The Best Junkyard that Ever Was: ACE Auto Dismantlers

Bay Area filmmaker Yasmin Mawaz-Khan is making a very important documentary about the one of the key enablers to early San Francisco Bay Area Maker culture. Bill Kennedy is the former owner of San Francisco’s Ace Junkyard and helped San Francisco’s collaborative art community build their dreams.

If you have attended Maker Faire in San Mateo, New York, Detroit, and Milwaukee, you have enjoyed the fruits of his labor. Projects like Life Size Mousetrap and Cyclecide’s pedal-powered carnival would never have been completed without the generosity of Billy the Junkman.  Power Tools Drag Racing was born there, and made famous on TV there.

Key Maker Faire Bay Area makers such as the Flaming Lotus Girls, Rich Humphrey, Paul the Plumber, John Law, Jim Mason, Simone Davalos, Kimric Smythe, Shannon O’Hare, Mark Pauline and Survival Research Laboratories, Karen Cusolito, Scott Gasparian, Charles Gadeken—all of these makers depended on the ACE supply chain.

Electronics, metal, tires, bathtubs, motors, wood—for twenty five years, whatever the makers needed, ACE was there.  Until it wasn’t.  In 2009, the landlord evicted Billy and ACE.

Yasmin Mawaz-Khan was there, and she documented the end days.  She has also collected great footage of the ACE heydays.  You can help Yasmin tell the ACE story and Billy’s key role in Bay Area Maker culture. Support her Kickstarter campaign and help realize a document of Maker Movement history.