There are many reasons why car owners choose to restore their cars. Such reasons as they really like the car or perhaps the car belonged to someone they loved very much like their grandparents, parents, family member, friend or well regarded person. These enthusiastic owners appreciate the hard work that goes into making their dream projects into driving reality. They plan to enjoy their car for many years to make the considerable investment sensible to them and we enjoy working for such owners that plan to continually enjoy what we have done for their car. 

 Properly restoring most cars with the object of selling them for a healthy quick profit seldom makes financial sense as every car is not super rare nor in high demand at the moment. Of course, buying a new car with the object of selling it for a profit seldom works out either except for car dealers. 

 We have found that owners without an emotional attachment about their vintage car or that lack a real sense of excitement from owning and driving a particular car or that require instant gratification do not make the best of clients as the car means little or nothing to them. The car is just another soon to be boring object in their cluttered lives and we prefer to work for owners that have a real affection for their car and care about its future as well as their personal safely.  (They definitely want good brakes.) 

                       And now a few words from our Sponsor!

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Better hurry! Only one of each left! However if you buy twenty two we will throw in another one for free!  These products are guaranteed for what we really don't know and are unavailable anywhere.

After we sell out of these products we are going to write a car dieting book so car owners can help their cars lose weight.

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Back to car restoration:

 So how much time does a typical restoration take?  ( A lot)

What does such work cost?  ( A whole lot)

These are amongst the hardest questions to definitely answer as there are no typical restorations and owners have their own ideas on what they want.  Factors such as condition, age, availability of quality parts and owners desires make huge differences in costs and time. You should watch the movie," The Money Pit", as an introduction of sorts to restoring vintage cars. It's a very funny movie yet some of the truths about the common pitfalls of restoring cars, houses, boats. aeroplanes and such that are in poor condition are ever so true. Essentially anything done well that involves a great many labor hours and a lot of parts and machine work is going to be expensive for the 99% that are not in the 1%.  Expensive, uncommon, beautiful and stylishly fun things tend to be very desirable and sought after things though don't they?

Again, why restore anything? A good reason is that many fantastic things were made in the past such as Hammond organs, Klipschorn speakers, Harmon Karden tube equipment,  lots of guitars, Fender tube amps, Sunbeam T-9 toasters, Genelex KT-88 tubes and many cars that had wonderful character and enduring beauty. Besides, after tomorrow, everything was made in the past sooner or later!

We always tried to make sure that owners understand the costs of automobile restoration work as well as we can as we wanted to make sure they had the financial means to finish the project in a proper manner. However, we expected clients to behave responsibly and not ask us to do works that they did not have the means to pay for and no one is well served for an owner to get well into a restoration and run out of funds to finish it. We have completed many restoration attempts that other shops and individuals began and did not finish for reasons explained below. 

It is unseemly that all may not be what it seems to be when it comes to restoring cars. 

or 

To restore or not to restore, 

 is that not the question?

                                                                       Horatio actually said to the skull:  "Just shut up, I never asked that question."

The concept of what a proper restoration involves can certainly be broadly interpreted thus we liked to have good meaningful discussions with the car owner on what we wanted to do with a car and why. Here are photos of the under chassis on a Frogeye Sprite that was purchased as being restored. The new owner of the Sprite brought it to us to replace the interior and told us the car had been restored by a master Sprite restorer. The paint work was very nice but the rest of the car was not very nice. We didn't know what was under the new paint or what was inside the engine.

In this photo those happy fingers waving at you are poking through a rust hole in the drivers floor. The floor and hole were covered by a piece of shaped plywood laid under the old carpet. Perhaps the fellow restoring the car thought that laying some 1/4 inch plywood over the hole rather than replacing the rotten floor was a good way to restore the car. Or perhaps the restorer left it that way as a toilet?

These front suspension parts do not appear to have had genuine restoration work in the last thousand years. See the shiny triangular thing inserted into the lower coils of the front spring? This wedge is called a "spring helper"  and it is a horrible device used by crooks and  people that know nothing about car springs. When we encounter these we know the car has been in the wrong hands. As a road spring ages and sags "some people" will jam a spring helper into the spring and it will push the sagging spring up somewhat so the car does not appear to have bad springs. This is an old trick and does nothing for the suspension but it does enable a car to be sold to an unsuspecting buyer. 

 Here we see the rotten 60 year old wiring. The rest of the cars mechanicals appear to be pretty much just a tired old car. 

