Preparation & Paint

A finish is only ever as good as what sits underneath it. That's why the majority of the hours we put into a car happen before the colour goes anywhere near it — stripping it back, sorting the metal, and getting every panel genuinely flat rather than merely smooth.

We take cars back to bare metal rather than painting over someone else's work, because old paint hides rust, filler and repairs you don't want to inherit. Rust is cut out and replaced with new steel. Dents are worked out in the panel itself. Filler is used for the last fraction of a millimeter, never to shape a car. Everything then gets blocked by hand and checked with guide coats until the surface sands out clean. The slow, unglamorous work that decides whether your reflections come out straight or wavy.

We use premium two-pack systems throughout, from epoxy primer to high-solids clear, and we stay within a single manufacturer's system so every layer is designed to work with the one beneath it. Cheap materials and mismatched products are a false economy: they look identical on handover day and show themselves in two years as lifting, dulling and colour shift. We put down enough clear that the car can be cut and polished properly for decades without ever threatening the colour underneath.

Colour is sprayed in a filtered, temperature-controlled booth, and on anything other than a factory-fresh code we mix, spray out and check the match under several light sources before committing. Paint codes describe how a car left the factory, not how it looks after forty years of sun. We match to the car in front of us. Jambs, shuts, engine bay and door faces are all painted — because that's where anyone who knows cars looks first.

Behind all of it is time on the tools. Knowing how a panel will move under heat, how a metallic lays down on a humid day, when a colour needs a blend rather than a hard edge — that judgement isn't in any product data sheet, and it's the difference between a car that looks right and one that looks finished.