Fabrication, Welding & Metalwork

Restoration lives or dies in the steel. Paint gets the attention, but a car is only as straight and as sound as the metal beneath it — and by the time a classic reaches us, that metal has usually had fifty years of rust, accidents and other people's shortcuts to contend with.

We repair panels rather than paper over them. Rust is cut back to clean, sound steel — not treated, not filled, not covered and new metal is let in to replace what's gone. Where a panel is available we'll use it. Where it isn't, we make it: sills, floor pans, wheel arches, lower quarters, boot floors and inner structure fabricated on the English wheel, shrinker-stretcher and bead roller until the new section matches the original in shape, gauge and character. On rare cars, that's often the only way forward, because nobody has been pressing those panels for decades.

Welding is done to suit the job. MIG where strength and speed matter on structural sections, TIG where heat control and a clean finish are critical on thin or visible panels, and spot welds replicated where the factory used them so the repair reads correctly to anyone who looks underneath. Every weld is dressed back and metal-finished, so the join disappears into the panel rather than sitting under a mound of filler waiting to crack.

Panel work itself is done the old way — hammer and dolly, shrinking discs, patience. Dents are worked out of the steel rather than buried, high spots brought down, low spots raised, and the panel returned to its original shape before any filler is even considered. It's slower than the alternative and it's the reason our cars hold straight reflections down the whole flank.

We also handle the structural side that most shops won't touch: chassis and sub frame repair, rust in the rails, mounting points, and the alignment work that follows. If the underlying structure isn't true, nothing bolted to it will ever line up panel gaps drift, doors drop, and no amount of adjustment at the hinge will fix it permanently.

Custom work is welcome too. Firewall smoothing, shaved handles and badges, tubbed arches, engine bay tidy ups, custom mounts and brackets for engine conversions, one-off pieces to solve problems that don't have an off-the-shelf answer.

The common thread is that all of this eventually disappears. Done properly, our metalwork is invisible — no filler cracking, no bubbling through a respray in five years, no doors that need a shoulder. That's the point of it.