Body work restoration

[Fenton]

Hi,

I have a series 1 fhc.
Mechanically it is very good, and I have had lots of work done over the 15 years I have owned the car.
The body work has never been restored, and it is beginning to look fairly ropy.

I do not want a concours car, I would like a lovely looking, serviceable classic that is as close to original as possible, with sensible modifications (ken low fan, electric ignition, larger radiator etc).

I do not envisage ever selling the car.

Ideally, I would like the car striping, bm re spray , and putting back, 'as is'.

With estimates ranging from 15k (ebay!) to 100k, how do I find someone to do this work, to a decent standard, for sensible money?

What do people think 'sensible money' would be?

Thanks in advance for all thoughts offered!
F

[MarkE]

I think that you first of all have to define what you mean by a 'decent' standard and 'sensible' money.

For me, the panel gaps have to be perfect, and the swage lines aligned. There can't be any 'ripples' looking down the side of the car or along the bonnet, which sounds pretty obvious. But, with a dark colour especially, can be tricky if repairs have been made to panels rather than panels replaced. Finally, the shape of the panels have to be right, which means that if reproduction panels are fitted, a lot of fettling by a pretty skilled panel man will be required.

If you are after the same sort of standard, that is a professional standard body restoration which is expensive these days.

Where you can save on the concours body restorations is to have the underside de-rusted and repaired as required, and then undersealed again (as per standard specification) rather than have it painted to look as good as the outside of the car. Same for the floor of the car underneath the carpet. But really, you will probably be looking at a 20% or so difference in price.

You talk about a ?15k restoration vs ?100k restoration, but these are very different processes. I've seen the eBay advert, and that is to strip the car, repair the shell using panels provided by YOU, and repaint it / put it back together. As mentioned above, if they start to put repro panels on, they won't fit properly or line up, and the they will offer you the opportunity to buy a better panel, or extend the cost for them to fettle the panel to fit, adding another chunk of cost each time. Then multiply that by 10 or 20, depending on just how many panels / repairs they have to make! And when they put it back together, they will put all the original and tatty bits and pieces back in exactly as they came out, so the car will look a mess. Of course they will restore the bits as well, for further extensions to the price.

For the ?100k restoration completed by the Jaguar specialist, you get a turnkey service...drive a tatty car in, and a showroom car out again.

So the spectrum of cost of ?15k to ?100k is not comparing like with like.

All the specialists will restore just the shell for you, or just the rear arches, or doors, or sills, or whatever your requirements are. If the shell needs everything doing, then the specialist will tell you, and spell out a way to do the work in a phased approach or in one 'big bang'. I've seen a couple of cars at CMC for example which come
in every year and have a small amount of work done to keep them going. The work completed is all good stuff that contributes to the whole, completed job, but inevitable there is some re-work needed in this approach. The cars get better every year, but one in particular has several colours of red as various repairs have been made over the years, which will be sorted out one year when all the metalwork is complete and the car is treated to a bare metal repaint.

My last thoughts are that you don't have to use an E Type specialist to get the work done, but you do need an old?fashioned body shop that knows how to fettle the panels rather than just replace them. Certainly a crash-repair shop is not the place to go.

Whilst the shells are pretty straightforward to restore, I would prefer to go to someone who knows E Types well, and who understands what has to be done to a repro rear wing to make it fit, or who will make their own instead. Both CMC and Eagle make all their own outer panels now, such is the extent of the work required to make a repro panel fit and have the right shape. They also know every nook and cranny to look at to appraise the condition of an E Type, and the work that may be required to get it sorted. Another non-specialist bodyshop may well under-estimate the amount of work required.

I think that you may have to do a bit more work to quantify the extent of the repairs needed to your car, the standard you want it repaired to, and maybe take it to one of the specialist to get their view / approach. Also something to figure in is how much work you will do in stripping the car / putting it back together and restoring the other components.

I'm sure that many others will chime in with their ideas and food for thought!

[Durango2k]

If you?re hardcore, DIY is the solution. Takes 10 years and I?d guess for panels and paint (you wrote mech parts are fine) 15 grand min.

Carsten (I?m into this since Dec 2008m with a 2+2 which came from a scrapyard in the US, got re-shelled and still ! a LOT of things).

[abowie]

I am currently restoring a 3.8 roadster.

I gave the stripped body shell to a panel shop who have done a bare metal respray for me. This has taken them 450 hours and has cost me AU$30k, about 20k quid. Their hourly rate is only $55 which is cheap.

[Fenton]

Thanks for the replies., mark especially.

It is clear that the professional standard is the only way to go, and I appreciate your advice re the areas to save some money v the concours approach.

My problem is I don't have the money to do a Big Bang.
The car has been a rolling improvement project, and I have enjoyed approaching it in this way.

I do not do any of the work myself, I am far better off sticking to what I know and employing the services of someone who knows the e.

