"The motor from Majorca
don't look like
what it oughta!"
Rolls Royce - Modern Car Restoration

Intro
We got a call from a gentleman who asked us if we could work on his Rolls Royce. He had been looking for somebody to connollise his leather and seen that we also refurbished wheels, removed dents and a few other things by reading our website, so he decided to call us. We looked at the photos he sent by email, told him we could do most of them and he seemed eager to book his car in with us.
As it transpired, the car was in Majorca. We are quite prepared to collect cars from just about anywhere, but in this case the customer shipped the car to Ramsgate and we had it collected from there.

The car arrived here from Ramsgate minus the Walnut tops of the doors which had been removed and sent direct to Cooper Woodtrim who specialize in Rolls-Royce and Jaguar interior wood restoration. I have to say, they did a fantastic job on them, and without a doubt, we will be recommending them to our customers in future.
They did come back darker than the rest of the walnut, but that is to be expected as the rest of the walnut will have faded over the years. The customer was also suitably impressed and vowed to have the rest of the walnut done next time.

We were only given a short time to work on the car, it was here for about 10 days, and unfortunately a bank holiday weekend fell within this period. We were also slightly hindered by the fact that some of our technicians were away on holiday but we did get done everything that was promised, except for the smart repairs because upon inspecting the car, we felt this method of repair wouldn't be adequate. The car will be coming back to us later this year when we will complete phase two, which will include bodywork and paintwork correction.

Wheel Refurbishment
All of the wheels were scuffed, and the photo below shows how the raised detail was badly damaged. This required some reconstruction which was rather difficult to do. It needed to be built up again and then re-shaped which is much easier said than done.

The raised detail was damaged and was later reconstructed.

Our normal process for refurbishing wheels is to take the wheel off, deflate the tyres, and then use a special machine for 'breaking the bead', which means pushing the tyre back from the front edge. This exposes the rim allowing it to be worked on properly, it also allows the tyre to be masked out properly and more easily. Any gouges can then be filled with metal filler, there is no need for welding as we do not undertake work where the rim is so badly damaged that it has compromised the structural integrity. The filler just repairs cosmetic damage, even so a special liquid metal filler is used.
Next the whole face of the wheel is then rubbed down and repainted with primer, base coat and clear coat (lacquer).

One of the two Brians putting the wheels back on. There are two chaps called brian who do our wheels, 'Baldy Brian' and 'Beardy Brian'. Can you guess which one this is?

A wheel refurbished and the hub-cap replaced. The tyres will need to be cleaned and dressed. White wall tires are not something we encounter very often these days.

The white wall tyres did have us wondering. There was a time when they were fairly common and most suppliers of valeting products would have had both a tyre blacking and a white rubber paint. But these days, nobody uses 'tyre black' instead we use clear dressings that feed and protect the rubber. And we really didn't want to get into the business of painting the white walls even if the paint was available! Luckily we were able to clean off any dirty marks, and once dressed with a normal dressing they looked like new.

This is a picture of the car with the wheels finished, this was almost all we did on the exterior this time around. We hand cleaned the chrome and gave the car a coat of good quality wax, and with the wheels refurbished and the white-wall tires cleaned up and dressed it makes a world of difference.

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Glass Repair

Rolls Royce Restoration
1. Intro & Wheel Refurbishment
2. Glass Repair
3. Rust Repair
4. Leather Recolouring - Seats
5. Leather Recolouring - Steering Wheel
6. Dent Repair
7. work in progress

Modern Car Restoration

Valeting Articles: Index Page A list of articles on various car care and car valeting subjects