Vintage Motors, LLC

My name is Richard Willard from Vintage Motor Cars in Westbrook, Connecticut. And today we're going to give you a tour of our facility so you can visually see what we do and some of the challenges that we are met with every day. This is our upstairs. This is where we primarily do our clean work, our final assembly and our service area. It's very important to have a dust free environment in order to put these cars together. And I'll show you some of the cars that we have here. This is a 52 Caddy convertible. This is a frame off. We do some, for some of our clients, we do some exotic modern. This is a 2004 Maserati that we're working on. This is a 53 Allard and we're getting this running and then decide what they want to do with it if we're going to do a frame off or just leave it so they can run it as is. And this Allard actually came in, I think, second place at Watkins Glen. We don't specialize in any particular, we don't just do hot rods or just antiques, just as long as it's a vintage car. This is a 52 Ford that we just have for sale. 36 Maxim fire truck. The kids had vandalized it, they set it on fire ironically and we're going to redo the whole back at this point. Another Maserati, this is a 65 Mastrell. This is a 48 Town and Country, half for sale. And what we're doing with this one is we're just getting it so that the average person can take over the restoration. Because these cars are, they're very expensive, restored anywhere from 150 to maybe 200,000. What I'm doing with this car is I'm doing all the big stuff so that if a home guy wants to do it, he could take it and restore it himself. We have the interior done, we did metal replacement, put the engine in and get it running, the engine was all rebuilt, so that's what we're doing with this particular car. Over here we have a 35 Packard. It's just really great to see him come in here and he's a retired English professor. We just maintain it for him to keep it drivable so he can enjoy it and drive it all the time. So it's really neat. And it's a Packard which Packard's worth some of the best cars made. Here we have a 57 Cadillac Baritz, which was top of the line in 57. Great car and we have our own interior area and Armando did a fabulous job on the interior. Just really, the red and white just pops. This is our upholstery area where Mr. Armando does all of our upholstery for all of the cars that come in here, which includes we do seats, headliners, convertible tops, a lot of custom stuff. Actually I also even do boats and stuff for the local community here because we're on the shoreline. We also are an authorized LeBaron Body installer so we install LeBaron Body kits also. Okay now we're done with our upstairs. Let's take you downstairs to our dirty work and show you all the interesting projects we have going on there. So I'm going to show you the booth here. These are fantastic. They have unfortunately incredibly expensive today. They probably are around $70,000 today but they must have in order to have the quality work that people demand today. This thing uses enough gas to heat a small country. You turn it on and it will suck out when you're spraying. It sucks out all your over spray from underneath, runs it through filters, heats that air and comes back into the top. It's A lot of places don't have them because they're so darn expensive but they save a whole lot of time and give just the quality of work. Because the other problem you'll have when you're painting, if you don't get rid of that air, that air gets laden with solvent. If you don't get rid of that air, it's Now here we have another lift and this is where we might take body panels apart, evaluate cars. These are where our frame offs would be, our fabricating our floors, putting quarters on, removing engines. These are the initial phases of restoration. Here we have a 68 Camaro, 57 Chevy, very unique 41 Oles that you really won't see too much of. It's the first one we've ever seen. This is for a client in France and it's going to be a frame off restoration. We've already taken it apart, found it to be a mess which is typical and we're making the floor pans and the rockers of it now. Another area over here, this is where we start to make the panels. You see Mike cutting out, he's putting a quarter panel on a 60. Mike what year is that? 66, GTL. Some of these more involved restorations, you just can't call up and get a new floor pan or get a sheet metal part or a fender so you have to be able to make just about everything that's needed on these old cars. This particular instance we're making rocker panels for the 41 Oles that you saw earlier. One of the unique things is that we have some of the machinery here that will actually bend the metal into a curve because rocker panels, except for the earlier cars, very often have a curve to them. So we're going to show you here how this pole max work which is a terrific machine and is vital for any restoration shop or any metal fabrication that has to be done in the restoration business. But down here we make our panels, wall demand, we have another spray booth where we'll do a lot of our priming, we have our woodworking area because a lot of the earlier cars structurally were made out of wood and then we have our engine room over there where we do our engine rebuilding. We are in the engine room. This is our exclusive isolated area just to do engines and we do most of our engines that are needed for our accounts and we do all the reassembly. We don't do any heavy, But the majority of work we do here. And that's pretty much our tour of vintage motor cars. We are located at 2000 Boston Post Road, Westbrook, Connecticut. Our webpage is vintagemotorcarasllc. com and if you want to come by and visit and see what we do and check out some more cars, please come by. If you're looking for service, restoration or even a buy and sell car, come by and we'll more than happy to help you out. Our hours are Monday through Friday, 8 to 4. 30. And our phone is 860-399-2311.