Carrozzeria means coachbuilder, and coachbuilding is the heart of this workshop. Before pressed steel and robotic lines, a car's body was a piece of sculpture beaten from flat sheet over a wooden buck by a craftsman who could read a curve with his hands. That skill never truly disappeared — it simply became rare. We have kept it alive because, for the cars we look after, there is no alternative that does them justice.
When a wing is beyond repair, when a sill has rotted past saving, or when an entire body must be recreated from a handful of original sections and a set of drawings, we form the metal ourselves. Aluminium over an ash frame, or steel where the marque demands it, shaped on the English wheel, the planishing hammer and the sandbag, then offered up, trimmed and welded until the line is exactly, undeniably right.
Reading the original line
The difference between a good panel and a correct one lies in the line. A factory wing has a character — a subtle crown, a tightening radius near the headlamp, a flat the eye reads as movement. Copy the dimensions and miss the line, and the car looks wrong without anyone being able to say why. We take the time to understand the original geometry, using surviving panels, factory drawings and our own reference library, before a single sheet is touched.
Where hand-forming earns its keep
- Recreating wings, valances, sills and door skins no longer available as parts
- Fabricating complete aluminium bodies over a traditional timber buck
- Forming repair sections to splice into otherwise sound original panels
- Correcting earlier poor repairs and accident damage to restore symmetry
- Setting shut-lines and panel gaps to a consistent, period-correct standard
Joining old metal to new
Fabrication is only half the work; the join is the other half. We let new metal into old with care, gas or TIG welding as the original construction demands, dressing the seam so it disappears. Where a marque used lead to fill and fair its joints, we use lead — not filler — because that is how the car was made and how it should remain. The result is a panel that is structurally sound, dimensionally accurate and, once finished, indistinguishable from the metalwork around it.
A buck for the future
For significant projects we build and retain a buck — the timber or steel form over which the panels are shaped. It becomes part of your car's story and, should the worst ever happen, the means by which its body can be made again. This is coachbuilding as it was always meant to be: slow, exact, and made to outlast everyone involved. It is the most demanding work we do, and the most rewarding, because a body shaped by hand has a life in its surfaces that no press will ever match.