Keeping classic vehicles up and running isn’t always easy, and these days, that’s just as true for shops as it is for DIYers. I recently talked to four owners or operators of restoration shops to find out what their top business challenges are in 2024. Some of the answers I received were not a surprise. Frankly, everyone has been talking about finding qualified labor in almost every field. But some of the answers I got were eye-openers. 

Every independent restoration shop operates differently. Some shops are very well-established with a long track record, and a few have major national or worldwide concours wins under their belts. Some are more focused on their local area, building a reputation as well as a customer base. Many shops also tend to specialize in a particular field, such as engine and transmission rebuilds, paintwork, or a specific type or decade of cars. In 2024, even full-service shops tend to utilize independent rebuilders or repair shops for specific skills such as radiator repair and rebuilding, powder coating, or rebuilding clocks or radios.

The repair, not just restoration business is also thriving at many restoration shops. Those services that might have been handled by a local service station 20 or 30 years ago—tune-ups, hose and belt replacement or air conditioning repairs—now represent part of the day-to-day work docket of many restoration shops.

Adam Hammer, owner of Hammer and Dolly Automotive Restorations LLC in Traverse City, MI, sees the value in doing many of the small jobs alongside the full restorations that they also perform. The “small work adds more volume, and helps to make sure that everyone in the shop keeps busy” says Hammer.

Hammer, a graduate of the McPherson College Automotive Restoration program, has been in business as Hammer and Dolly for 13 years, has 10 employees and offers services ranging from full restorations to maintenance. Challenges include increasing costs for parts and equipment, as well as labor. In addition to increased cost, backorders for those parts is also an ongoing issue. Hammer also mentioned environmental challenges, as some regularly used compounds such as paints and solvents are no longer sold, making substitutions, often seen as harder to work with, a necessity. As to finding qualified workers, Hammer says “find the right person with aptitude to grow the skills, and we can teach the skill.”

Husband and wife Ed and Melissa Sweeny are the co-owners of Proper Noise, LTD, a restoration shop located in Mount Penn, PA that specializes in both postwar British and Brass Era cars. In business for seven years, there are six employees including the Sweeneys. They specialize in the mechanical side of a restoration, and will outsource paint as well as some other areas of restoration if needed. When asked about current challenges, Ed focused on a few areas such as the quality of parts that they source from vendors. The issue is serious enough that Sweeney has turned in-house to scanning and 3D printing parts when necessary. Another challenge? Finding correct tires post-pandemic for those cars that use odd sizes, including many of the Brass Era vehicles he works on. “No one can go into production for just a small amount of tires, making it too expensive for the supplier, it becomes impossible for them to make any money,” says Ed.  

Another problem facing all of these small shops? “It’s always hard to say no to clients, but sometimes scheduling work can be very tough.” Sweeny is talking about “job creep”, where a car comes in for brakes, for example, but, upon inspection, tie rods and shocks and more are needed, turning a few days repair into a week, or longer.

Mechanical Arts, located in Tenants Harbor, ME, is owned by Philip Reinhardt, also a recent McPherson College graduate. In business for four years, the shop has three employees. Specializing in repairs and restorations of pre-1980s vehicles, with a sweet spot for cars of the 1930s through 1960s, Reinhardt is facing another common problem in the restoration world: Running out of space to work on client’s cars. Their 3000 square foot shop is overwhelmed with customer cars, forcing staff to “play musical cars.” Although he characterizes this as a “good problem to have” Reinhardt hopes to expand soon, with plans to more than double the size of Mechanical Arts. Reinhardt also sees the “job creep” on client cars which can make effective scheduling tough. “Maine doesn’t have a State Inspection for older cars, so a car coming in for a routine service can have a completely worn out front-end” said Reinhardt. This type of problem is especially important to owners who are new to the old car world, some of whom have grown up in an era when going 10,000 miles between services is expected.

Finally, Eric Peterson is the manager of Leydon Restorations in Lahaska, PA, a shop that has been in business for just over 50 years. Peterson has worked there for 16 years, and been manager for 13. Leydon is known almost exclusively for mechanical restorations, which you can expect to see (or hear) at concours lawns around the globe. Peterson has a bit different take on finding talent. With the advent of television “rebuilder” shows and pop culture expectations of the mythical 30-minute total restoration, occasionally managing expectations of potential new hires is a challenge. “The realities of the work-a-day life at a shop is much different than what some might expect. You can’t have someone who is only interested in the glitz and glamor side of  the restoration.” That said, Peterson reminds us that good people are an investment, and that he feels very fortunate to have a great crew aboard.

Like other shops, Peterson laments the quality of parts that are currently available. “The quality keeps getting worse. I have one car that has had three ‘bad from new’ condensers. Few things are of the lasting quality (that we used to see). Manufacturers are just looking for the cheapest way, the least expensive supplier. Charge us more the first time if you have to, but give us a part that works!” 

Peterson also brought up a theme that ran through just about all of my discussions with restorers. Perhaps the biggest problem facing restorers in 2024 is simply finding the right specialty shop that can do the smaller jobs that used to be easier to farm out. A town that used to have three, four or five radiator shops might have one remaining. The owner is usually older, too, and often looking for someone to take over. It’s the same deal at a radio repair facility or that automobile clock repair shop. Finding someone who can reline brakes, grind cams or even make replacement keys is becoming increasingly more difficult.

The takeaways are twofold: For the consumer, understand that constraints are tightening for the shops that keep your ride on the road, so once you’ve found a good one, be patient with them. For the entrepreneurs who might be reading:  Perhaps you should set your focus on becoming a specialty supplier. Find a need and fill it. And do it soon, because the demand is strong.

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“The number of vomit emojis has definitely gone down,” laughs Marc Davis, founder of Moment Motor Co., about the business’s social media attention. I guess you have to learn to laugh at stuff like that, especially when you’re doing something as drastic (and new) as putting electric motors into old cars. Plus, car people on the internet are quick to judge no matter what you do. The response Davis gets now, though, is a lot more positive, and it’s indicative of the changes in public perception since he started swapping EV powertrains into classic cars in 2017.

Indeed, those changes came big and they came quick. On the new car market, EVs have gone totally mainstream, and electric’s performance and maintenance advantages have become clearer. On the old car scene, the arguments for electrifying classics made by Davis and people like him, mainly that these conversions keep classics on the road long-term and help bring new people into the hobby, have gained more traction and acceptance. As for the electric powertrains themselves, they’ve improved and have become more readily available, while the process of converting a car is now easier. To see how all this happened as well as what the steps are for “de-ICEing” and electrifying a classic, I visited Moment’s shop on South Congress Ave. in Austin, Texas.

Then, to find out if EV swaps are really “soulless” like the skeptics say, I drove three of Moment’s finished builds: A Mercedes-Benz 280SL, a 1966 Jaguar E-Type, and a G-body Porsche 911 Carrera.

Davis’ first career was in the tech industry, but he’s a lifelong car guy who spent weekends tinkering in his garage and building relationships in the classic and hot rod communities. He still love cars of all types, but saw electrification as something new, exciting, and part of the future. Experience from his professional life combined with the passion in his personal life in 2017 when he formed Moment, and there’s a clear overlap between tech and cars. “Our team is mostly made up of either engineers from the tech industry who are passionate about cars or performance cars builders who are excited to work with these new drivetrains,” says Davis. “Everything we do is tracked in modern project management software…Progress is tracked with pictures, hours, descriptions, and detailed updates to the client the whole way through.”

While plenty of shops specialize in a fairly narrow range of makes and models, the goal with Moment from the beginning was being able to convert any classic car to electric power. So far, Moment has completed about four dozen builds, ranging from Porsche 356s and Alfa Romeo Spiders to Chevy Blazers and Toyota pickups. Being versatile was key since Davis knew the market for what they were doing was relatively small.

The technology, even less than a decade ago, was also limited. The first builds were, “and I hate saying this, mostly repurposed golf cart and forklift kind of stuff. It worked but was low-power and simplistic.” There were of course new EVs on the road in 2017, namely Teslas and Nissan Leafs, but the manufacturers wouldn’t sell their powertrains to anybody. The workaround was that as those Teslas and Nissans hit salvage yards, their drivetrains could be removed and repurposed. Even from wrecked cars, these were better than anything else that was available and became Moment’s preferred source of powertrains from later in 2017 until 2021. Then, more recently, as the rest of the new car industry has caught up, there are EV powertrains and components that are functionally equivalent, warrantied, and widely available. That’s what goes into Moment’s builds today.

The facility is located near the end of Austin’s trendy South Congress Ave., and one thing is striking from the moment you arrive there: Despite the ’60s and ’70s vehicles outside and all the cars in various states of assembly inside, the place is quiet. The floors are clean. All the tools you’d expect to find in a place that takes apart cars and puts them back together again are there, but so are wiring, diagrams, a humming 3D printer, electric motors, and batteries lining the workbenches. As for the cars, the sights and smells you expect from a jacked-up Austin-Healey 3000 with its hood wide open simply aren’t there. Neither is this Healey’s tall 6-cylinder engine, nor any drips of oil. In its place is a compact electric motor nestled under the tunnel where the four-speed gearbox used to be.

On the other side of the shop, a 1963 Corvette Split Window rests alongside a ’68 Mustang fastback. Both look like they just got back from a Pro Touring meet, but they’re electric, too. There are also a couple of 911s and an Alfa GTV, as well as several W113-generation (1963-71) Mercedes-Benz SLs. Moment has converted enough of these W113 builds that their process has gotten both quicker and cheaper. Which isn’t to say that any of their builds are quick or cheap. Each takes months, and the cost ranges from $50K–$150K, not including the donor car. Even so, Moment currently has a nine-month wait list.

The wide range of cars in the shop suggests that Moment has a wide range of customers, and they do. Many are traditional car collectors who “see what we do as a way to rejuvenate and enjoy one of their classics in a different way.” They also see clients who have long had an affinity for classic cars but for one reason or another “never had the confidence or desire to keep up with the maintenance,” Davis says. These could be people who inherited a classic car from an enthusiast relative and see electrification as a way to enjoy and preserve a car that’s been in the family, or it could simply be someone who fell in love with a classic and sees electrification the only way to realistically use and enjoy owning it. Other clients are simply very new to classic cars altogether. “They drive new cars and like the simplicity of them; they’re primarily EV owners. Then, they see a perfect old Mercedes or vintage pickup and literally fall in love, but then find out they can own one with a modern electric drivetrain.”

Builds like these, then, bring new people into the old car world. What’s more, they keep old cars out and about in regular use. Many of them might ordinarily sit and suffer neglect if they were left stock. Despite the massive changes and updates under the skin, Davis says “ultimately we’re about preserving these things. We want these cars to be driven, not sitting in the garage. We want to give someone the ability to just go out and go whenever they want.” There’s simply far less to worry about and check for than with a ’60s-era, carbureted gas engine. “In the end we’re putting cars back on the road, driving.” It’s hard to argue with that.

When someone brings a car in for conversion, Moment fully inspects everything and addresses any necessary fixes. “We aren’t a restoration shop, so if the car needs metal work, paint, or repair, we partner with other shops to handle that stage of the process.” Then, they de-ICE the car, removing the drivetrain and fuel systems.

What happens to the old engines? Many owners want to keep them. Many don’t. “We can try to sell them, but you’d be surprised how hard it is. I have a storage unit with far more of them than I expected.”

Next they 3D scan the car, mainly the engine bay, transmission tunnel and trunk to determine where all the new components and drivetrain will have to fit. One challenge is weight distribution, as they want to keep the balance and driving dynamics as close to the original design as possible. Another is simply where to fit everything, as the space under the lines of a ’60s sports car was never meant for things like rectilinear battery boxes. This effort often requires designing and test-fitting brackets, platforms, and mounts to hold everything in place. Meanwhile, the team figures out where to route the high voltage cabling and coolant lines. Understandably, when they’ve converted the same type of car a few times, like Mercedes 230/250/280SLs, the process gets quicker and easier.

After final assembly, Moment tests and tunes the car, sorting out everything from throttle response curves and thermal systems to squeaks, creaks, and rattles—these are still old cars, after all. After enough test miles and tweaking, the finished product goes to the customer, while any new parts created through the process go into a library of chassis-specific components to make future builds easier.

So, how does the finished product actually drive? Of the three electrified classics I’m driving during this visit, the Mercedes-Benz 280SL makes the most sense as a candidate for EV conversion. It’s not surprising to learn that more W113-generation (1963-71) SLs have gotten the Moment treatment than any other car.

The 2.8-liter, 180-hp, fuel-injected, single-cam six that powered this car out of Stuttgart in the ’60s is a fine engine. It’s smooth, stout, well-built. But it was never the star of the show. It doesn’t make a memorable noise. Nobody ever bought a 230/250/280SL for what was under the hood, and most U.S. buyers ordered theirs with an automatic, anyway. Instead, they bought it for the looks—arguably designer Paul Bracq’s magnum opus—as well as the clever “pagoda” hardtop, and the classy, comfortable interior. This was a car for leisurely cruising at moderate to high speed and looking good while doing it, and that’s still the main appeal of the W113 for classic car buyers today. What does an EV swap take away from that experience? Nothing, really. It arguably makes it better.

“I think if you went back to the Mercedes folks in 1967 and said you had this silent, smooth, powerful drivetrain, they’d probably think it was perfect for a car like this,” Marc says as we slide into the SL’s springy seats. And, from the driver’s side, the W113 platform and the electric motor complement each other well. It rides like a normal SL, and it steers like one. In fact, everything feels like the original, except, of course, for the much deeper reserves of power and torque, which push you forward no matter how fast you’re going. The way this example is geared makes low speed acceleration swift but not savage, while speeding up from 60-80 mph is accomplished surprisingly quickly. If any “soul” or “character” has left this SL, I’m not really missing it.

The E-Type, I think, is a tougher sell as an EV. Yes, there was an electric E at the royal wedding, and a U.K. company even makes a drop-in EV kit for Jag’s most famous sports car, but the original XK six-cylinder engine is one of the all-time greats. It powered beautiful cars and won major races for decades. It looks great. It sounds great. Its length and heft dictated the E-Type’s long, lithe, forward-hinged hood, and the twin exhaust pipes tucked under its tail are one of the E’s more distinguishing features. To take all that away, then, removes much of the car’s character, right? Well, yes, but not as much as you might expect.

Getting in, there’s no doubt you’re in an old Jag. The leather smells right. The signature toggle switches on the dash are all there. So are the gauges, except that some offer different read-outs. For the dial to the right of the speedo, which measures kilowatts but has been cleverly designed in the style of the original Smiths tachometer. The only obvious clue to the car’s alternative drivetrain on the inside are the simple up arrow, down arrow and P (Park) buttons where the shifter boot used to be. Some of the batteries reside under the luggage area, but you’d have to lift a panel to find them. On the outside, the only obvious clue is the lack of those exhaust pipes. Somewhat surprisingly, their absence doesn’t take anything away from the XKE’s famous good looks.

A bigger surprise is just how much this car feels like a good-old-fashioned gas-guzzling E-Type on the road. I was afraid it might drive like a twenty-first century roller skate cosplaying as old English sports car, but that’s not the case at all. The tail still squats and the nose still lifts slightly under hard acceleration. Under cornering, you still feel stiffening and flexing through the wood-rimmed steering wheel.

Despite the extra heft and all the batteries distributed throughout the platform, the rear brakes are still inboard as they were in period. Because this example is geared more for highway driving and passing, acceleration from a standstill isn’t startling, but it is immediate and, especially in the ’60s setting of the cabin, feels very quick. The package delivers about 300hp and 375 lb-ft to the Jaguar rear end via a carbon-fiber driveshaft. At higher speeds, rolling into the left lane for a quick squirt of acceleration to pass someone is completely effortless. It’s almost intoxicating, in that over-too-quickly, want-to-do-it-again kind of way. This would be a fantastic car on a short road trip. I did miss that legendary twin-cam six up front, but not as much as I thought I would. A couple of times I forgot about it completely.

Finally, of the three, the 911 Carrera gives the most uneasy first impression as an electrified classic. For 60 years now, the weight of a flat-six mounted in the back has been the most consistent part of a 911’s makeup. But not in this one. This car presents the heft of its batteries more noticeably than the other conversions, and it’s not the traditional distribution as the tail-heavy original. As a result of packaging requirements, Moment had to locate some of the batteries up front, occupying much of the front trunk between the headlights.

The driving experience, then, doesn’t hew to classic 911 dynamics. This car feels heavy, particularly in the steering. Even at high speed, working the steering wheel through twisty bits fires up your shoulder muscles. It’s a contrast to the normally light-on-their-feet, stock 911s of this period.

Notice I said heavy, not slow. Indeed the acceleration feels very quick, and the car very planted. Throwing it into a bend requires less bravery than tail-snappy 911s of yore. Traction and power are very easy to come by. And while it’s not as good as the music from an air-cooled six, the electric motor’s noise coming up the transmission tunnel from behind and between the seats is not unpleasant, and emits more of a growing mechanical whir than the high-pitched electric whine I was expecting.

Speaking of the transmission tunnel, what’s hiding underneath it is this EV Porsche’s party piece. The G50 five-speed that originally came in this car is a fantastic gearbox, so Moment kept it right where it was and adapted it to the new motor. It does take some getting used to—you only really need to accelerate from a stop in second gear (doing so in first is borderline violent and correspondingly brief) and around town or on country roads you can have almost all the fun you want in third or fourth, but it remains fun and satisfying to shift. Also, while you do have to use the clutch pedal to go from gear to gear, you don’t have to do anything with your left foot when you come to a stop because the gearbox isn’t hooked up to a constantly rotating ICE engine. No stalling uphill from a stoplight here.

Like the Jag, the Porsche sacrifices plenty through losing its ICE engine. But it gains plenty, too, and it certainly put a smile on this skeptic’s face.

EV swaps are not for everybody, but I can see why this type of conversion is getting more popular, and Davis sees the future in its as well. “At this point the only downside is cost and perhaps range, but both of these things will only get better over time.” Davis also foresees greater standardization across this corner of the industry, and even complete EV-conversion kits for certain vehicles in the near future, like components specifically designed for electrifying a Tri-Five Chevy or VW Beetle, to name a couple.

No matter what kind of emojis you’re posting when an EV conversion hits your feed, it’s hard to deny that the classic car industry is going through big, quick, interesting changes. Shops like Moment are not only driving those changes, but also keeping the hobby going, and even growing it.

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There are many staples of a DIY shop or garage, but the workbench stands above the rest. Having a work surface that is not the floor can make working on projects safer, more efficient, and more enjoyable. Sadly, just because benches are ubiquitous does not mean each one is good.

Like so many other things in life, a workbench must balance budget, function, appearance, and specialization. While we can’t help you with the last one on that list, we can get you to a great starting point by calling out some of the attributes that every good workbench will have. Whether you are building a new one or checking up on one that you’ve been using for years, here are five characteristics every great workbench needs.

A Flat (ish) Surface

You don’t need to rebuild a carburetor on a certified granite slab, but you do want a surface that can be clean and smooth while not allowing parts to roll away. You’ll often need to level your bench using shims or some other method, because garage floors are not typically very even—occasionally, on purpose.

Dozens of materials can be appropriate for bench tops, so be sure to take a deep look at what kinds of projects you think you’ll tackle and choose a material that can take the amount of weight you need it to and that won’t deform during use. Butcher’s block surfaces have been great to me, though there are a few sections of my bench that have some serious dents from hammer blows or heavy parts.

Height

It might be tempting to plan your workbench around the height of a kitchen countertop (36 inches is standard), but be careful: Most kitchen tasks are less precise than most DIY projects, and food prep and cooking don’t require leverage or a large range of movement, like garage work often does. A lower work surface height is more tolerable in a kitchen, the arrangement of which needs to be somewhat standardized. Your workspace has no such constraints. Set your bench at a comfortable height for you and the work you do. That might even mean two benches at two different heights: parts cleaning is best done at a lower bench, while carburetor rebuilding is best done at a higher one, so that it’s easier to see.

Heft

A flimsy bench makes work difficult in a number of ways. If you’ve got a component plopped on top of your workbench and every time you move it or shift something for access, the whole bench moves, you won’t feel confident in the work you’re doing.

Again, be careful: You can have too much of a good thing. Nice and sturdy does not require using 6×6-inch steel tubing for legs and 1/2-inch plate for the top. There’s a place for a bench like that in a welding shop, but in most home shops, it would be more annoying than helpful.

A Solid Vise

The third hand we always seem to need, a vise is a necessity for any shop for many reasons. It can be a anvil, a press, or an anchor that can help projects big and small in a multitude of ways. Don’t believe me? Try and work without one for a while.

Like the other characteristics listed here, consider your specific needs and choose accordingly. Do we all need Wilton Bullets? No, but most people would be better served with one than with an import vise whose jaws don’t line up evenly and have a ton of slop. If you’re on a budget, consider buying an old vise to restore. It’s a fun project, and we can honestly say that cast metals aren’t what they once used to be.

Sturdiness

When wrenching on something, it’s nice to have a workbench that doesn’t move an inch to the left when trying to loosen something and an inch to the right when tightening something. Especially if you are not planning to bolt the bench to a wall or other structure in your garage, consider using an under-bench shelf for storage: It will add a nice, low weight and improve stability.

Bonus: Wheels

I’ve said it before and will say it again: The ability to bring your tools and workspace to your project is a superpower. Buy a good set of double-locking casters, put them on your bench, and suddendly it is a tool that goes places with you. The other side of the shop? Easy. The driveway? No problem. Putting multiple benches together to create super bench? Also an option! Use this power wisely.

No matter what, having a workbench is better than not having one. If you are looking to maximize your workspace and haven’t assessed whether your workbench is working for or against you, now is the time.

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Whodunits are fun. About a quarter of the top-ranking global podcasts are true-crime-themed. Working to understand every twist and turn to solve the mystery gives people a rush. That’s the feeling gearheads chase when something isn’t working and they want to track down the cause. The engines under our hoods are comprised of myriad parts and systems that, when all operating as designed, create a harmonious symphony of power, heat, and exhaust. When something is wrong, it can be a frustrating experience learning just how much more intricate an engine can be than simple “does it have fuel, air, and spark?”

The latest diagnostics tale I’ve been following is that of high-performance engine builder Steve Morris and the small-block Chevrolet V-8 that got bolted up to his dynamometer. The engine is in its second life now; it first served as an NHRA Pro Stock Truck powerplant when the NHRA had such a class nearly 30 years ago. It wears heavily modified Chevrolet casting, which is unique compared with many high-horsepower applications these days that utilize aftermarket and improved castings or, simply, blank-slate billet engine blocks and cylinder heads.

That NHRA class, full of Chevrolet S10- and Ford Ranger-bodied vehicles, is long faded from it’s short-lived popularity. But that didn’t mean this engine was relegated to a shelf or scrap metal pile. Instead, it now lives inside a mini-mod pulling tractor that is designed to move a weighted sled as far and as fast as possible on dirt. It’s a very different use case for the engine, and that created problems. As we learn in Morris’ YouTube video, the first issue was recently solved, but another popped up and it’s a stumper. On the bright side, it’s an interesting reason to learn something.

The initial problem: The engine would destroy the thrust bearing on the crankshaft after only a few runs down the dirt track. Turns out, the amount of clutch usage and pressure plate force over the duration of a tractor pull run is significantly different compared with the rapid-fire hits of shifting down a drag strip. The solution was a roller-style thrust bearing, and to be sure the fix was going to work, Morris hung the engine on the dyno to give it final checks.

After the first loaded pull, the engine exhibited a slightly higher idle than before. After the second pull, the idle reset again to another couple hundred rpm higher. Even after the team dialed in the idle air screws and reset the idle on the carbs, the engine continued to high-idle after a dyno pull. It even coughed a bit of smoke on startup after sitting between pulls. No vacuum leaks could be found.

Later in the video, Morris seems to have some ideas as to the cause of the high idle, but he doesn’t let on much. Can we at-home players suss out the problem?

My personal theory is that the problem is related to ignition timing. The short clip of a dyno pull at the start of the video shows that this engine is using the front-mounted distributor for arcing the plugs. While it’s extremely unlikely to be running a points plate, there could be some form of mechanical advance inside that is hanging up as the engine slows down after a dyno pull. Or the pick-up and sensor are moving due to vibration thus causing a slight timing change.

I am also totally aware that my theories could be 100 percent wrong. Is the fact that Morris has the valve cover off in the video a tell or a well-placed red herring?

Morris closes the video with a promise that he will post a video within a couple of days, revealing the answer. These kinds of diagnostic discussions are just plain fun for some gearheads. If you have a solid guess, leave a comment below. I promise not to edit the story when you prove how wrong I am!

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Along a stretch of West Putnam Avenue in Greenwich, Connecticut, you can fill every one of your automotive dreams. There you’ll find BMW of Greenwich, Mercedes-Benz of Greenwich, New Country Porsche of Greenwich, and Miller Motorcars (Ferrari, Maserati, Aston Martin, Bugatti, and on and on). But if what you’re after is a little oasis of humanity, look a little further to Freccia Brothers, the small Volkswagen repair shop frozen in time at 246 West Putnam. No fancy lighting, no salesmen in Italian suits, and no cars worth more than the GNP of some small countries.

Freccia Bros. has been standing for more than a century and has not changed much in that time. It doesn’t have the look of an antiseptic operating room—no banks of gleaming equipment. Rather, it has the look of a working garage, with real mechanics with dirt under their nails, who work from their knowledge, not technicians reliant on a computer to interface with the car to tell them what’s wrong. All the tools they need to get the job done are there, and nothing more.

Walk in and you’re transported. Some parts probably haven’t been painted since it opened its doors in 1923. The space is like an art gallery, complete with a wonderful tableau of VW ephemera and tools. Air-cooled horizontally opposed engines sit on surfaces like working sculptures. Look deep into corners and you’ll see the long history of a family business. There are no lifts. The floor laid down a century ago founder Giuseppe Freccia is still billiard table–level, perfect for jack stands, and every Friday afternoon, Frank Freccia III still winds all the clocks.

Out front, you’ll see a who’s who of the Volkswagen world: every type of Bug, from split-windows to Super Beetles, with a Baja Bug thrown in for good measure. A sporty Karmann Ghia sits fender to fender with a Thing, which sits next to an original Rabbit cabriolet. Everywhere you look, VWs. Freccia Brothers is steeped in history, and this is only part of it.

Giuseppe Freccia, his wife Carmela, and their sons Frank and Gene made their way from Cosenza, Italy, to Greenwich in the early 1920s. They purchased a piece of land and set to work. Giuseppe was a stone mason by trade, and he literally and figuratively laid the foundation of what would become Freccia Brothers, founded in 1922.

When the doors opened, they started out by painting carriages and horseless carriages. From there, the family went into car sales. With hard work and perseverance, they made it through the Great Depression while living above the shop. During WWII, when cars were a scarce commodity, the Freccias and the men they hired would head out on the road in search of inventory. They traveled south to Washington, D.C. and as far north as Maine to buy cars and drive them back to the shop.

They also got into repairs, though there wasn’t much around at that time. Frank and Gene often spoke about sitting around in the 1920s and ’30s waiting for a car to break down. In time, however, their business grew.

Giuseppe died young, in the 1930s, but his sons kept things going. Their sister, Emily, a woman very much ahead of her time, joined the business as a salesperson and, in the ’50s, established a real estate and insurance agency at the shop. She and her brothers were expanding their empire, building houses in the area while keeping the shop open. Business was good, and soon the next generation stepped in to lend a hand.

Frank Jr.—aka Skip—had been hanging around the shop from the time he was able to walk, and when he got out of the Marine Corps in 1961, he came on full-time. Once again, there were two generations of Freccias working under one roof, and they were happy to work on anything their customers brought them.

Then the ’60s happened, and the Freccias got into Volkswagens in a big way. They never looked back. Freccia Brothers became known as air-cooled specialists. They were repairing daily drivers throughout the ’60s and ’70s, and after 1979, once Beetle production for the U.S. came to an end, they started doing restorations on people’s beloved VWs.

With all this work, they would need more mechanics. Luckily, there were more Freccias waiting in the wings. In 1972, 10-year-old Frank III started hanging around. Every minute he wasn’t in school, he was learning his craft from his grandfather, great uncle, and dad, until he came on full-time in 1981. Now, there were three generations of Freccias taking care of the VW world. That carried on until Gene died in 1993, followed by Frank in 1998. That left Skip and Frank III.

Other cars came into the shop on occasion, but the reputation of Freccia Bros. preceded it, and air-cooled VWs were the vocation and avocation of the shop. The cars for sale out front are so loved, and they all have names. And if one of these beloved VWs does get sold, the name goes with it.

Frank III thought work would drop off in the 1990s and 2000s, that the generation of air-cooled lovers would disappear, but the younger generation, who really hadn’t had contact with the VW when new, came to love them, just like the people who came before. The cars’ appeal is transcendent, he discovered, and things kept right on cooking at the shop. Folks who have a Bug in their collection don’t own it just because of the price point, and many would argue they get more attention in their VW than they do in their Ferrari or Lamborghini. And it’s always more fun getting a thumbs-up than it is getting the bird.

Frank III has friends in the industry who have regaled him with horror stories of terrible customers. Thankfully, that’s never been the case at 246 West Putnam. The Freccias have always understood that their customers’ Volkswagens are essentially family members, and they want the best for them. For his part, in 50 years of doing this, Frank III says he has never dreaded coming to work.

Having his family around makes that easy, and these days, Frank III’s kids have stepped into roles around the shop. Each one has a name that sounds like they fell out of the pages of a great novel: Anastasia, Dartagnan, Locksley, Gene (for Giuseppe,) and Guinevere.

Like any good Freccia, Guinevere hung around the shop as a child, sweeping up and doing other things to make herself useful. Then she went off to art school. On her return, she made it her task to bring Freccia Brothers kicking and screaming into the 21st century (sort of.) She banished the rotary phone. They now have voicemail. There is a website, but no computer. She deals with marketing, photography, social media, anything to get the word out. She also helps out when her small hands can get in a tight space that others can’t.

Guinevere also felt it was time to phase out the daily-driver Toyotas and Hondas that came to the shop. They were just way too busy with the air-cooled stuff. Of course, they would never turn away old customers, even if they weren’t, for some reason, driving VWs. By 2017, then, Freccia Bros. was pretty much VWs all day, every day—Bugs, Squarebacks, Fastbacks, Buses, Karmann Ghias, Things, you name it. But have no fear, they’ll make time for early Rabbits and Jettas, too.

Skip died in January 2018. By then there was a successor in place: David D’Andrea, a carpenter and landscaper who also loved working on cars, had started hanging around the shop in 2012. He became a partner in the shop the next year and soon became Guinevere’s partner. He also proved to be a stellar mechanic, the guy who can get into the mind of a carburetor and make it sing.

Some of the cars that come into the shop have been under the Freccias’ care for more than 40 years. They are complemented by a regular stream of new customers, including folks who fell for a pretty face at auction only to discover their “people’s car” isn’t all it was cracked up to be. Frank and David are all too happy to have them. If and when those cars move on to other owners, you just know they’ll somehow find their way back to the little white shop on West Putnam.

