HOME IMPROVEMENTS
Turning a flawed gem into a jewel of a classic doesn’t always mean a full restoration. We’re picking out improvements you can make at home – and those best trusted to the professionals
INTERIOR TRIM
Nice paint might attract attention, but a great interior really sells it. You can buy pre-made carpet sets (around £250 for a Mini or small MG) and sets of seat covers (c. £300 for leather covers for an MGB or TR) for many of the most popular marques and models. In other words, it’s possible to re-trim the interior with a mouse-click… and some patient work.
Take advice from fellow owners about the feasibility of tackling the fitting job at home. As a general guide, if you can cope with unbolting the seats from a small British sports car of the Sixties you can probably cope with fitting its new carpet set and even pulling on some seat covers. For anything more daunting, get a quote from a trimmer.
For more unusual cars, getting a full set of carpets made is costlier and will mean leaving the car with the trimmer. If the leather is torn or split, small panels can be let in by expert hands but you’ll often have to accept an imperfect match. But sometimes, what look like cracks in leather are just cracks in the surface dye so stripping and recolouring can transform it. Even the deeper cracks in dried-out leather can be eliminated with good hide filler and paint products.
Replacing or recovering a cracked dash-top can be an easy DIY fix too… but as moulded plastic takes over in Seventies and Eighties cars, it’s more about hunting rare replacement parts that haven’t suffered the same damage. It’s possible, if involved, to sand back and then fill splits in vinyl-over-foam dash tops with special polyurethane fillers available online, before re-painting the whole item.
The key point about interior trim improvements is to pick your battles – identify the worst aspect and tackle it first. Most will be relatively quick jobs and you can spread the cost while keeping the car on the road.
THE ENGINE BAY
This is an ideal job to tackle at home and it can make a vast difference to the way a car presents. Start by brushing degreaser on the engine and anything else that’s oily, protect electrical items and the air intake(s) with plastic bags and rubber bands, then pressure-wash the lot.
Remove ancillaries and anything mounted on the inner wings or bulkhead in order to clean and polish every bit of paint you can reach. Pay attention to the fixings themselves and consider getting nuts, bolts, washers and brackets zinc-plated and passivated, or buy one of the DIY kits to do this at home. New belts, hoses, plug leads and distributor caps can have as much benefit to reliability as to beauty.
For a five-star finish, consider removing aluminium castings and carburettors and getting them vapour-blasted. Exhaust manifolds and radiators can be smartened up with special VHT (very high temperature) paint, while the engine block can be painted with products such as Finnigans Smoothrite.
WIRING IMPROVEMENTS
Basic wiring jobs aren’t intimidating. Anyone can replace damaged wires and connectors. Invest in a quality ratchet-type crimping tool, plus connectors and cable of age-appropriate appearance. It looks so much better in a period engine bay.
Older cars often have aftermarket items spliced into the ignition circuit - radios, cooling fans, electric fuel pumps. Remove connections that have been tee’d off an original cable (for example with a ‘chocolate block’ plastic connector or Scotch Locks) and make a new supply running to the appropriate fuse. While at the fuse box, check all spade or plug connectors are tight. Exposed wires? Trim and re-make with new connectors - these are better than soldered joints. Check the condition of earth straps to the engine, to the chassis and from less obvious places, for example at the base of the steering column.
Inside the car, dangling wires under the dash should be tidied up - replace frayed sections with new cables of the right colour, wired point-to-point, or at the very least with proper crimped barrel connectors covered with heat-shrink tubing.
Allow enough excess in any wiring runs that you fit in order to avoid putting stress on connections.
PAINTWORK
Found a classic car for sale cheaply because of paint defects? Cost-effective repairs could leave you with a great buy, but paint can conceal a lot. It’s important to tell the difference between surface flaws and signs of deeper trouble.
Haze and light scratches in the finish can be eliminated by cutting compound and polish; this is also the way to blend in touch-up repairs to stone chips. The texture called orange peel that tends to remain where new paint has not been flatted back and re-polished can also be corrected at home with fine wet-and-dry paper and care, or by a professional bodyshop for a few hours’ labour. Microblisters, tiny pimple-like bumps, or ‘fish-eyes’ deeper in the finish will need to be totally stripped back, so if they spread over more than one panel, beware of correction turning into a total respray.
Learn to spot poor repairs and hidden corrosion. Look along a surface to spot the wobbles in the finish created by clumsilysanded filler. On steel panels, confirm the diagnosis with a small magnet – the less metal, the less attraction. Other signs include tiny pinholes in the paint and a solid, dead sound when tapped with a knuckle. Check wheelarches – are the lips sharp or is the whole thing a sculpture in filler? Scabs or blisters in the paint can be caused by corrosion or moisture under the finish. Cracks and splits in the paint – especially those along seams from which rust-coloured stains emerge – probably mean rot is taking hold.
A small hole in a wheel arch is less likely to lead to a terrifying strip-down than a hole in an inner wing or bulkhead, so if there’s any doubt, get the car inspected by a professional who can quote for the work. As long as the signs are minor, a localised strip, repair and repaint is straightforward for any bodyshop. If your classic is one of many that has remanufactured panels available, replacement may be more cost-effective than repair.
‘Learn to look along a surface to spot the wobbles in the finish created by clumsily-sanded filler’
WHEEL REFURBISHMENT
Both steel and alloy wheels can be refurbished at home quite easily. Wire wheels are a different matter, because their structural condition needs assessment before restorative work begins, so they’re best left to a specialist. For the others, you can either leave the tyres on and mask them carefully, or slip a few quid in the coffee jar at your local tyre and exhaust place to get the tyres removed. Then consider using a blasting company to strip the wheels, especially if they have complex contours. A DIY approach with paintstripper is okay but beware of using a drill with a wire brush attachment that will scratch the alloy.
Aerosol paint will do for re-finishing. If painting colour, start with an etch primer, then use several coats of high-build primer and flat it back with increasing grades of paper up to 400 grit, finishing with the colour coat and if it’s metallic, a clear lacquer. Bear in mind a professional powdercoated finish will last longer because it’s baked on. You can make bare alloy shiny again with grades of cutting compound and polish, after which it can be lacquered.
RUSTPROOFING
Any poorly-protected classic can corrode alarmingly fast without protection. If you’re selling one, evidence (and/or receipts) for anti-corrosion work shows care and justifies a higher price.
Start by jacking up the car and supporting it safely on at least four axle stands. Wrap yourself up in a boiler suit, mask, goggles and gloves and work methodically from one end of the car to the other, removing loose paint, cracked underseal and all the rust you can find. It’s usually a slow process so start protecting the surfaces you expose, for instance with a brush-on rust converter, before you move on to the next area. Antirust waxes can be painted on, sprayed from an aerosol or from a re-fillable gun, if you have a compressor. Identify box-sections (sills, chassis rails, all double-skinned panels) that need internal protection, and drill small, well-hidden holes to insert cavity wax - there are some excellent aerosol products available with long, flexible tubes.