Fun in the workshop!
We’ve just had a set of panels for a Tifosi Rana made for a customer, and they are ready to be shipped out – there is generally a 3 to 4 week lead time between order and despatch. It is always exciting when people are having a go at a project like this and tweaking their classic to their own tastes. We’ve actually had three more enquiries in very quick succession, which we think is the result of people sitting on projects for the last few years and now deciding to get on with them. And the benefit of a Rana body kit is that from the moment it arrives, they can generally envisage how the finished car will look and that can be a real incentive to crack on with the work. Don’t forget that if you want a Rana but don’t have the time, the skills or the inclination to build your own, we do have a former pretty primrose demonstrator that we built which is now back in the showroom and up for £11,995ono.
We have had a rash of cars come through the workshop recently with broken suspension springs, the inevitable aftermath of the recent frosts helping to make the potholes worse. If left alone, a broken spring can often cause damage elsewhere, meaning you will need to get new top mounts or dampers too. So it really does pay to check your springs if you are unfortunate enough to hit a pothole with any force because finding a broken spring and replacing it early can save you money in the long run.
On the MoT front, Steve has done his first couple of tests on electric cars, and was surprised by how close they were to the weight limit on the ramp and the lifting beam – all those batteries soon add up. The other unexpected issue was the width of some of these cars – even the Nissan Leaf we tested and which we tend to think of as a reasonably small car barely fitted on the ramp with only three inches tolerance on either side. Steve is happy that
we will be having a new examiner start with us shortly, meaning he will be able to concentrate on the classics instead.
Classics such as the Austin-Healey 100-6 we had in recently, though we don’t know if the rest of the staff will let him get a look in. The Healey wasn’t in for an MoT, but needed a fair degree of fettling. In the course of this work, it was great to see Danny, Ryan and Alfie all working on it together. Ryan joined us because he wanted to work more on classics and Alfie is our new mustard-keen apprentice, and with Danny leading them they thoroughly enjoyed themselves. In fact they left work with such big smiles on their faces that it made us wonder why we pay them...