People say that Freccia’s is an anomaly among all the high-ticket automotive purveyors around them. Frank’s response to that is simple: “We were here first, and we never left.” There have been countless offers over the years to buy them out, too, but Frank understands that could only end with someone tearing down the building that was erected by his ancestors in order to put up some flashy showroom. “Where would I go every day if I did that?” he muses.

As is befitting such a long-standing fixture of the Greenwich community, the shop gets a great deal of attention, and the Freccias use it to do good. In 2022, to celebrate their 100th Christmas, they put out the word they were having a toy drive. In the end they collected more than a thousand gifts for kids in foster care and other situations. They continued their new tradition in 2023, and lots of deserving kids had a Merry Christmas.

Like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him, Frank Freccia III sees no reason to stop what he is doing. He is surrounded by his family, the work they do is respected far and wide, and, most importantly, it’s too much fun to give up anytime soon.

Be nice and be honest; that’s how they do it at Freccia’s. Because of that, people come from all over to have the Freccias lay hands on their cars. Even when Frank tries to tell them they are too far away, that they should try to find another shop, they won’t be dissuaded. They want that special touch, that eye for detail, and pride in a job done right. People crash-land at their door when a cross-country trek in a 60-year-old V-Dub goes awry, and they camp out until their car is road-worthy. When you get a bill, it has been handwritten by Frank III, and you are happy to pay it.

People stop in every day and say they have been driving by for 20 years, or their grandfather drove them past the shop. They saw things going on but had to find out for themselves what magic was happening inside. And when they do find out, it all puts smiles on their faces.

***

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We’re delighted and confused by the automotive cornucopia that fills the brick-and-glass shop called Ai Design. As we stroll through the 10,000-square-foot, sun-lit space, located just north of New York City, we spy a 1961 Cadillac Eldorado, a 1985 Audi Quattro Sport rally car, a Porsche 959, a partially disassembled Maserati race car that’s resting on jack stands next to a military-grade Hummer H1, and a pristine 1970s Ford Bronco. They all have four wheels, but the similarities end there. What is this place?

“I freely admit that I can’t describe it in one sentence,” says owner and founder Matt Figliola. The services offered include not only repairing, modifying, or restoring any car, but also locating examples of rare vehicles—indeed, this outfit helped us find the cars we drove profiled in last month’s rally car story. (Click here to read it.)

Figliola, 56, got his start in the mid-’80s, upgrading the sound system and electronics of a Plymouth Horizon.

The craftsmanship and ingenuity of the modifications persuaded a custom-car shop in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood to hire the self-taught electronics whiz. In those days, the wolves of Wall Street wanted hi-fi car stereos, radar detectors, and body kits installed in such a way that they looked like they came from the factory. That meant hours of costly detail work. Money, however, flowed in the greed decade, and Figliola learned the importance of cultivating the clients who were willing to pay for the details he wanted to craft. “I’ve always been fastidious,” he says.

In 1992, Figliola left Manhattan and opened his own shop in Yonkers; six years later, he moved to his current location in Tuckahoe, a town 20 miles north of the Empire State Building.

Few shops that work on cars are so neat. The floor is polished daily, and even the ductwork shines. Metal sculptures and wall-hanging decorations accompany the expected tool chests, welding stations, and metal-working jigs, lending an art gallery feel. The space itself attracts what Figliola admits is an eclectic clientele, as evidenced by the varied machines inside. “We help them find the personal touches they want in their cars,” he says.

On the day we visited, the shop was hustling to finish a Maserati MC12 that was due to leave in a week so the owner could drive it in the GoldRush Rally. One technician shuttled between the car and the fabrication room, which was sealed from the shop’s main space by a pair of automatic sliding doors. The owner wanted air conditioning, which meant building a new set of carbon-fiber ducts to house condensers in the nose. Another worker retrofitted a new wiring harness in order to power front and rear video cameras and assorted other electronics.

The H1 Hummer nearby had received every survival gadget imaginable, including joystick-controlled spotlights, power-opening sides with tool storage, exterior cameras, Wi-Fi, and infrared lights for… we’re not sure. The recently finished Bronco, which Ai Design built from scratch and upgraded with modern mechanicals, waited for the owner to pick it up.

Future restorations, according to Figliola, will require different skills than that Bronco required. Cars built after 1980 are more electronically complicated and often have plastic-based materials that degrade over time. “I see a firestorm coming,” says Figliola. Engine computers were built on boards that develop hair-line cracks. The capacitors are vulnerable to leaking. “We are well situated to tackle these problems because we’re experienced with electronics, and we’ve been scanning and 3D printing parts for years,” he adds. Ai is also ready and willing to convert your classic to an EV, if you so desire. Indeed, we first encountered the shop two years ago when we reviewed a Willys-Jeep it had electrified.

These days, it’s definitely trendy to question the long-term future of our automotive obsession, especially in places like New York City. (Around the time of our visit, The New Yorker magazine published a piece with the headline, “How to Quit Cars.”) Shops like this give us hope that said future will be wonderfully weird.

Ai Design (Tuckahoe, New York)

• Open since: 1992
• Cars serviced yearly: 175–200
• Crew size: 12 full-timers
• Sweet spot: Custom anything and electronics
• Shop vibe: Art museum meets elbow grease

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“I hope I’m not scaring you,” Jaime Kopchinski says to the photographer and me. We’re passengers in his 1959 Mercedes-Benz 219, driving past the old churches and barns that surround his shop. I never saw the speedometer go far past 40 mph, but that indeed felt fast for a car with a radio made of tubes.

A few minutes in, though, I started to adopt the confidence Kopchinski had in his Mercedes. It wasn’t rolling hard through turns. Nothing groaned. The seats didn’t bounce or vibrate. It held the road and absorbed bumps well (an important attribute in post-war Germany).

The drive demonstrated a point that Kopchinski had made earlier about vintage Mercedes-Benzes: “These cars are designed to be extremely robust. It can run sustained at 5000 or even 6000 rpm all day until you run out of gas.” A Mercedes such as this, like the ones he works on, were built for real driving, in modern traffic. His job is to get them back to that factory setting.

You wouldn’t think much of Kopchinski’s place, Classic Workshop, if you drove past it. Just a nondescript New Jersey warehouse some 50 miles west of Manhattan. Yet it’s notable for a number of reasons. For one, it’s bursting with youth. If you need confirmation that the classic car world is full of young, curious, capable geeks, here is a good place to look. Kopchinski is only 44. He’s got a beard, flattering eyeglasses frames, and works in a black t-shirt with the shop’s logo—a minimalist outline of a thin vintage Mercedes steering wheel, designed by a friend who worked in fashion marketing.

He has two employees: Alexander Potrohosh came from Ukraine with his wife and two-year-old son as refugees. Aside from his mechanic skills, Kopchinski says Potrohosh has a special touch with dent removal. Veronica Petriella is a recent graduate of Universal Technical Institute and drives an ’87 300SDL. She’s also transgender, which is only worth mentioning because she exemplifies Kopchinski’s mission of hiring techs with a wide spectrum of backgrounds. “At the moment, we don’t have any techs from the traditional dealer or repair shop world,” he says. “That’s quite intentional.”

Then there’s the simple fact that this shop exists at all. The pandemic made the already tough business of automotive restoration even more challenging. With the cost of parts on the rise and skilled labor on the decline, even some veteran restorers have decided to call it quits. Yet for Kopchinski, it’s the realization of a long-held dream.

Despite his young age, he already has a decades-long list of accomplishments in the automotive industry which informs how the place operates. Before he opened Classic Workshop in March 2023, Kopchinski worked in-house at Jaguar Land Rover, managing a team of engineers tasked with optimizing the infotainment systems in models like the 2020 Defender. And before Jaguar Land Rover, starting in the early 2000s, he worked on the radios and infotainment systems in Mercedes-Benzes. You can find his work in the AMG GT, the E-Class, the S-Class, and Maybachs of the 2000s and 2010s.

In 2017, when Mercedes relocated his department from New Jersey to Southern California, he reluctantly quit, took the severance pay, and spent the next several months wrenching on cars in his home garage. “That was probably the first taste I had of actually working on cars all time,” he says. “It was the best.” Five years later, when he was at Jaguar Land Rover, word-of-mouth referrals led to a waiting list of over 30 cars. Meanwhile, the pandemic spiked the value of the vehicles he was working on. He started asking around about which buildings were available and applying for loans. Wherever he went to make his case to get the operation off the ground, he arrived in a vintage Mercedes-Benz, usually a 1972 280SE, as a conversation starter for the business.

He found his building, secured loans, and convinced the town council to let him open his business. After he had set up successors and delegated projects, he told Jaguar Land Rover that March 10, 2023 would be his last day. “Every one of my colleagues wanted to know about the business,” he says. “Because they’re car people. They were so excited about someone going into their passion.”

That background gives him a unique perspective: Although he’s obviously obsessed with old cars, he is not one to romanticize the past and dismiss the automotive present. Kopchinski can wax poetic about the latest generations of the S-Class. He recalls test driving one in Florida, along the Tamiami trail. “There’s this dirt road that runs parallel to half of it,” he says. “We were going 40 miles an hour in a prototype S-Class, just flying down the road, rushing through puddles, slowing down for the alligators. They’re just so robust.”

His past life may also inform his appreciation for what he calls “The real treasures in this place.” On a shelf behind one of the workbenches, underneath a tool for diagnosing Bosch fuel injection systems, there are dozens of small books. They’re full of diagrams and specifications—torque for certain bolts, power output curves, something called “injection timing device bushings.” “It’s every technical spec that you could ever imagine,” Kopchinski says.

The shop itself is huge, bright—it’s such a big space that you don’t really have to hunch over or watch where you’re stepping. Inside are three lifts, workbenches, organized shelves full of parts and tools, a wheel balancer, a forklift, and a bunch of customer vehicles—an R129 SL-Class, a W126 S-Class, a G-Wagen, stuff from post-war all the way through the ’90s. The walls have big plastic Mercedes-Benz star logos and posters that he rescued from the trash, at his old job.

The shop is busy with between 15 and 20 vehicles being serviced on any day and a waitlist of around 35. The work surfaces reflect this, with Post-Its and grime-covered parts. But the space is so clean and organized that you’d think it serviced electric vehicles. The only blemish on the surgically clean, light gray floor are some fluids that spill from an old SL.

Along with the manufacturer’s obsessive documentation and a range of specialty tools, Classic Workshop’s operation depends on a reliable flow of quality parts. Which, he says, Mercedes does especially well. “A lot of people like to complain that Mercedes doesn’t support their classic cars,” he says. “But I find that to be untrue.” He gets daily FedEx deliveries from Mercedes-Benz Classic Center in Long Beach, California, which supplies the majority of the parts that he uses to get and keep cars running. “Pretty much anything I could need, they can get me tomorrow morning,” he says. For components that he can’t get straight from the source, he orders them from separate supplies, which Mercedes will often hire to keep up with demand. These replacements might cost more than and look a bit different from the originals, but the metal and rubber will be the same as what was put in the vehicle at the factory.

Part of what makes sourcing so easy for him is that, as he observed while working there, Mercedes thinks hard before making any changes to their cars. Both an early 1970s S-Class and a 2015 S-Class, he points out, have the wiper and headlight controls in the same place. Another example: a connector that he pulls from under the hood of a 1991 420SEL, which is almost identical to the same corrosion-resistant, expensive connector in modern Mercedes-Benzes.

“I’m sure these engineers knew more than we do right now about that particular component. Mechanics love to say, ‘Why did the engineers do this?’” Kopchinski says. “But there’s a million reasons why they engineered a thing a certain way, and it’s not to screw a mechanic 15 years later.”

I ask him what these modern, gadget-laden models will mean for his shop and for people who want to buy an older Mercedes. The current models are loaded with transistors, sensors, and screens, tech hardware that were used to failing or becoming obsolete within a decade. Will touchscreen-operated scent diffusers be repairable?

Back when Kopchinski was working on the 2003 E-Class, he had the same thought: that they’ll be too complicated to fix, that they’ll only last 15 years. “Now, 20 years later, they’re great used cars,” he says. “And they’re maintainable, because everyone figured out the electronics.” That’s because this era of auto technology coincided with the growth of the internet, which made it easier to buy and learn how to use modern tools to install replacement parts. “Young people who are buying the 20-year-old Mercedes for their first $5000 car, they grew up in the 2000s,” he says. “Electronics don’t scare them at all.” Kopchinski refers me back to his point about the caliber of work that he saw done at Mercedes: “[The engineers] take quality extremely seriously. [The cars] are just different. And that’s okay.”

Now, a skeptical reader might note that were it not for those electronics, modern Mercedes wouldn’t depreciate to $5000 in the first place. Yet part of what makes Kopchinski so good at making you want a classic Mercedes is that he sounds like he’s never stopped being a fan. By his estimation he’s owned between 75 and 100 of them. Most were ancestors to the cars he was helping engineer through the 2000s and 2010s. (He’s also owned two Porsches, two Saabs, a Volvo, and currently owns an NSU Ro 80—a West German sedan with a Wankel engine.)

Listen to Kopchinski for long enough and it becomes tough to be cynical about modern cars. The screens and driver aids in modern S-Classes seem less like excess gadgetry and more like timestamp advancements that mark the evolution of a brand. His shop, then, keeps examples of the markers in that timeline in motion, all keeping pace with each other on the road.

We go back to his shelf of Mercedes-issued technical books. In the copies dating from the late ’50s and early ’60s, many pages are dedicated to a then-radical technology: fuel injection.

***

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The room is bright and warm. Signwriter Terry Smith stands at an easel, his chest rising, pausing, and falling; each brush stroke is a breath held. He appears entranced, locked into an irregular but comfortable rhythm with his paintbrush, its once crimson-lacquered handle worn to bare wood. A prickly whiff of paint thinner hangs in the air.

Working from left to right, Smith supports his painting hand using a mahl stick, which he calls his third arm. Its round, padded head glides across his work surface, collecting chalk dust from the positional renderings he uses as a spacing guide. In signwriting circles, this known as the pounce method, but Smith doesn’t rely on it.

With the brim of his flat cap resting on the frame of his glasses, his eyes are cast in shadow, but I can see them darting, repeatedly, to his right. “I’m projecting the finished letter in my mind’s eye,” explains Smith, who has been signwriting, the traditional way, since the mid-’70s.

“I won’t follow the chalk marks—they show me where I need to start and finish, but it’s up to me and my brush to get it right. If you can’t freehand when painting lettering, you won’t earn a living out of it. It’s a sixth sense that’s difficult to teach.”

Using the inside edge of a paint pot as his palette, Smith manipulates the bristles of his brush with a series of strokes to find its “sweet spot.” All brushes, he says, have a point at which they perform their best because of the way their bristles have been laid and fastened. “When you use them day in, day out, you get to know what they’re capable of.”

From tip to tip, an artist’s paintbrush comprises three main parts; head, ferrule and handle. Each brush’s specific anatomy, such as size and brush shape makes it a character in its own right, says Smith. Once you know how to get that optimum chisel, he says, the brush give you what you want. “By making friends with them you can get the best result from them, but if a brush starts to shed its bristles, it’s had its day.”

Gradually, letters emerge from a mesmerizing sequence of swirls and curls and quick-fast flicks. With a lift and a twist, Smith adds a flourish to the foot of the final letter. He paints those impeccably straight lines with a tremble in his hand. Undetectable to the naked eye, it’s not an ailment but a deliberate and exacting technique that helps persuade paint to part ways with a brush; think of it like a singer’s vibrato.

Had life panned out a little differently, we might not have been on our own in Smith’s studio. Of his two sons, it’s the one who emigrated to Australia that inherited his creative flair. The final project they worked on together was a mural of the Brighton Belle electric train; it remains Smith’s largest single work to date. Spanning over 50 feet, it occupies three panels set into the arches of the forecourt in England’s Brighton Station. The project took five weeks for them to complete. “I miss bouncing ideas off each other,” says Smith, as he sets down his paintbrush. It’s time to take a break.

Over black coffee and chocolate biscuits, Smith pores over photographs of his signwriting accomplishments. They include scenes from Goodwood’s Revival—“I paint the ‘Gentlemen, start your engines’ kind of stuff”—and a restored 911 that was used as a promo car for Private Motor Club magazine. It’s a commission that he’s particularly fond of: “The livery was inspired by a Porsche that raced Le Mans in 1972,” he explains. “When signwriting a car, you have to ignore its curves because you want the artwork to be true to its original design and form; you don’t want to elongate anything whether that be lettering, a logo or an image.”

With steam rising from his cup, Smith recalls a “bitterly cold” assignment that took place in a dusty Dutch barn. On occasion, he admits, his paintbrushes have played second fiddle to his portable convection heater. Cold hands are not conducive to effective signwriting.

As he flips through this deconstructed portfolio of work, Smith explains why he refuses to post on Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat in order to attract new business: “My reputation and word of mouth seem to do the trick and I’ve won more jobs doodling on the back of an envelope than any other way. Over the years I’ve walked into shops, picked the pencil out from behind my ear, roughed something up, and bingo, I’ve got the job.” He has no website or email address to his name: If you want to make inquiries you’ll have to contact Terry Smith Signwriting the old-fashioned way; by picking up the phone.

He eats lunch overlooking fields that fall away into the sea within four miles. Home, for the moment, is a bolt-hole in West Sussex, but fundamentally, it’s wherever Terry parks his VW camper van. Bearing the same sign-written name as his automobilia shop, “Old’s Cool,” the van is the place where he reacquaints with his nomadic self. In 40 years, Smith has relocated 13 times, but his current casa—a converted police traffic control office with a trio of outbuildings that once housed panda cars and are now in service as a signwriting workspace, garage, and store front—is ideal.

It was several studios ago, back in the ’80s, that a salesman first came knocking at Smith’s door with a vinyl cutter. “I said, I’ve got a project for us to do,” recalls Smith, his tone hinting at mischief. The mano a mano that followed, he tells me, was a civilized competition between craftsmanship and computer.

“After he’d set his machine up, we started at the same time and we finished at the same time. I then said, ‘Well, there you go bud, that machine is £10,000 and I’ve got to buy countless rolls of vinyl to feed it. I mix my colors by eye, in a thimble, for what I need to do the job.’” The salesman countered Smith’s appraisal with the argument that vinyl is more efficient because it doesn’t involve drying time. He didn’t convince Smith.

“I instantly decided I wasn’t going to subscribe to it. I wanted to keep going, hoping that there would be a nice little niche for me to inhabit.” He continues with a word of caution: “If you’re even thinking about vinyl, I’m not your man. This is a different thing, this is hand done. I also don’t price it per letter, this is not like putting an ad in the newspaper.”

For centuries, buildings, boats, and all forms of transport have been distinguished by hand-painted signs. Once upon a time, Smith says, “You’d see a signwriter in a high street, they were as common as decorators or plumbers.” He’s a stickler for period correctness. “If an object pre-dates vinyl, then it absolutely shouldn’t wear it. If it’s a vehicle I’m signwriting, I match its vintage to a typeface from that era. The vinyl boys often get it wrong, plumping for something they see on a screen that wasn’t even designed when the object they are working on was built.”

Smith laments the days when a recognized qualification in signwriting could be obtained at the City & Guilds of London Institute: “Now it’s just left to nutters like me to drum it into people.” Back then, he says, a true signwriter could distinguish subtle differences in the handling of lettering that made it identifiable as an individual’s work. “The process of vinyl printing is genius, but to call it signwriting is a travesty. That’s why I call myself a sign painter these days.”

To nurture newcomers to his craft, Smith runs courses and hosts workshops at the Brighton Fishing Museum, West Dean College of Arts and Conservation, and at home. He hopes to discover someone who has got what it takes to inherit his paintbrushes. If you sign up, be prepared to switch off: “I wouldn’t dream of having a mobile phone in my studio—the last thing I want when I’m in the zone is interruption.” Previous experience using small, fine paintbrushes, he says, is desired. Left-handed artists need only apply: “One of the tidiest workers I’ve ever seen was left-handed, she was fantastic.”

Before he lets me try my hand, he shares some basic principles: Typeface is the design of lettering; font refers to how a typeface is displayed, such as size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed). He lifts a practice board off the floor. On it, the alphabet has been painted in Gill Sans, one of Smith’s preferred typefaces. It was designed by the English artist and type designer Eric Gill, and he based it on Edward Johnston’s 1916 “Underground Alphabet”, which is used on London Underground signage. Its clean and rounded proportions, without extending features known as serifs, make it ideal for beginners.

“Any signwriter worth his salt has a repertoire of typefaces in his head that can be done without needing to reference anything, but by anyone’s standards, Gill Sans is straightforward to copy because it requires a minimal amount of brush strokes. With those perfectly round O’s, it screams 1930s—it’s such a lovely type.”

Smith is adept at defusing impatience in a student. “We’ll get on to that in a minute,” he says, knowing full well that without proper practice of the basics, dropped shadows or gold leaf are going to be an uphill struggle. Slowing down and cultivating an intuition for how fonts and effects can be applied to different typefaces is all part of the signwriter’s sixth sense: “You have to know how to play with them.”

I’ve assigned myself the task of painting a slogan on a chest that belonged to my grandfather. It’s going to be a surprise for my dad. We settle on a speedy to accomplish “one stroke” style named Flash before transferring the words using the pounce method. As I grapple with a mahl stick, paintbrush, and pot, Smith says: “My one Achilles’ heel is getting A’s, V’s, and anything with a diagonal line that needs to be symmetrical not to look like a tent that’s falling over. It’s easier when they’re italic.” His favorite letter? An S: “I love the free-falling sweep of its shape.”

Occasional mistakes can be wiped away with a dab of white spirit, but Smith says that imperfections will add personality to the sign written piece. Typically it takes four hours for the enamel paint that I’ve used to dry, but our time together has come to an end.

Before saying goodbye, we pause next to a Fordson van. It’s just a few shades of blue darker than Smith’s denim dungarees and the word “signsmith” is emblazoned on its side. When not parked in the courtyard that separates his living and work spaces, the van earns its keep as a mobile billboard. “It’s my trademark,” explains Smith. “Me and Ford, we’re inextricably linked—my mum and dad were employed by them, it’s how they met.”

As I drive home, away from the mist that’s rolling in from the sea, I think of Smith in his studio, now dark and turning cold, I hope that soon he will be joined by a protégé. Until then, it’s up to him to keep the craft alive.

Terry Smith: 01243 377948. Click here and here for more information about the courses Smith runs.

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The Miata has long been known for being fun. One of Mazda’s first advertisements for the car called it “incredible fun to drive—for that is its only purpose for being,” and pretty much every review of the vehicle since has concurred. Yet getting behind the wheel of one still feels like being let in on a secret way to make life feel lighter and happier.

A similar phenomenon applies to one of the car’s most devoted tuning shops, Flyin’ Miata. It’s been around for 40 years—yes, longer than the car itself—and gained famed years ago for its snarling small-block V-8 Miata builds. (I’ve driven one. It’s worthy of the hype.) Yet you have to be deep inside the Miata community to really appreciate what makes this outfit special. From its participation in grassroots motorsports to its thoughtfully produced parts (the company’s $12.99 “ninja” cam alignment tool can shave hours of frustration from a timing belt change), this team of vocal Miata die-hards feels like it really belongs to the community.

Now, the enterprise itself literally does. Founded as a family-owned business, Flyin’ Miata transitioned in the the fall of 2020 to an employee-owned cooperative. Of the 20 employees presently employed at the company’s Palisade, Colorado, headquarters, eight of them are owners. Any employee who has been part of the company for more than two years can buy in, make their voice heard, and help determine the direction of the business.

I headed to the Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains to see how Flyin’ Miata is getting along in this new era. Down a lonely back road that winds through old orchards and trendy wineries sits the company’s unremarkable-looking 25,000-square-foot warehouse. The atmosphere at the quiet reception desk is of an equally unremarkable, too-beige office. Even whispering seems rude. The lines start to fill in with color when you notice the hilariously diverse collection of Miata paraphernalia plastered on walls and littered across desks—die-cast models in various scales and liveries, a dozen fancy plaques that showcase past stories from automotive magazines, a patchwork quilt sewn by a customer and depicting beloved Flyin’ Miata shop cars.

Behind the front office is the warehouse. Cabinets sit lined with brand-new turbochargers, donor engines wait on wood pallets, and plastic bins overflow with torn-apart suspension struts. At the south end of the facility is the skunkworks section with two-post lifts and well-appointed workbenches, near which sits a torn-apart third-generation Miata with a 3D-printed turbocharger bolted to its exhaust manifold. Every generation of Miata is accounted for in the shop, taking many forms: an all-original first-generation roadster, a V-8 swap, a hill-climber with bead-locked Hoosiers, and a kitted-out fourth-generation prototype with a fat turbo.

The sheer diversity of the Miatas on hand reflects the employees’ deep and nuanced passion. They care, which means they’re invested in the company’s success. No one can stomach the idea of Flyin’ Miata being sold, stripped apart, and shoved into the corners of some overcrowded parts catalog owned by a conglomerate.

The story of Flyin’ Miata began in 1983. Founder Bill Cardell opened his first automotive service center, “The Dealer Alternative, Inc.,” in New Jersey, with specialized services for Audi, Porsche, and Volkswagen. On a fateful day in 1989, one of Cardell’s customers showed up in one of the first Mazda MX-5 Miatas imported into the United States. Cardell drove the car and immediately fell in love with the fun-loving, rear-drive drop-top. He promptly placed an order for one, which he received in September 1989 and still owns today.

“A couple of months later I saw an article on a Miata turbocharger kit in Turbo Magazine and actually believed the fanciful claims they made, so I purchased [the kit],” Cardell explains. “The installation ‘directions’ consisted of six Polaroid photographs with writing on the back of each one stating, ‘It should look something like this when you’re done.’”

After installing a half-dozen half-baked turbo kits on client cars, an unsatisfied Cardell met with the U.S. distributor for Greddy (then Trust). They struck a deal and started piecing together their own high-quality, aftermarket spool systems for the Miata. “There were never any big, strategic business plans,” he says. “I just liked making Miatas fast.” The instructions, nonetheless, were better.

In 1996, Cardell sold his repair shop so that he and his wife, Teri, could move to Colorado to ski more often. Still, Cardell couldn’t shake his fascination with making Miatas fly, so he convinced her to be his business partner in Flyin’ Miata. “She said she’d give me one year, but she ended up staying until we sold the business to our employees in the fall of 2020,” Cardell says. They might have held out longer, even, were it not for Cardell’s Parkinson’s diagnosis, which moved up their retirement timeline.

It helped that Keith Tanner was one of the employees ready to take the reins. Director of e-commerce and systems at Flyin’ Miata, Tanner has been with the company for 22 years and boasts four Miatas in his garage. Tanner bought his first Miata in the late ’90s and started designing, building, and selling his own parts before attracting Cardell’s attention. Many know Tanner as the face of Flyin’ Miata in YouTube videos and on internet forums. His granular suspension knowledge, in particular, has turned him into a sort of Miata chassis guru.

From the Flyin’ Miata warehouse, Tanner takes us onto some of Mesa County’s most beautiful, winding roads. He’s behind the wheel of his red 1990 Miata, nicknamed “338,” (it’s the 338^th Miata the come off of the Hiroshima production line) and I’m in a big-winged, ND-generation turbo test car, which handles with perfect composure, accelerates with serious pull, and has me smiling from ear to ear as we dodge wayward turkeys and speed along the clean, tight roads that wander through snow-covered valleys. As engaging as the car is to drive, I reminisce about the LS3 V-8-powered ND Miata that I drove during a shop visit years ago. It was intensely communicative, endlessly enchanting, and near flawless as a driver’s car. Why would Flyin’ Miata give that up?

“They work really well, but they didn’t work for us as a business,” Tanner says. “We almost didn’t do it. In 2008, we ran the numbers, and the general feeling was that we probably shouldn’t build V-8 Miatas, as much as we all wanted to. Bill overruled us.”

The V-8 swaps got a ton of ink in major media outlets, but turn-keys remained a small, ancillary part of the business that sucked up the most valuable resource for a small-scale shop: time. At least one quarter of the company’s parts catalog is designed by and exclusive to Flyin’ Miata, which requires a lot of hours for adequate testing and quality assurance. And, Tanner says, the workload is only going to grow when Mazda releases the fifth-generation, “NE” Miata.

“With every new generation, we’re adding a chassis to our portfolio while still developing parts for the older ones, so when the NE comes out, our work is going to increase by 20 percent.

“The V-8s were a completely parallel product. Yeah, the brakes and suspension cross over, but all of the drivetrain was different and required an absurd amount of time and effort to build,” Tanner says. “We love them but, unfortunately, it just doesn’t work for the company.”

That choice didn’t come easy, but it is one Flyin’ Miata’s employee-owners agree is necessary. Cardell’s takeaway is that today’s Flyin’ Miata is more of a proper business than “a runaway hobby as it tended to be during my time.” All of the owners are driven and hungry. They work tirelessly to improve quality and transparency in customer service, test the ragged limits of their externally sourced and internally developed performance parts, and investigate new opportunities that become possible with emerging technologies.

3D printing, for instance, has become a massively helpful and influential system at Flyin’ Miata. They own a half-dozen Markforged printers that are constantly stacking filament to create whatever the staff requires, from mock-up turbocharger housings to replacement door bushings and the aforementioned cam-gear ninja tool. Flyin’ Miata’s “You Design” program encourages customers to submit their own Miata-specific ideas, which can be assessed and developed using company printers. If accepted, these designs are added to the roster and marketed through Flyin’ Miata’s channels. The creator then gets a royalty kickback on every unit sold.

New technologies also make it easier for Flyin’ Miata to reproduce high-quality versions of hard-to-find parts for the earliest iterations of the Miata. Factory gauge hoods, for instance, tend to break the instant you remove them. The tiny rubber lock caps that cinch onto ends of the soft- and hard-top latches? Extremely tricky to track down. “We’re never going to turn into a full-on restoration shop, though,” Tanner insists. “We’re going stay with modification. The car is such a great blank canvas, and there are always going to be people tweaking them.”

As promising as that future may seem, it depends on Flyin’ Miata navigating its new, untested business structure. Cardell admits that the co-op’s road ahead is uncertain, with a lot of teething and growing pains to endure, but that he and his wife have total faith in the current crew. Brandon Fitch, co-owner and director of product development, who drives a turbocharged ’96 Miata and has been at the company for 17 years, sees the benefit of the collective approach. “We’ve all been working together for so long that we can often see each other’s points of view, intelligently discuss issues, and come up with the best possible outcome,” Fitch says. “While final decisions sometimes take longer to make than if there were a single owner, the decisions we come up with typically feel better since we incorporate multiple viewpoints and opinions.”

Flyin’ Miata president Jeremy Ferber, an 18-year company veteran and ’95 Miata driver, has no illusions about the rocky road ahead but is certain the business is on the correct course. “We’ve quadrupled in size since I started and grown from a small ‘mom-and-pop’ feel into a good-sized company that supports the income of a lot of people, as well as the fun factor of countless customers,” he says. “I’m excited to watch us evolve from a young co-op into a mature one.”

