Paint laid over metal that was never made straight. A body assembled around a finish that hadn’t hardened. Chrome hung on gaps nobody set. None of it shows on the day the car goes home, and all of it shows within a year — a ripple down a quarter panel in low sun, a door that sits proud, a seam that opens up.
A stage is finished when the next one can begin without apology.
So the five stages below never run at once on the same car. Each one closes before the next opens, which is the reason a build takes what it takes — and the reason the page under this one moves the way it does. Nothing arrives until the thing before it is out of the way.
The gatesFive stages, in the order a car moves through the building. Nothing leaves for an outside shop, and nothing advances before the stage before it is right.
Stage 01 /05The body comes off the frame and the car goes to bare metal. Every bracket, line, and panel is inspected, cataloged, and either saved or remade.
Stage 02 /05Rust and damage are cut out and replaced with metal we form in-house. Where a panel no longer exists, we make it — gaps set by hand before a drop of filler.
— Gate outBlocked straight, primed, and color laid in a controlled booth, then cut and buffed. The finish is flat as glass because the body under it is flat first.
— Gate outModern drivetrain, brakes, suspension, and electronics — fuel injection, overdrive, A/C — engineered in so a sixty-year-old car drives like it always should have.
Stage 05 /05Reassembled by the same crew that took it apart, wet-sanded, fitted, and shaken down on the road. It leaves when it is right — not before.
— Gate outThe list is short because it is the whole of it.