I am interested in the idea of a phased approach, and this has been mentioned briefly by my current mechanic. I should explore this further. If you have any recommendations for professionals to consult in the north of England, I would be grateful for your advice.

There is also part of me that wonders wether I should just be saving up for a whole new body shell. How easy is it to judge the integrity of the whole shell and chassis via a phased approach?

I am also interested in your comments re the red car. Has a phased approach been taken, with a view to repairing all panels, and then doing a full strip down and bm re spray?

Thanks again for your time
F

[christopher storey]

Take the car along to Hutsons in Bradford and see Andy Rayner. You will get an honest view, and an honest estimate of the minimum, and I mean minimum , cost. The problem is that it is not what you can see which is the trouble - it is what you can't see which adds to the cost. There are dozens of E types which look fine on the outside but which are rotten inside. If you are on a strict budget, the only way to go is to strip and reassemble the car yourself, leaving it to the professionals to do the metalwork and , unless you are absolutely strapped for cash, the paint. Even so, 15k is not going to get you all the way, but it will probably get you a sound shell/bonnet/doors etc . If you can paint it yourself you will save something like 5k ( the paint itself is very expensive these days ) and if you can trim it yourself you will save another 3 or 4 k . Nonetheless, without wishing to depress you, I did all the work except paint and metalwork and still spent 40K, but I did the job properly and it was a last nut and bolt restoration

[V12 Epyte]

You could also try Paul Brown in Ripley Derbyshire for honest advice and appraisal.
www.pbcj.co.uk

[MarkE]

Many cars are renovated without pulling the car apart to a bare shell, but it really depends what you are starting with.

You say that the body has never been restored. If it's an original UK car, that makes it very rare indeed, and could mean that it wasn't used in the winter months / bad weather in it's first few years, or it had some sort of body protection system applied when it was new. It may have escaped having its body rot away as many did when exposed to the salt and damp in our green and pleasant land!

If it is not rotten, and the shell is straight and true, then it is a perfect candidate to have rolling repairs completed in several goes over a few years.

When the professionals check over a car to see what need doing, the first thing they will do is to check the alignment of the shell. This is easier to do with a bare shell, but fairly straightforward with a rolling car, and really is a job for the professional to complete.

Quite a lot of convertibles that go into CMC for bodywork have twisted shells, usually due to poor restoration work in the 70s and 80s where too much metal was removed and the shell distorted. Or they've had a heavy crash and not been repaired properly. The only thing to do then is to strip the car down to a bare shell, cut it in half across the sills and floor, mount the front and rear bulkheads onto a jig, cut away all the rubbish and rebuild the shell virtually from scratch.

Luckily it's a rare process to have to carry out on a Coupe, but it's not unheard of.

If the car is straight and with no obvious ripples / poor accident repairs, then it's down to spotting where the rot is and developing a plan of attack. If you are fairly hands-on, you can complete a lot of the analysis work yourself.

Firstly, remove the seats, carpet, boot boards and door / side trims. That is going to show you, at least superficially, the state of the floors, the boot floor and the lower parts of the bulkhead. If you buy an endoscope and attach it to a laptop, you can then explore inside the sills, 'A' posts, 'B' posts, doors, bonnet, inside the rear wings, and the rear of the car around the hatch.

You can buy endoscopes now for less than ?15, and are a very worthwhile investment for many types of inspections....you can look inside your combustion chamber, gearbox and all sorts of exciting places!

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261158772054? ... 1439.l2649

You will also need to get underneath and scrape of the underseal around all the vulnerable areas to uncover any nasties lurking there.

The plan of attack must sort out the safety bits first, if you're intending to carry on using the car. Obviously any issues with sills, floors, 'A' and 'B' posts and most importantly the pickup up point areas for the front frames and the rear subframe must be all part of phase 1. If there is a lot of rot around the front frame pickups on the bulkhead, as well as the other structural areas, then it's probably best to do the whole lot in one hit as a lot of the car has to be taken apart to sort out any issues with the bulkhead.

If the rear tubs and rear wings have a little rust in them, but are not completely rotten, they can be done as another phase, probably along with any issues around the rear panel / numberplate area.

The doors and tailgate can be another phase, and of course the bonnet yet another.

Each phase will require some sort of paintwork, and this is the cost that is wasted when you come to do the last phase, the complete bare-metal paint.

So it really is impossible to price up how much the job is going to cost until the work required, and the method of completing the work, is quantified.

As you can see from above, there is a lot of work to be done just to quantify what needs to be done, and if you just drive the car in, you should budget on spending around 2 to 3 days labour to provide that quantification. If it's not done up front, then things will inevitably be uncovered as the work progresses which could upset the approach you take and, inevitably, the cost.

[Moeregaard]

There's nothing really mysterious or difficult about the mechanical bits of an E-Type, and they're of a known quantity, so you could refurbish the moving parts yourself (learning something in the process), while farming out the tinworm removal.