Tanner shares that sentiment, comforted by the knowledge that none of Flyin’ Miata’s eight owners are selfish or money-hungry. All of them are protective of their shared passion, desperate for it to stay pure—and fun. “This is not a way for us all to become filthy rich and retire. It’s how we keep this business we genuinely love running and happy.”

For those working at Flyin’ Miata, the success of the business will come down to balancing heart and head. Both matter. This small company has spent more than three decades faithfully supporting some of the most dedicated automotive enthusiasts on Earth, encouraging them to fall even more in love with their joyous little roadsters, as they have with their own. As long as that’s still on the table, Flyin’ Miata is fulfilling its own “only purpose for being.”

***

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It’s easy to fall into the “back in my day” trap—the belief that things were easier or better when you were younger. That trap exists for those of us who love cars and especially for those who love modifying them.

One glance under the hood of a modern machine can be a strong deterrent to would-be modders. Navigating that maze of wires and sensors without making a control computer mad seems like an impossible proposition, the world’s worst game of Operation. Layer on the increasingly punishing gauntlet of state and federal laws regarding vehicle modification, you might think tuning is a dying art.

But that is far from the truth. Despite a predicted shrinkage of the overall auto market over the next decade, the tuning industry is growing. A 2021 study by Future Market Insights found that the performance-tuning industry is set to grow at a rate of six percent per year through the next decade, a figure echoed by SEMA’s most recent Market Report. To see that growth in action, you need only look at the surge of supporting businesses springing up in response, large and small.

Round Lake Auto is a small and unassuming shop out in the country, about 30 minutes northwest of Albany, New York. What started 21 years ago as a two-bay repair operation on the side of a gas station has swelled over the past few years to a dedicated location with eight bays and a separate showroom. Much of that growth is in response to the increasing demand for engine fettling and performance modifications.

What makes this shop particularly interesting is the fact that it’s run by two generations of tuners, David and Razick Razai, father and son. Each has been tuning cars his entire life, just in very different ways.

I knew I had arrived at Round Lake Auto when I saw the parking lot full of late-model WRX and STIs. Subarus are popular among enthusiasts up here, one of the few sports cars you can truly enjoy year-round. Stepping inside, however, I was greeted by a different generation of tuner toys: a Mk II Toyota MR2 Turbo in lovely condition, and not one but two Mk IV Toyota Supras, the latter surrounded by boxes of parts.

These are David Razai’s cars. The 51-year-old has been a mechanic for 35 years, opening his own business back in 2002. “I started with regular service maintenance,” David says. “My goal was, when I started the business, honesty. Honesty is the business.”

David’s son, Razick, 23, is largely responsible for the business’s shift in focus from needed repair to performance upgrades.

“He was always into the performance stuff,” Razick says of his dad, “but we never really got majorly into it.” Ten years ago, Round Lake Auto’s business was 99-percent general repairs. Today, performance tuning makes up 60 percent of the business, and that figure is still growing.

The shift started largely thanks to word of mouth and social media. In 2020, the Razais purchased a Mustang dynamometer to handle the increasing demand for more advanced tuning. “Once we got that,” Razick says, “that’s when we started seeing a huge, huge change. Like, within a week after posting that we had the dyno, I started getting a ton of phone calls, emails.”

Any car that comes in for tuning gets strapped on the dyno. When possible, Razick connects to the car’s ECU directly via the OBD-II port to pull data, but the Razais also install an external air-fuel meter. They’ll then put the car through a number of runs, often 10 or more, seeking the perfect air-fuel ratio at every rpm.

It’s a radically different process than when David was tuning his brother’s car as a kid. “Back in the ’80s, we didn’t have tunes and dynos. My generation, I didn’t know much about them. It was, you know, ‘Okay, let’s put in an exhaust system. Let’s take the cats out and straighten things up and put a pipe in it,'” he says. “But now, you can’t.”

Ignoring the legal ramifications, which we’ll get into in a moment, even minor intake or exhaust modifications today are ill-advised without massaging a car’s ECU.

“In a Subaru, if you do an intake and you don’t tune it, it’s gonna run lean,” Razick says. “If you do a downpipe change, without tuning it, it’s gonna overboost.

What about tuning on carburetors? Yes, they do that too, but rarely these days. One customer, local Citroën restorer and racer Dave Burnham, brought his heavily modified 1984 Maserati Biturbo in for work. With no electronic fuel-injection (EFI) to fettle, Razick says, the dyno process was more manual: “I’d tell him, ‘At this rpm we’re not getting enough fuel. Is there any way you can get more out of it?'”

I spoke with Burnham, who said he brought along a whole array of jets for the occasion. “If we wanted the top end to be richer or leaner, I’d change the air-corrector jet. If I wanted the whole range to be richer or leaner, I’d change the main jet.” The same basic concept as with a software tune, then, but slower, more manual, and less precise. “It takes a whole lot longer than pushing a couple of buttons.”

For Burnham, the days of swapping jets on his Biturbo are nearly over; he’s going modern. “I’ve got a Haltech [engine-management] computer and all their sensors, and I ended up buying an intake manifold on eBay from a fuel-injected car, which bolts right on.”

Ease of tuning is Burnham’s main reason for making the swap, but EFI adds some other major advantages: “If your temperature gets too hot, it’ll start pulling timing out, or it’ll turn your cooling fans on earlier. With my carburetor, if I’m not looking at the damn gauges, I’ll blow the thing up, you know? I do a lot of time-trial stuff in the summer and it’s wicked hot. And I’ll look down and the engine’s at 250 degrees and I’m like, ‘Holy crap, I gotta back off!'”

For Burnham, more tech means easier tuning and safer running, but in some new cars, tech is becoming a roadblock. The current, eighth-generation Chevrolet Corvette is the most frequently cited example. “There isn’t much you can do with a factory ECU on those,” Razick says. “Basically, since the car has Wi-Fi, it updates itself on its own. If you were to try and tune the factory ECU, whenever it updated itself, it would basically overwrite it.”

But, Razick says, there’s always a way, even for those who want to stay legal. “I feel like this has turned in the last few years. A lot of Audi R8s and Lamborghinis, people are twin-turboing them. MoTeC makes a plug-and-play system for those. It’s actually [California Air Research Board] compliant. These cars are making around 1000, 1200 hp, but they’re still completely compliant because the turbos are added after the factory cats. So they keep the factory manifold.”

Compliance is important, especially with the steeper penalties demanded by anti-modification legislation, like California’s (since-repealed) A.B. 1824 and New York’s new SLEEP Act. New York has not only quadrupled violation fines for illegal exhausts but added the threat of revoked licenses for any business caught performing the work.

Razick says many of their customers actually get better fuel economy after a tune, which means lower carbon emissions.

Looking over the landscape of an emissions-free future, there are options for that, too. The Nissan Leaf, the first real mainstream EV, has multiple tuning options available in the aftermarket, and an impressively large cadre of tuners exist to optimize every flavor of Tesla. With the Model S putting down 1020 hp and even Kia’s recent EV6 GT making 576, it’s hard to imagine what more you could possibly want—other than what everyone wants when modifying their cars: more.

Today’s tuning scene is radically different from that of a few decades ago, but the passion and the drive are still the same. Using a laptop instead of a vacuum gauge doesn’t make you any less of an enthusiast, and caring about the environment is no longer a dealbreaker.

***

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Most digital content is built for quick consumption, but there’s still a place for more involving stories and thoughtful exploration. Pour your beverage of choice and join us for another Great Read. –Ed. 

What do a 35-inch lifted Ram pickup and a race-prepped 1990s Ford Fox-body have in common? Both represent the patience and passion of their 29-year-old owners, identical twin brothers who apply the same discipline, 70 hours a week, to the rotating cast of Ford Mustangs in their family’s restoration shop.

Preston and Cody Ingrassia are the heirs to the world’s largest Mustang restoration business, measured by builds completed annually. The Chicago company is at an inflection point. The Ingrassias’ father, Christopher, founded it in 1980 with a yellow Mustang given to him by his father, who had brought the family over from Italy.

Christopher can still be seen on the shop floor seven days a week, in his cowboy hat and white coat, but he’s preparing to hand the business down. The most obvious change is in the name: once Mustang Restorations, now The Mustang Brothers.

“We love bringing something back to life,” Cody says. He freely acknowledges that his show-worthy Ram, nicknamed Goliath, once belonged in a junkyard. “Anybody can go out and buy a clean truck and build it. I’d rather put the money into that and bring it back to life.”

Preston butts in. “It’s huge. He gets gas at night because he doesn’t want anybody to take a video.”

Cody laughs, not denying the jab. “I wasn’t blessed with height.”

Christmas Day, 1920, the Ingrassia family came to America from Italy. After getting kicked out of Oklahoma for bootlegging, they moved to Queens, New York, where the father bought a Sunoco gas station. He taught his son, Christopher, to pump gas and change oil and swap wiper blades. When the father’s job took him—no legal prompting this time—to Chicago, Christopher eventually followed. The younger Ingrassia was the last of his family to leave New York. He took with him the yellow 1960s Mustang coupe that his father had passed to him when he started high school.

“If he had bought a Corvair,” Christopher says, “This shop would be filled with Corvairs.”

Christopher worked as a stagehand at the Chicago Opera House before quitting to start his own business, setting up a small shop near the Chicago riverfront, where the casino boats are now. Today, Mustang Brothers occupies an expansive warehouse in the suburban town of East Dundee.

The five full-time employees who round out the eight-man crew have each worked there longer than Preston and Cody have been alive. One currently lives in an apartment that the family built for him above the shop; he’s suffering through double kidney failure, and travel to and from work had become miserable. Cody and Preston trade off telling the story.

“We’ll tell him, ‘Don’t come in,’ and he’s—”

“—he’s down here at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning.”

It was these people to whom Christopher and his wife showed their newborn twins, going straight from hospital to shop before taking their babies home. Amazingly, Mrs. Ingrassia didn’t object—either to the detour or to the black Mustang limousine (yes) in which they made the trip.

“When you’re a little kid, what do you want to be? You want to be rich and famous,” Christopher says. “What comes with that? A limousine. Well, when the rich-and-famous part wasn’t coming along, I could [at least] make my own limousine, and voilá.”

That car, built around 35 years ago, now sits in the shop’s back room, near Christopher’s high-school Mustang, the space doubling as unofficial museum. Neither brother has children yet, but each plans to recreate the hospital trip when the time comes. Preston and Cody call the limo a “legacy car”—they clearly love its glamour and delight in pointing out the quality of the stretched Ford’s bodywork, how its long flanks lack the waviness of most aging limo conversions. “We’re Italian,” one told me, “so we had to have the gangster whitewalls on it.” (Forgive the lack of attribution on that quote—as twins, the men sound so alike on an audio recording that you can’t always tell them apart.)

The Ingrassias may have a taste for flash, and the sons a penchant for tattoos and slim-fit shirts, but the shop doesn’t steer away from more humble projects. It accepts Ford’s most famous model in any vintage and condition, from barn-find to well-loved.

Over there is the 1968 Casca Ford, a big-block 428 race car and a $120,000 restoration, the car bought sight-unseen and its work commissioned by a man who had never met the brothers or visited East Dundee, only read reviews online. Near the limo is a six-cylinder automatic coupe from the early 2000s; the owner loves it so much that she recently contracted for a thorough freshening costing more than the car is worth. Nor is the patience only for the mechanical. A 1969 Mach 1 has hunkered in the back of the parts room for close to 20 years, its owner long since disappeared.

Many customers, the Ingrassias say, sneak their rides in for work without telling family. Illinois law lets a shop take possession of a vehicle with no contract after 30 days, but the brothers don’t want to file a lien—and anyway, they add, the work is paid for.

In 43 years of business, the shop’s best were 2021 and 2022. Some of that boom came in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic—in the family’s estimation, because owners were working from home and around their vintage cars more often. But many more commissions came because, when faced with a Mustang flooded to the doors by Hurricane Ian, the brothers pulled out their iPhones before starting the engine. The video they posted to TikTok showed seawater blowing out the exhaust and pouring from the cylinders when the spark plugs were removed. It racked up 400,000 views in a day.

“We are now getting calls from around the world,” Preston says. “People have seen us out there, seen the company out there.”

When either man picks up a phone during work, then, it’s usually to document a build, texting photos to the owner or posting to TikTok a tastefully cut video overlaid with electronic music or hip-hop. Customers love it, they say, but perhaps more important, the choice reflects a conviction that classic cars belong in modern pop culture, that the greasy work of restoration is worthwhile and cool.

Nobody needs an appointment to visit. Customers who happen to be in the area can simply walk in. The brothers send build-progress pictures and videos to those who can’t.

They are not nervous about the future. They don’t have much in the way of competition, they say, have never seen the business slow down. What do they think of the modern iterations of Ford’s pony car? They’re good-looking cars, they say, and fast. Sound great. But not, Christopher specifies, “the Mach-E one. Not the electric.”

“Preston and I have talked about eventually maybe putting electric motors in these older cars,” Cody says. “Is this something that we want to do? Definitely not. I love the carburetors…”

“…but if you don’t innovate,” Preston adds, “you’re left behind.”

“Yeah,” Cody says, nodding.

“Talk to my dad about fuel injection and stuff like that. It’s like talking to a wall.”

The two men have not said a word about the work that waits as we chat. When I ask if they need to get back to it, they are unflappably polite. Preston walks to a red GTA convertible on a lift, reaching into the engine bay. Cody kneels by a weathered white coupe, test-fitting a bumper. Each picks up a wrench.

“If you need us, just let us know, okay?”

***

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This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

You might think it strange that a rabid car enthusiast and a man of means from Italy would have no Fiats, Alfa Romeos, or Ferraris in his collection. But retired billionaire jeweler Nicola Bulgari’s driving interest makes perfect sense when you understand its origin.

In 1944, after Rome was liberated from Nazi occupation, young Bulgari marveled at a 1935 Buick 96S driven by American soldiers on the streets of his home city.

When he came to the States in the 1970s to develop his family’s jewelry business, Bulgari brought his deep love of classic American automotive elegance. This led to his founding of Allentown, Pennsylvania’s NB Center for American Automotive Heritage.

The private, 27-acre campus includes a working drive-in theater and a fully functional gas station with vintage pumps. It also boasts 2 miles of road, multiple restoration shops, a 24,000-square-foot lodge for car club functions, and buildings for storage and displaying the 192-strong collection central to Bulgari’s crusade—reminding Americans that they build the best cars in the world and always have.

That’s where the NB Center’s newest and youngest mechanic comes in, 21-year-old Anthony Maguschak. He helps restore the center’s cars—Oldsmobiles, DeSotos, Hudsons, Cadillacs, and Bulgari’s beloved Buicks—which form the backbone of the largest historical trust of American cars and information from the 1920s through the early ’50s.

“Three months before COVID hit, I was headed to Penn State to study wildlife technology,” Maguschak says. “Then I realized career opportunities in the field were scarce.” He sat down with his parents and told them that what he really wanted to do was work on cars for a living.

Once accepted to Penn College of Technology’s two-year restoration program, Maguschak spent the pandemic studying and working under the hood.

“I found everything interesting and fun—the mechanics, transmissions, chassis, bodywork, paint, and upholstery,” he says. While the rest of the world hit pause, the learning at Penn never slowed, and Maguschak was offered a three-month internship opportunity from Keith Flickinger, the NB Center’s curator and chief restorer.

“I am constantly visiting and working with America’s top restoration colleges, looking for young talent like Anthony,” Flickinger says, adding that there aren’t many like Maguschak. “Remember his name. He’s just a rock star—smart, dedicated, driven to learn. He’s an old soul way beyond his 21 years.”

Passion is what fuels the work at the NB Center, and it’s what Flickinger seeks most. “I can teach a skill set, and the RPM Foundation solves the problem of funding to cover lodging, meals—the things I don’t want students worrying about while they’re here learning and working with our professionals.”

Now employed full time at the center, Maguschak primarily works with a small team of seven restorers who maintain every car in “ready-to-drive” condition.

With a new visitors center and library, the collection will continue to expand with the goal of becoming a global destination. But Flickinger is quick to point out that Bulgari’s founding mission is about more than preserving old cars, documents, and photos.

“We like to say that we don’t need to restore another car. We just need to educate future generations with our facility. It’s about paying it forward, by teaching and inspiring young people who will go do the same.”

People just like Anthony Maguschak.

***

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This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

If the matte black Cadillac hearse hadn’t been parked outside the row of beige concrete and brick buildings, it would have been easy to miss Brothers Custom Automotive, a mecca of hot rods, customs, and Ford flathead V-8s in an industrial park in suburban Detroit.

Rosie the shop cat, who presides over the front office, demanded belly rubs from us before we continued into the 8000-square-foot shop. A sweeping glance took in a shark-mouthed land speed racer, a slammed two-tone Lincoln Premiere, modified Fords from the ’20s through the ’50s in various states of repair, a royal blue Mercedes 190SL, a flared Alfa Romeo GTV, and a primer-coated 1965 Bentley S3.

The cars and parts were interspersed with machining equipment, some as old as the cars being serviced, like a Bridgeport mill and a Sun engine tester straight out of the Truman era. The shop’s playlist was as eclectic as the cars, ranging from Sinatra’s “My Way” to the Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.”

Over by the trio of two-post lifts, owner Bill Jagenow was under the dashboard of a cream-colored 1952 Ford Vicky sedan, attempting to diagnose faulty turn-signal wiring using an original factory service manual. Middle-aged, with short, blond hair styled somewhere between rockabilly and military, he was wearing a button-up shirt emblazoned with the Brothers logo. Eventually, he found the electrical short in the Ford, and the Vicky was back to blinking.

Across the garage, Autumn Riggle, Jagenow’s partner and the shop’s manager, meticulously wet-sanded Alfa body panels fresh from the paint booth. Her jet-black Bettie Page bangs complemented her Dickies work shirt. Two other full-timers were hard at work, one welding up a set of seat rails for the Alfa and the other adjusting the carburetors on a ’35 Ford.

Riggle met Jagenow in Detroit through the local car and music scene. She was working in the fashion industry, but as their relationship progressed, she became more involved in the shop’s operation. “I went from selling shoes and coats at Gucci to ordering spare parts on my lunch break,” she recalled. She eventually joined full time to run the business side of the operation.

Jagenow and Riggle are fixtures on the Detroit car scene, from concours to cars and coffee. Due to its community presence and reputation for winning shows, Brothers doesn’t have to advertise for business. Patrons include C-suite execs from the Detroit automakers, professional sports figures, celebrities like Eminem, and average Joes. The reach of Jagenow’s reputation is not limited to Motown, though. At one point during our visit, he had to excuse himself to take a call from a German collector regarding a potential job.

Jagenow had a circuitous journey from being a kid on the east side of Detroit to his current role as an automotive magician for the Motor City elite. He discovered his natural mechanical skills while keeping his first car, a 1972 Cadillac, running in high school. Then he joined the Navy and was stationed in San Diego, where he got caught up in the hot-rod scene. “I was drawn to the way the people in Southern California changed how the car sits,” Jagenow said.

He made friends with hot-rod legend Gene Winfield and other devotees to the discipline. After the Navy and a stint at the California outpost of Mercedes tuner Brabus, he drove his 1949 Ford back to Detroit to work for an automotive supplier.

By day, Jagenow developed and made parts for concept cars. By night, he was wrenching on his own cars and those of his friends. Before long, he found himself maintaining the private collection of former Meadow Brook Concours d’Elegance chairman Larry Smith, who helped spread the word that this former Navy man was the real deal. After Jagenow was laid off during the Great Recession, which devastated the Detroit auto industry, it was only natural that he would become a full-time mechanic and hot-rodder. The enterprise started out of his home garage in partnership with his brother Steve, who is no longer involved. But the name stuck.

Although proficient in rebuilding powertrains in anything from prewar grand tourers to concours classics, Jagenow’s real passion is the flathead Ford V-8. Which explains why flathead engines and oily parts were jammed onto floor-to-ceiling shelves, under workbenches, and wherever else there was room in the Brothers shop.

Indeed, Jagenow is a flathead virtuoso, with his engines powering land speed racing cars that chase records at Bonneville as well as reliable daily drivers. “It’s a beautiful engine—nothing is hidden—and I love the sound they make,” he mused. For the land speed racers, he attends the races with spare parts in tow to act as pit crew.

In order to break speed records and provide extra oomph to street cars, Jagenow invariably turns his attention to the intake side of Ford’s first V-8.

“It’s the biggest restriction to making power with a flathead,” said Jagenow, as he showed me a cut-in-half cylinder head. He uses the half-head to visualize how much metal he can remove from the intake passages to increase airflow. Half art, half science. He also doesn’t hesitate to use go-fast bits from the likes of Iskenderian, Stromberg, and Edelbrock.

Brothers Custom does far more than hopping up engines, though. The crew is well versed in frenching taillights, chopping tops, channeling bodies, and other old-school methods of car modification, but they don’t shy away from using modern paints and body fillers or from more mundane tasks like brake jobs and oil changes.

“I care for these cars like they’re mine,” said Jagenow. “I know all the nuts and bolts on them. I show all the customers everything that I can to keep them safe and make good decisions to keep the car on the road.”

The culmination of Brothers’ skill sets is Jagenow’s ’27 Ford roadster. It’s a striking machine, wearing deep gloss black with a crimson interior. A 4-inch channel—when a hot-rodder raises the floorpan so the body sits lower on the chassis—gives the Ford an imposing posture. In 2013, the car won the Best in Show award at Autorama Extreme. The ’27 is not just a garage queen, however. Jagenow drove it to Chicago for a car show, the flathead V-8’s lumpy, unmuffled bark coming out of both exhaust pipes in stereo.

Ideal for a road trip? Not quite. “It sucked!” Jagenow said.

The vibrant car scene in Detroit runs the gamut from coachbuilt classics to lowriders and vinyl-wrapped supercars. Jagenow and Riggle are in the thick of it all. But Jagenow likes to reimagine cars through historic filters.

“Hot-rodding can be whatever you want it to be,” he said. “But I prefer what cars used to look like in a 1940s magazine.”

Brothers Custom (Troy, Michigan)

• Open since: 2006
• Cars serviced yearly: 75–100
• Crew size: 5 full-timers
• Sweet spot: Hot-rod teardowns and flathead soup-ups
• Shop vibe: Greasy Rally Rats with an eagle eye for perfection

***

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The post Metro Detroit hot-rod shop obsesses over Ford’s first V-8 appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Working on cars is inherently dangerous. Just like driving, spinning wrenches on a vehicle requires respect and undivided attention. We all accept a certain amount of risk when taking on DIY projects, and I’m willing to bet that the percentage of people who have left every single one of their projects without a scrape or bruise to be less than one. I won’t go so far as to say everything is dangerous, but here are a few repeat offenders that I think are the most dangerous tools in the average shade tree mechanic’s shop.

Drill press/drill

Even small drill presses are high-torque affairs thanks to speed reduction pulleys. Snag something on a drill bit and the machine will continue to wrap that material until you hit the stop switch. When drilling, remember that the most dangerous time is right before the bit breaks through the backside of the material. Should the tooling bite, rather than cut, it will take whatever you’re working on and whip it into oblivion. A vise will hold your workpiece in place, but used with a hand drill, you run the risk of twisting your wrist. Still, holding a piece in your hand and drilling on the drill press is asking for trouble. Get a drill vise or appropriate clamps and use them.

Remember, speeds and feeds are incredibly important when drilling. Make sure to adjust the speed at which the drill is spinning and monitor the feed, or the rate as which the drilling takes place.

Grinder

Handheld grinders can easily spin a 4.5″ disc to 8000 rpm and are used to remove material from your project. That material is coming off the wheel at Mach Jesus and bouncing about your shop. Without due care that material will bounce right back at you or damage delicate parts of your project, or worse, your eyes. Questionable quality discs can also break apart and become projectiles in every direction. Grinders are powerful tools to be used with respect and care as to where the material is going. It’s best practice to to use quality attachments, combined with good personal protective equipment: safety glasses, hearing protection, and gloves, at a minimum.

Spring compressor

Hell hath no fury like a compressed spring unintentionally released. Literally tons of force can be sprung loose in an instant. The suspension in our beloved car is sometimes one slip of a wrench from shooting out big parts at ballistic speeds. When working with spring compressors a big dose of extra caution is warranted.

Consider taking a “belt and suspenders” approach by not only carefully using the proper tool, but also using chain to retain the spring to a solid part of the vehicle like the frame, so that if energy is released it will still be contained to an area that you are choosing and can then stay out of. Spring compressors tend to be extra dangerous because often times they are rented tools rather than purchased, and come with few instruction on how to safely use. Do your research on the safe use of spring compressors, and know your limits on when it is time to call in the professionals.

Trash can

Seriously. Have you ever seen that video where a Christmas tree catches fire and it’s only seconds before the whole room is ablaze? That can happen with your shop trashcan too. More than a few projects involve any number of chemicals and it only takes two of the wrong ones to mix in you trash can before they spontaneously combust. We haven’t even talked about the danger of drying oils which can oxidize and create enough heat to self-ignite. Throwing rags in your trash can is asking for trouble. the better move is to get a fire-rated canister with a lid that serves to not only contain any fire, but also limit the access to oxygen that is required to stoke the fire in the first place.

Your ego

One of the most powerful and dangerous tools is your own brain. Confidence comes in one of two ways: experience or ignorance. Walk into a job with the latter and it’s only a matter of time before you are hurt and wondering what happened. Using tools improperly or taking shortcuts are surefire ways to end up damaging your project and/or your body. Check you ego at the garage door, and a safer—and more fun—time will be had by all.

Jack

Floor jacks are fascinating tools once you understand how leverage and hydraulic physics. The ability to easily lift thousands of pounds is a superpower possessed by anyone with a $100 bill. That is terrifying, if you consider the dangers involved. Lifting a car requires attention to proper jacking points and also proper support once up in the air. Again, the physics are amazing, but even more amazing is that all that hydraulic pressure often rests on just a few five-cent o-rings. Do you trust your life to an o-ring? I didn’t think so. Use jack stands. Every time.

Any knife

This is a strange one to explain to folks who haven’t experienced it before, but sharp knives are the safe ones. Dull cutting edges require additional force to push through material and thus have a tendency to slip or turn in a direction the user didn’t intend. Combine this with bad habits like cutting towards ourselves (I’m guilty of this more than I would care to admit) and you have a recipe for disaster. Grab a whetstone and put a fresh edge on your sharp things. I promise that is actually safer.

Punches

When using a punch or chisel you are likely scared of the hammer blows and the chance of hitting your holding hand. That’s a real fear, but the chisel itself may conspire to hurt you as well. The end of a punch that receives those carefully placed hammer strikes has a tendency to mushroom slightly and can reach a point where the edge becomes brittle. When struck, it becomes a sharp projectile. This is easily prevented by filing down any mushrooming edges on your punches.

In the wrong hands anything can be dangerous, just ask my friend who has a glass eye about how dangerous a screwdriver can be when used incorrectly. That doesn’t mean you should never go out and enjoy working on your car though. Everything in life comes with risk, but mitigating some of that by acting responsibly is never a bad idea. Think there is another tool in a common home shop that presents more risk? Leave us the details in the Hagerty Community below.

The post 8 of the most lethal tools in your home shop appeared first on Hagerty Media.

At 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday, in an industrial Southern California suburb a stone’s throw from Disneyland, the guttural rumble of a straight-eight thundered ever closer. Stanley Chavik arrived with the squeal of cross-ply tires, climbed out of his replica 1933 Buick Shafer 8 looking like a Viking headed to battle, then cracked a broad, gap-toothed smile. “Oh, I remember you.” Stanley’s thick Czech accent rolled over his respectable English, which he learned only four years ago. “Come in!”

Stanley hails from the Czech Republic, where his father and grandfather were both car guys. It was a pale yellow 1940s DeSoto, its bumper heavy with metal spikes for an Italian Mad Max knockoff called I Predatori Di Atlantide, that captured his attention. Stanley got hooked on American hot rods.

The internet nourished his hot-rod daydreams. He’d browse classic images from the likes of Gene Winfield, George Barris, and modern builders like Chip Foose. After opening his own welding and fabrication shop in the Czech town of Zlín in 2003, Stanley married Daisy, who applied her business savvy and determination to the venture.

European automotive regulations choked the Chaviks when it came to how they built their cars, but a ramshackle 1939 Buick he’d acquired made Stanley’s dreams manifest when he rebuilt it into a replica of a Shafer 8, inspired by Phil Shafer’s early Indy racers.

After the car’s completion, and much contemplation, the Chaviks packed up the Shafer 8, their U.S. E-2 visa for new businesses, and what money they had. The family, now three with the birth of their son, Stanley Jr., landed in California in late 2017.

Hot-Rod Chavik USA, in sunny Orange County, isn’t large—only about 2000 square feet, with three garage doors that roll skyward to the lofted ceiling. The space owns its Eastern European orderliness. Any color comes thanks to the candy-hued cars that roll in and out.

Upon arrival to the States, Stanley had to buy the cheapest tools he could afford from Home Depot. “We don’t do credit. When we have money, we buy tools,” Daisy says. Stanley does most of his shaping with a Pullmax and his hammers. “I stopped using the English wheel. I prefer a pummeling hammer,” he explains, as if the famous British machine were too delicate.

Aluminum has always been Stanley’s medium. Daisy revealed that he used to shape metal roses for the girls at school. “I like weapons, also,” Stanley interjects, slightly puffing his barreled chest lest I think he’s just a flower guy.

On my visit, two cars sat in the shop, waiting to be animated by their maker. One is a swept speedster that Stanley is building to look as though it might have come from Buick around 1949. The second is an almost-done restomod of a 1963 Toyota FJ43, the entire body, badly mauled by rust, recently fabricated by Stanley. “A Toyota guy comes in to look and he thought it was from factory,” says Stanley. “This is why I’m here.” He says it as if it is a spiritual calling.

Hot-Rod Chavik’s operations are a 50/50 endeavor. Daisy is the feet on the ground, Stanley the head in the clouds. “I’m the professional,” Daisy explains. “I’m not so into cars as Stanley, but if it’s not right, I know. I get the right colors. I make it look perfect.”

“I always say black,” Stanley confesses, and he stays in his lane. Daisy knows her audience, the Southern California hot-rodding scene, full of Skittles-colored flair and flamboyance. “I do advertising, marketing, promotion, Google; we have no life but cars,” Daisy says, showing off a calendar with the grayed-out weekends full of car-related activities.

Their endgame is simple: Get green cards, then become U.S. citizens. In a political climate that would have some think America no longer fulfills its promises, the Chaviks disagree. “Here, opportunity is for everyone. We get to choose how we do our cars,” Daisy says.

Stanley’s heart lies with land speed racers. “When I go to El Mirage to watch the cars, I’m always crying. It’s the same feeling for me as church.” They’re building Daisy a 1932 Ford roadster. Like other Chavik creations, it will look original but be built like a racer, with an Ardun overhead-valve flathead, a rollcage, and a fire system. “But not a trailer queen,” Daisy says. “You can drive it.”