The work is moving along. We have stripped, prepped and repainted the engine bay and are refitting the prepped and painted black parts and new mechanical and electric parts.

Shine On

The re-chroming or plating of the brightwork on a car can involve great risk. The risk is losing small and perhaps irreplaceable parts. Plating work is a nasty business as it involves dangerous and hazardous to health chemicals, a hot environment and a lot of hard physical polishing labor using large polishing machines that can take your fingers right off or grab the part and fling it at high speed into whatever is in the way. Keeping track of a bunch of small parts and sometimes large parts can be difficult for some shops to manage. We had a chrome shop lose an entire  bumper and often hear stories from clients looking for very hard to replace parts that were lost at chrome shops.  Here are some tips:

1. Always inventory and photograph all parts sent to a chrome shop. Give them copies of the photos and inventory so everyone knows exactly what was left and are expected to be returned. Get written confirmation. If they lose a part, what happens next?

2. Check for how long the business has been around.

3.  Regarding chrome plating, as some assemblies like outside door handles have buttons and key lock cylinders,  thick layers of brass and chrome will reduce the bore size of the button hole and the button will no longer fit in the handle. This detail requires discussion. This sort of thing happens with other parts as well.

4. Some chrome shops do no repairing and plating over a dent will not make you happy. Enquire as to what their skills are.

5. Do not expect absolute perfection on parts that are very thin or that are made of pot metal.

6. Parts that have threaded holes will need to be re-tapped and this takes time.

7. Assemblies made of other parts like outside door handles require complete disassembly to be plated.

8. It is always better to have everything intended to be plated done at the same time as chemical mixes do change.

9. Never leave the finished goods at the chrome shop for very long. Never tell them that you don't care about how long the job takes. Pick the parts up the day they are done if at all possible.

10. Good chrome work is very expensive. If your car is dripping in chrome with big chrome bumpers and lots of mouldings, get ready for a large bill.

Reasons for an uncompleted restoration do vary.

1. The car in question may have been in far more pitiable condition than the owner knew. This is a common problem as many cars have been "worked over" many times during their long lives. Very bad and expensive problems can be well hidden only to surface after much work has been expended. ( See the " Money Pit".) Thus some jobs grow extensively as discoveries are made and most owners want newly discovered problems solved as well. ( See the Money Pit again.) The end result can be great but getting there takes stamina and considerable fuel. i.e. funding. 

Thus it's financially but not necessarily emotionally better to start out with a car in relatively good condition. Restoring a car that is rusted out, worn out, trashed, abandoned for years in a swamp, used for target practice or dropped out of a bomber over Baghdad during "Shock and Awe", is not a good place to start unless the car in question has emotional significance to the owner or the car is highly desirable. Cars bought from on line auctions can and many times are especially risky purchases. It's best to carefully examine all such purchases beforehand. 

2. Perhaps the shop entrusted to do the work did not manage the job properly or lacked the experience to handle the job in a proper manner. #2 can probably be avoided by properly vetting a potential shop to find out how long they have been in business and what sort of business they do. A paint and body shop that only does late model crashes may not be the best place to have a classic car body done as such work is too time consuming for their business model. Look into how well organized a shop appears to be, keeping in mind that vintage car shops usually have a lot of vintage parts around that they are working on at all times so clutter can mean a busy shop and many restorationists are packrats. It's in the blood.  Clutter does not mean cars are sitting around covered in layers of dust with parts, old boxes and beer cans piled on top of them. These cars have become a part of the scenery. You don't want your car to become a part of the shop scenery. 

 How enthusiastic about the cars and work are the employees?  If an car owner gives a shop $5K or $10K or more to work with at a time, does the shop have the integrity and organizational ability to manage the funds properly so the work moves along? We have found this last part to be a real problem that results in many unfinished projects. It is not a bad thing to "trust but verify."  We provided photos of works in progress via e-mail for owners that are a distance away and were always happy to show owners the work in progress. It is all part of the enjoyment of having a car restored. 

3. Maybe the car owner or shop encountered financial or personal problems mid-stream during the job that caused the work to slow down or stop. These problems can happen to anyone at anytime. Divorces, cyclical stock market crashes, family or health problems can create a lack of funds or focus. Life is hard sometimes and we did our best to work with our clients while they sorted out the vicissitudes of life that hit us all upon occasion. 

