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a brief background on British builders
British Cars
By Global-Car
American cars are the subject of most restorations in North America but they are by no means the only occupants of a busy restoration shop. British sports cars are subjects often targeted for restoration, and because there are so many on the road and in process, parts availability is often quite good. Don't confuse availability with low price however, because depending on which car you choose, mechanical parts can be quite expensive. The plus side is that body parts are usually quite reasonable and considering that these are the parts you will find you need the most of, that is a good thing.
So where do we start in a discussion of the restoration of Brit cars? Perhaps a quick explanation of why, unlike any other foreign cars excepting the Beetle, British sports cars entered our car culture is in order.
Shortly after the Second World War Britain was in the process of rebuilding a badly ravaged economy, which not only included the rebuilding of infrastructure and the retooling of factories from war materials to civil need, but also included a shortage of money. The national coffers were just about empty and England needed a thriving export trade in order to bring in cash. North America proved a fertile target for export because unlike England, the U.S. and Canada came out of the war in very enviable positions. Industry was booming and millions of returning servicemen guaranteed a consumer base who needed almost everything, from homes to toasters to cars. Cars were a product that many in England thought could be exploited and to that end designs for small cars to fill an area that the American manufacturers ignored completely were tendered and built. Although they tried to introduce small passenger cars, America wasn't interested in economy cars in which four adults felt cramped, and with their small motors and inefficient heating systems, they could not begin to compete on a continent of such vast distances and extreme weather conditions. As passenger vehicles English cars were less than a great success, but a niche that they virtually created in North America was far more successful.
The British had always built small two passenger sporting cars for racing and just plain driving. Marques like M.G., Jaguar, and Aston Martin thrived before the war and were set to continue producing cars after the war. Aston Martin never achieved much market share because their cars were expensive but Jaguar did find a market for their X.K 120, 140 and 150s. Jag also made the most serious inroads into the passenger car market but this was because their cars were larger and better able to compete with the American cars, although undependability and nagging electrical problems which remained unsolved year to year assured that the large Jaguars would never capture much market share from the high end American luxury cars with which they were competing.
M.G., short for Morris Garages, built small, inexpensive cars which captured a specialized market and became an immediate hit. They were soon followed by Triumph, Austin Healy and to a lesser extent Lotus, Healy and Daimler, but it was M.G. and Triumph which filled the niche and gave the American public cars unlike anything else on the American road. They were small, economical to run, fairly easy to fix and just plain fun to drive. They appealed to younger single people and with families affluent enough to have a second or even third car for popping around and running errands. Racing and rally enthusiasts also welcomed these little cars with open arms. By the late fifties these British cars could be found all over the Continent and the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties saw a small Renaissance for the British Sports cars and they ruled unchallenged by anyone all through this period. Some other countries tried to jump on the bandwagon such as Germany with its Porsches and later the Volkswagen, and Karmen Ghia and Fiats from Italy, but these attempts were pretty feeble when compared to the acceptance with which the British cars were given in North America. It is strange but understandable due to economics that these cars were far more common in North America than they were in Britain, and remain so to this day. I recently read an article in a British car magazine heralding the restoration of an early steel bumpered Triumph Spitfire of which they reckoned only three existed in England. This is a car which I know has at least three examples within four miles of my shop. Their rarity in their country of origin points out just how aimed at export all of these little cars were.
The popularity of these cars remains today despite the fact that their manufacturers are long gone from the serious American market with the exception of Jaguar. The reasons that they disappeared are too many to outline here but gone they are, leaving behind a legacy which has created some of the most loyal following and largest most enthusiastic clubs and organizations on the continent.
This popularity is based on the fact that these cars are just plain fun to drive. No, they are rarely what anyone would consider fast, even the fastest of them, but they feel fast. No, they are not dependable, they require understanding, patience and a certain masochism on the part of the owner. They are certainly not comfortable. A long drive can be an agonizing experience as limbs lock up from poor and cramped driving positions and you get in contact with parts of your body that you hadn't known existed in years, but they feel great in small doses.
What they do is conjure pictures of Stirling Moss and John Surtees stroking their cars through the road courses at Le Mans or Monterey. They sound and feel like racing cars. Their faults are forgiven, because for many of us they are as close as we will ever be to getting into the cockpit of a real racing car, and they really do deliver on the promise. You may be able to take your Neon around the on ramp at seventy miles per hour effortlessly, a speed which would cause a Triumph Spitfire to go spinning off onto the verge at anything over forty, but at forty that corner is an exciting prospect which starts the adrenaline coursing and sets the teeth grinding in anticipation. The fact that you can have these Walter Mitty like dreams while passing a Police Cruiser who will remain unconcerned about your speed or what's going through your mind is a huge part of the appeal. In a Corvette, Mustang or any other American car, the same feelings will only be obtainable when you are far outside the legal limits and you will really be endangering the driving public. In a British Sports car the only one who will think you are endangering the rest of the driving public will be you.