“Can turn it upside down, it will be perfect,” Stanley adds. It will also make an eyelash-curling 400 horsepower. Among the awards for showing the Shafer 8, which take the top shelf of a merch case in the shop’s office, sits Daisy’s favorite: a first-place trophy in the Vintage Race Car category from the 2020 Sacramento Autorama. “It made us legitimate. I cried,” says Daisy. All of their trophies, in fact, help. “They’re proof that we are serious to stay here. I don’t ever want to go back.”

“I’m a showman,” Stanley says. He loved the attention he got as we drove the Shafer 8 to breakfast, accelerating around a traffic circle twice in search of a parking spot. And people are starting to notice the show. When we arrived back at the car, there was a note on the dash from none other than Chip Foose, including his phone number, asking Stanley to give him a call. “This will please Daisy,” Stanley says, then, under his breath, “Chip Foose. OK.”

Forget Disneyland—as far as the Chaviks are concerned, a 2000-square-foot shop in Southern California is the happiest place on earth.

The post Coming to America: Czech hot-rodders find their place in the sun appeared first on Hagerty Media.

In the early ’80s Adam Howell was smoking around the U.K. in his company car carrying out building surveys. But estate agency and property weren’t for him, and he looked about for a career change. In 1986 he set up A.C.F. Howell, metal finishers. So what took him from structural dampness to chrome plating?

When he wasn’t hammering up the M1 in his repmobile, Howell was busy restoring a Jaguar E-Type. Most parts were available from specialists such as Martin Robey, but the one bit that Howell couldn’t find was a replacement chrome trim for his coupe’s guttering. This would have stymied your author and many others, but Howell rolled up his sleeves and made his own replacement from brass strip which he then had chrome-plated. Word got around the Jaguar club to which he belonged, and before long our man was making sets of trim for other owners.

Realizing that he was deriving more pleasure from making parts for classic Jags than he was from peering around lofts, he set up the company that we are visiting today. Howell is not sure about the history of his Victorian-era workshops in Walsall, on the outskirts of Birmingham, but word is that it was once the home of an automotive engineering company—possibly one that manufactured steering wheels.

Back when Howell started the company it only occupied a small part of the premises that it does today. Expansion happened quickly and by the early ’90s A.C.F Howell had some pretty serious customers.

“Land Rover, which was owned by Ford at the time,” explains Howell, “wanted to build a limited edition of the P38 Range Rover. The standard car had door handles that were painted black but SVO (Special Vehicle Operations) had a plan to build a limited run of 100 cars that had chrome-plated handles and also a chrome surround on the center console. That was a pretty straightforward job for us because the numbers were low. SVO was very pleased with our work and it also impressed those in the production section of Land Rover. They asked us if we could produce parts for them for regular-production models and not just limited editions.”

Within less than a decade Adam Howell found himself going from making a handful of E-Type moldings to employing a small number of people in a corner of a workshop to running a business that had 90 staff and was delivering thousands of parts per month to one of the most prestigious brands on the planet. Those days came and went, as they often do when you’re relatively small cog in a very big supply chain.

Today A.C. Howell Limited is back where it started, helping enthusiasts and professional restorers by returning tarnished and rusting parts back to their gloriously shiny original condition, and from 90 staff down to a more manageable and friendly 18. You get the impression that Adam Howell doesn’t miss the glory days of dealing with big business and the associated worries—or the hassles of running a large company.

I’ve never done a ground-up restoration, but I’ve spent a lifetime titivating and rejuventating old crocks. Running restorations is the correct technical phrase. I know from experience that one of the most satisfying and downright sexy parts of fettling old cars is a trip to a plating company to collect freshly rechromed parts. Having passed through the area in which new jobs are unpacked and assessed, we’re in the part of the works where repairs are carried out before parts go through the plating process. For example, a radiator grille for a Jaguar XK is being soldered because a couple of the gills have broken.

Also waiting for attention is a huge front bumper. As he proves later on our visit, Adam can spot and identify an E-Type part from a hundred paces, but without looking at the job card he’s unable to identify this large bumper. Being an American car nerd, I am fairly sure it’s from a 1960s Pontiac Grand Prix or Bonneville. I used to own a 1972 Chevrolet El Camino pick-up truck and I remember clearly the excitement when its front bumper came back from the platers. I could have bought a new (pattern) bumper from America for not much more than the cost of the plating but the quality of the chrome would not have been as sensible.

“That’s often the case,” says Howell. “Preparation is absolutely key to a brilliant finish. Just the same with painting a car: If you have a poorly prepared base layer then the finished result will be poor. Some of the finishes that you see on pattern bumpers or chrome parts will only last a few years in our climate.”

Also in this part of the workshop is a machine that produces channeling like those parts Howell made 36 years ago for his own E-Type. There’s a drum of flat-brass strip that is fed into a succession of rollers that shape it into a perfect U-shaped channel.

“We made this machine ourselves,” says Howell, “and it does a fantastic job.”

But enough of this. I want to see where the magic happens. Where the chemistry and potions mix to turn a dull piece of metal into a shiny concours winning part of a work of art. The room where the actual plating is done. Howell leads us into a room in which there is a long row of vats—more than are needed today, but they were installed when the company was flat-out with its Ranger Rover work. Still, there’s plenty going on.

Chemistry is one of the many O levels that I failed to pass, but I do have vague memories of copper plating a spoon by dipping it into a solution of copper sulphate and then passing a current through the solution. “You’re in the right area,” says a generous and tactful Howell. Before we delve into the periodic tables, Howell has company chemist Dale Lyons try to explain the science to me—a brief overview of what’s happening.

“With the new guttering you saw us making earlier,” explains Howell, “we can take it straight to be nickel-plated and then after that chrome-plated. For parts like the bumper you saw, we first have to copper-plate it, then add a layer of nickel and then the chrome.” Howell shows us some parts that have been copper-plated and then polished. They look absolutely gorgeous in this finish and it’s almost a shame to carry on with the process. It certainly backs up Howell’s point about preparation being everything. Now to Dale Lyons—who, by the way, is a very hands-on person and doesn’t look anything like the typical stereotype of a chemist in a white coat with pencils poking from the top pocket.

“The process of electroplating is not particularly complicated,” explains Lyons. “The part or parts that you’re plating are placed in a bath of a salt of the coating material. The parts are then connected to the negative terminal of a source of electricity. Another conductor, composed of the coating metal, is connected to the positive terminal of the source. When the current is passed through the solution, atoms of the plating metal deposit onto the negative electrode or cathode.”

Lyons goes to explain that the thickness of the plating depends on the length of time that the current is passed and also the strength of that current. Up the current, and you plate more quickly. It’s all to do with Faraday’s Law. “Chrome is only in the bath for a few minutes,” explains Howell. “You’re aiming for a coating of chrome only 0.3 to 0.5 of a micron thick. If you apply too thick a coating of chrome it will crack and, equally serious, you may find that parts no longer fit together.”

Once plated the parts are taken for polishing and then to final inspection. The variety of jobs on the go is amazing. Everything from a Rolls-Royce Camargue radiator grille to an exhaust from a classic two-stroke Suzuki motorcycle. And, fittingly, plenty of E-Type parts, including bumper sections. It seems a shame to put them back on the car. The company also has a large stock of Jaguar bumpers that can be used if a customer’s own part is too far gone. Incidentally, to rechrome a MK2 Jag bumper costs about £400 ($520, roughly). That said, prices are likely to have to go up in the near future. “We use lots of electricity,” says Howell. “Our electricity bill would make your hair fall out and the cost of energy, as everyone knows, is shooting up.”

Adam Howell parted with his E-Types (he had a small collection of them) a while back but is still a totally committed enthusiast. He has a Lamborghini Espada and a Ferrari 512 Boxer bought for a ridiculously small sum when prices were low. But the car I’d love to see is the Mercedes-Benz 450 SEL 6.9 that he restored himself. That generation of S-Class Mercs had the most fantastic big chrome bumpers. I’ll wager looking directly at those on Howell’s on a sunny day could damage your eyesight.

Via Hagerty UK

The post A.C.F. Howell metal finishers is a shrine to shine appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Jake Raby likes problems. If you manage to catch him amidst a rare moment of rest, he’ll cheerfully tell you that the quicker things blow up, the better. “I like failure. I like when things don’t work,” he explained during our visit to Flat-Six Innovations in Cleveland, Georgia. “You never learn from successes. Honestly, success hinders development because it makes you think you know more than you do.”

Perhaps that’s why Raby has chosen to become an expert (although he disavows that word) in the much-maligned water-cooled M96 and M97 engines that powered the 996- and 997- generation (1999–2013) 911, as well as Boxsters and Caymans of that era. Raby developed the original patented repair for the most notorious issue on early water-cooled (M96- and M97-engine) Porsches—intermediate shaft bearing failure—but his “fixes” go much further, into hot-rod territory. They also turn on its head the bottom-line-oriented thinking that propelled Porsche’s first truly mass-produced 911.

Raby himself turns on its head whatever preconceived notion you might have of a master Porsche engine builder. A proud Marine veteran, his office appears more like a recruiter’s den than the administrative haunt of a master engineer. There are no pictures of cars, no signed, well-wishing headshots from assorted automotive celebrities, and no framed feature articles nailed to the walls. Instead, a carved seal of the Marine Corps. hangs on the wall a few feet from a stuffed bobcat he bagged on this property. In the corner, a lone shotgun rests in a glass-fronted gun cabinet, downwind from a small paper sign warning that anyone attempting to haggle or negotiate a quote or invoice will be immediately denied service and physically removed from his 20-acre property.

Those who patronize Flat Six Innovations (FSI) each year are an unconventional bunch for Porsche nuts, themselves. Whereas most high-end Porsche shops park rows of gleaming, fully-prepped hot-rod 911s, the customer car storage area of FSI hides a generic fleet of basic, world-worn 996/997 coupes and cabrios complemented by a smattering of equally unremarkable Boxsters and Caymans. Outside of Raby’s idyllic tree-lined workshop, water-cooled Porsches like these are still among the least likely candidates for big-buck modifications. The typical driver-condition 996 still trades for an average of $29,000 according to the Hagerty Price Guide. If you hand Raby the keys to your 986 Boxster, you’re particularly mad—our price guide indicates a 2000 Boxster shuffles around for an average of $11,000. Raby’s services can easily run triple these values and beyond, and that’s accounting for the recent run-up in values for water-cooled Porsches. Still, starry-eyed enthusiasts from around the world made the pilgrimage to Cleveland, Georgia long before prices jumped.

“These guys would bring in a broken 996 or a Boxster, and it would still be their dream car. I still hear that on a weekly basis—‘dream car,’” says Raby of his early customers. “I would tell them they would have to love this $5000 car beyond measure for me to do what you want me to do.”

What he does is bring obsessive re-engineering and top-shelf components to a family of engines that are about as well regarded in the Porsche community as an oil-soaked sock. If you skip the stout and reliability-focused “Stocker” build, both the “Stage I” and “Stage II” bores out the cylinders to increase displacement by 0.2-liters and slots in Nikasil cylinder liners. The “Stage II” is by far the most popular build, carrying everything offered in the “Stage I,” only now with a gut full of billet connecting rods and forged pistons. The heads are ported and polished, with customers given the opportunity to dish out for optional top-level extras like lightweight valves and spring upgrades. Regardless of package, each FSI build packs Raby’s patented IMS fix, replacing Porsche’s failure-prone sealed ball bearings with a pressure-fed oil-lubricated plain bearing.

The invoice for these services is not for the faint of wallet. The Stage II will set you back $30,000. If you’ve really got it bad, $70,000 will net you FSI’s “R-Series” engine—a high-compression reactor that makes up to 460 hp at the crank—(with a range of displacements from 3.8 to 4.4 liters)—that sounds like a chainsaw fitted with starship Enterprise’s warp drive. Of course, the “R-Series” engines are far from settled science; Raby is pushing for a 500 crank-hp “R-Series” by the end of 2023.

Don’t bother breaking out the whiteboard for some visual ideation—nothing about these upgrades makes any financial sense whatsoever. Although Raby notes that some customers have been able to “cash out” profitably thanks to the rise in 996 values and the longstanding reputation of his builds, the napkin math in 2022 says you’ll need to outlay something like $60,000 for a clean 996 Carrera with the Stage II engine, and that’s before you start futzing around with the brakes, wheels, and suspension. What, you were going to just stop with what’s under the decklid?

Raby, ever the straight shooter, doesn’t try to justify the outlay with some revisionist history of Porsche’s water-cooled engines. “In some ways, I love it [the M96],” he says. “But, I really hate the practice behind it—I hate that Porsche basically sold out all the engineers and prior people who had done so much to build engines that are worth a damn, and to set itself up for just-in-time manufacturing.”

FSI’s workflow is decidedly not “just-in-time.” Customer builds of all scales—each handled through an intricate filing and progress-check scheduling system involving manilla folders in the office’s “War Room”—carry the full weight of thousands of developmental hours. “To me, none of this is about the engine. It’s about process of doing this,” he says back in the office. “The engine is just a culmination; It took me working on an engine in a hog pen with dirt floor to get to this point. You’re not buying just this engine, you’re buying a few thousand engines from me that we’ve learned from.”

Despite his outstanding success in the Porsche space, Raby’s more interested in air-cooled stuff with a few less cylinders and a few less computers to worry about. A lifelong devoted Volkswagen enthusiast, he notes that the newest car he owns, aside from his tow-rig, is an air-cooled 993. His watercooled “M9X” program started as a secret side business to his main passion—building micron-precise VW Type 4 flat-four engines. Raby’s Aircooled Technology (RAT) was the first division under Raby Enterprises and remains his primary focus today; from what we gathered, outside of the rarified R-Series builds, he leaves most of the day-to-day prep of customer engines to his well-oiled staff in Cleveland, Georgia, squirreling himself away in his large RAT workshop located on his private, personal property a short drive away.

Yet Raby understands the fervor of his customers, who he says aren’t traditional Porschephiles. “These are a new breed. They wanted this car forever; some of these guys had this car on the poster on their wall,” Raby noted as we walked through his workshop. As he showed us his engine dyno room—the only engine-out, Porsche-focused dyno outside of Germany by his reckoning—he added, “We’re dealing with pure emotions here, stuff that’s not quantifiable. I don’t do work on someone’s car unless they are absolutely sure they absolutely love this car, and they do.”

Two cars were pulled from FSI’s customer fleet for our sampling. First, a 997 Carrera 4 Cabriolet with a Stage II FSI engine, making 325 hp at the wheels and around 400 at the flywheel. This drop-top was a fascinating window into what type of enthusiast gravitates toward FSI. From the outside, nothing about this dark silver C4 denoted there was almost $40,000 buzzing under that rear decklid, nor did the well-lived interior. So, think of it as the antithesis of a 1980s Gemballa Porsche. Even as we calmly cruised through intersections and past prowling cops on our way to backroads, the physical and aural experience was subtler than the numbers and dollar signs might have you believe.

Blurred trees and echoing foothills immediately organized our thoughts. The duality is incredible; what initially felt like no more than a standard 997 with a sport exhaust evolved into a wonderful cacophony of rip and rasp akin to an angle grinder cutting into a pipe organ. These engines, when stock, need lots of revs—peak torque came around 4500 rpm. Not this one—a deep well of torque gave way to seemingly endless acceleration.

A 1999 996.1 Carrera with a Stage I package idled grumpily in FSI’s courtyard upon our return. This 3.6-liter’s 360 crank hp is a significant boost from the stock 3.4-liter’s original 296 hp, and puts it dead-nuts-even with a contemporary 996.1 911 GT3. And, as with the other car, it feels shockingly refined. Everything is completely turnkey and wonderfully confidence inspiring; even at parking lot speeds, there’s not a single whiff of “project car” growing pains to be found.

As with the 997’s Stage II, power is remarkably progressive and the torque butter-thick. The Stage I was predictably less explosive, but redline arrived in a rush, offering up somewhat muted flat-six clatter and zing but a wonderfully strong sense of acceleration that feels broader than the contemporary 996 GT3. With a proper engine, this early build 996 came to life; its excellent steering feel and a shockingly decontented interior lent a rather vintage vibe to the whole experience.

That purity may be what customers are really paying for here, and we don’t blame them.

These days, hot-rodding a 356 or air-cooled 911 is fraught with preconceived notions of what is tasteful and what the market will accept. There are rules. In contrast, no one is stopping you from making a 996 your own. You can do whatever you want to that 1999 Carrera, and no purist would bat an eye. Cage it, strip it out, hunker it down—who cares? It’s a 996, and if you love it—if you really, really love it—then use this transitory affordability to create the Porsche of your dreams. We’re sure Jake Raby and Flat Six Innovations would love to help out.

The post Georgia engine builder challenges Porsche dogma with hot-rod 996s appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Find someone who looks at you the way Michael Mallock looks at the RML Short Wheelbase, moments after its Ferrari V-12 has been mounted to its subframe.

It’s been a long two and a half years up to this point. For all of us generally, but particularly for a company like RML, birthing a brand new and very serious product. Now, with the red cam covers of the Ferrari 5.5-liter, “F133” V-12 just visible past the Short Wheelbase’s raised front wings, it looks like an actual car.

The Short Wheelbase is RML’s attempt to recapture some of the driving experience of classic grand touring sports cars in a package that can be used as long and as often as any modern car. Set up as Ray Mallock Ltd. in 1984, RML better known for its multiple sports car and touring car championships, as well as special projects like the Nissan Juke-R, and engineering for OEMs like Chinese electric sports car maker Nio.

It’s also the company’s first in-house production road car. Each SWB is based loosely on a Ferrari 550 Maranello donor car—though extensively reengineered, as we’ll see. And it’s something of a name-building exercise in this field, though with a CV like RML’s, the company’s expertise isn’t in doubt.

There are still wheels and lights and glass and numerous other parts to bolt on to the prototype (Car Zero) of course. Many, like the artfully laid-up carbon underbody panels that few will ever see, are propped up on dollies or carefully arranged on benches. Others are being meticulously milled, and others still are yet to arrive at RML from suppliers.

Once they’re all attached by some time early in the New Year, serious testing can begin. For now, elevated a few feet above the ground on a two-post lift, the RML Short Wheelbase looks almost ready to go.

Six months of progress

As Mallock explains, the fruits of the last few years amount to far more than the parts on display. “It’s been busy. Very busy. We’ve had parts constantly coming in and they’re dropping into the car as they should, but now we’re in final assembly. Early next year we’ll have Car Zero that we can drive down the road—which is massively exciting.”

Testing of donor cars for customer builds is already underway too—a process that ensures each 550 is a suitable base for conversion into a SWB, and that issues don’t come up in the finished product that could have been dealt with while it was still a 550 Maranello.

RML’s durability program for the finished products is impressive too, compressing climatic tests, shake and rattle programs, load testing and more, to the equivalent of 50,000 road miles. It’s all to ensure the finished product, from its paintwork and its carbon-fiber structure to the smallest trim components, is on par with any major manufacturer. Hopefully these cars will be used as regularly as the 550 some of its components were drawn from—and perform even better.

From expertise to testing rigs, RML already had much of what it needed to undertake a project like the SWB. “We’re working with partners,” says Mallock, “but the team on the Short Wheelbase project have been there from the start. There’s a mixture of both a mainstream automotive and a motorsport background. Then the testing rigs for individual components—we do that here too.”

Docking procedure

Brand-new mats are laid carefully across the SWB’s front wings and nose section as the V12 is wheeled slowly overhead. Mallock says that the paint they’re protecting hasn’t yet been finished to production standards, since the car has plenty of work ahead of it. You’d be hard-pressed to tell from more than a few paces away.

The paint looks like Tour de France Blue—always a good shade for front-engined Ferraris—but it’s actually a custom hue, and RML has gone through dozens of samples to find a blue that suits the car’s curves. Under artificial light it really pops. “Having that parked outside at Goodwood or on the lawn at Pebble Beach,” says the boss, “is going to look mega.”

Last time we caught up with the project, there was a well-used Ferrari 550 Maranello (in that traditional shade of blue) sitting between the posts on the lift. The team’s full-scale model, silver when I saw it, is now wearing a rather more vivid shade of yellow paint. Yellow suits it, but Mallock reasoned it may not be the ideal shade for promotional purposes when the car is finally ready. The prototype’s interior, incidentally, will be trimmed in tan leather—Bridge of Weir supplies the hides.

Walking around the car, Mallock talks me through some of the other details, but it’s hard not to gaze back at the engine as it’s carefully lowered into place.

“With every car we get in, the engine comes out and goes straight on the dyno for a full sign-off process,” Mallock explains. “That gives us a baseline. Then the whole thing is stripped down, and gets blueprinted [a process where the engine is rebuilt and adjusted to the tightest manufacturer tolerances]—even if it’s had a rebuild 500 miles before we bought the car.”

Any parts that need changing are changed, those that need cleaning are cleaned, and minor parts are tested, making sure each and every component is perfect. Engines come into RML in different states (as you might expect for cars that are now as much as 25 years old) but it gives RML some interesting facts and figures to sift through.

“The engine in this car was about 15-18 percent off the book figures,” says Mallock. After the rebuild, “It’s now within one per cent, which is probably the closest any of these engines gets to the claimed figures.”

RML doesn’t quote an output just yet, but given the work to each unit we’d guess it’s equivalent to a very healthy 550; something in region of 480 bhp to 500 bhp, against a dry weight target of 1500 kg (3307 pounds).

Smallest details

Engineers move under, around, and over the engine bay, slotting in the V-12 in an efficient but somewhat drawn-out process that reminds you engine installations aren’t as easy as YouTube makes them look. Within around thirty minutes though, it’s sitting there, red crackle-finish cam covers glowing inside the spotless engine bay.

Nearby is the car’s gearbox, also restored and rebuilt in-house by RML, and beside that is the 550’s propshaft tube. Doors, bonnet, boot lid and underbody panels sit nearby, as does a table containing the car’s intake manifold, and a steering column subassembly that Mallock is particularly proud of.

“The column shroud on the 550 is quite a big unit, and doesn’t fit with our aesthetic, so we’ve designed and engineered this little beauty. It’s one of my favorite bits on the car, actually. Early on we talked a lot about taking inspiration from jewelry and watchmaking, and this has a lot of those elements in it.”

A massive shame then that so few will ever see it—unless they happen to check out these photos before buying their Short Wheelbase. But as with so many examples of engineering obsession, from the work of art that is a McLaren F1’s throttle pedal to the oft-painted-over, bookmatched carbon weave on a Pagani, what goes on under the skin is a microcosm of the quality buyers expect from the entire car.

And of course, the action of the indicator and wiper stalks on this skeletal, soon-to-be-shrouded functional item, has been matched to the weights of the rest of the car’s controls. Because even if you can’t see it, you’re still going to feel it.

The plan for 2022

Then, how about the exhaust system? It’s fully legal of course, both in terms of emissions and noise levels, but still custom designed to produce a glorious V-12 note to out-howl the standard Maranello.

The process of designing this, as Mallock explains, goes far deeper than just welding together a few stainless tubes, with engineers simulating the path the gases take all the way from the combustion chamber to the moment it leaves the finishing pipes. The intake, meanwhile, is the standard Ferrari unit, but fed via the functional scoop on the carbon bonnet. Each throttle blip may feel like sitting on the grid at Goodwood. We can’t wait to find out …

There are numerous finishes for the exterior brightwork (Mallock shows me yet another beautiful sculpture—the car’s flush-fitting door handle), interior components, while the reverse of the bonnet, bootlid and doors has been left in bare carbon to show off the material. And of course, there’s that aforementioned, three-piece undertray, slatted for cooling down its entire length.

There’s a palpable buzz from the engineers to get it all attached to the car and see it on its wheels, which should all happen early in 2022.

Then there’s road testing, and after that—most excitingly for us, and for the customers who already have their orders in (eventually, 30 of them)—those outside RML will finally get to drive it. 2022’s really looking up.

The post RML’s 250 GT homage is glorious even in development appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Porsches arrive from all over the country at Jerry Pellegrino’s repair shop in Natick, Massachusetts. Some owners drive there. Some ship their cars. “The blue [car] belongs to a collector in Florida,” says Pellegrino, indicating a 1972 911 E.

European Performance Engineering (EPE) in Natick fixes the elite of the world of Porsches, says Tom Thalmann, who since 2009 has been driving his ’03 911 more than 70 miles to EPE from his home in Rhode Island.

European Performance Engineering has worked on many million-plus dollar Porsches. That figure may reflect purchase price, and/or the fame of a former owner, as in the case of a 930 that had belonged to an Academy-Award-winning actor whom I remember vividly, despite his untimely demise more than four decades ago. (Pellegrino, who emphasizes the importance of discretion in his business, refrains from giving out information that might identify his customers.)

Other notable Porsches receiving EPE’s ministrations include “probably ten 959s, a handful of RS Carreras, of which there may be 50 in the country, a 964 #1 prototype, and one of the five 911ST rally cars that were built for the East African Rally,” says Thalmann, whose Porsche is famous for his having driven it more than 650,000 miles.

“We’re known as a bit of a specialist in certain things—air cooled engines, and 959s,” says Pellegrino. “We are entrusted with all manner of Porsches, from early 356s to the latest high tech 911s.”

“The 959s come in from as far away as California,” says Pellegrino. Built beginning in 1986, and sold only in 1987 and 1988, they “combined such forward thinking features as all wheel drive, antilock brakes, and cockpit adjustable ride height, as well as front/rear drive torque distribution, just to name a few,” says Pellegrino. Even today, they remain “a true technological tour de force.” The first 959 to enter the 6,100 mile Paris-Dakar rally, in 1986, won that race.

Production ceased prematurely when it became clear that the cost to manufacture each 959 was more than double the purchase price. Of the 329 or 337 that were made—estimates vary—only around 50 came to the US.

But even what Pellegrino refers to as “regular cars”—Porsches like Thalmann’s 911—cross state lines to be serviced and repaired at European Performance Engineering.

One notable customer who doesn’t have to cross state lines is Paul Russell, the proprietor of the eponymous antique car restoration company in Essex, MA. Among others, Russell restored Ralph Lauren’s cars, including a Bugatti Atlantic, one of several in the world. One of Russell’s restorations won Best in Show at this year’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.

Russell sends cars to Pellegrino that “are a little out of our concentrated focus area. He’s taken care of several of our clients’ 959s, which involved some deep, heavy service work that required engine removal, disassembly, and inspection,” says Russell.

Russell also sent his wife’s unrestored 1973 BMW 2002 TII to Pellegrino for mechanical work.
“If somebody calls here requesting services that I can’t provide, then it’s a great relief to have a trusted vendor that we can refer people to,” says Russell.

Working on esoteric cars can lead to esoteric problems, says Pellegrino. “With the 959, sometimes certain parts are not available. Also the prices on some of the parts are absurd… We can sometimes repair what we’ve got, [or] we can have some parts made. We might take something from another car and adapt it. When you have a car that’s worth around a million dollars, you have to fix it.”

Not all of Pellegrino’s work is repairs. Dana Martin, a long-time local customer, has a 1973 911, which he likes because it predated much of the emissions control equipment, and it’s “one of the lightest 911s.” Pellegrino informed Martin that Porsche moved so incrementally on changes that he could easily replace that car’s 2.4 liter engine with a 1995 3.6 liter engine,” along with a g50 gearbox and a hydraulic clutch, which Pellegrino then did. “Now I’ve got this almost 50 year old 911 that goes like stink!” says Martin.

Besides working in the shop, “we have also been hired to support racers in both professional and amateur events, including three very successful trips to the 24 Hours of Daytona,” says Pellegrino.

“In the earliest days of Porsche’s racing [under Porsche Motorsport North America], just three people were allowed to open Porsche’s race engines,” says Peter Bassett, another long-time local customer who has raced Porsche GT3 cup cars. “Jerry was one of them.”

In racing, says Bassett, three elements are paramount: prepping the car, which involves tuning the suspension and the engine for a particular track; repairs during the race; and strategy. Pellegrino has expertise in all of the above, in no small part because he has raced.

Part of that expertise also stems from Pellegrino’s having been director of drivers’ ed for the Porsche Club of America’s New England Region, as well as an instructor, says Bassett. “I did my first driver’s ed event in 2004, in a Porsche, with Jerry as my first instructor. I’ve been on the podium, at a very high level with cup cars, so Jerry must have done something right.”

In one incident, Pellegrino got Bassett back onto the track in time for the next sprint, after Bassett messed up his exhaust when he spun his spec Porsche GT3 cup car into the guardrail on turn 7 at Sebring. (Sprints in this context are roughly half hour races.) In another, at Daytona, Martin blew the transmission on his spec Boxster. Pellegrino, his brother, and another mechanic extracted the transmission “in a day, right there in the paddock, [and installed a new one Martin had scrounged], and I was able to race for the race weekend,” says Martin. (Pellegrino’s brother, Greg, owns Vintage Motorsports in Holliston Mass., which services classic and vintage cars.)

Martin notes that Pellegrino’s name carries such weight that “when I need a part or a tool, I can go to another team, and they’re more than happy to lend Jerry stuff.”

Pellegrino came late to the love of cars. He’d worked doing “very, very high tolerance grinding and machine work,” for a company owned by his uncle. “I earned a good living, but it was really boring.”

At the time, he had an Alfa Romeo he’d bought used from a then well-known Boston area dealer, Gaston Andrey. His mechanic, Keith Welby, a British Master Mechanic, was the only person he trusted to work on that car, says Pellegrino, noting that Master Mechanics “are required to understand all aspects of automobile design, engineering, and manufacturing.” But one day Pellegrino found him gone from that dealer. He tracked him down at Welby’s new shop, Cars International, then in Upton, Mass., and asked for a job.

“He hired me because I had no experience,” said Pellegrino. The advantage of no experience: Pellegrino hadn’t developed bad habits.

Asked about his philosophy, Pellegrino characterized European Performance Engineering as being in the entertainment business. “Most people drive their Porsches because they enjoy them. We try to maintain that. If the car doesn’t run well, and it’s not reliable, it becomes no fun fast.”

To that end, the mechanics specialize. “As the senior mechanic,” says Pellegrino, who was born during the second Eisenhower administration, “I am well suited to work on the earlier cars which I dealt with when they were new. Bill, my longest tenured co-worker now does most of the engine and gearbox rebuilds as well as [servicing] most of the many 959s that pass through EPE. Jeremy is charged with much of the newer cars with his very strong skill set in diagnostic and computer systems.”

Pellegrino makes himself easily accessible. “Most of my clients have my cell phone number. I tell people, if you have a problem that I can fix with a phone call, call me. Nobody abuses it.”

Customers also become good friends, says Pellegrino. However, “If they don’t, it doesn’t work. I’ve fired a few clients,” he says. “It’s wonderful. I’ve said to people, you don’t have to pay your bill but you need to find someone else to care for your car.”

Asked about the coming of electric cars, Pellegrino responds, “I joke that I was hoping to be dead before I ran out of air cooled cars to fix.” For that matter, he says that most recent cars—regardless of power source—are boring.

“The problem with new cars is that they’re too good. You get in a modern anything, not just Porsche, and all you’re doing is aiming it. That’s not me. I had a 2021 Turbo S [in the shop]—a phenomenal car. Everything it does, it does perfectly and quietly. I wouldn’t own it for love nor money.”

