Employee Spotlight – Nick Thelen

Employee Spotlight: Nick Thelen, Team Lead | Welder | Mechanical Jack-of-All-Trades

If you’ve ever wandered through the shop and heard someone humming “Soulshine” by the Allman Brothers or talking about converting a horse trailer into a mobile bar, chances are you’ve run into Nick Thelen.

Nick’s official title is Team Lead, but he wears many hats at KDS. Whether he’s building fans, welding new prototypes, or helping engineers improve drawings based on real-world efficiency, Nick is the guy who gets it done, no fuss, no drama, just results.

Before KDS, Nick was a factory-trained Harley tech. Building bikes was his childhood dream, and he chased it with determination. But once he found his way to our shop through a friend of a friend, he never looked back. Today, he has been with KDS since 2016 and has contributed to nearly every project in the building, including in-house CDK structure fabrication and overseeing complex burner builds.

Ask Nick what makes the job worth showing up for, and he’ll tell you: variety. No two days are the same, and that’s just how he likes it. “If I do the same thing too long, I get burnt out. But here? There’s always something new, and I love that.”

Outside of work, Nick’s life is just as full. He’s a father of four, a gym rat by 4:00 a.m., and a karaoke fiend by night. He crafts incredible metal art out of scrap parts, including custom pieces made from horseshoes, crankshafts, and whatever else he can salvage from the scrapyard.

Fun fact? He eats the same pack of peanut butter crackers at break nearly every day, and his go-to walk-in song would be Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold.” Enough said.

Nick’s philosophy? “Don’t expect anything, be pleasantly surprised with anything you get.” Spoken like a man who’s welded, parented, problem-solved, and karaoke’d his way through life with equal parts grit and good humor.