Restoration is a must for any classic car owner who wants to have the authentic look and feel of the model they have. While restoring a vintage car may be no easy task, the rewards are great: your car will increase its value, and you get to ride in an almost authentic make.
You can easily have a shop that specializes in restoration fix your car. But if you want to tinker around and do restoration on your own, here are 5 great tips that you can easily follow.
1. Inspect the car thoroughly, and keep a list of things you want to restore. Do not go and immediately replace everything--some parts may still be usable. The top things that you need to replace are: heavily-rusted parts, chrome parts that could not be shined by polishing, broken windows, upholstery that are heavily worn-out, and of course, everything mechanical that does not work.
2. For the non-mechanical parts (e.g. windows, chrome parts), it would be much better to look for parts cars first. Parts cars are cars that could not be feasibly restored, but has parts that could be reused. By shopping around for parts cars, you would be saving a few hundred bucks.
For the mechanical parts however, it would be much safer to look for stock parts. You can't assume that an engine of a parts car would still be good in three to five years. A stock engine might seem to be more expensive, but it will certainly last longer.
3. For the paint job, find a shop that offers a wide variety of paint colors. If you can find one that specializes in paints for restoration, it would be much better. Your goal is to find the paint that perfectly matches a color of the classic car you have. It does not need to be the color that you bought it in. For example, if you have a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow in red, you can still paint in cream, since it's one of the colors that it came in.
4. If your car seats are leather, clean it thoroughly. After cleaning, inspect the leather condition. If it has a few minor scratches on it, you can easily restore it by buying liquid leather solutions. Just make sure that the solution that you will apply is the same color as the seat, or else it would look horrible. Look for excess leather under the seat and bring it to the shop, in order to accurately compare the colors.
If the leather is heavily damaged and worn-out, replacing it would be better. At this point of the restoration, you can be a little more lax in terms of authenticity. You can have your seats replaced with new ones that exactly looks the same, but of a different kind of leather.
5. If the chrome parts could not be restored back into its shining glory by polishing, you need to replace them. You can do the paintjob yourself, but unless you have experience with chrome re-plating, you need to find a specialist. Detach all the chrome parts from the car, and have an expert re-chrome these parts.
The fun part about restoring a classic car is that you get to spend more time with your car, thus making it ever more valuable to you. Once you finish restoring, you can surely enjoy the product of your hard work.
Peter Grizzly is an age-old classic car enthusiast. He makes his living now by being a classic car trader. He owns a third generation Thunderbird, and would like to collect all of the released T-Birds, including the 1954 prototype. His website, which is a classic car auction can be found at: http://www.classicvehicleauction.com
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