In fact, that perfection of the new, he says, “is what’s elevating the prices of older Porsches.”

Indeed, many of Pellegrino’s clients are buying older Porsches. “They want nonpower steering. A car that’s lithe, responsive, and light. This is what made Porsche. You don’t get that with the new stuff.”

Pellegrino quotes Martin on the why he prefers his’73 911. “He says ‘I don’t want to be the guy who ends up on the front page of the [Boston] Globe arrested for doing 140 mph because I was bored.’”

Pellegrino has owned lots of Porsches—all but one of them air cooled. The current Porsche is a 1987 911 coupe, which he describes as “very simple, G body car, nothing fancy. It makes 205 horsepower. You’ve gotta shift it a lot to go fast, but it’s got great steering, great brakes.”

But Pellegrino has put that car away for his daughter, Lucia, now three years old. He is stockpiling parts for it, about which he says, “someone like my brother can keep that car going forever. Unlike a newer car.”

Pellegrino’s and his wife’s daily drivers are Mercedes. (Pellegrino keeps an all wheel drive pickup for winter driving.) “A very wise person said when I was starting out, ‘if you want to buy a racehorse, buy a Porsche. If you want to buy a workhorse, get a Mercedes.’ I’m a believer in Mercedes, they are extremely safe, extremely well engineered. I have owned 4 door midsize Mercedes continually for 40 years. Traditionally, I buy E class, 3-4 years old.”

In 2008, Pellegrino broke with that tradition, buying the first new car of his life. It’s an AMG C63, “a true German hot rod with big normally aspirated V8 and rear wheel drive,” he says. “Other than the high rear tire consumption rate, it is in my opinion a near perfect blend of performance, comfort, practicality, and efficiency, along with the wolf in sheep’s clothing presentation that makes it the ideal choice as a daily driver.”

Driving that Mercedes served him particularly well during the years his wife, a physician, was a medical resident in Hackensack, NJ, giving him a 400 mile round trip weekly commute. “The C63 was the ultimate car for car for these trips, consuming thousands of Merritt Parkway miles at speed with tremendous aplomb,” he says.

“My wife [who just bought an AMG as well] keeps telling me, ‘you need a newer car.’ But there’s nothing out there that I lust for.”

The post See the Boston-area repair shop that has become a Mecca for Porsche owners appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If GDK Veneering was a multinational company it would have plaques and posters on the walls at its global headquarters proclaiming its green credentials and boasts that it was single-handedly solving global warming. But GDK Veneering isn’t a multinational company and its global headquarters are behind a smart semi in a residential street in Crewe, U.K., Not that far from the Bentley factory. Flash it ain’t, but what could be greener or kinder to the planet than taking faded, cracked and aged wood from a classic car and making it like new again?

Years of fiddling with old cars has filled my address book with useful contacts for the many trades that are essential for the amateur fettler or restorer. Rusty bodyshell? No problem, I can point you in the direction of a company that can blast the rust off your E-Type’s monocoque using friendly media such as nut shells. MIG or TIG welding? Easy, I’ve got just the man for you. But woodwork and in particular work with veneers, I’m afraid I can’t help you. That’s changed after a morning with Ged Gollings, his son Daniel, and nephew Sean.

I’ve never visited an outfit quite like this before. Ged Gollings apologizes profusely and repeatedly for the rustic appearance of the workshop, but there’s no need because I’m used to seeing craftsmen working in cramped and untidy premises. Look more closely, however, and you see a perfectly managed and organized operation in which experience, lateral thinking, and sheer improvisation has created a perfect working environment.

You’d expect from seeing his work that 52 year-old Ged had served an apprenticeship up the road at Rolls-Royce (which was in Crewe until BMW bought it) or Bentley. Not quite. Until redundancy struck he was working at his local B&Q. Gollings explains his unusual career path: “I then got a job at a company doing veneering that was run by a bloke who was at Rolls until he was also made redundant. I’ve never been massively into cars but as I soon as I started I fell in love with the job. When I started all I did was simple tasks like stripping off old material and removing brackets. Exactly the type of work that my nephew Sean does here.”

Unfortunately this company went to the wall when a large OEM pulled its work, and since it was the firm’s major customer, that was it. “We started GDK in 2013,” recounts Gollings, “and because I’d loved the work I’d paid attention and picked up a lot of the skills. I’m getting better at making things all the time and my skill level is improving.”

Looking at the work done here, that’s an understatement.

GDK Veneering is planning an imminent move into larger premises where everything will be done under one roof. For now there are three separate workshops. There’s the one at the back of the house where the intricate work is done, plus final polishing and then despatch of finished work; a small work shed on a small industrial estate is where Sean strips off brackets and strips off old lacquer; and then on the same estate there’s The Shack. From the outside The Shack looks like an old chicken shed but inside is a shed-within-a-shed. This is where final sanding and preparation takes place and where lacquer is sprayed onto parts. The Gollings have built an elaborate filter system so dust doesn’t get onto the wet surfaces.

Meanwhile, back at the home workshop Daniel Collings is working on some woodwork for a Mark II Jaguar. “It’s funny,” says Ged, “we seem to get runs of a particular car and then we go for ages without seeing another one.”

I’ve never seen veneering done before. It’s mesmerizing—a real art. Gollings Jr. is cutting small strips of veneer and then gluing them to the wood itself. Behind him is a fantastic example of Gollings ingenuity: a vacuum chamber made from plywood. It features a rubber sheet that is drawn down over, say a door capping, that has had its veneer glued on and now needs to cure. The sheet, drawn down onto the part by vacuum, holds the veneer in place until the glue has thoroughly dried. Smaller and more intricate parts that can’t be fitted into the vacuum curing box have to allowed to dry more slowly in the open air, with carefully applied tape holding the veneer in position.

The veneers themselves come in a multitude of different materials including the ever popular burr walnut. About four sheets of veneer are needed for a set of Jag Mark II woodwork, and they’ll cost around £250 ($336). I’d always assumed that the veneers come from the trunk of a tree, but that’s not the case. “No,” explains Gollings Sr., “the veneer comes from the tree’s bulb that’s below ground.”

Back at the satellite works Ged Gollings pulls out a box of wooden trim parts that are in an absolutely dreadful state. “This is about as bad as it gets,” says Gollings, “they’re from a 1960s Mercedes SL ‘Pagoda’. You can see how the lacquer has been in the sun for decades and has bubbled off. Also, the wood underneath the veneer has delaminated and looks as though it was made of some sort of cardboard rather than ply. This is going to be a complicated job as we’re going to have to make new bases for some of the parts before we can even think about the veneer. We’ll be charging about £1900 ($2555) to return this lot to perfect condition.’ Which seems extremely reasonable to me. Firstly, a perfectly restored Pagoda will be worth at least £100,000 ($134,500).

Once Daniel Gollings’ work has cured in the drying box it’s time for the parts to go to The Shack for spraying. “In the postwar period a polyurethane lacquer was commonly used,” says Ged Gollings, “but today we use a polyester lacquer. Pre-war material was more like a varnish.’

Pieces that have already been sprayed with lacquer are on drying shelves and I’m surprised at how thick the coating is. That’s explained as Ged takes me through the multiple sanding stages that go from the use of coarse 180 grit paper to finishing with 1200 grit. “It’s important,” he points out, “to use a good quality sand paper. We get through a lot of it.”

Back at the house we move to the polishing wheels. Again the Gollings’ imagination and improvisation skills have gone into making a really impressive polishing station. It’s miraculous to watch: with only a couple of passes along the spinning polishing wheel (to which Ged has applied one of several different types of polish that are used) a Mark II Jag door capping has gone from having a smoothly sanded but matte finish, to a high gloss part that looks as good as it would have done when came out of Browns Lane in the early ‘60s.

Speaking of Jaguar and its history, GDK was responsible for restoring the dashboard and wood parts for Sir William Lyons’ personal XJ6. Another set of XJ6 woodwork is currently going through the workshops. Unlike his father, Daniel Gollings is heavily into classic cars and is very knowledgeable. “Money no object I’d have a Jaguar XK-SS but on a more realistic level I’d like to get something like a Triumph Spitfire.” Presumably he wouldn’t be able to resist restoring its woodwork. “Those cheaper cars, like TRs and Cortinas, used cheap straight grain veneers together with cheap lacquers and animal glue. Not quite in the Bentley league.” Talking of Bentleys, Turbo R interiors are currently very popular. GDK also makes parts to keep in stock such as MGB wood kits.

“We make them if we get any spare time,” explains Ged Gollings, “which is rare. We currently have around an eight-month waiting list.” Gollings also tells us that customers are very precious about their car’s woodwork and often come and see work in progress. “We once had a Middle Eastern prince arrive to look at his car’s wood trim. He arrived in a Range Rover with heavily tinted windows and bodyguards, parked outside and came out back to check on progress.” I suspect he was surprised by the premises and awestruck by the quality of the work done within it.

Now my car restoration address book is complete, and I can point you in the direction of an outfit that can turn your classic’s sun-bleached, cracked, and discolored wood dashboard back into a thing of beauty.

Via Hagerty UK

The post Polished to perfection: Behind the scenes of GDK Veneering appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Ask anyone waiting at the DMV door on their 16th birthday and they will tell you that wheels bring freedom. The garage is no different. I’m not talking about project cars, though. This is about the wheels on everything else you have in the shop. Your tools and benches don’t roll? Here’s why they should.

A humble garage is only separated from a high-production workspace by the motivation and desires of its owner. Lots of folks will tell you that X amount of square footage is mandatory, but the reality is that space isn’t what matters. There are exceptions to that rule, but a properly organized two-car garage can do nearly everything a full pole barn can if you have the ability to rearrange equipment on the fly. That is where my favorite garage hack comes in handy: casters.

Nothing has changed how I work in the garage quite like the ability to roll my tools next to my projects, or rearrange my benches to allow something oversize to fit inside the doors. Easy cleaning is big extra bonus, too. The spare engines tucked in the corner: on casters. The multiple motorcycles on stands: on castors. Have something large to work on? I can put my two 2×8-foot workbenches together and have all the space I could want to spread things out and stay organized. There is a catch to all this convenience, though. Two, actually.

The first is that good castors aren’t cheap and cheap castors aren’t good. A couple factors should be considered when selecting rollers for your shop equipment: weight rating and locking style. Cheapo casters will have a load capacity high enough that you will assume they can handle a workbench on them, but don’t be tempted to skimp. Estimate the weight of the apparatus you’ll put on the bench and add 50 percent—at least. The literal last thing you want while working on a project is to have your work surface collapse beneath you. Not worth the personal injury or project damage.

The second catch: Once you have the weight rating you need, consider how you will keep the thing from not moving. I know, I’m pretty focused on how nice it is when things roll around the shop, but there are times when you want things to stay where you put them. Most garage floors have at least some slope for drainage and you don’t want a few-hundred-pound workbench careening about like a shopping cart in a windy parking lot. Locking casters are a must. Consider the two types of locks as well: total lock or top lock. Total lock is designed to lock both the wheel and the swivel, whereas the top lock only secures the wheel. Total lock is by far my personal preference, because it makes things feel much more secure when positioned.

My garage floor is pretty smooth, but I put monster 5-inch wheels on my benches because I wanted the ability to easily bump the bench out into my driveway for dirty projects or to be next to something that couldn’t fit inside the garage (my big, red Express van is too tall for my garage doors, for instance). Size your wheels so that you don’t have to worry about rough surface texture or damage. Rubber or polyurethane wheels have great traction to help the bench stay in place while you are working; a steel or hard plastic wheel might slide, even when locked.

Maybe it’s not as simple as a run to the hardware store to snag a few wheels, but I promise the results are worth the effort. Putting garage equipment on wheels makes small spaces more productive and large spaces feel even bigger—or smaller, if dividing up a generous space helps you be more efficient. Everything might have a home, but the ability to rearrange and try new layouts or storage solutions without spending an afternoon laboring to drag metal across concrete—and risking your spinal alignment in the process—is a gift.

My benches stay exactly where they are 85 percent of the time but boy, is it nice when I need them to move. Make the investment to put castors on your benches, boxes, and projects, and you will find that wheels are just as freeing as you thought—and more so.

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You don’t imagine for a moment that there might be disappointment when visiting a Bugatti specialist, but there’s a first for everything. It had been hoped that our visit would coincide with the firing up of the monstrous Bugatti Diatto Avio 8C but, unfortunately, during a trial run the day before a slight oil weep was spotted and Charles Knill-Jones quite sensibly would like to make further investigations before he and his team fire up the mighty 14.5-liter, eight-cylinder aero engine again. No matter, for there is plenty else to see inside the pristine workshops of Tula Precision, Bugatti specialists of world renown.

It didn’t start out that way and it wasn’t in the brief, but our Hard Craft series seems to have by chance turned into a celebration of youth in engineering. Our first subject, O’Rourke Coachtrimmers, is headed up by its eponymous owner who is yet to see his half century.

The Hard Craft series, including this installment, originally hails from Hagerty U.K., which you can visit here. It’s been expatriated to our site for your viewing pleasure. Do indulge Mr. Goodwin his native vocabulary. 

By coincidence the proprietor of Tula Precision is himself a tender 48 years old. Before Knill-Jones tells us the history of his company and how at the young age of 25 he came to own it, he hands Louis McNair a box of gears. McNair is only 23 and looks it. Knill-Jones casually gives a short explanation of the work that needs to be done: Bevel this, ream that, make this pin, and other instructions that mean little to this layman. Although McNair is young, he hails from New Zealand, a country well known for its history of producing fine engineers and with it a spirit of mend and repair. Anyone who has seen the film The World’s Fastest Indian will already know this. By the time McNair was 21 he’d already built a microlight aircraft and restored a sports racing car that’s powered by a two-stroke Evinrude outboard motor.

Charles Knill-Jones was drawing bicycles and cars as soon as he could hold a pencil. “My mum said that I drove out of her womb,” he says. An alarming image, but petrol and engineering are clearly in the genes. “My grandfather was friends with Malcolm Campbell and although my dad ran the family printing company he owned a 12/50 Alvis.”

More importantly, Knill-Jones Senior was fully supportive of his son’s karting hobby. “He let me race karts from the age of 8,” explains Knill-Jones, “racing against guys like David Couthard. When I was 13 Dad asked me if I wanted to do a proper season of karting, funded as well as we could have afforded. I thought about it but instead I chose to go to boarding school so that I could be with my friends who were going.” Motor racing’s loss was academia’s gain as post school Knill-Jones studied material science and technology at Brunel University in Uxbridge, West London.

“I chose this course because I thought it would be the best way into Formula 1. It was a fascinating course and during it a team of us won the Ford Prize for technical innovation. We were among the first people to do 3D printing using engineering ceramics. We sold a patent to NASA for it. It was an interesting time but it made me realize that it was as near to theoretical work as I wanted to get. I also realized that Formula 1 would be very restricted. I wanted to be involved in a more hands-on world.”

That goal was achieved when Charles answered an advertisement in Autosport magazine for a young engineer to join Nick Mason’s Ten Tenths establishment to look after the Pink Floyd drummer’s comprehensive car collection.

“I started with Nick in 1996,” says Knill-Jones, “and within six months was sent to Tula Engineering in Cirencester to rebuild a Bugatti Type 35 that was being made for Nick’s wife Annette to race.”

Tula Engineering was founded by a chap called Richard I’Anson and one of his friends in 1969 to supply the burgeoning kit car industry with parts and services. Fate decreed, however, that the company would become one of the go-to specialists for Bugatti enthusiasts. “In 1998 Richard wanted to retire and asked me if I would take over running Tula,” says Knill-Jones. “Trouble was I really liked working at Ten Tenths. It was Nick Mason who came up with the solution: He suggested that I run the company out of the Ten Tenths premises and worked on Bugattis alongside Nick’s cars. It turned out to be the perfect plan. One of the greatest pleasures was taking Nick’s cars to various events around the U.K. and in Europe and the amazing characters that I met in historic racing. The sort of people that I would never have come across in F1.”

When you consider the hours involved in restoring the various different types of Bugatti, and Tula’s reputation, it should come as little surprise the company has about two years’ of work stretching out ahead of it. It handles minor jobs, ongoing care, motor sports preparation and complete, ground-up restorations, and as well as the U.K., clients come from France, Germany, and America.

To restore a Grand Prix Bugatti is, says Knill-Jones, around 2000 hours of work. A Type 59 takes that up to around 3000 hours—roughly the same as a touring type model—while a “Pebble Beach standard restoration can involve as much as 4000 hours of toiling.

“We like nothing more than getting our teeth into a full restoration,” he reports, “as the connection between and the car becomes so much deeper.”

Charles Knill-Jones made the move to this new premises in Northleach in 2019, taking on a building that used to be a sawmill. The attention to detail in converting it into a workshop—the high security doors themselves are a work of art in wood and galvanized metal—reflect the level of craftsmanship that you’ll find behind them.

The Bugatti Diatto Avio 8C is a thing of majestic beauty that, as well as being a formidable machine in itself, has a fascinating history. “Bugatti developed the engine for Italian engineering company Diatto who on September 23, 1916, sent Ettore Bugatti a telegram announcing that the engine had successfully run non-stop on a dynamometer for 50 hours and by the end was producing 210 horsepower. This engine is widely regarded as the basis for the Bugatti Royale’s eight-cylinder engine.”

Found in a museum in Turin decades ago, the Bugatti-designed Diatto Avio 8C passed through several hands before the current owner commissioned Tula to bring it to life a century after its birth. It is a wondrous machine but for sheer beauty you cannot beat the Bugatti Type 59 that sits in the workshop a few paces from the Diatto. “This car is actually a replica that was built years ago by Tula,” points out Charles, “the Type 59 and the Brescias are without question my favorite Bugattis. The Brescia was a really amazing machine and was the forefather of the performance sports car. I used to have one but sold it to buy a house!”

You need an expert on hand to fully appreciate the details and the engineering highlights on the Type 59. To not have a guide as knowledgeable as Knill-Jones to explain them would be like visiting the Valley of the Kings without a guide. He’s busy building a Bugatti engine upstairs but the man for the job should really be Michael Whiting. Whiting has been at Tula for 50 years, almost from the beginning. He retires in September and with him will go an immense amount of knowledge and experience. It was he who built the Type 59 that we’re looking at.

The Type 59 is the most gorgeous thing. Even if prewar racing cars are not your bag, anyone who has a passion for mechanical things cannot fail to fall in love with this machine. Not only is it a stunning looking machine, the detailing is incredible—from the hand-scraped hatched pattern on the cambox (it takes two weeks work to do that, explains Charles) to the gear-driven carburetor linkage. “Isn’t it wonderful?” asks Knill-Jones. “And look at the brake adjusting mechanism. Not only do the intricate chains and gears allow for brake wear front to rear, but also side to side. The attention to detail is simply stunning.”

You’ll remember from all our visits to specialists that a crucial part of their businesses is collecting and preserving archive material. Not just important for the company itself, but for the future of that particular marque or detail. It is the same at Tula Precision. Filing cabinets contain priceless drawings of parts; shelves contain patterns from which extinct components can be remade.

But it’s the people at Tula Precision who, along with a handful of other specialists around the world, will ensure that Bugatti enthusiasts present and in the future have the technical (and moral) support that their incredible machines deserve. It’s a small team at Tula but each fulfills a crucial role. Trisha Davis is the parts controller and in a previous life ran the Bugatti Owners’ Club parts department. Her knowledge is invaluable. Ray Nash has been manning the lathes and milling machines at Tula since the 1980s. Louis McNair we’ve already met, but with him in the workshop is another youngster called Callum Frost. Frost came from Crosthwaite & Gardiner. Another of our past subjects.

Staff will come and go—that is life—but there’s no doubt that the beauty and stunning technical detail of Bugattis will entrance new generations of engineers and craftsmen. Youngsters who would perhaps rather set up the supercharger and carburetors on a Bugatti Type 59 than develop the software for the infotainment system on an electric Bentley. One thing’s for sure, Charles Knill-Jones will never be far from his tool chest and his beloved Bugattis.

Via Hagerty UK

The post Young blood gives new life to old Bugattis at Tula Precision appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We’d all be lost without a congenial mechanic to keep our lawn mowers and garden tillers in tip-top shape. Rich Brooks, a kindred spirit at the opposite end of the mechanical spectrum, specializes in American supercars. If your 2005–06 or 2017–20 Ford GT needs anything beyond a lube job, Brooks’s GT Garage in rural southeast Michigan is your go-to destination.

Ford’s revival of the Le Mans–conquering GT40s from the 1960s are the most exotic and expensive sports cars ever conceived in America. Powered by a supercharged 5.4-liter, 550-hp DOHC V-8, the 2005 edition started at $139,995. Just over 4000 first-gen GTs were built by Mayflower Vehicle Systems and Saleen Special Vehicles under the auspices of Ford’s Special Vehicle Team (SVT). The mid-engine layout, Ricardo six-speed transmission, low-drag bodywork, and aluminum-cum-magnesium chassis provided the ideal platform for analog performance.

The second-generation GT is a more ambitious blend of molded carbon fiber, structural aluminum, and Gorilla Glass. This time, Ford opted for an EcoBoost V-6, initially rated at 647 horsepower, bolted to a Getrag seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transaxle. Upholding their lineage, a pair of these GTs in LM GTE-Pro trim finished first and third in class at the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans. Since 2017, about 1000 of these GTs have been sold, for roughly $500,000 apiece.

Brooks established his garage complex less than 10 miles from his birthplace. “My dad began coaching my mechanical inclinations at the bicycle stage,” the bright-eyed 40-something wrench explains. After earning an associate’s degree at Henry Ford College in Dearborn, Brooks began his career at Roush Industries as a technician-mechanic in 1995. That was an especially rewarding time, because John Coletti ran Ford’s SVT department full-throttle, and Roush was contracted to execute many of its projects. Brooks personally stuffed a Contour V-6 into a Ford Focus for Coletti. He helped develop the 2003 Mustang SVT Cobra and the second-generation F-150 Lightning pickup. His luckiest stroke was being present in 2003 for the creation of the first Ford GTs under Coletti.

After a dozen or so years at Roush, Brooks felt the urge to steer the skills and knowledge he’d acquired in a fresh direction. In 2008, he began a double-shift routine—clocking in at Roush by day and getting his fledgling GT Garage up and running during evening and weekend hours. By 2010, his GT customer base had grown sufficiently to enable snipping the Roush apron strings altogether.

What resembles a classic red barn on the outside houses nearly 5000 square feet of space for repairs and storage. A dozen or so free-range chickens help the complex blend into the farming-oriented neighborhood.

Brooks’s shop is clean enough for surgical procedures thanks to work habits inspired by his Army veteran father, whom he describes as a clean freak. “Frequent cleaning is essential in my work,” Brooks says. “I sweep work areas every time a car leaves and power-wash the floors once or twice a year.” White-finished metal walls ricochet illumination provided by more than a dozen fluorescent light fixtures. The concrete floor is as smooth as a sheet of plate glass, interrupted only by the well-worn paths of GoJak wheel dollies.

Since Brooks’s home is only a short hike from his shop complex, there are no bathroom facilities, though creature comforts include Wi-Fi, a wall-mounted TV, Bose satellite radio typically wailing ’80s and ’90s rock, and a stocked fridge.

Acknowledging that there are only so many tunes a one-man band can play, Brooks subcontracts paint jobs to focus on mechanical work. He also relies on a web of collaborators for heavy collision repairs, machining, and full engine overhauls; GT transaxles are so intricate that they’re generally replaced rather than rebuilt when they suffer major internal wounds. Alongside an array of hand tools, Brooks has a Miller TIG welder, drill press, hydraulic press, band saw, tire changer, and four-wheel alignment system. A new tire balancer tops his wish list.

A pair of two-post lifts reside in the main work area, and three four-post lifts stash inventory in the storage room. The standby list there includes Brooks’s high school ride (a 1987 Ford Ranger stuffed with a 302-cubic-inch V-8), his wife’s 2003 Thunderbird, his 2014 Shelby GT500, a 2014 F-150 SVT Raptor pickup, one of only four remaining GT workhorse prototypes, and a dozen-plus customer cars. Brand-new body shells bought from Ford at attractive prices are on hand to resurrect first-gen cars seriously damaged in crashes.

Because the second-generation GTs are still under-warranty newbies, Brooks focuses on 2005–06 cars. “With over 2000 owners on my client list, I’ve worked on at least half of the production run,” he notes. Supplementing his base of wealthy car enthusiasts, Brooks services GTs owned by Ford royalty: Edsel Ford II; Henry Ford III; the company’s current CEO, Jim Farley; and Multimatic’s president and CEO, Raj Nair.

Instead of using an hourly shop rate, Brooks quotes projects on a fixed-cost basis. For example, removing and replacing a GT’s front fascia runs $600. “After customers submit a list of what they want done, I respond with a total cost analysis to avoid surprises,” Brooks says. Additionally, he has flown all over the country to assess for-sale GTs for prospective buyers.

One of his most fruitful relationships is with ex-Ford designer Camilo Pardo, who operates studios in Detroit and Southern California. Working with customers, Brooks and Pardo have built a dozen Signature Series Ford GTs—including Brooks’s personal car—with performance upgrades and stunning exterior treatment. Paint jobs mimicking the most memorable Le Mans racers are the preferred schemes to date.

If there’s one thing Brooks doesn’t put much effort into, it’s selling himself. Instead, he simply attends annual gatherings for members of the Ford GT Forum in order to stay in touch with current clients and to meet new ones. Framed posters from these family reunions adorn the walls of the shop.

Customer satisfaction is another reason why Brooks spends little time marketing his skills. “Ninety-eight percent of my customers are happy with the service I provide,” he says. “While pleasing everyone may be impossible, I haven’t stopped trying to win over the remaining 2 percent.”

The post GT Whisperer: The Michigan shop keeping Ford’s supercars on the boil appeared first on Hagerty Media.

At Twr Gwyn Bach, a small cottage workshop in mid Wales, three highly skilled craftspeople turn an apparently humble twenty-quid sheet of aluminum alloy into a beautiful work of art. Welcome to TAB II Classics, where engineering meets sculpture, and handmade fuel tanks are crafted. Husband and wife Richard and Aline Phelps, together with master welder Mark Purslow, make motorcycle tanks. Tanks for Tritons, Seeleys, Suzuki RG500s, Ducatis and dozens of other bikes.

This story originally published on Hagerty UK.

Contemplating slotting a Harley Sportster engine into a Norton frame? You’ll be needing to visit TAB II Classics for a Slimline fuel tank or, if you’re wanting your special to be a real one-off, TAB will make you a bespoke tank either from your design or using their own vast experience.

The TAB in the company’s name comes from the initials of Terry A. Baker, a keen amateur motorcycle racer who in 1972, unable to find a suitable tank for his Honda K4 race bike, decided to make one from scratch. As often happens, other riders wanted Terry to make tanks for their bikes and a business was born. Baker died in 2010 but fortunately for the motorcycling community his daughter Aline, who had grown up around motorcycles and spent her younger years hanging around her dad’s workshop, took over the business with her husband Richard.

“It’s not very grand here,” Richard Phelps explains, “but we’ve given the place a tidy.” Actually, the workshop looks extremely well organized. In a side room there are rows of shelves on which are kept dozens of formers, each one carefully labeled. Made from a mix of sawdust and epoxy, these “soft” tools are placed in a press and are used to form the shape of each part of the tank: generally two sides, a top section and then a base made from two or more separate pieces depending on the tank design.

The piece that comes out of the press is far from finished and will need hours of careful shaping on an English wheel and perhaps several well-placed blows with metal shaping hammers. All three are capable of doing all the processes used to build a tank but in practice each specializes. Aline Phelps is the master of the English wheel. It’s fascinating to watch. One side of a Manx Norton tank has come out of the press with loads of wrinkles along one edge. With just a few passes through the wheel Aline has removed all the wrinkles and the aluminum is now smooth. It looks easy but I know from previous attempts at “wheeling” metal that it isn’t.

This I prove when Aline gives me a bit of scrap alloy to try shaping. I can’t even get the sheet to stay between the rollers; it seems to have a mind of its own. Wisely she doesn’t let me near the tank side that she’s been working on.

When you look at a finished tank, its polished surface gleaming in the sun, it’s hard to believe that you’re not looking at one piece of aluminum because it is impossible to see a join however hard you look. Two reasons for this: one is the technique used and the other is down to the skill of Mark Purslow. I was expecting to see a TIG welder because they create an incredibly neat weld. “The problem is,” explains Aline, “is that a TIG weld is very hard and that means that I wouldn’t be able to roll the weld bead flat in the English wheel; it would have to be ground flat.”

Mark Purslow has been at TAB since 2013. He joined via the Job Growth Wales Scheme but had already learned welding before. Today the 28 year-old is a master at the art. And of course, like the Phelps, he’s obsessed with motorcycles. He races them and won the Manx GP in 2015, riding in the Lightweight class.

“I make my own filler rod for welding from scraps of the same 1050A H14  sheet that’s used for the tanks,” explains Purslow. “We use 1.5-mm thick sheet for the tanks, which is the metric equivalent of 16 gauge, and 2-mm for oil tanks and seat bases.”

I’ve always been fascinated by welding, especially gas welding. Although Aline Phelps is master of the wheel and Purslow of the torch, the two work together when it comes to joining sections together. First Purslow tack welds the pieces together as Aline bends and manipulates the two sections while Purslow dabs the rod. She’s remarkably brutal with the metal as she bends it but thousands of hours of experience clearly tells her what she can get away with. With the side and top of the tank neatly tacked together Purslow deftly and smoothly runs the weld, stopping in places and then coming from the other direction so that the heat can dissipate. I’ve got to give this a go.

An expendable couple of pieces of sheet are found and Purslow sets up the torch with the correct mix of acetylene and oxygen to create an almost white cone of heat. My first attempt at tack welds is a bit hit and miss: a combination of plops from a pigeon that had a very hot jalfrezi the night before, and holes where I have held the torch in the same place for too long and have burned right through the metal.

“Have a go at simply running the torch along the middle of the sheet without the rod,” suggests Purslow, “so you can get a feel for the speed that you have go at without the worry of dipping the rod.” Sure enough, my bead of melted metal is much neater and I haven’t burnt a hole. In fact I went a bit too quickly and the heat has penetrated deep enough. With practice though …

So where does Richard Phelps come in? Richard is front of house at TAB, liaises with customers and does the paperwork. He’s not exactly white collar because he’ll also disappear into a Dickensian room where he does the final polishing and finishing of each tank. It’s a filthy world of dust but it is as fascinating to watch Phelps polish a tank on a buffing wheel as it is to watch Aline bend metal at the wheel and Mark weld it. Richard starts with a rough grade of sanding disc on an air sander and then works through finer grades before moving to the polishing wheel. “Knowing what polish to use and which weight of buffing wheel and concentration of cloth is down to experience,” explains Phelps. What is amazing is how quickly the tank’s surface goes from a dull finish to a deep shine.

It takes between 20 and 30 hours to make a tank; longer if it is bespoke. Ex-racer Steve Parrish has commissioned a new tank for the Yamaha TD2 which was the first bike he ever raced. He’s supplied the original tank for comparison and the new one is sat next to it. Presumably Parrish will ride the bike with the new tank on it and keep the original in case of a tumble.