4. Perhaps the car owner had unreasonable expectations on costs or time to complete the work. #4 results in many uncompleted cars.  Once upon a time, we had a client with a car in the workshop, a car that we were well into restoring. This client had placed a bet with a pal of his without telling us beforehand. The bet was that we would restore the car for him by a date certain. The car was in much worse condition than the time frame would allow (lots of rust covered with bondo and heavy paint kind of thing) and no doubt the person that placed the bet had restored a car before and  knew they had suckered their friend. The car owner made this bet without consulting us beforehand and lost as restoring a car is not a game. Working people are not playthings and people should not treat people as pawns in their games. 

 Some owners think that we or other shops have a magic wand of sorts that we can wave over their cars and poof, the work is all done and the cost is whatever they want. Actually, car restoration is a lot of hard physical work that takes considerable planning, thought, parts and funding to accomplish. This work is not done by a computer app or program and is certainly no video game. Working with skilled hands and a clear mind in a time honored manner completes a restoration. Nothing else will make it happen.

5. Sometimes events happen that are beyond the control of the restoration shop such as a mechanic or specialist intimately involved with a job will quit, retire,  become seriously ill or die in the middle of a large job.  This sort of event means the remaining shop employees will have to re-organize the job and determine exactly what remains to be done to complete the work and continue on with their own jobs as well. These unfortunate situations have happened to us over the years and to any shop that has a pedigree. Life just does not cooperate at times and it is what it is.   If the shop is a one man shop, then the situation can mean the car owner has to retrieve their car and parts and hope they get it all. Over the last 35 years we have seen these situations happen many times and have known of car projects that were literally thrown out in pieces before the car owner knew something was wrong. Thus it is best to keep in touch with those working for you.

Once upon a time, a very rough 1956 Jaguar XK140 was towed in to the shop with an owner than wanted it restored. We removed the body from the frame and found it severely rusted. The best thing about the car was that it was a XK140 roadster.  After we discussed the likely cost of sorting out the car at well over $110K the owner decided to have it taken to guy that lived out in a rural area and have him restore the car at a much lower cost. We were relieved as this car was on the edge of rusty scrap metal and we really did not want the job but we would have done it as we liked the owner. We lost track of the car for a few years and eventually the owner called us and told us that the fellow that was restoring the car had disappeared. The Jaguar was totally disassembled and had been dumped into a field behind the garage at some point. The money paid was gone with the wind as were a lot of the cars original parts.  We declined to take the job on and he had the pieces picked up and taken to a hot rod shop that operated out of a creepy location. They kept the car for some ten years and eventually the owner abandoned it and whatever money paid was lost.

Recently we heard the sad tale of a 1967 Austin Healey 3000 that an elderly owner wanting to have the car restored took to a shop that works mostly on new cars. He took the car there because someone in the Austin Healey Club suggested them. For unknown reasons the shop decided to work on the car and quoted a complete restoration cost of $12,000. This was a ridiculous lowball figure and instead of running away the owner left the car. Three years later the car was "finished" and the cost was $48,000 a figure that is still far below a  properly done professional restoration cost. The car has a transmission that does not shift into third gear, has numerous wiring problems, poor brakes and an ill hung exhaust. It has many problems everywhere and worst of all no invoicing from the shop that reveals anything at all about what parts and labors were used.

We no longer respray cars, yet are involved with the process as we frequently disassemble and reassemble cars to be painted and supply many parts for such work.  Once a car is re-sprayed and the body looks great, it is time to replace all the body rubber and sometimes the lenses. Over the years, plastic lenses crack, darken and get sandblasted by air borne dirt. The sun deteriorates the plastic and the material eventually crumbles. New lenses not only make the car look crisp again but they allow more light to shine through as well. yes, we stock many lenses for the cars we work with. 

  We offer Vredestein tires for many of the cars we work with. Check our tire section here. 

 For parts orders call 281.448.5165 or   Send us an e-mail!

Here be Dragons! (or parts of them)

Some of the cars we have restored are vintage fire breathing fuel drinking dragons that swept the roads of all that lingered before them in their day.  Cars such as big Austin Healey's, Jaguar XK120, XK140, XK150, all the E-Types,  Mercedes Benz 6.3 and perhaps an Iso Grifo, Bristol or Jensen Interceptor amongst them were and still are for many good reasons some of the most desirable cars ever made.  They roared and shook the earth with their powerful engines and tuned exhausts while hurling their delighted owners through the air on down the road.  It's been a real pleasure to bring these cars back to action once again. Here are a few cars we have done over the years.

