As with all our restorations the first job is to strip the car down to a bare shell and repair as necessary. this always involves removing the (often many coats) of paint to reveal the condition of the body below. Once all the paint is removed we repair the shell, as you can see from the pictures on the right this car had at one point in its life been involved in a minor fracas with some road furniture, the tail goes that it was the Armco barrier of the Windsor bypass. The process of repairing the body shell also involves re-instating all the bulkheads etc. and in this case the owner has asked us to fit new stainless steel fuel tanks in place of the standard glass fibre items, complete with new filler caps which came from a Jaguar XJ6. My own Rochdale Olympic was the first car to incorporate these filler caps so we have all the body moulds needed to facilitate the fitting.

The instructions for this particular restoration was to restore the car to the specification it was in 30 years ago, with only a few detailed changes.

This is really nice for me as over the past few years the specifications we have had to follow have been quite radical, it will be nice to get back to building a standard car to a good standard.

The stripped car as pictured on the left now shows up the type of damage that has to be repaired before the body can be finally prepared for painting.

As with any glass fibre car the initial damaged area can extend quite a long way into the surrounding structure in the form off stress cracks, obviously all of these have to be dealt with at the same time as the repair is done to stop them from re appearing later on in the cars life.

We have found over the 30+ years that I have been working on Rochdale Olympics that the best way to fully repair the bodyshell for paint is to always try to do the fibreglass work with the surface you are trying to repair horisontal. We have recently designed and built our own spit roast for this specific purpose.

The picture on the right showing the bodyshell in an advanced state of repair with the floor almost ready for paint.

The two pictures on the left show the bodyshell in our paintshop now fully repaired, with all the modifications made, and in primer ready for the finish colour to be applied.

 Above are pictures of the car now fully painted, and removed from the spit roast.

With the bodyshell painted in its final finish the next stage is to re-fit all the mechanical components which were removed very early in the restoration. All of the mechanical parts have undergone there own restoration and now boast new bushes and bearings as well as a new coat of satin black powder coat.

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