All of the tanks dotted around the workshops are beautiful but none more so than a Ducati Imola tank, which happens to be Aline Phelps’ favorite, too. “You can tell that it was made using an English wheel, which is unusual in Italy.” No, what Aline means is that she can tell.

The Ducati tank is so beautiful that despite the fact that I don’t have a 900 SS upon which to put it, I am very tempted to buy one as an objet d’art for the sitting room. It would look spectacularly cool if one half of it was painted in that lovely blue and silver of Paul Smart’s Imola 200-winning 750 SS and the other side left in its polished alloy finish. This is not a daft idea because TAB II Classics wants only the reasonable sum of £550 ($777) plus VAT for an Imola tank complete with filler cap and fittings.

It is possible to buy tanks from India and China that are considerably cheaper, but then you’re taking quite a risk. What if the tank isn’t a perfect fit? Currently at Twr Gwyn Bach (in the Welsh village of Tregaron) is a Seeley-framed Honda CB750 owned by a Seeley fanatic who has a collection of ten bikes. He’s wisely brought his bike along to make sure that the tank perfectly fits his frame. He’s had to come a long way, but it’s a shorter drive than it is to Delhi or Beijing. And good luck with commissioning a one-off design from a company in a different time zone run by people who have probably never seen any of the bikes they’re making tanks for.

Not that the Phelpses and Mark Purslow need to worry too much about demand. The whiteboard in the office is full of orders from customers from Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. as well as mainland Europe. And then there’s the hipster market and the cult of custom bikes that is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. In fact, I reckon that more and more youngsters will discover the thrill of biking and the even bigger buzz of creating your own machine. There are many jobs on a motorcycle that are straightforward and that can be tackled by an amateur. Building a fuel tank from scratch isn’t one of them. I know, I’ve just tried it.

The post Tanked up: Learning to make aluminum fuel tanks with Tab Classics appeared first on Hagerty Media.

From the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, take Crawfordsville Road northwest for 12 miles, and you’ll come to Brownsburg, population 27,000. The town is home to many of the nation’s greatest race teams, and in one network of gray offices and subtly labeled shop spaces lie the headquarters for the most recent Indy 500–winning team (Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing), the Rolex 24 victors (Wayne Taylor Racing), and the NHRA Funny Car champs (Don Schumacher Racing). Tucked into this high-profile racing neighborhood, you’ll also find Rick Duman’s Turn Four Restorations.

The two-story shop currently houses 31 cars, and some, in two-story stacks, tickle the rafters. For a man who’s been hunched over the engine bays of race cars for more than five decades, Duman is light-footed as he moves about the place. He’s intimately familiar with each car in his possession: a prewar Miller, a 1960 Epperly roadster, a 1972 Gurney Eagle driven by Bobby Unser, Eddie Cheever’s Dallara, multiple McLarens—far too many open-wheel heroes to list, in various states of assembly or disassembly. Despite the large footprint and vast collection, Turn Four is remarkably tidy, with mise en place on stainless-steel workbenches under surgical white lights. Framed, faded photographs of Victory Lane celebrations adorn the pale white walls and hint at the lifetime Duman has spent in this world both racing and wrenching.

Duman grew up in the shadows of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Behind his childhood home at 25th and Georgetown, his father, Indy racer Ronnie Duman, built race cars out of his own shop. As a 15-year-old, Rick used to sneak into the track’s garages to help anyone willing to adopt an underage volunteer. “I would go in and clean, sweep floors, and polish cars,” says Duman. “I kept USAC tech happy, too.” Back then, officials were allowed to drink at the Speedway, but only after practices concluded. Every afternoon during those May practices, however, certain officials would find a spot obscured by the large wooden garage doors and Duman would slip them beers. In the ’60s, a young Duman tugged on the shirt cuffs of Indy’s giants. “Troy Ruttman gave me my first minibike,” he says, casually, like it was no big deal that the youngest winner of the Indy 500 remembered his birthday.

In 1968, Ronnie was killed in a crash at the Milwaukee Mile. Still, Rick decided to give racing a shot in the ’70s. It was a grind, and tough on the pocketbook. The young driver made a series of legitimate attempts at the grassroots level, but at the cost of his basic needs. “I was sitting in a house, 55 degrees, with my coat on, and I wasn’t really going anywhere, so I went back to work on race cars.”

Duman bounced from car to car, spinning wrenches for multiple mom-and-pop Indy teams, many of which built cars in Indy garages that they rented all year. “I worked for all of them, except Penske and Newman/Haas,” he says. “Back then, you could go to the Speedway and help anybody.” In 1992, he won CART’s esteemed George Bignotti Preparation Award, and in 2001, he became the lead mechanic for Chip Ganassi Racing.

Duman’s restoration career took hold when a couple of prolific race car collectors reached out to the accomplished mechanic with questions about vintage Indy cars. “I answered the phone and told the truth,” he says. Before long, the group agreed to a partnership, and Duman’s Turn Four Restorations was born.

It was Duman’s five decades of experience and familiarity that separated him from the numerous shops willing to bolt together old Indy relics for paying customers. “We worked on this stuff when it was new,” he says. In fact, many of the open-wheelers parked in Duman’s shop are old acquaintances, having spent time in his care when they roared around the 2.5-mile oval in anger. “Plus,” he adds, “we’re just damn good.” It’s the attention to detail, he argues. “The cars look better than they did back then. [A.J.] Watson never polished the tubs,” Duman says, motioning to a reflective monocoque, buffed within an inch of its life, leaning up against the back wall. “We do.”

Turn Four operates with only two full-time employees on staff. Next to Duman, Tim Whiting spends the most time in the shop. Whiting recently ran the IndyCar circuit, crewing on various teams as they trucked from shore to shore. Giving up a life on the road, Whiting traded suitcases for Supertanium and began working on vintage race cars, many much older than he. During my visit, Whiting stripped the brakes from a 1960 Lindsey Hopkins–owned Epperly open-wheeler. The sleek blue roadster, impossibly low slung (thanks to the Offenhauser four-cylinder mounted on its side), is a new addition.

“All of these cars are special,” Duman says, “but the Coyote, that was pretty much a basket case when we found it.” His crew finished restoration on A.J. Foyt’s Indy 500–winning Coyote back in 2018 and had it ripping around vintage exhibitions across the Midwest. Since its completion, the car regularly rolls back through the large bay door at Turn Four for service. Unlike the practice at many restoration shops, once a Duman project is finished, it is not cast out, never to be seen again. Instead, many of Turn Four’s restorations are year-round installations.

But don’t confuse Turn Four for some high-dollar toy box. New projects come and go with the same frequency as the repeat offenders. The morning after my visit, Duman trucked to Illinois to pick up a McLaren M24. A day later, he drove down to Louisiana to drag back another Gurney Eagle. Past the Speedway, up Crawfordsville Road, into Turn Four, where there’s work to be done.

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If you’ve spent an outrageous length of time staring at a beautifully machined footrest on a Ducati Panigale or lovingly unwrapped a set of Omega high-compression pistons for your Mini Cooper’s A-Series engine, then I invite you to join me on a tour of Crosthwaite & Gardiner. The company’s workshops in the small village of Buxted, Sussex, are a paradise on earth for those of us who love engineering and the tactile feel of superlative-quality machined parts. Or are fascinated by the idea of a steel billet being turned into a work of art.

There are not many companies like Crosthwaite & Gardiner. Founded by engineers Dick Crosthwaite and John Gardiner in the early 1960s and from 1969 based here at Hogge Farm, the company has built up a global reputation for its engineering skills and its ability to reverse-engineer extremely complicated parts and assemblies to breathtaking standards. If this sounds like hyperbole, then don’t take my word for it—just ask Audi.

C&W has worked on all of the existing Auto Union “Silver Arrows” and was commissioned by Audi to build from scratch seven replica Auto Unions. Mercedes-Benz, too, has come knocking at the farm’s door asking the company to build for it engines for its W125 prewar grand prix cars.

John Gardiner passed away in 2007 and Dick Crosthwaite is retired, but his son Oliver now runs the business. Not that Crosthwaite senior seems to understand the concept of retirement, because on all my visits to Hogge Farm he’s been busy messing around with his own projects or fettling one of the several classic cars that he and his son own.

You couldn’t successfully run a company like C&G without having a deep knowledge of engineering so it’s not surprising to hear that Ollie Crosthwaite served a tool-making apprenticeship. On that subject, Crosthwaite & Gardiner typically has around 30 staff, several of whom are apprentices working on the premises or attending college with regular stints of practical experience in Sussex. “Many of them come from Oxford Brookes University,” explains Crosthwaite, “and what impresses us enormously is how clever they are at programming our CNC machines [Computer Numerically Controlled] and working in CFD [Computational Fluid Dynamics].”

These CNC machines are remarkable. A current job in progress is the manufacture of rotors for a supercharger. These have to be machined to tolerances of 8 thousandths of an inch which, Ollie Crosthwaite helpfully points out, is around 4 hairs’ width. Each two-lobe rotor is machined from a large billet of steel, at least 80 per cent of which will end up as swarf on the machine’s bed. A huge amount of machining time is required but this can go on overnight or even over a weekend. Sounds simple, but before this wizardry can take place a lot of traditional measuring and setup has to be performed.

“I love it when we take on a new challenge,” says Crosthwaite Jr. “Like these crankshafts that we’re making. They’re for a Porsche Carrera 2 engine; the double overhead-cam engine that was fitted to the 356 Carrera and several racing Porsches.” The crankshaft runs in roller bearings and therefore is split into several parts, each of which fits together and is positioned by a toothed face. “It’s really clever,” says Ollie, “as they’re self-aligning. It means that you have to machine a flat face between the teeth, which is a complicated job.”

Frustratingly, especially for the company itself, these days a lot of non-disclosure agreements have to be signed, so there are quite a lot of jobs in progress that are hush-hush. Even private clients have asked for them to be signed, presumably so that when the glorious unveiling of the car happens at Pebble Beach or some other prestigious event, the balloon hasn’t been popped earlier by news of its ongoing restoration. C&G also carry out full restorations, one of which is hidden from view in a secret workshop. It’s for an OEM that would get very grumpy indeed if word got out.

Going back to the Mercedes-Benz W125 engines that C&G has built, there are a few cylinder blocks sitting around awaiting completion. “Those engines are unbelievably complicated and contain some of the most stunning engineering. The straight-eight cylinder engine has two separate blocks of four cylinders, each of which is entirely fabricated. Sheet steel is shaped and then gas-brazed, and the cylinders themselves then welded to a thick steel plate that then bolts to the crankcase itself. We generally use exactly the same techniques as were used originally in the 1930s, but for that particular detail we use electron beam welding because it’s just better.”

What is no secret is that Crosthwaite & Gardiner builds complete racing-specification Jaguar engines that feature aluminum blocks, used in many historic E-Type race cars. We’re in luck today because there’s a recently finished motor being run-in on one of the company’s dynamometers. This 3.8-liter unit is pumping out over 300 hp and with it a fabulous noise. “Our nearest neighbour, an elderly lady, says she loves the noise of the engines running up,” says Ollie, “but she’s not so keen when we run engines like the W125 because they burn methanol, which doesn’t smell particularly pleasant.”

The dyno controls, complete with computer screen, look very high-tech; what doesn’t is something that looks like an ear-trumpet or speaking tube from an ancient ship. “Actually,” explains Ollie, “it’s so that the guy operating the dyno can hear if there’s knock or pre-ignition. It’s much more reliable than using modern knock sensors in the block itself.”

You’ll be familiar with the problem: Got too much stuff for the garage, so build a bigger garage. Acquire more stuff and then need an even larger one. Crosthwaite & Gardiner has a similar issue, as its parts department is struggling to contain the massive selection of parts that the company makes and keeps in stock. It’s not only engine parts that are made here. Need a new magnesium rear wheel for your Porsche 917? They’re in stock. As are rear uprights for a Lotus 18 single-seater and myriad other parts that, miraculously, Oliver Crosthwaite can identify.

Sitting in a corridor on a pallet is a brand-new Coventry Climax four-cylinder racing engine. “These were the first complete engines that we built from the ground up,” says Crosthwaite. “We did the first one about 30 years ago and since then we’ve done about 150 cylinder blocks so that gives you an idea of how many complete engines we’ve made.

“We assemble the engines for customers but can also supply them as a kit of parts, like this one is, right down to the spark plugs. It saves the customer money but there’s still about 160 hours of labor required to assemble the engine. What the customer doesn’t need to worry about is details like lapping in valves or polishing or flowing ports, because the machining is so accurate that the valves don’t need lapping in; the ports are CNC-machined to a ready-to-go finish.” And, hold your breath, the price? “About £35,000 (~$48,400) for this 1.5-liter version.” Considering the value of the racing car it’s likely to be fitted to, this doesn’t strike me as exorbitant.

There are other examples of the company’s trusted craftsmanship. Imagine you’re just about to set off for a drive in your McLaren F1 when you hear an ominous squeal from the engine compartment: The water pump’s on the way out. What to do? Ring McLaren for a new one? No, because a company called Lanzante Motorsport is actually the go-to place for F1 servicing and repairs. Trouble is, BMW (which made the F1’s engine) doesn’t have any spares and worse still, junked the tooling for the pump. Fortunately Lanzante commissioned C&G to reverse-engineer the pump and make fresh dies for the pump’s major castings. Those dies are now stored along with hundreds of others, all carefully marked up in crates, for future needs. The last time I felt so in awe of history I was standing in the Cairo museum.

But what about the future of Crosthwaite & Gardiner? John Gardiner didn’t have children and Ollie Crosthwaite has one five-year-old daughter. Will there be a third generation at C&W? “It’s looking reasonably promising,” says a smiling Oliver. “We’ve got a replica baby Bugatti and she loves driving that. She also loves sitting in the various cars when I bring her in on Saturdays—the Frazer Nash is her favorite. More importantly she seems to really enjoy taking things apart and putting them together again.”

As for the company itself, I’m sure that it has a long future. Take the example of the McLaren F1 water pump. It’s possible that the tooling for say, a Bugatti Veyron water pump, could also be mislaid in a vast organization like the Volkswagen Group. Will even Ferrari keep all the tooling for cars like the F50 and Enzo?

“I’m sure you’re right,” says Crosthwaite. “Throughout its 50-year life the company has changed and adapted. The work we do today is very different from that we were doing even 10 years ago. I’m sure if you come back in another ten years then we’ll be concentrating in another area yet again but who knows what?

“One thing I can promise you is that we won’t be rewinding electric motors.”

Via Hagerty UK

The post This unpretentious U.K. machine shop has been making history—literally—for five decades appeared first on Hagerty Media.

There is a lot of change in the collector car market these days. New buying and selling platforms are cropping up. Younger enthusiasts are entering the market and paying big money for cars and trucks built in recent decades. In all this excitement it’s easy to forget about old and slow English sports cars.

That’d be a mistake, says David Silberkleit, aka the Bugeyeguy. “2020 was the best year in our history. Everything here has accelerated and expanded,” he said.

Silberkleit’s main shop is a neatly restored 1950s Quonset hut in Branford, Connecticut, located a few miles east of New Haven on Long Island Sound. He’s fluent in MG and Mini, but most of the cars coming in and out of the Quonset hut are Mk I Austin-Healey Sprites, commonly called “Bugeye.” He currently has 15 Sprites in the queue for restoration work and is booked out for three months on other jobs. The parts side of the business has grown dramatically over the past year, and earlier in 2021 Silberkleit sold his 300th Bugeye. “We hardly had time to celebrate! We sold the 301st a few days later,” he says. As of this writing, they’re on 307.

Impressive stuff for a business whose focus is so narrow, at least at first glance. The Bugeye only lasted from 1958–61 and, more often than not, was driven hard and put away wet. The short version of the Sprite story starts in the late 1950s, when the Brits were already selling as many two-seaters to sports car-hungry Americans as they could screw together. But Donald Healey saw another opening in the market. There were plenty of young enthusiasts itching for a nimble roadster who didn’t quite have the cash for something like a Porsche or even the Austin-Healey 100. Enter the Sprite, which for just $1795 bought you no windows, no outside door handles, no trunk lid, and modest performance, but a ton of driving fun. Its headlights, originally intended to be retractable, were left fixed in the up position rather awkwardly (but adorably) on top of the hood to save costs, earning it the nickname Bugeye (or “Frogeye” back in the UK).

The Sprite was a hit, filling countless grids at amateur sports car races and allowing racers and young gearheads to cut their teeth fixing a car on a budget. Nearly 49,000 were sold. After 1961 the Sprite got a more conventional shape and bigger, more powerful engines until being discontinued after 1969. It also spawned an MG version called the Midget (all Sprites/Midgets were built at the MG factory in Abingdon) that lasted until 1979. None of them, though, captured the spirit of the original. Used Bugeyes became entry-level cars for subsequent generations of sports car fans, who could often pick one up for a few hundred bucks. Today Bugeyes are worth thousands more than their “square body” descendants, not to mention bigger, more powerful MGBs. They’ve also held their value even as some older classics fade.

The Bugeyeguy himself remains infatuated with the humble roadster. “It is probably the greatest cult car with the greatest personality and the biggest smile. It’s a car with absolutely no pretensions, so it’s the opposite of something like a 911, and it has so much character. It elicits all kinds of responses from all kinds of people, from small kids to old racers. You just don’t get that with most cars.”

Silberkleit bought his first Bugeye for $1100 in 1978, when he was in high school. Despite life’s curveballs and other cars coming and going, he never got rid of it. “There were other phases in my life where I’ve had to pare down, ramp up, have a house, sell the house, etc., but my Bugeye survived it all.” He didn’t truly become the “Bugeyeguy,” however, until 2007. In the mid-2000s he was running an executive coaching practice, advising people to follow their passions in their entrepreneurial work. In part to provide an example for his clients and in part to indulge in his love for the smiley-faced two-seater, he ran a webpage and updated it regularly with articles, pictures, and other content he had amassed over the years as a Bugeye enthusiast.

Then the messages started coming in, not from budding entrepreneurs but from other Bugeye fans. “Because I had all this content, and especially back then when the internet was in its earlier days, I had this number one rating on Google. And then people just started contacting me about Bugeyes.” Silberkleit decided to follow his own advice, and pursue a passion-based career. “I was willing to take a flyer and see if we could make a business dedicated to just this one little car.”

One little car that appeals to many different buyers. “They can wear many different kinds of hats,” said Silberkleit. While the average buyer is a man in his late 60s who wants a sorted Bugeye that’s as headache-free as possible (“There’s no such thing as the perfect car. They do break”), Silberkleit also regularly sells cars to women and to younger car guys on a budget. Data from Hagerty’s insurance quotes shows similar diversity: Although Baby Boomers are the most common buyers, nearly a third of the people calling us about Bugeyes are Gen-Xers, 10 percent are millennials, and 3 percent are from Gen Z.

Silberkleit sells driver-quality cars, concours-quality show cars, high-dollar custom builds with superchargers and upgraded interiors, and cars with lengthened chassis for older clients to make getting in and out easier. Bugeyeguy has even done two electric conversions to Bugeyes and is working on a third with Tesla power.

Silberkleit has also been able to adapt the business. He credits much of his spike in last year to his large internet presence. In addition to the main website and usual social media channels (we got connected to Silberkleit through Instagram), he has been posting YouTube videos for years that highlight cars for sale or the shop’s restoration work. There are currently over 800 such videos on Bugeyeguy’s channel. And because of the website’s high search ranking after so many years of posting content, “if someone is Googling and looking to find out more about Bugeyes, they will almost always come across us.”

Despite custom builds that can run up to $60,000 (nearly twice our current condition #1, or “concours” value in the Hagerty Price Guide), he maintains his perspective on the Sprite’s humble origins. “You wouldn’t cut up a 246 Dino like this because it’s too precious and the value of a car like that is in its accuracy. But a Bugeye is just a Bugeye. You don’t have to take it so seriously. A lot of these restomod-type cars and re-imaginings like Singer Porsches are becoming really popular these days, and the Bugeye is very viable for that because it was never so literal.” Silberkleit also gives the Sprite’s chassis, which was relatively advanced for the late 1950s, plenty of credit. “More than so many of these old body-on-frame British cars, the unibody structure of a Bugeye is an exceptional asset since they’re so tight and nimble. Even a rusty one can drive really well if you work out the kinks.”

Over nearly a decade and a half the Bugeyeguy shop has grown to seven employees, including two 25-year-old McPherson College grads, and the business is growing even more to meet pandemic-induced demand. “There were people who had a Bugeye on the bucket list saying ‘You know what, I’m done waiting. I’m not going to be around forever.’ I’ve had a lot of those types of phone calls.”

Bugeyeguy’s biggest challenges these days are in finding quality parts and high-quality help. The custom builds are becoming more and more popular, and although he sees a bright future in the electric conversions, he’s been too busy with the standard cars to develop them as much as he would like. That said, his next Bugeye EV is going to a client who already has two other Bugeyes—one completely factory-correct car and another supercharged hot-rodded Bugeye. “Does this guy really need three?” asks Silberkleit. “Well, if you think about it, they’re three different cars for three different occasions. And I think he’s a great summary of how versatile these cars are.”

“Versatile,” “charming,” “fun,” “personality.” These are all ingredients of cars that stay at the top of enthusiasts’ wish lists decades after they go out of production. It’s why a smart business like Bugeyeguy can thrive even as tastes change and the market shifts. People will be driving Bugeyes for years to come, and they (both car and driver) will have a big grin on their face the whole time. A lot of those Bugeyes will come out of a Quonset hut in Connecticut. “A lot of people have had a second childhood from these cars,” Silberkleit says. Who wouldn’t enjoy a second childhood?

This story originally appeared on Hagerty Insider.

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Classic car restoration virtuoso Bob Mosier is calling it quits. Since starting his career 49 years ago as a teenager working for Phil Hill, he’s practiced his craft on hundreds of award-winning cars ranging from Brass Era Pierce-Arrows to Art Deco-inspired Talbot-Lagos. A few weeks before closing his shop in Inglewood, California, the 67-year-old Mosier reflected on how the collector car hobby has changed over the past half-century. The transcript of this conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How’d you get together with Phil Hill?

I loved cars and worked on them all the time. I knew Phil because we lived in the neighborhood [in Santa Monica]. I would ride there on my bicycle when I was kid, and I would drive there and hang out when I got older. When I graduated from high school, he asked me to come work for him at his house. I didn’t know anything about old cars, but my attitude was: If Phil Hill likes ’em, I like ’em.

What was his restoration philosophy?

Phil believed that his best experiences with automobiles were always when they were new. So that was the goal. The idea was to do whatever it took—re-machine, re-bush, re-bearing, realign—to make the car function like it did when it was new.

You were there when Hill and Ken Vaughn bought two collections and began restoring cars on spec. How did they start restoring cars for other people?

We were conspicuous because we were on the street outside Phil’s house, painting things, removing things, repairing things. Friends would come around and ask, “Can I get you to fix this or that on my car?” The answer always was, “Well, we really don’t do that. These are cars that belong to us, and we’re fixing them up for sale.” Eventually, a local eye doctor prevailed upon Ken and Phil to restore his 1931 Packard. That was the first car they restored for money. Hill & Vaughn was the first place in Southern California where you could take your car unrestored through the front door and have it come out the back door restored. Otherwise, you were your own general contractor, and you ferried your car from the engine overhaul guy to the paint and body guy, then to the upholstery guy, then to the tire and wheel guy, then to the brake guy.

Of course, the collector car universe was much, much smaller back then.

It was a small hobby. When I was a kid, people who restored old cars were thought to be a bit quirky. Why would you want to horse around with a 50-year-old car? The first time I went to Pebble Beach in 1972, it was a small show. There were 50, 60 cars there, and I would park on the tennis courts with my camper and sleep overnight. Now, you can’t get within five miles of the place. The event’s gotten bigger and more prestigious. The demographics have changed.

How so?

We started out in the ’70s working for millionaires, and now we’re working for billionaires. It’s a whole different milieu. Pebble Beach is just one stop for the jet set. They go to the Kentucky Derby, they fly over to Europe for this, they go to China for another thing, they live HUGE lives.

We started out in the ’70s working for millionaires, and now we’re working for billionaires. It’s a whole different milieu.

We did a job for a guy one year, and at the same time we were restoring his Bugatti, he was having a home built, he was having a yacht built, he was having a plane customized. So how could he possibly devote the emotional attention to a car that the hobbyists used to back when the car was their primary focus?

The financial calculations have changed too, haven’t they?

In the ’80s, the cars began to be quite a bit more valuable, and then in the ’90s, there began to be a speculative element where guys were working an equation in their mind: If I spend X on the car and put B into it, I want to sell it for X + B + a profit.

For the first 10 or 15 years I was in the business, a car was not an investment. I draw a parallel to a boat in the marina. You buy a yacht and you start writing checks, and you don’t stop until you get rid of that boat. Nobody’s sitting at the bar of the California Yacht Club imagining they can sell their boat for a profit.

Let’s switch gears and talk about the restoration shop side of the business. You left Hill & Vaughn to form your own company in 1978. Why?

At that time, we had 25 guys at Hill & Vaughn, and to keep them busy, we were working on cars that five or eight years earlier we wouldn’t have looked at sideways. I was very selective. I didn’t want to restore your car if I sensed you weren’t interested in doing a really careful, really thorough job. When a customer comes in and says, “I want to come up just a little bit short of perfection,” that’s code for “I don’t want to pay the normal price.” I wasn’t willing to make the compromises that come along with meeting a bottom-line number. I wanted to be in the business of “best effort.” Every decision you make is easy because you just do it the best way you could possibly do it. But you need a cooperative customer who understands that a really careful, really thorough job is really expensive.

How did things go when you opened your own shop?

I started with one guy, Greg Morrell. Our first job was a 1937 Packard Twelve Convertible Victoria. The very first show we ever went to was at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. It was the most prestigious show in Southern California. We won Best of Show, and at Pebble Beach, we won our class and were runner-up in Best of Show. So immediately, the phone was ringing. At the risk of boasting, I’d say our jobs were the nicest on the West Coast—better than Hill & Vaughn, actually, because we were able to control the work better, and we were working more thoroughly, more carefully, to higher standards. For quite a while, we were the shop to beat if you wanted to win prizes.

But as times changed, so did your approach, didn’t it?

My attitude at first was: Only I know what you should do with your car. I would do only best effort, 100 point, every bushing, every bearing, every seal brand new. Then I evolved to the point where if you came to me with a project, and you had some ideas that didn’t rhyme with mine, I could suffer your ignorance and let you have what you want. Then I evolved even further to the point where I am today, where only you know what you want to do with your car, and it’s none of my business.

My attitude at first was: Only I know what you should do with your car. I would do only best effort, 100 point, every bushing, every bearing, every seal brand-new. I evolved … to the point where I am today, where only you know what you want to do with your car, and it’s none of my business.

A guy like [mega-collector] Chip Connor has a lot of cars, some of which we have restored to absolute perfection. But other cars just aren’t going to be lavished with that level of attention.

And, of course, attitudes about restoration changed too, right?

Phil, Ken, and I were some of the instigators of the over-restoration approach. It was akin to what the guys were doing with hot rods at custom car shows. Everything was bejeweled, everything was glossy.

I like to think that the 1933 Packard 12-cylinder Dietrich Convertible Victoria I did for [former Los Angeles Times publisher] Otis Chandler helped start the pendulum moving in the other direction. It was EXACTLY like a brand-new 1933 Packard Twelve. It was done accurately, and it was done authentically, and it was well-received.

What do you make of the fascination with barn finds and preservation cars?

A barn find is novel, yes, and it’s probably very low-mileage. But one of the timbers of the barn fell in and broke the roof, and nobody ever drained the water out of the engine, so it rotted clear through the block, and now you literally can’t drive the car. That’s not a preserved car. That’s a dilapidated car. A preserved car is a car that’s always been in service. It probably had its top replaced at some point, and it’s probably been repainted here and there and perhaps entirely. But it’s presentable in sort of original condition, and it’s well enough preserved mechanically that it can be used without any danger to itself. Those cars are very difficult to find, and very valuable when you do.

You’re pretty well preserved yourself. Why are you closing your shop?

I’ve enjoyed this business. Trust me, I will be eternally grateful for the career I’ve had doing this stuff. But I’m weary of it. I’ve done it long enough. One by one, the guys here aged out and retired, and I didn’t replace them. I’m at a point now where I can lease this building, and the tenant will have to pay me more in rent than I normally make in a month. So I have that happy scenario where I go home and I get a raise.

Via Hagerty Insider

The post Confessions of a car restorer appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The sun has just crested the row of pines encircling Ida Automotive, in Morganville, New Jersey, but the sprawling shop is already humming. Welding torches fizzle, and mallet knells spill out of the open garage doors. Rob Ida stands between a ’32 Ford and a ’40 Mercury in the two-car showroom that doubles as a front lobby. He’s 47, clean-cut, hair properly slicked to the side, and not a button out of place. Much like his builds.

“Willys, Tuckers, and Porsches—those are my top three models,” Rob says. “But I love everything. You name it, we seem to get involved.”

“Getting involved” is an understatement. For the past two decades, many of the cars that have spent time at Ida Automotive have been on a direct path to trophies. In fact, Ida is on a short list of elite hot-rod builders capable of turning heads at events like the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) Show while also dropping jaws on the 18th fairway at Pebble Beach. The secret to this successful recipe seems to be something he has been cooking up for most of his life.

As he walks out of the showroom for a tour of the shop, Rob says he can trace his custom-car empire back to one moment and one photo. “I was 7. One day, I opened up a family scrapbook and found a picture of my dad’s old race car, an Austin-Healey gasser with a blown Hemi engine. By then, he had been out of the car scene for a while. I remember being entranced by that car, the engine poking through the hood, the oversize tires. I became obsessed with drag cars.”

Rob and his father, Bob, have been working side by side since the shop’s inception in 1990. On this day, Bob takes breaks from cutting a new wheel in their CNC machine to share stories about young Rob. It was after the famed scrapbook encounter, in 1980, that Bob and 7-year-old Rob built their first hot rod together, a Willys pickup. They quickly finished the truck and took it to local cruise nights in Old Bridge and New Brunswick—back when, as Rob will tell you, “cruise nights in that area ended when the cops came.” Rob had the taste. He wanted to build his own car.

When he turned 14, Rob bought another Willys pickup. “To call it a Willys was modest,” he says. “Really, it was just the roof and the back wall of the cab.” He fabricated the rest of the cab and plopped the whole thing on a Toyota pickup chassis. Scraping together allowances and wages from odd jobs, he bought a small-block Chevy from the junkyard. He occasionally gleaned advice from his father, but Rob ultimately built the truck by himself. “I finished it right before I got my license at 17,” Rob says. “Just in time to take my future wife out on our first date.” Rob and his wife, Brenda, have been together ever since, and they now have two teenage daughters.

We stroll through one of the five large rooms that make up the sprawling shop. There’s a 1939 Ford stripped down to bare metal. “I bought that over 15 years ago to build a family cruiser, but work and bills got in the way.” The Ford is tucked in the corner to make space for a $2 million Tucker 48 that recently arrived in the shop.