Restoring and maintaining these cars has floated hundreds of specialized companies from single bay proprietorships to huge parts supply and reproduction companies. They are sometimes fun to restore and sometimes so challenging that most people just shut off the light and swing the door closed.
The easy ones like the M.G.T. series cars are very satisfying and are simple enough for even dedicated but reasonably inexperienced amateurs to bring up to incredible standards. The hard ones like Healy 3000, Astons, and some of the Jags are a challenge for any restorer. An Austin Healy 3000 will inevitably take from 1000 to 1500 hours to restore properly and costs can exceed fifty thousand dollars quite easily. Many of these cars have bodies composed of steel and aluminum panels. Structural integrity is a blend of small lightweight chassis combined with bodies bolted on which continue the structural support through rockers panels and specialized internal braces and supports. Rust and corrosion supported by water and dirt traps along with reactions caused when steel and aluminum come in contact with each other plague the restorer, and the uninitiated can come to grief if they hack and slash before properly jigging the car and supporting it properly.
I have seen many cars where nothing fits properly because the correct steps were not taken to preserve the car's dimensions while it was being prepared. If you are cutting up a 57 Chev and replacing panels, you have to work pretty hard to mess it up so badly that a door won't fit back in its hole. With a British Sports Car it will be inevitable unless you learn how to avoid it.
I once worked on a Jaguar XK 140 Roadster which had a concourse restoration. Unfortunately the back of the car was on a totally different angle to the front of the car and the wheels were flush with the wheel wells on one side while buried deep within on the other. To compensate for these problems the shop that did the car actually removed a quarter inch from the edge of one door and added a half inch to the edge of the other. The car passed a non critical inspection every time because it was just so pretty to look at, on serious inspection it was a mess. It wasn't that the shop that restored it did it on purpose, it was that they just didn't know how to avoid certain problems at the beginning. By the time the problems were evident I am sure that the car was almost finished and they didn't want to admit the mistakes and start over. Instead they made adjustments like the doors and a few other things under the car in order to get it off to the auction where it was sold to an unsuspecting buyer.
In short, British cars need a certain knowledge on the part of the restorer if some of their largest problems are to be avoided. A lot of their original design deficiencies can also be corrected during restoration, many of which won't even hurt their chances at show. In the next column Ill address some of the problems encountered during the restoration of these cars, and how you can avoid them.
Global-Car.
is there logic to Flat rate vs. actual time
is there logic as we are faced everyday with such rationale? If you NEVER own or drive a car, you probably have no single clue where to start at but for those that does, you know the answer without question.:leader:
Flat rate vs. actual time
I recently watched a television program on which a restorer from the American south was interviewed and discussed the restoration business. It was fascinating to note that he seemed to have all the same staff, all the same customers and all the same problems and solutions as I. I was very interested when he spoke about the correct restoration of any vehicle taking from one thousand to four thousand hours depending on the vehicle and its condition, and that he was not just talking about 1932 Packards and 1920 Silver Ghosts, he was talking about 58 Chevys and early sixties Valiants.
Interestingly enough, I have over the years spoken to many restorers who have had all the same problems and complications in their craft, the catch being that they did not restore cars. One was an art conservator, another a restorer of old buildings, several boat restorers involved in the restoration of antique wooden boats, and several gentlemen involved in the restoration of antique aircraft, indisputably the most exacting of all the restoration disciplines.
I am often asked why a body shop can paint a car for less money than a restoration shop, and there are of course those who constantly raise the issue of paint shop chains offering paint jobs for two hundred and fifty dollars. The answers to these questions are of course quite simple. In fact, a body shop cannot paint a car for less than a restoration shop if they are going to do the same job and as a matter of fact, when they attempt to do the same job, costs often exceed those from a restoration shop where experience is a great cost cutter.
Most body shop are in the business of taking a car which has been in a collision or perhaps is eight or nine years old and needs to be freshened up a bit. In very few cases are the cars stripped to bare metal, chrome, trim and glass removed which is always the case when a car is being restored.
Of course when all the paint and body work has been removed any corrosion or old repairs have to be repaired and the panels all made straight and tidy before the repainting process is started.
In all the automotive trades there is not one that is as complex and demanding as that of a restorer, and yet the restorer, and certainly the restoration shop, has the leanest profit margins of any of those trades. Why? Another question simply answered. When a car is being restored it is done in real time in a billing system called Time and Materials. This simply means that the owner of the car pays for real hours spent working on the car and for the materials involved in its repair. I’ll discuss the why of this later. This is a fair system in anyone's eyes and the only workable solution during a restoration.
In almost all other automotive trades a system called flat rate is used. This means that long before a job comes in the door the price of doing that has been determined by the industry. Those costs are usually published in flat rate books and it is in these books that the cost of fixing your crumpled front fender or replacing that fuel injection system is written in stone. Now in most cases those times are easily kept within even by relatively inexperienced tradesmen, but when the tradesman is experienced and motivated, watch out. I had a good friend who was a cracker jack body man. He was fast and efficient, so much so that he could usually be counted on to be on his way home by three or four in the afternoon if he felt like it. In real time he rarely put in a thirty five hour work week but he was never happy unless he had been paid for eighty hours in a week. He was allowed by the shop owner to come and go as he wished because while he made a lot of money, the shop made a killing from his work. He made out so well he ended up moving out to the west coast and to semi retirement by the time he was in his early forties. I once got a hold of him and asked if he would like to come and work in a restoration shop. He was interested until he found out that it is a time and materials job, at which point, with real regrets, he turned it down. It seemed that working part time he was able to pull down a fair bit more money than he could make in restoration working a full week.