We converted this 1966 MGB from L.H.D. to R.H.D. as it was going back to England. We also performed a total restoration including new leather cockpit, canvas top, ANSA exhaust, total rewire and all mechanicals rebuilt. The ground under the car looked great as well. 

 How about a 1962 Bentley Park Ward Continental Convertible? In for transmission rebuilding, differential work, replacement of the top wood parts, total rebuild on front and rear suspension and steering,  upgrading the air conditioning system and various improvements. 

 Everyone looks good in a great Mercedes Benz 1967 250SE Convertible. In for brakes, steering, front and rear suspension rebuild, stainless exhaust, general road work and freshening up on the mechanicals before a cross country road trip to Florida.

We totally restored this 1952 MGTD a while back.

Some 18 years before we were engaged to restore this MG. The car had been totally disassembled by the owners son. After he had parts scattered all over the lad took off and left the car in pieces. The owner moved several times in the interim and many critical parts were lost. Parts like the crankshaft, main caps, oil pump and connecting rods among others were gone. This MGTD was brought to us in several truck loads. We rebuilt the car and these days the owner drives the car whenever she wants to. 

The MGTD interior in leather. 

Secret Sins of the Automotive Ages

    Restorations in Various Stages

This 1956 Jaguar XK140 roadster was poorly restored several decades ago. The owner wanted some refreshing.  

Check out the horrible structural condition. There was old rusty nasty stuff hidden here. 

The car had a nice looking paint job over who knows what horrors lurking underneath and the owner did not want to ruin the paint to find out. He asked us to solve the structural problems without damaging the paint, a difficult assignment. During the discovery process we discovered that the right hand structural door sill was repaired in the past by grafting two pieces of galvanized sheet metal together with pop rivets. This "repair " provided no strength to the chassis.  A thick layer of plastic filler was applied with some paint on top of the junk metal and that was that. It's very disappointing to find such scary work on these great cars. The car also suffered from shake, rattle and roll from worn out suspension and dubious brakes. We sliced away both sills and cleaned and chemically treated all accessible rusty areas.

We made a removable jig to hold the body in place and fitted new structural pieces that were welded into place. We replaced the door hinges as this car had the typical door sag from badly worn and seized hinges. This is a difficult job as the hinges are not designed to be replaced without removing the nicely painted welded on fenders. 

We saved the expensive paintwork by "surgically" removing the hinges from the inside in a  manner not envisioned by the original designer.  The car is structurally solid once again and the owner can enjoy the car as it was intended. We rebuilt the rear suspension , front suspension, steering and brakes on the car as well. The original column push horn was also rebuilt and now the cockpit works as intended.

A fresh stainless steel exhaust was fitted once the structural work was completed.

The now great XK140 driving off to Florida after it's  reconstruction. 

This 1962 Bentley S2 Continental drophead (ragtop) was treated to a major "pit stop". 

We completely rebuilt the front suspension and steering on this Bentley. All good parts were removed, cleaned, bead blasted and repainted and all worn parts replaced.

New front springs and specially rebuilt rear springs were fitted  with new leather wraps. We stock new front springs for all Silver Cloud series.

This Bentley now steers as it should. We custom made and installed the convertible top tacking wood using a nice close grained mahogany. This fresh wood allowed a new top to be properly fitted. 

MGB

A 1977 MGB enjoying a nine month restoration with tasteful customizations that include a total change of paint color to a 2001 BMW deep red metallic, custom tan leather seats and interior, tan canvas top, bolt on chrome 15" wire wheels with Michelin tires, detailed engine compartment, , upholstered trunk, rebuilt steering, suspension, new wiring and  stainless steel headers with an ANSA exhaust. This is a fine toy and it looks fabulous.

Jaguar Mark II Restoration

We converted this Jaguar from right hand drive to left hand drive. We also converted the car from an automatic transmission to a four speed with overdrive transmission and changed wheel specification from steel wheel to original spline drive wire wheel specification. The enhancements included new paint work and body seals, fitting an electric aerial with a state of the art sound system, rebuilding the engine, brakes, suspension, steering, replacing all wiring,  and fitting additional insulation as well. The entire interior is fresh with new leather, carpers, panels, headliner etc. This car sports a set of original and rare recliner front seats and will have all the bells and whistles. 

MGA Coupe Restoration

This MGA Coupe body and mechanicals was stripped and rebuilt.