The Ida family has a longstanding relationship with the Tucker name. Rob’s grandfather Joe and his Uncle Dominick owned a Tucker dealership in Yonkers, New York, in 1948, before Tucker Corp. went belly up. Rob still has boxes addressed to his Grandpa Joe from Tucker at the Jersey shop. “My dad and I wanted to build a Tucker for my grandfather, but there was no way we could afford to buy one.” So, the father-son duo built a full-size Tucker 48 replica out of fiberglass, powered by a Cadillac Northstar V-8. During the project, Rob developed a friendship with Preston Tucker’s great-grandson, Sean. Since that first Tucker replica back in 2000, Rob and his shop have worked on five more Tucker builds, including a custom twin-turbo Tucker 48, a Tucker Torpedo concept car, and a restored Tucker 48 that earned second place at the 2018 Pebble Beach Concours.

Rob’s latest project, a Jaguar E-Type, highlights his ability to play in so many different automotive arenas. “The client said we have the eye for hot rods, but we understand the European stuff, too” Rob says. “I think we just know how to properly blend that line between customs and European sports cars.” Rob and his crew have big plans for this Jag, which was sitting in the back of the shop on a rolling rack. “A lot of shops will fixate on what they like about the car. We look at what we can improve.” So Rob and crew didn’t hesitate to cut into what Enzo Ferrari called “the most beautiful car in the world.” Less than halfway into the build, Rob has already shortened the wheelbase 9 inches and chopped the top.

In an adjacent room, they’re chopping the top on a more traditional hot rod. A shop in South Carolina sent Ida a 1934 Ford 5-window coupe for surgery. This is no ordinary slice, as normally it would be done by subtracting metal with pie cuts. Instead, Rob and his team are forming new sheetmetal pieces that fit into the car’s windowsills and around its pillars. They’re obsessed with making the car look as if it was manufactured that way.

One of Rob’s three full-time employees, Arthur Zygnerski, is cutting out the metal substrate for the driver’s-side C-pillar of the ’34. “That’s Artie,” Rob says. “He’s worked here for 15 years. Over there …” Rob points at another employee elbow deep in a ’37 Chevy’s door panel, “that’s Young Artie.” They are not father and son; both Arties are under 30 years old. Russ Monte, laying a coat of black satin on interior panels in the paint booth, is a young gun as well. “You can’t be afraid to invest time in someone you see who is worth it,” Rob says. “This is my hobby as much as my lifestyle. I need to make sure it continues well after I’m gone.”

Perhaps Rob is inspired by the mentorship he received from his father, or from friend and hot-rod icon Gene Winfield. The 93-year-old Winfield still occasionally visits to lead a car, chop a top, or lay down a famous Winfield fade paint job. When Winfield’s first customer car, a black 1932 Ford roadster he did in 1953, came up for auction last year, Rob jumped at the opportunity to own the historic Deuce.

Rob strolls back into the showroom and fires it up. The Ford V-8 with Ardun heads and a Scott supercharger rumbles to life and then idles smoothly above the chopped, dropped, and filled front axle. The sound and sight still put a smile on his face.

Beside the Deuce, front and center in the showroom, is the famed 1940 Mercury Eight that Ida built for New Jersey construction contractor Jack Kiely. He nods at the Merc and sort of shouts above the flathead’s ruckus: “If I had to pick one build that sticks out, it might be that one.” In 2015, Rob and his team completely transformed the Mercury from stock into Kiely’s one-off coachbuilt sled, which now rides on a tube chassis and is powered by the 5.4-liter supercharged V-8 out of a Mustang GT500. The impossibly smooth Merc cleaned house at shows, including “World’s Most Beautiful Custom” at the 2016 Sacramento Autorama, and “Best in Show” at the 2016 SEMA event.

Rob pauses, his face contemplative in the noise. “Actually,” he says, “whatever car we’re working on at the moment is the one that sticks out.” No doubt, that next car of the moment—whatever it may be—will contend for trophies, too.

The post Second-gen customizer Rob Ida is a rodder with range appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Leading down a cobbled alleyway hidden behind rows of brown stone terrace houses sits Raysons workshop on the outskirts of Rochdale, Lancashire, U.K. Were it not for the bright blue wooden doors and signage of the garage, you could easily imagine you’d stumbled onto the set of an industrial-era period drama. Open the door and the sensation of a bygone age grows. The garage is part of a mill originally built in 1800s, and it’s here that Ben Hardman—a third-generation exhaust fabricator—keeps alive the skills that may just save Britain’s classic motorcycles.

Inside the workshop, the comforting smell of oily engines lingers in the air. Exhaust pipes dangle from every available rafter of the workshop ceiling. Old lathes, milling machines, and workbenches cover almost every inch of the cold concrete floor. Sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, fettling away on an old bike with a mug of tea close to hand, is Hardman.

The working environment is captivating. A large portion of the walls are covered in framed photos of his dad racing or working on bikes. Tools inherited from his granddad are scattered all over. Machines dating from well before Hardman was born line the floorspace, one of them from World War II with a plaque stamped “Property of the Air Ministry”.

His craft, skill and knowledge of motorbikes—British bikes especially—runs deep in the family. Hardman’s grandfather, Peter Lee, had his own bike shop in Rochdale, called Unity Equipe. It specialized in British bikes, particularly the Manx Norton, and regularly had to fabricate and bend pipes for customers. Hardman’s father Ray (Peter’s son-in-law) was a keen road racer, regularly competing throughout the ’80s and ’90s. He often worked with Peter to produce exhausts, and he had his own business, Unibend, using the same workshop in which we now stand. However, in 1997 Ray died in a racing accident at the famous Olivers Mount road racing circuit in Scarborough.

Despite the fact that Ray was unable to pass on his knowledge and fabricating skills, he had left his son a legacy of tinkering and a love of engineering. It was ingrained from a young age, with weekends spent in the paddocks of the nation’s race tracks.

Surprisingly, when Hardman first showed an interest in fabricating exhausts for classic bikes in his twenties, his granddad wasn’t keen; he worried it wouldn’t make him enough money. Even his father’s old friends try to dissuade him from the classic scene. “All my dad’s mates said, ‘You want to do [Japanese] bikes, they’re the next big thing; ’70s stuff is coming up, you wanna do two-strokes,’ but I just didn’t want to do ’em,” Hardman says. He stuck to his guns, though, and thankfully the classic motorcycle scene has grown in popularity in recent years—especially British bikes.

Hardman learned the craft beginning in 2008, and it wasn’t long before his granddad gave in and taught him the art of pipe bending. He’s become an expert in the field of exhaust pipes and it’s a fascinating sight to see him manipulate the steel pipes into precise, complex twists and turns using little more than a vise, torch (to heat and soften the steel) and his own bodyweight. He leans against the tubing, making fine adjustments.

Despite having been in the business for more than ten years and making a name for himself, Hardman’s still keen to push himself and learn new techniques. One process that I still can’t get my head around is hydroforming. He shows me a “megaphone” exhaust; it looks like a swollen pipe,  kind of like the expansion chamber on a two-stroke. To create this effect, Hardman welds two flat pieces of steel together and pumps water between them at high pressure (with a tap to let any air out) until the steel swells into a hollow cylinder. After knocking out any dents and polishing out the welds, the finish is seamless and the pipe looks more a piece of modern art than it does an exhaust.

Hardman believes in ensuring his work is faithful to the era and style of each of client’s bike. He point’s to a pre-war bike, looking as though it’s just rolled out of a museum. “That’s a 1929 Humber that the owner found in a shed. I’ve got that style now where I can make them a bit rough, so they fit in.”

“So they fit the patina?” I ask.

“Yeah, just by hand-making them, I know how to make them look handmade. Rather than just a bent piece of pipe.”

Hardman achieves this effect using techniques and tools that both his granddad and father would have used. “I’ll sandbend that,” he says pointing to the Humber’s exhaust sitting on his workbench, “and braze instead of TIG welding it. Everyone’s got a TIG welder now, so they can TIG weld absolutely everything. I’ll braze or gas weld, depends on what it is really. Different jobs for different things.”

A BSA Scrambler sits in the corner, looking as though it’s come straight out of a showroom 50 years ago. “That looks immaculate, that pipe does,” says Hardman. “It’s currently at the chromer’s. But still it has to look a little bit rough—to make it perfect it’s got to be imperfect. That’s what makes these look dead nice, they’re slightly imperfect.” It’s all part of the tailor-made patina that a craftsperson like Hardman is able to bring to the classic bike community.

As you’d expect from the classic motorcycle scene, a mix of styles and genres of bikes pass through the wooden doors of Rayson’s workshop, ranging from BSA scramblers to Seeley race bikes. Of all the classics he works on, what’s his favorite, you ask? “Road racers,” says Hardman, in his thick Lancashire accent. “Yeah, they’re just nice aren’t they—and you get to see them race afterwards. I like to watch the scrambler bikes race but it’s just not as competitive.’”

He expands on his admiration for the racers: “Whereas the road racers take it proper, proper seriously. It’s their lives, that’s all they do. It all gets proper serious in road racing.”

One of the most impressive and modern race bikes he’s worked on in recent years is the rare Norton Rotary. Hardman was asked to build an exhaust system for the Wiz Norton Racing team, which rider Josh Brookes would use to compete at the Isle of Man Classic TT. It was a dream commission.

With a grin on his face, he tells me how he leapt at the chance to fire up the unique sounding rotary in the alleyway outside the workshop. “It sounded like a Formula 1 car, I was like, ‘Honestly we might have to kill it because someone’s going to call the police!’ Just had it running for a few minutes—it was proper loud!”

For this talented exhaust fabricator, work is more a passion than a business. You sense the importance of family, the handing-down of traditional skills, and the enthusiasm for the motorcycling scene that, dare we say it, you do not get when dealing with off-the-shelf suppliers. “Character, that’s what it is—character. Bikes need a bit of soul.” And need people like Hardman to keep feeding that soul.

Via Hagerty UK

The post This third-generation exhaust fabricator is helping save Britain’s classic bikes appeared first on Hagerty Media.

“It’s like dairy farming. It’s in my blood,” Steve Markowski says in a heavy New England accent. “You can take the boy out of the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the boy.”

Steve and his father, Peter Markowski, run one of the East Coast’s preeminent Ferrari specialist shops out of three barns, behind a hill erupting with wildflowers in Vergennes, Vermont. Located an hour’s drive south of Burlington, among gently sloping farmland between Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains, Restoration and Performance Motorcars is as much a family enterprise as any of the surrounding farms.

The senior Markowski raised his family next door, and Steve and his brother Evan grew up in the shop, crawling around dashboards and riding bicycles in circles next to Ferrari Dinos. Like any good family business, they were put to work at a young age, sweeping up in the shop. Like any 12-year-old kids, they didn’t want to.

“My brother and I would sneak past so my dad didn’t see us; if he saw us, he’d put us to work,” says Steve, now 43. “So we’d sneak past, go in the house, and try to watch Seinfeld reruns—if he didn’t grab us by the collar first and say, ‘Get out there.’”

When we visited the shop, it was late summer in Vermont, a bright, muggy day. Summertime for RPM is the lull. Nineties rock blares from hidden boomboxes, and the air is warm with castor oil and grease, musty like a Victorian attic. Outside, a Jaguar E-Type announces its arrival from a shakedown drive with snarling fanfare. On the walls are posters of past Ferrari rallies, the design imitating 1920s art forms.

There’s also a poster of the official Ferrari magazine, Cavallino, featuring Peter Markowski’s own old warhorse (more on that later), and backrooms lead to other backrooms full of Italian artifacts. Here is the quad-cam V-8 of a Maserati Ghibli; around the corner is a Ferrari Daytona getting its Dunlop brakes rebuilt. In a separate barn, a Ferrari 308 GT4 waits for a new windshield, while a custom Mini pick-up truck demands completion. A Lamborghini Miura sleeps semi-naked, in need of new bodywork after its massive clamshell hood unlatched itself on a New Jersey freeway at 70 mph.

“We have been known for making cars actually work,” Peter says. “That’s not a normal thing. We have seen work done by shops from around the country, and even Europe, that we have to redo to actually make the car function.”

That includes replicating to rigorous precision brand-new parts to replace unobtainable bits that weren’t made very well to begin with. Steve Markowski says he’s lost sleep over the exact way to recreate the plastic levers that control the seat rake on a Ferrari Dino, which often break once they’re 50 years out of the mold.

“If only Ferrari, and especially Ferrari, had kept using metal switches and dials into the 1960s,” RPM wouldn’t have to manufacture replacements, he says. But because the carmaker no longer tools for them, nor sells them, he’s left with little other choice. And so Steve Markowski has become an obsessive artisan focused on re-creating original-equipment plastics, from door-release levers to radio knobs—all, he acknowledges, built with the same inherent weaknesses that originally doomed them to failure, because customers want exact replacements.

Steve muses that this “sickness” set in at an early age. He was about 18 when he noticed the rubber pads that inset on the bumpers of a Ferrari 250 were dry-rotted. “So I called around and I found some used ones. And guess what? They were used and old and cracked. I’m just, ‘Well, how hard is this?’” He made a mold, poured liquid rubber into it, and they came out perfect.

Steve’s father, Peter, grew up on a dairy farm in Rutland, Vermont, 45 minutes south of Vergennes. He learned to drive on a Ford dump truck. In 1958, when he was 12, an army sergeant neighbor returned from Naples, Italy, with a 1950 Ferrari 275S/340 America Barchetta by Scaglietti. He let Peter sit in it. Two years later, Sgt. Carroll Mills gave him a ride. Eventually, Peter gave Mills $500, a modest sum for a Ferrari nobody was able to relate to, and brought it home. Mills had not treated the Ferrari well, running it with hardly any oil. It took Peter seven years, but he got the Barchetta in working order. He owned it for the next 40.

“It was good to me,” Peter says, “and I learned a lot, met a lot of great people, and I became somewhat notorious for that. I had a chance to drive it across the auction stage at Pebble Beach four years ago. Did I cry? Sure. It was a big part of me.” Perhaps the sale price of almost $8 million helped sweeten the moment.

Peter has held dozens of jobs, from selling farm equipment to mortgage banking, from setting bowling pins in an alley (back when it was done by hand), to representing Freightliner Trucks. But that Ferrari 340 was always Peter’s impetus to work for himself. In 1985, he founded Restoration and Performance Motorcars from the basement of his home, initially tinkering on the Ferraris of friends, and soon building the main barn next door. Some of his earliest customers are still here. “I’ve had enough of this, working for someone else,” Peter recalls saying to himself. “Now I have to work for everybody. You go from one boss to many.”

Gone are the days where a cheap Ferrari 308 can roll into the shop with a belt and a fluid change and be on its merry way. Those cars are now four decades old, and your average Quattrovalvole requires a $25,000 engine-out service, Steve says. Some customers, understandably, balk at the costs. But what used to be castoff former play-things for the rich are now valuable investments, a changing shift in the very nature of enthusiasm. The standards must now approach perfection, even though no Ferrari was ever so perfect.

“In the old days, Ferraris were some of the poorest engineered cars on the planet,” Steve says. “They kind of got them together, and they kind of did the job.” You would know what he’s talking about if you’ve ever cut a hole in the floor of a $1.7 million 250 Lusso just to change out the master cylinder. “That’s not engineering,” he scoffs.

But Steve Markowski is also at peace with the fact that “Ferrari didn’t do anything conventionally.” It’s been very good for business.

The article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe to our magazine and join the club. 

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Bruce Canepa may be best known for bringing the Porsche 959 to America and tweaking the platform ever since, but as a specialist dealer, his highly equipped workshop also houses over 100 other rare cars at any given moment. As a former Pikes Peak, IMSA GT, sprint car, supermodified, and Trans Am racer, Canepa also maintains what’s known as the The Canepa Motorsport Museum, a collection of his favorite historically significant speed machines.

Upstairs at the showroom in California’s Scotts Valley, you can feast your eyes on such available collectibles as Chip Ganassi’s personal Ford GT, Jerry Seinfeld’s Porsche 964 RS, a McLaren P1 GTR, a perfect BMW M1, and both a 289 and a 427 Cobra. In addition to several 356s, Jaguars, and Ferraris, the museum is home to a few cars that have been with Canepa since the late ’70s.

The journey begins with Canepa’s first Pikes Peak car from 1979, a 1000-pound gravel racer with a 400-hp Porsche turbo powerplant. Next up is the first RSR Porsche built as a works car, 1974’s Le Mans class winner. Continuing with the theme, there’s Canepa’s single-turbo 1977 934.5 built for IMSA, parked close to a late factory 935 with a Joest Racing widebody kit. The other Porsche 935 in-house is the final and fastest Kremer evolution, the mighty K4.

When one likes 917s, it’s good to have both 1970’s Daytona winner 917K and the later Can Am version rated at 1200 hp in qualifying tune. While these cars use basic aluminum tubs, the 962C of Jackie Ickx and Jochen Mass is also present to take you into the composite era.

Porsches aside, there’s the 1970 AMC Javelin Trans Am campaigned by Penske Racing, Steve McQueen’s 1961 Cooper T56 Formula Junior, the 1969 Ford 427 Torino from the only year Richard Petty drove for the Blue Oval, and an all-original Austin Healey from the golden era of sports car racing. These are kept company by Jochen Mass’s Ford-powered 1972 Chevron B21; Dan Gurney’s first Indy Car, the 1966 Eagle T1F; the ultra-fast Lola T9100 Indy Car from 1991; the second chassis of Dale Earnhardt’s 200-mph Chevrolet Monte Carlo from the 1987 season; the only Audi R15 TDI Le Mans prototype in private hands; the wonderful, Pininfarina-designed Lancia Montecarlo Group 4 racer; and a Fiat Abarth 1000 Berlina Corsa from 1969.

Further U.S.-specific gems include a 1976 Maxwell Sprint car in dirt configuration, Don Prudhomme’s 3000-hp Shelby Super Snake Top Fuel Dragster from 1967, a ’34 Ford hot rod with a supercharged flathead built for Bonneville, and three generations of Sprint and Indy cars: 1953’s Kurtis 500B, 1960’s 1960 Kuzma USAC, and the 1961 Estes Sprint Car.

Here’s Bruce Canepa to tell you all about them:

To get a better understanding of what Canepa is doing, we have to visit his workshop and storage facility. With at least fifty projects managed at any given moment, the place is home to over a hundred vehicles of all colors, shapes and origins. Apart from the plating of parts, every process is kept in-house: fabrication, machining, upholstery, body and paint, engines, and composite work.

Canepa’s team has rebuilt around 14 Porsche 959s so far, with its upgraded 959 SCs rated at 950 hp on E85. These specials take roughly 4300 hours to finish, but they are hardly the only Porsches on the team’s to-do list. Other projects include the Esso-liveried 911 rally car Jean Todt co-piloted in 1974; the final, 1800-pound 911 R prototype (#4); several 356 Outlaws; a 993 GT2; and even a one-off known as 2000’s Carrera GT prototype. However, because Bruce Canepa will gear up for any challenge he fancies, the shop currently also deals with oddities such as a stealth Maybach and a ’67 Cadillac Eldorado Custom, tube-framed wonders such as an early Lamborghini Countach, supercars like a Bugatti EB110, and several classic Ferraris and Jaguars.

What would such a place have in the racing car section of the workshop? I guess you’ll have to find out with the man himself, courtesy of the Petersen Automotive Museum:

The post Take the full tour of Bruce Canepa’s dream-car empire appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Like most restoration experts, Matt Pfahl can spout production numbers and model designations without looking up from his workbench. He knows all the collectors in his specialty, has a calendar full of show dates, and owns a shop papered with old photos and vintage sales brochures. His dog’s name is Diesel, which is your first indication that Pfahl’s restoration world isn’t based on racing Hemis or high-revving V-12s. Think bigger.

You’ll find Pfahl and his giants in a vast, metal-sided warehouse in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Outside, a massive claw lies partially buried in the earth, and 40-foot skeletons dream of freight runs long over. Inside, the air smells of hot metal and dark smoke, and racks of beefy shelves house engines and transmissions the size of Triumph roadsters. And they’ll all be brought back to life by the big-truck specialists of Pfahl’s Mack and Antique Truck Restorations.

Pfahl bought his first truck, a 1955 Mack B61, in 1987, when he was just out of high school. The Mack B models are among the most popular of classic big rigs, with a rounded cab and fenders and an upright radiator shell that looks like an early Ford magnified by 10. Pfahl’s restoration on that truck netted him a reputation as a man who paid attention to the small details, even on a large project. It’s now been more than 25 years since he opened for business, and he’s about to add another 20-by-80-foot shop to his 8000-square-foot facility. “My first shop was 18 by 40 and sat on my parents’ property,” Pfahl says. “If you wanted to change your mind, you’d have to step outside to do it.”

These days, Pfahl has 11 employees. On the day we visited, there were six projects in the works, half of which were done and replaced by new ones by the time I called a few weeks later to check on the model year of one of the firetrucks. “Do you remember the name on it?” Pfahl asked apologetically. “We do so many firetrucks.”

Firetrucks are popular with truck collectors for the obvious reason. Who didn’t grow up wanting to be a firefighter? They also survived more often than other work vehicles, because they were built better, kept inside, and maintained regularly by the station. “Other work trucks got worked to death, rebuilt, and worked to death again,” Pfahl says.

Big trucks were often custom orders, especially firetrucks. Luckily, Mack has kept impeccable archives, and Pfahl can call the historian with a serial number and get a full “line sheet” that details every option, as well as blueprints for anything from a window trim piece to a fender. “It’s not like there’s a catalog I can flip open to get parts,” he says. “But if it’s broken and bent, I can fix it or re-create it. If they made it once, I can make it again.”

In the back corner, an enormous 1960s-era dump truck they’ve nicknamed the Orange Monster towers over the rest of the rigs. “We’re making a whole new dump bed for that. It’s as big as a living room.” It’s as big as some apartments, too. And like a walk-up, you have to climb a ladder to see the 673-cubic-inch, turbocharged straight-six diesel in the engine bay. Driveline components are measured not in pounds but in tons. Ask Pfahl what kind of engine hoist it requires and he’ll point to a forklift.

Forklifts aside, restoring a big rig is no different from restoring a car. Like car collectors, truck enthusiasts range from folks who like hot rods to folks who like it stock. In all of it, Pfahl has seen the hobby grow, despite the challenges of housing and registering such large collectibles. “Twenty years ago, we had maybe five or six things to do each season. Now you could do two to three events per weekend.” He adds that although interest in ancient chain-driven trucks remains strong, just like in the car collecting world, more ’70s and ’80s machines are getting attention. “Folks want the truck they started their business with, or the truck their dad had.”

The one scene you won’t find at a big truck show? A numbers-matching debate. “Trucks got rebuilt to make them work. By the time they come here, they’ve had different engines, different transmissions—maybe it was a dump and now it’s a flatbed. You tell someone a truck is low miles or numbers-matching, and they’re gonna ask what’s wrong with it.”

In all his time wrenching on big machines, Pfahl says there’s only been one that nearly beat him—a 1954 GMC Scenicruiser Greyhound bus. “We worked on that for seven years. It came in boxes. No motor, no transmission, no floors, no wiring. It was a million-piece puzzle and every piece was white. Took 25,000 hours and 45,000 rivets.” Pfahl heard that HBO is going to use it for a show. “I hope they shoot it,” he says. He doesn’t mean with a camera.

The bus is an outlier, because Pfahl is remarkably affectionate towards his vehicles. He pats a 1939 Mack FG C-cab gently on its glossy green fender as he explains its rarity (162 built, he knows of six still in existence, and only this one is still owned by the company that originally bought it). And he gets downright flushed and sparkly-eyed when he tells me the Mack museum is sending over its oldest existing truck for work. “To have it here in this shop is going to be amazing.” Pfahl stops for a second, looks around, then says: “My first shop was built over my childhood sandbox. I guess I’m still just a kid playing with trucks.”

This story originally appeared in the March/April 2020 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine.

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We’re a slightly more addicted to zip ties than we’re comfortable admitting. These handy strips of plastic are invaluable for organizing and fixing just about anything on a car. While a litany of impromptu fixes spring to mind, it’s their use in a more premeditated job—organizing things under the hood—that we’ll talk about today.

When people go to clean-up their installs by clipping the unused tails of the zip tie, they often commit a mistake. You may have done it yourself—snipping off the tail of a zip tie tidies up your engine bay and is likely a no-brainer action you do with whatever clipping tool is lying around. Usually, wire cutters are a handy choice, but their beveled cutting edges leaves a sneaky surprise for the next person who reaches into Medusa’s engine bay and painfully discovers a razor-sharp edge.

Flush cutters solve this problem with cutting edges that meet to form a flat surface. This leaves behind a blunt end on the zip tie rather than the roof-peak shape left by the beveled edges of your typical wire cutters. Flush cutters are primarily used in electronics to clip components flush with the surface of a circuit board, but they have a home in your toolbox, too.

What if you’re in lockdown, though, and it doesn’t behoove you to head into the store to grab some of these nifty cutters? Global pandemics aside, sometimes your local hardware store doesn’t carry these specialty pliers. Well, here’s where today’s Wrenchin’ Wednesday steps in.

Before

What we’re going to do is grind off half of each beveled edge so that one side of our wire cutters is totally level. It’s the V-shaped tips of the teeth on wire cutters that creates the razor edge on a hastily snipped zip tie.

There’s a bevy of grinding tools that you can use for this project (including the humble hand file), but we chose to use a flap-wheel on an angle grinder; they’re excellent at removing a lot of material over a wide contact patch. Clamp down the treacherous wire cutters and brush the blunt side of the cutting edge with the grinder until you eliminate the valley where the teeth meet. Take your time here by making a few passes and checking your work. You can always take more material off—it’s really, really hard to put metal back on after you grind it into oblivion.

After

As you can see, our cutters are now flat on the top side and angled on the bottom side. What’s trick about this tip is that you haven’t junked a set of wire cutters to make a set of flush-cutters; they’ll still munch through whatever you feed them. The cutting edges are flush with the face of the pliers, and your homemade flush cutters will do just as good of a job as a store-bought pair will.

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Matt Pollitz is elbow-deep under the hood of a 1970 Volvo 145 wagon. The cabin looks as if several drifters had until recently claimed its cavernous quarters for squatting. It’s actually a longtime customer’s wagon, but as Pollitz puts it, this client “should do a lot more preventative maintenance on this car. Instead he calls me when it stops running.”

Pollitz has had his shop, X-Ray Automotive, in one Seattle location or another over the past two decades. Old Volvos are common enough in Seattle that they’re reasonably cheap to buy and run, and they have undeniable character. Pollitz’s customers do own some beauties of collector quality, from 444s to Amazons and Duetts, but most all of them are daily drivers. “That’s just Seattle,” he says with a shrug.

The stockily built, stubble-faced Pollitz, like most mechanics, isn’t shy about his biases. He’s attracted to Volvos because they’re a bit like him: stoic, but not cold. He likes that the cars are rugged and even the old ones are relatively safe, and he’s working on a Duett for his daughter to drive when she gets her license in a few years. Of course, that would make her the coolest kid in her high school, but that’s hardly Pollitz’s motive. He grins a bit ironically when asked about the hipster crowd in his part of Seattle and its interest in mid-’80s Volvos. To him the bright side of that buzz is the potential to electrify the cars—to make the old and mossy very new and shiny.

Although he owns X-Ray, Pollitz isn’t a mechanic by training. The 44-year-old grew up in New England, and his cars were always 1960s Volvos, which meant that teaching himself to work on them was a matter of necessity. After traveling around Eastern Europe working as an artist in the wake of the Soviet collapse in the 1990s, he came back to the U.S. thinking he’d continue his art career. “But nobody gave a crap about art here, so I found myself in Seattle seeing Volvos on every corner with my mind blown,” he says. “All of these old cars had turned to rust where I grew up and I figured there had to be a job in keeping them running.”

What Pollitz quickly realized, too, was that his skills were no longer mainstream. “Your dad used to teach you how to set points and tune carburetors, and there were millions of Americans who used to know how to work on cars,” he reflects. His expertise fell by the wayside by the early 2000s, when all his twenty- and thirty-something peer mechanics only knew how to work on newer machines. Much like the old Volvos crowding Seattle streets, Pollitz was an anomaly—a rare young person who knew how to maintain naturally aspirated cars.

Twenty years ago, as now, Seattle’s economy was booming, and one constant has been the city’s rich stock of 1950s–1970s Swedish machinery. Seattle after WWII was a sleepy backwater. Waves of Nordic immigrants helped settle the Northwest, attracted to businesses like forestry and fishing that carried over from their previous homeland. These Swedes and Norwegians settled stalwart middle-class seaside neighborhoods like Ballard, where Pollitz has always had his shops, and such folks were some of the first Americans to pine after imported Volvos, making Seattle one of the strongest markets in the U.S. “Back then, in most of America if you bought an imported car it was a VW,” Pollitz says. “But in Seattle people bought Volvos— and they still do.”

The big difference today, the relatively gruff Pollitz notes, is the wash of money coating every corner of the city. “I couldn’t buy a postage stamp, let alone a house in Ballard,” Pollitz snorts. The district may still appear working-class—especially the warehouse section surrounding his current outpost, where he works cheek-by-jowl with metal artisans and sculptors who share his tin-walled, chilly building—but single-family homes regularly sell for north of $1 million here. Rather than live nearby with his wife and daughter, Pollitz instead commutes every day to X-Ray in his mid-1950s Volvo Duett, fighting north-south I-5 traffic from the scruffy, but far more affordable city of Tacoma, Washington.

Even as housing costs have risen throughout the Northwest—Seattle is no longer the sleepy town it once was—its environs have been kind to old cars. Western Washington is damp, but it rarely snows and roads aren’t salted, so vintage iron grows moss, rather than rust. (Yes, really.) Pollitz recently bought a field-found Amazon 122 that’s literally green-hued. “The tabs are from 1998, which is the last time it was registered, but I did a little work and got it running.”

And as Volvo aficionados know, these vintage Swedes are built to take a beating. “The B18, which they introduced in ’62, everyone thought Volvo was crazy,” Pollitz explains. “It’s a four-cylinder engine with five main bearings. Then, and even today, four-cylinder engines mostly have three bearings on the crankshaft. It’s an additional expense—not just the bearings but the journals—plus more intricate casting of the block.” Pollitz says those five-bearing fours are unbelievably tough. He figures the careworn B18 he’s repairing in his shop right now easily has a half-million miles on it without a rebuild, and he’s fairly sure the owner has seldom given it much if any serious attention.

Indeed, he says that a number of his current customers—mostly musicians, artists, and other creative types—barely care about what’s under the hoods of their cars. “They’re not in love with the internal combustion engine,” he says. “It’s the shape of the car, the look of it, the body style.” For that reason, Pollitz has already dabbled here and there converting some into EVs. 