So you ask, why is restoration done in time and materials rather than in flat rate? If you were to try to flat rate a restoration there are two things that could happen. One is that that those figures that I mentioned at the beginning of the column would be double. When a thousand hours is estimated as a ball park on a job it is a very real guess, but no more than that because the car and its condition will be the end determiner of the hours that the job will take. Now to lock in a flat rate at least twice as much time would have to be estimated on the job. So, if a job was really a thousand hours to accomplish, flat rate could be two thousand hours just in case the job turned out to be more difficult than originally thought. Now if the flat rate was set at a thousand hours for a job that was thought to be a thousand hours in duration and it really took fifteen hundred
hours to accomplish two things can happen.
The first is that the shop is going to lose a pile of money by subsidizing one third of the restoration from its own pocket and after a few jobs, go bankrupt, or at one third into the job the shop is going to realize that to restore the car properly is going to take much more than the original estimate so, if the price is truly locked in, the shop may decide to start short cutting and compromising the integrity of the work in order to meet the estimate.
I have for many years thought that the flat rate system is a less than perfect system from the owner's standpoint because most of the time the owner pays more time for a job to be accomplished than it actually took, and when you factor in that many flat rate shops in large cities can charge up to and in some cases over a eighty dollars an hour it makes for a pretty tidy profit margin.
Time and materials is at least fair to all parties concerned providing of course that both parties, both the shop and the owner, live up to their obligations, which are to restore the car properly in the case of the former, and to pay for that service in the case of the later.
So how come a restorer with years of experience can’t put anything but an educated guess on how much a car will cost to restore?
It is in fact the huge complexity of the job involved that makes it almost impossible to accurately forecast how much the job will be to within a few hundred or even thousand dollars. To give you a very simple example. Take a car’s water pump. Just one small mechanical part of a complex machine, itself a machine in its own right, tasked with the job of pumping coolant through the rest of the car’s engine to keep it operating at tolerable temperatures. So we have a part critical to the car as a whole.
Now take it off the engine. For the sake of argument say it is off of the engine of a fifty three Buick, so it is forty six years old and a replacement is not available. So if the engine is low miles perhaps only a couple of hours needs to be spent on the water pump, removing it, disassembling it, sandblasting the parts, painting and then reassembling the pump, which now looks and is in perfect working order. So if the shop rate is sixty per hour, the water pump has cost one hundred and twenty dollars plus tax.
Now what if when the pump is removed from the engine, all the bolts are rust seized into place and two snap. Now we might have two hours removing the pump from the engine in order to minimize the damage to the pump. Now, with it off and disassembled we discover that the impeller is completely worn out, the shaft on which the front seal is so badly corroded that sealing it will be impossible and to finish matters, the pump housing itself has a great big crack in it and a couple of badly attempted brass repairs to that crack which have warped the impeller housing.
So the shaft has to be milled or a replacement made and a seal found, the impeller has to be rebuilt if a replacement cannot be found or an impeller which is close in dimension perhaps customized to fit. Then the housing has to be properly welded using an exotic gas procedure which ensures it won’t re-crack in the same place, and then the housing has to be checked internally to make sure that the impeller will fit and pump properly. After all of this then the whole affair has to be painted, the broken studs removed from the block and the block re-tapped for new hardware. So how does that compare with the first job? It has probably taken a minimum of ten hours which is little more than a day, plus shipping of the casing to a specialized welding shop where the cast can be properly welded, the costs of that welding perhaps another couple of hundred dollars. So you can end up with a thousand dollars plus tax in the water pump. (This is based on a replacement being impossible to obtain which with some cars is a very real possibility, although not as likely with a 53 Buick). Now imagine this kind of thing happening repeatedly throughout the restoration and you can imagine why it is impossible to determine how much a job will cost before it is done, unless of course you take a worst case scenario for every part of the car.
This is why a restoration will never be as simple as a straight forward body job on a five year old car, or an engine rebuild on a six year old engine. Time and previous repairs ravage old cars.
The restorer and the restoration shop are tasked with the job of making a Phoenix rise from the ashes, shiny and new and in many cases, even better than when the object being restored was new. That is what restoration is about, no matter whether it is a Model T or a Duesenberg, a Victorian Manor house or a 1938 Chris Craft power boat, a 1939 Piper Cub or a B 17 Bomber.
There is no logic to the restoration of old things, but there is a lot of commitment, craftsmanship and passion to the preservation of the machines and buildings of the twentieth century. There is no doubt in my mind that this passion will extend itself far into the twenty first.
Written by Global-Car
