Restoration quality

[Taylor James]

I was at Goodwood yesterday so had a good look at a wide range of cars.

I was struck by the poor quality of many restorations. Not so much paint, although there were plenty of cars where it was clear the painter hadn't wanted to bend their back but particularly around things like panel gaps, doors badly aligned, etc.

Is this the legacy of the boom, with lots more average restorers working on cars or am I just picky? I can't get my head around how someone can do a great paint job on an Escort or E-type (to give just two examples) yet leave big and inconsistent gaps and poorly aligned doors/bonnets/etc.

[POORCARDEALER]

Taylor James said:

I was at Goodwood yesterday so had a good look at a wide range of cars.

I was struck by the poor quality of many restorations. Not so much paint, although there were plenty of cars where it was clear the painter hadn't wanted to bend their back but particularly around things like panel gaps, doors badly aligned, etc.

Is this the legacy of the boom, with lots more average restorers working on cars or am I just picky? I can't get my head around how someone can do a great paint job on an Escort or E-type (to give just two examples) yet leave big and inconsistent gaps and poorly aligned doors/bonnets/etc.

I agree.

Reasons....many "paint shops" doing restoration work for the money when they are skilled at bolting on newish car panels, budget.....high quality restoration costs serious money, spending a week aligning panels correctly for a customer who doesn't want to pay the hourly rate.

Skill set.....Simply are not the amount of highly skilled craftsmen around that there once was, employing and retaining highly skilled people is difficult

I know a couple of highly skilled body men/restorers.....I couldn't consider sending them anything that's going to be worth less than 50/60K finished for a restoration as the sums simply don't add up

Edited by POORCARDEALER on Monday 5th August 10:20

[droopsnoot]

I recently saw three cars parked on a display stand together as representations of before, during and after work at a restoration company. The "during" car had been stripped, repaired and painted. The standard of welding on it looked terrible to me - big blobs of weld that hadn't been properly ground down, strips of MIG welding wire that were visible from the other side of a panel, plates put on without cutting the bad bit out, all sorts of stuff like that. I am quite fussy, but I wasn't the only person who noticed the poor quality. In a way I hope they'd slapped a bit of paint on it just for the sake of the show, but I'm not sure as I noticed one or two rough edges on the "after" car while the bonnet was open.

[NewUsername]

Would something like the Escort have had decent panel gaps as new?


I know of one owner who was unhappy when his Lotus Elan was presented back to him after restoration with perfectly aligned panels and panel gaps because it was so unrealistic to period.

[aeropilot]

NewUsername said:

Would something like the Escort have had decent panel gaps as new?

Actually, they weren't that bad new. The problem is how they were built, and as always once those original bodyshell's are 'disturbed' and then re-panelled (with not great quality pattern panels) and jigged (badly) and 'restored' it takes a lot of effort to make it look like it had been built originally.

[Taylor James]

I owned a few Ford Escorts and various other Fords from the 70s. You could never get a fingertip between the bonnet and front wing or spot the bolts holding the wing on.

[droopsnoot]

Some of the panel gaps achievable by a good restorer are far better than would ever have been achieved in the factory - and not surprisingly, given that the restorer would take much more time about it. I wondered about this on my recent restoration, and ended up just getting it as close as I could. It's not perfect, but I just had to stop messing with it and get it back on the road. In addition, some of the shapes don't allow a particularly small gap - the front door to front wing gap has to be fairly wide, otherwise the door hits the wing when it's opened.

[Mike-tf3n0]

For the majority of restorations it is simply a case of cost vs value. When I was at Lynx I used to field a lot of calls from people who owned cars like MGbs or TRs, who rather liked the quality of our restoration work on stuff like the ex Steve McQueen XKSS which we showed at Earls Court Motor Show in '86 or 87', I forget which now. What will it cost for you to restore my car was always the question but it is impossible to just give a quote like that as there are always nasties lurking. I used to give an indication of what our work cost and that was usually the end of the conversation, sometimes with a few impolite parting words. Occasionally I would get a call months later from proud owner of now 'restored' motor car telling me how little he had paid to have his car restored.

It is horses for courses of course, and also the thickness of your pocket book. The best quality work is there to be had and for the XKSS it was the very best of course, no options and no shortcuts but for the MGB or TR that is hard to justify given what the car will be worth when done, hence the large number of 'average' quality restorations.

What is most important in the real world however is that we should all enjoy, and have fun with, whatever we are fortunate enough to own. It's better to patch up and enjoy than to go without!