Jeannette Meade swings by X-Ray in her Volvo 444 because her wipers aren’t tracking correctly. She’s originally from Sweden and an owner of a local coffee shop. She always noticed Pollitz coming to get a coffee in a different vintage Volvo. Eventually she asked how she could get her hands on one. That led her down the rabbit hole not just to any 444, but to this one that Pollitz converted to electric power for her, using a forklift motor. Meade’s car retains its traditional gearbox, too. Why gears? Hills. Seattle has a lot of them, and Pollitz wanted Meade to have the option to downshift for descents, particularly in the rain.

Meade kindly let me take her car for a spin around the block. What’s immediately amusing is the ferocious torque; you can start the damn thing in third gear. “I just leave it in third or second,” she tells me. You also don’t have to dump the clutch at a light and shift to neutral, because it will never stall like an engine would. The clutch is only necessary to change gears.

Pollitz says the idea of converting all of his clients’ cars to electric is a fantasy he hopes to somehow make a reality. “I don’t relish maintaining a fleet of cute super-polluters. I know that might be heresy to fans of old cars, but look, these have been around for sometimes 50 years, and the ones in great shape can be around for another 50. But going forward it’s only smart for wear and tear alone if they’re electric.”

He’s well aware that this concept creates a conundrum for his own business. Meade only stopped by because of her degrading wiper performance. Otherwise, she doesn’t visit X-Ray; like many greasy, cluttered vintage car repair shops it’s hardly hospitable; and besides, her EV doesn’t need oil changes or coolant flushes. As Pollitz inspects her car, though, he realizes she does in fact need some suspension and other work. Making a car into an EV puts the onus on Pollitz to pester his customers to see him regularly, like a dentist wishfully nagging patients to get regular cleanings. “Brakes, tire rotations, that kind of thing. Just so I’m keeping an eye on any little problems before they compound.”

Even as Pollitz has made a business of maintaining older Volvos, he reiterates that the boxier 1970s–’90s 240s that Gen X, Gen Y, and Millennial car fans are warming to are even better-suited for EV conversions. “There’s just so much room in them for batteries and electric motors,” he says.

The one problem for Pollitz is that Seattleites are somewhat spoiled: They have a misperception that old Volvos are more plentiful than they actually are, which depresses their value, at least locally. So he’s stuck, in a way. Scaling up to swipe used Nissan Leaf drivetrains and swap them into 244s and 245s for resale would be ideal, but it’s not a cheap proposition. “Short of becoming a nonprofit, I’m not sure how you do it,” he says. Pollitz figures his customers would be wiser to just buy used Leafs and drive them, but he also knows they don’t putter around in old Volvos for strictly rational reasons.

“There’s a love for these old cars,” says Pollitz. “Converting them to electric would be better for the planet and it would save more Volvos. These are beautiful cars and they’re also an important part of Seattle’s history, so I hope to find a way to make it work.”

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The 1937 Alfa-Romeo 8C2900 Berlinetta owned by David and Ginny Sydorick is well on its way to becoming the most-awarded concours car of all time. It has won Pebble Beach. It has won Best of the Best in Paris. It scored a clean sweep of the awards at Villa d’Este Concorso d’Eleganza. It is gorgeous, and it is graceful, and it is (almost) invaluable, and its resurrection is clearly the work of master craftsmen.

Surely, the facility that restored this rolling artwork must be a shrine to the car as enshrined holy object. A hallowed place where artisans, scholars, and historians gather to resurrect the finest automobiles in the world. A place of quiet gentility, white gloves, spotless shop aprons, of hushed, reverent voices discussing the intricacies of prewar coachwork. Of…

Hang on—is that a frickin’ Mini Moke parked out front?

Clang-Clang-Clang! Mike Taylor, bodywork specialist at Canada’s RX Autoworks, is beating the absolute bejesus out of a body panel for a supercharged Stutz. Mechanic Rob Fram, the Moke’s owner, is elbows deep in a small-bumper 1989 Aston Martin Vantage that’s in for servicing. Ian Davey, in charge of paint and finish, is prepping a 1950 Alfa Romeo 6C 2500 Super Sport in the paint booth. He’s just spent 11 hours reformulating the paint and is itching to get the Alfa out and off to Pebble Beach so he can get his own Mazda RX-3 vintage racer project under the knife.

What the deuce? Where’s the oak panelling and jeweller’s lorgnettes and the starched collars? You won’t find those at RX.

Ported rotaries join patina-laden Plymouths, bored-out 1275-cc Minis, turbocharged Miatas, and fourth team member JP Parker’s glistening, whitewall-shod 1950 Chevy Fleetline. Occasionally, you’ll find Duncan Dickinson’s grey MGA parked curbside too, as he pitches in on the bigger jobs.

“I think many folks in our community were surprised to find out that we have such amazing shop hidden away in North Vancouver,” says Dave Hord, co-founder of British Columbia’s Classic Car Adventures, a touring group for classic car enthusiasts. “We’ve discovered a sense of pride in the fact that this is our ‘home shop.’ We didn’t turn a wrench, beat a panel or lay the paint, but we share in the pride that goes behind every win because it was done here. “They’re just regular guys; there is no entitlement or arrogance when you meet them.”

Concours events can be hard for anyone with fuel in their veins to understand, in the same way that opera doesn’t always appeal to people who like electric guitars. If cars are meant to be driven, then surely the champagne, frilly hats, and static displays of a high-end concours are the exact opposite of what the vehicle makers intended.

That’s not what RX Autoworks is about. The place is more like a speed shop, the type to rivet motorcycle fenders to a $20M prewar Alfa-Romeo and go ripping through the straight-cut gears on mountain-top shakedown runs. It’s Bohemian Rhapsody sung by a twin-supercharged straight-eight.

Underneath the glittering chrome of a concours is real metal. Yes, there’s a certain amount of bank account jousting going on at any top level car show. Behind the scenes is the genuine craftsmanship, the people who take joy not just in making things shiny, but getting the details accurate, and bringing cars back to life.

“In a world full of restoration shops, it’s an honor and privilege to know that the very best in the world is right here in our hometown,” says Geoff Peterson, owner of Peterson’s VWs and co-founder of CarBS and Coffee. “RX is a culmination of the top craftsmen in their respective fields all coming together in the perfect virtuoso of paint, metal, chrome and octane under one roof. These guys are an inspiration to so many in the field as well as the younger generation of car enthusiasts. Not only do I respect the entire staff I also have the privilege of calling many of them friends.”

Parker, who at 29 is the youngest member of the RX team, has learned that accuracy can be a messy business. Coming from the mile-deep paint of the hot-rodding world, he’s had to undo modern welding habits with techniques that mirror the spatter and hand-built feel of 1930s coachwork. Taylor, who builds all his own traditional tools, sometimes will go so far as to weld left-handed to get things looking suitably Italian.

There’s a language to these cars, whether it’s the tell-tale dots of an Italian power-hammer or the lines made by an English wheel. Body lines are often asymmetrical, and it’s not uncommon to have to undo a too-perfect previous restoration. Dexterity and a long back-catalogue of experience is required, but so to is the desire to go treasure hunting for parts or delving back through sepia-toned photos to try to reconstruct bodywork that’s lost to time.

Given that so much of the period photography featuring these cars is in black-and-white, and so much of the chemical composition of paintwork has changed, Davey probably has the most frustrating job of the four. The exacting work matches his personality, and he has a few tricks up his sleeve. When painting the ’37 Alfa-Romeo 6C, for instance, he test-painted a few panels with different compounds, and laid them out near the sidewalk. Whenever a woman would pass by, Davey would ask which color they preferred. Research has shown that women can distinguish tiny differences in color variation that men can miss.

All of this technical expertise probably would have gotten RX only to the threshold of exceptional. What pushes the guys across the line is the way they work together, how their personalities mesh and complement each other. Fram is affable and gregarious, to the point that the others are happy to sit back and let him do the talking. Taylor seems to be happiest when he’s giving one of his teammates a verbal elbow to the ribs. Davey is his own harshest critic. And all three delight in needling Parker, who, to his credit, fires back as good as he gets it.

There’s no hand-holding; it’s more a friendly rivalry that doesn’t let a mistake or a do-over go unpunished. “Good enough” doesn’t exist here.

So while the work is performed on some of the best cars ever produced, it’s more about the team than the metal. As RX responds to the huge amount of demand for its services—the reward of success—that’s a formula not likely to change.

“Despite the victories at the most famous Concours events in the world, they have not forgotten their early roots and are happy to share their passion and showcase their skills locally to enthusiasts who can’t make it to Pebble Beach or Villa d’Este,” says Nigel Matthews, Pebble Beach Concours judge. “They share their knowledge by judging at local events or simply talking about cars at the local Carbs and Coffee meetings, or by participating in the Hagerty Spring Thaw Rally. This year, Rob Fram won the Spirit of the Thaw award for always being the first car to pull over or do a U-Turn to go back and help someone who has broken down.”

The response from the impressive wins at Pebble and Villa d’Este has been huge. In a single afternoon, the RX team booked some 12,000 hours of work. Its doors are effectively shut for the next four years. The crew will keep helping former clients service and refresh their vehicles, but they’re trying to reduce the number of projects to a more manageable level, to reduce turnaround.

If you happen to be in North Vancouver on July 14, you can take a peek into RX to see what the team is up to. RX’s semi-sporadic annual open house provides a glimpse of the workspace, the trophies on their shelves, and the projects coming together. 

Just don’t forget to talk to the guys themselves. The cars are special, but the people are extraordinary.

The post In this world-class restoration shop, regular car guys get it done appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Take away the tattoo of the British motor Corporation emblem on his right forearm, and tall, trim Ed Sweeney looks more like a high-school history teacher or Eagle Scout than a car restorer.

Last spring, the 34-year-old, who actually is an Eagle Scout, bought Carriage Craft, his hometown British sportscar shop, from MG racer and mechanic Bill Shields. Since 1975, it had been the place in Reading, Pennsylvania, for everything from tuneups to full restorations. The wiry and bearded Shields was known for providing fair prices, top-quality work, and, on Fridays, cold Yuengling beer. Customers would drop by to hang out among the MGs, Triumphs, and the odd Austin-Healey or Lotus. Since 1989, I’ve counted myself among those customers.

In recent years, Shields had cut his hours, his son, Michael, was running the shop, and retirement was on the horizon. But in August 2016, Michael was murdered while aiding his roommate, who was being robbed at gunpoint. Ed Sweeney made a condolence call. “I’d known Bill as long as I could remember,” he says, “because of going with my dad to buy parts for his 1965 MGB.” The conversation continued, and Shields saw a way to sell his business, while Sweeney found a way to fulfill his dream of running his own shop.

Before the sale closed, Carriage Craft’s longtime lead mechanic, Allen Witman, asked me if I knew Sweeney. I could hear the uncertainty in his voice. The shop had been in Shields’s capable hands for more than 40 years, so this was a big change.

Neither Witman nor Carriage Craft’s customers need worry, I told him. I met Sweeney more than 10 years ago, when he was finishing his marketing degree at Temple University in Philadelphia while working at a British car shop in New Jersey. He impressed me then with his manners, enthusiasm for British cars, and mechanical skill. Sweeney later spent years at Leydon Restorations, a shop legendary for its mechanical and machining capabilities on exotics such as 8C Alfa Romeos, Bugattis, and Ferraris.

During the transition, Carriage Craft closed for two weeks and then reopened as Proper Noise, a name Sweeney took from a commentator’s description of the sounds made by historic racing cars at the Goodwood Revival in England. Despite the new name, much of the shop is the same as it’s always been. It is tucked into a quaint community of small ranch and Cape Cod homes. You come upon a squat building surrounded by a dozen MGs, a few Minis, a Sprite here or there. Wood smoke wafts out of the chimney and drifts over the neighborhood.

Not much has changed inside, either, although Sweeney’s toolbox has replaced Shields’s. The space is not exactly cluttered, but it’s overwhelmed by equipment. There’s room for five cars, and the shop would fit a sixth if not for the double-barrel Vogelzang wood stove Shields assembled from a kit decades ago. Welding gear occupies a corner, and several shelves are dedicated to project parts. Some old MG photos and vintage racing signs remain from Shields’s days, augmented by die-cast models and a few images of cars that have come through the shop. The tiny office has a computer for the first time.

Proper Noise has been open for less than a year, but Sweeney has plenty of work. Although he’ll never desert British cars, he accepts any project that interests him. He recently serviced a Porsche 356 and is now restoring a Volvo PV544, doing several jobs on a Delahaye, and has a Triumph GT6 on the schedule for restoration. Anything that keeps my local shop solvent is fine with me. It all seems fine with Witman, too, who’s happily turning wrenches alongside his new boss.

Sweeney predicts gradual changes, including a clean room for building engines and a bigger building with in-house paint facilities. His “in-house” machine shop, however, is actually in his father’s house. “Dad can fabricate and repair things that I’d otherwise send out,” Sweeney says. An accomplished woodworker, his father also crafts wood pieces for bodies and trim. Sweeney’s mother often delivers the latest machining projects.

Ed Sweeney is doing a fine job of carrying Bill Shields’s torch, and in itself this is a tribute to both Bill’s legacy and the memory of his son. Time will tell how big Proper Noise can grow. We’ll also have to wait to see which marque might be tattooed onto Sweeney’s left forearm to balance out the BMC logo.

The article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe to our magazine and join the club. 

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There’s a wind-swept oasis about 90 miles north of Hollywood, California, along a stretch of the old Sierra Highway, just beyond the dusty town of Rosamond. You’ll want to pull over when you see a sun-beaten stucco auto shop corralled by a steel-post fence. Out front are a faded 1970s sci-fi shuttlecraft from a B-movie no one remembers and cars from RoboCop and Blade Runner, long past their prime. That’s Gene Winfield Rod & Custom, and this legendary builder wants everyone to stop in.

Winfield’s place is a working shop and a shrine to himself, one of the custom world’s surviving kings. The main building stretches barely long enough to accommodate four service bays that connect to the shop’s heart, the paint booth. It is, after all, Winfield’s signature candy-color paint-blending technique that made him famous. The Winfield Fade became a sensation in 1960 when Winfield wowed the custom-car scene with the Jade Idol, a 1956 Mercury stretched out and flare-finned like one of Virgil Exner’s 1957 Forward Look Chryslers and wearing superbly blended leafy shades.

One doesn’t so much enter Winfield’s place; it’s more of an al fresco experience. Because of the relatively small workspace, much of his scrap stays outside exposed to the elements. The high-pitched whine of a metal sander and the dulcet tones of the 1970 White Plains hit My Baby Loves Lovin’ waft out of the shop on the cool high-desert air. Industrial shipping containers for additional storage lie scattered across the arid five-acre property. Out back, an orchard of sunbaked cars languishes.

Winfield employs four to six people, depending on who shows up on any given day. Lindsay Ross, Winfield’s current office manager and friend of 20 years, recently replaced the previous office guy after he went to prison for possession of assault rifles. “Out here in the desert, you take whatever drifts in,” Ross says of their eclectic payroll roster.

You’d never guess by watching Winfield maneuver around his shop that his own odometer rolled past 90 last year. He strides proudly through his rusting chaos, his wavy matinee-idol hair perfectly groomed. He introduces his countless metal-shaping tools, most of which he made himself, as if they were old friends at a cocktail party. From the Pullmax, an electric reciprocating machine that shapes and cuts metal, to his many bead rollers and hammers, to an old solid-steel riveter from Lockheed, Winfield still uses them all. “Retirement is when they put you in the ground,” he quips.

Brushing the shop’s ubiquitous layer of dust off an English wheel, Winfield waxes nostalgic about a time when custom work was a competitive sport among contemporaries such as George Barris, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, and Kenny Howard, a.k.a. Von Dutch. “Each of us was trying to outdo the other,” he says. Winfield travels the world offering clinics on hammering and shaping techniques, determined to keep his vanishing craft alive.

A ’40 Ford awaiting primer was set to make its world debut at Detroit Autorama and vie for the coveted Ridler Award, the lone recognition Winfield has never captured. Beside the Ford, a ’53 Pontiac needs some rear bumper fabrication work and custom taillights before heading back to Australia. Soft sunlight glistens off a ’49 Mercury, whose Winfield Fade flows seamlessly from golden sand to buttermilk to chartreuse to lily pad.

Winfield’s most significant project, his original Jade Idol, sits front and center, exactly where it belongs. “It was in storage in Massachusetts for 30 years. Then a man in Oregon bought it and is having me restore it to how it was originally.” Its matte-gray primer waits on Winfield’s colorful magic.

When you’re done checking out the metalwork, Winfield will gladly show you around his home. He resides on site in a museum chronicling his life. The walls are covered with his personal photos and memorabilia. Since he made the shuttlecraft for the original Star Trek TV series, there’s an entire room devoted to props from the show. He has guitars that he designs and sells, pinup lovelies, and even a bathroom that pays tribute to his former wife’s father-in-law, famous Lockheed designer Kelly Johnson. Please sign the guest book before you leave.

As dusk descends, Winfield gets the torch out, heating and bending a trim piece for the ’53 Pontiac. He’ll be back at it tomorrow, too, still shaping metal, still going for the perfect color fade, still dodging the reaper who’s taken old friends and rivals, and still living as though it were 1962, the subsequent years all blending into one candy-colored dream.

The article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe to our magazine and join the club. 

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Looking for a way to improve your restoration skills during the winter months? With the year’s schedule of car shows and swap meets virtually over, many hobbyists resign themselves to suffering “withdrawal symptoms” for the next four or five months, but that doesn’t have to include you…especially if you’re into British cars.

MG restoration expert John Twist recently announced the 2006 dates for his 23rd annual series of technical seminars aimed at British car enthusiasts. According to Twist, there will be eight different hands-on workshops this year. They will be held February 1–23 at University Motors Ltd., a British Motor Heritage-approved workshop, in Ada, Michigan (near Grand Rapids). Twist started operating this repair-and-restoration facility in 1971, following a stint as a mechanic at the original University Motors in England. He’s been doing it annually ever since.

Some of the 2006 technical seminars will be three-day weekend sessions, while others will be two-day courses on weekdays. The first seminar on rebuilding the XPEG engine used in TC, TD and some TF models will be a lecture and observation seminar. The weekend seminars – one on MG mechanicals and one on MGB restoration – are lecture and hands-on programs. Four other weekday sessions are workshops in which students will bring and rebuild gearboxes, carburetors and front suspension units from their own cars.

Typically, the University Motors seminars draw a combination of inquisitive car owners who are amateurs at restoration work and professional mechanics employed by sports car repair shops. As a result, they generate a lot of networking between enthusiasts with different levels of skill. The registration fee for each seminar is $325. Travel expenses, book fees and parts costs are additional.

A similar workshop on MGB Sheet Metal Restoration is also scheduled for February 15–16 at Eclectic Motorworks in Holland, Michigan. This shop is run by auto restorer and writer Carl Heideman, a former employee of University Motors, and it specializes in MGA and MGB restoration work.

John “Gunner” Gunnell is the automotive books editor at Krause Publications in Iola, Wis., and former editor of Old Cars Weekly andmOld Cars Price Guide.

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If you’re a tool junkie like me, the first New Year’s resolution on your list for 2006 is probably to find a better way to organize your tools. You can run out and buy that Carroll Shelby signature edition three-stacker tool chest for about $3,500 or you can put about $350 aside to build a tool board for your garage or shop. When you’ve finished your tool board, you’ll be able to find whatever tool you need at a glance, know which tools are missing, and have a tool organizer with a funky old-fashioned look that complements the classic styling of your car.

Properly designed and built tool board is like a piece of automotive art. It’s much more than a piece of pegboard and some snap-in-place hooks. Pegboard might work in an ordinary person’s garage, but it wouldn’t survive very well in the shop of a serious restorer. First, pegboard tends to warp fairly easily. Second, it’s a material that naturally collects dirt and doesn’t clean well when it gets dirty. Third, a heavy breaker bar, a large pipe wrench or a sledge hammer hung on pegboard can break the fiberboard or even bend the hooks. A pegboard looks nice the day it’s first hung, but usually doesn’t look the same a year later.

That’s why mechanics prefer a tool board. In fact, they are often seen in schools where mechanics learn their trade. McPherson College, in McPherson, Kansas, is nationally known as the only school that offers a bachelor’s degree in Automotive Restoration Technology. And McPherson has a nice assortment of tool boards. The mechanics at the Mercedes-Benz Classic Center in Stuttgart, Germany, also have tool boards in their shop. In fact, some of them are built like folding cabinets and roll on wheels.

Bill Kroseberg, an Automotive Technology instructor at WaupacaHigh School in Waupaca, Wisconsin , says that the tool board in his shop is a big help in teaching students the importance of putting tools back in their proper place after a job is done. “Students also learn how to pick the proper tool for the job,” says Kroseberg. “With a tool board, they can get an idea of just how many different tools are available.”

In a home shop, standard 4×8 sheets of ½-inch ACX plywood will do fine. This type of plywood is a bit smoother on one side for a nice look. You’ll want to stain it with an oil satin poly-coating. Molding to frame the edges of the tool board is optional.

If you know the spacing of the studs in your garage or shop, you can attach the stained plywood panels to the walls by driving 2 ½-inch course drywall screws into the studs. If you can’t find the studs, wall anchors will be a good idea. The tool board will be carrying a lot of weight and needs to be securely attached. If your shop has wood or concrete walls, different attaching methods will be required. Check with the experts at your building supply store.

If you’re going to frame your tool board with molding, it can be attached with good quality wood glue. You may want to use small finishing nails to make sure it’s securely attached. Drill guide holes before nailing, as wood molding splits easily. Using a miter box to get frame-type corners is a nice touch if you’re going for appearances.

Once the wood paneling is prepped and mounted on the wall, the fun begins. Many methods can be used to build shelves and racks that hold different tools on the board. Many tools like box-end wrenches and C-clamps can simply be hung on nails. Small shelves can be made from lumber for other tools. A set including different size hole saws that attach to your drill can be purchased for $6 or $7. You can cut the proper size holes in your shelves to hang screwdrivers, files, socket wrenches, pliers and other tools.

Many tools sold today come in their own plastic cases or holders that can be mounted directly to the tool board with drywall screws. In fact, it’s common for plastic cases to have keyhole-shaped slots on the back. The wider portion of the slot (on the bottom) fits over the head of a screw, and then you pull it down so the narrow portion is locked into place by the screw head. Tools such as punches and chisels come in pocket pouches that you can mount directly to the tool board with screws. When doing this, be sure to drill guide holes to try to keep the plywood from splitting.

Tools such as open-end wrenches, socket extensions, ball-joint separators and pry bars can be attached to the tool board with store-bought spring clips. Hammers can be hung through holes drilled in a wood shelf. Socket wrenches can be attached to store-bought organizer bars that can then be attached to wooden shelves. The organizers usually have holes on one or both ends to slip over nails. On the other end, you can use a loop or bracket to hold the handle of the organizer bar.

Planning the arrangement of tools on your tool board is an important part of building one if you want everything to be organized when you’re done. If you can find a school or business in your area that uses a tool board, call for a visit to check it out. Seeing how it’s organized will help you plan better when building your own.

Some tool boards have outlines of tools painted on the board. These images come in handy when a tool is missing. “The shop teacher can tell at a glance when a student forgot to put a tool back,” says Kroseberg. “That’s one thing we didn’t do when we built our tool board and I’ve always regretted that – it’s a very nice touch.”

Building a tool board isn’t a quick project; it’s a job that takes a lot of thought – a job you can savor for weeks while the snow is falling. And by the time your ready to give your collector car its spring service, your tool board will be done and you’ll be glad you’re organized.

John “Gunner” Gunnell is the automotive books editor at Krause Publications in Iola, Wis., and former editor of Old Cars Weekly and Old Cars Price Guide.

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It’s almost time for getting our classics out of storage and ready for the show season, cruising and just plain pampering. There are some things to consider regarding car fires that you should be aware of.

Checking for fuel line leaks, which are a potential fire when coupled with engine heat, can eliminate a large source of vintage car fires. Those old fuel and transmission fluid lines deteriorate over time. A well-adjusted or rebuilt carburetor will also prevent fuel leaks.

Another potential problem comes from aging electrical systems. By looking for frayed wires, or those that have come too close to exhaust manifolds, we can repair them before they become a problem. Brakes that hang up, especially on that first spring ride after sitting engaged all winter, cause heat if they don’t release, which could spread to other parts of the car.

How many nice chrome or dressed-up fire extinguishers have you seen in a vintage muscle car? It’s not a bad idea to have at least a UL-listed 5A 10BC* rated unit in the car where it can be reached quickly while someone is using the cell phone to dial 911.

If you’re like me, I look forward to having my ‘70 Corvette convertible in the garage for big projects during the colder weather. The shop needs some fine-tuning to keep our cars safe.

Believe it or not, rags with flammable liquids, strippers or some combustible degreasers can self-ignite if stored together. A metal can with a tight-fitting lid will contain the rags. Discarding them away from the garage after use is better yet.

Debris or combustibles piled in the garage can give a place for sparks to go off. On a 5 degree evening last winter, we responded to a house fire that was ignited when a cutting operation put sparks into some accumulated scrap. The owner went into the house, little realizing that a fire had started. It extended through the walls to a bedroom above, the kitchen and then the roof. Nine months later, the family might be able to move back into their house in another month.

Items to keep handy in the shop include at least one extinguisher with a rating of 5A 40BC* (I like to have one at each end of the shop) and some oil dry or cat litter to pick up combustible liquids and keep the fumes down (as the fumes are what burns). These are easy to sweep up and dispose of as well.

A great shop will have plenty of light and outlets. The classic “drop light” in several convenient locations can give plenty of light without tripping over the cords or running them over the car’s finish. Drop-light bulbs of the “Rough Use” type will lessen the frustration of dropping the drop light and having the bulb go out or break. An incandescent drop light makes enough heat to ignite combustible liquids or rags. Be sure to check the wiring on these and other tools for fraying or open spots.

Plenty of GFI outlets should be used, as should separate circuits of the correct amperage for those high-draw items like a compressor or welder.

If you’re lucky enough to be able to renovate your shop for more comfort’s sake, some improvements such as using 5/8 sheetrock on the walls and ceilings, putting in a 1-hour fire-rated door between the garage and house and putting a 4-inch step to the house to prevent fumes from entering and finding a source of ignition, would be money well spent.

So spring will finally be here and it’s time to put the top down for a ride, but the battery has run down during storage. Before using the trickle charger, make sure to check its wiring. I’ve been to a garage fire where the charger was hooked up and left. It shorted out or “fried” the battery and the car burned.

Also, when the shop manual says to disconnect the battery, do so. If you have occasion to drain flammable liquids, a container with a funnel top that can be closed after filling is helpful. This type of operation should be done in a well-ventilated area.

The Letters

Class A fires are the most common type around the house, involving ordinary combustibles such as wood, paper, cloth, rubber and plastics.

Class B fires involve flammable liquids (e.g., gasoline, kerosene, oil), gases and greases. These are most common in the garage, and vehicles. Class C fires involve live electrical appliances, equipment or wiring. Class C extinguishers are suitable for use on electrically energized fires.

The Numbers

Class A: The number preceding Class A indicates the approximate extinguishing potential. This number relates to the square feet of ordinary combustible material the extinguisher can put out and is dependent on the type of extinguisher, as well as efficiency of the operator (a firefighter may actually be able to put out a 10 square foot Class A fire with a 10A extinguisher, but an inexperienced citizen may not come close to putting the fire out).

Class B: The number used for Class B indicates the square footage of a deep-layer flammable liquid fire that a trained operator can put out.

When to Fight Fire

Personal safety for yourself and others is the most important factor when deciding whether to fight a small fire. It is dangerous to fight a fire in any circumstances. If in doubt, leave immediately, close off the area to slow the spread of the fire and smoke, and wait outside for the fire department to arrive.

If a car fire involves only upholstery (for example, a fire in the back seat started by a cigarette), use any fire extinguisher. If the fire involves the engine or dashboard, however, the fire could quickly become very dangerous. These fires should be fought with an extinguisher that has a B:C or ABC rating. Do not open the hood; aim through the car’s grill. If you can’t extinguish the fire immediately, leave the area, keep everyone far away from the car and wait for the fire department.

It’s very important that the type of extinguisher you use is appropriate for the type of fire you’re fighting. If you spray water on a grease fire, the water will cause the grease to splatter and the fire may spread. If you spray live electrical equipment with water, you suffer the risk of electrical shock. Dry chemical extinguishers are usually rated for multi-purpose use. They contain an extinguishing agent and use a compressed, non-flammable gas as a propellant.

— Jeff Allyn, Hagerty Protection Network member and a Midland Park volunteer firefighter in Midland Park, NJ.

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Summertime is a great time to work on cars. Before you pick up a screwdriver or wrench, the first step is to get your workshop in order. You can’t work efficiently or safely in a sloppy shop, so here are a dozen rules for improving your workshop environment:

1. No matter how small or large, the space should be devoted to one purpose only. Clear out toys, lawn furniture and garden tools. An inexpensive storage shed can give such items their own nice home.
2. Every shop needs a good, sturdy workbench. Commercial versions are available. Your local building supply store should have inexpensive kits to build a simple-but-sturdy wooden workbench.
3. Stacking things on the floor leads to clutter. Hang tools on the wall or keep spare parts in overhead storage bins to clear floor space.
4. Pegboard is the car restorer’s friend. Plaster the walls with it, insert hooks and hang up your tools and equipment. Tools arranged neatly on pegboard are handier than those dumped in a toolbox.
5. Keep plenty of trashcans in your garage, shop or building. As you work on different projects throughout your workshop, having a trashcan nearby is the best way to prevent clutter.
6. Shelves keep clutter off the floor and provide additional storage space for parts, tools, supplies and equipment. If you’re mounting shelves on a wall, anchor them well. Inexpensive steel and plastic shelving always seems to be on sale. Tip: Don’t buy the cheapest shelving in the store; quality counts.
7. Small parts roll off shelves. Look for cheap containers that fit on your shelves. You may find sturdy cardboard photocopy-paper boxes with lids available where you work. Cleaned plastic peanut butter jars are great for storing nuts and bolts. Cupcake tins are great for organizing small parts.
8. When it comes to equipment, long-lasting items like engine hoists, jack stands, engine stands, vises, etc. can often be found at auctions, garage sales, liquidators or on eBay in “good used” or “remanufactured” condition. Several national catalogs also offer remanufactured tools.
9. Equip your workshop with safety gloves, safety goggles, earplugs, shop aprons, coveralls, face masks and sturdy work boots. Adequate ventilation is important, too. Keep a box of rubber gloves handy. A first-aid kit is also a must-have item.
10. An old radio or TV will humanize your workplace and break the monotony. You might not know who’s winning the football game, but the sound of a human voice is still good company and keeps you alert in the garage.
11. Buy several sizes of sandwich bags and keep them in your shop. As you disassemble a car, put the small parts in the bags. Toss in a note or sketch that will help you identify the parts inside for reassembly. The bags will keep small parts from rolling and getting lost.
12. Go in with a plan. Be organized right from the start. If you put parts in a plastic storage cabinet, label the drawer as soon as you fill it.

John “Gunner” Gunnell is the automotive books editor at Krause Publications in Iola, Wis., and former editor of Old Cars Weekly and Old Cars Price Guide.

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