Ray was running 10s and 11s — in a Volkswagen — against the big boys, and beating them.
His 912-bodied racecar held an NHRA class record from 1978 all the way to 1992 — fourteen years on top. He built it, tuned it and drove it himself, out of his own shop, Vallero's. Everything that made the car fast came off his own bench.
Not a family tree, and not an apprenticeship — the trade doesn't really have a word for it. Ray and Tony were friends first, and everything else grew out of that.
Tony came to the trade his own way, training as a Subaru Master Technician — which is where the shop's Subaru work comes from. Then he took it racing himself, setting a ProGas national record along the way. What he shared with Ray wasn't a classroom; it was a standard, and a strip. The one he chases on the dyno is the same one he holds on the bench.
What ties this together isn't a logo — it's people who spent their lives around the same engines, the same strip and the same uncompromising idea of "done right." That family is exactly why Ray's car ever found its way home.
Twenty-two years after it disappeared, Ray's racecar turned up an ocean away. His racing family went and got it.
In 2014, friends tracked Ray's long-lost racecar down in Europe. It was Tony who brought it home and surprised him with it — 22 years after he'd last seen it. Ray passed the following year, in 2015. Getting his car back was one of the last gifts his racing family ever gave him.
That's the standard this shop is named for. Not a slogan — a debt. Every job carries it forward.
RVJ Machine started as the machine shop inside Tony's M45 Automotive — the precision work that kept M45's engine jobs in-house instead of farmed out. The results spoke for themselves.
A couple of years ago, Tony spun the machine shop out as its own business and opened the doors to everyone — drivers, builders and shops across the Sacramento area. Same hands, same standard, now under its own roof.
132 Borland Ave, Auburn, CA 95603
Every block we bore, every head we resurface, every rotating assembly we balance is held to the bar Ray and Vernon set. That's how Tony's built RVJ from day one.