What’s Done and What We’re About to Do

A Jaguar at Walmart

Your Scribe

There are several reasons why we think we do a better job than most other people in this industry.  To begin with, we repair british cars exclusively, and if it’s not british, we don’t work on it.    Another reason is other people don’t have our people.  We have had very little turnover over time, and when we do we’ve plugged the gaps slowly and deliberately.

XPAG engine in test

Patrick & Butch ran up a fresh XPAG  engine, but the customer was still unhappy

John Manning left us over a year ago in order to work a lot closer to home, and our new guy is George Rowbottom who is still in the process of proving his bonafides.  It doesn’t hurt him any in our eyes that in his feckless youth he wrecked his dad’s E-type pretty thoroughly.  After all a job worth doing is a job worth doing well.  Now he’s a couple of months into our retraining program which is a cross between getting grease under your fingernails, and testing one’s restraint in learning our somewhat esoteric inventory practices.

another TD

George prepped a TD for engine removal

If patience is a virtue, then he has proven to be pretty virtuous so far.  The working plan is for George to subsume my responsibilities in the parts department, thereby allowing me to spend more time swinging a wrench.  Over time as this business has grown I have found myself dealing with administrivia having very little to do with the core mission.  George’s role is going to be dealing with these daily tasks that keep me away from my service bay and work bench.

MG TD

Reilly tuned an MG TD

Reilly was back in the shop this past summer after a five year hitch in the Marines.  He got here just in time to put this two-tone TD  together ahead of an important Wedding Anniversary on L.I.  It arrived  here from Vermont’s Premier Automotive Restoration Shop with some assembly required.  While we don’t normally get involved with sheetmetal work, we bolted the body back together, wired it up, installed the drivetrain & upholstery and spent time trouble shooting it and ran it 85 miles for what worked out to be about $28.00 an hour.  It’s not a misprint, we knew the owner hadn’t got it.  I dropped it off gratis at his front door, but final chapter in this saga will take place on January 21st in a Small Claims Courtroom in Ronkonkoma, New York.  While I don’t mind being taken advantage of occasionally, I stop short of being played the Fool.

iPhone image

On your smartphone

Being the Luddite is a more comfortable fit.  You are reading this missive now because at some time in the past we were encouraged to put up a website, which was a task far beyond our native abilities.

David Pound Advertising Design solved this conundrum.  David put up the main site, and gave me sufficient instruction to be able to scratch together the words and images on this page.  His most recent major accomplishment was to make us compatible with so called ‘hand-held’ devices, so if you’ve navigated here from your smartphone, David, who also does all of the artwork for our magazine ads, deserves all of the credit, and that’s why I make the checks out to ‘David Pound, Advertising Genius’.  Go to our “links” page if you want to know more.

 

a new building

Butch surveys the future

As for what’s in store for 2015,  I would like to commend to your attention this photograph of Butch surveying 9,100 square feet of shop space less than half a mile off the interstate.

While we love our space in rural Westminster, it’s a bother this time of year when we have to open the bay doors on a 20 degree day to jack up the back of a car, not to speak of the logistics involved in moving work into or out of our downstairs driveline shop when there’s snow on the ground.  So what we may have to give up in rural ambiance will be more than offset in efficiency.  It will allow us to finally spread out our very extensive parts inventory properly, pipe in bulk lubricants, and with 11 foot ceilings we can even have lifts ! This is going to  be a slow build out, but it’s what’s up in 2015.

So thank you for your continuing support, and we’ll look forward to hearing from you in the new year.   -David Clark

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